The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

Brass

Mother comes back one evening and she starts up at supper about feng shui, how our house isn’t organized for a happy life, how the front door should never line up with the back door like ours does — never. One of her colleagues in Parks and Recreation told her that.

“They’re all dipshits down there,” I said.

And the boy said, talking with his mouth full like he always does, “That’s why you’re not supposed to have a crucifix in the bedroom. Is a cross the same as a crucifix?” he says.

I could see the meat with the ketchup on it in his mouth. “No,” I said. “A crucifix is a cross with the body on it.”

“A cross is OK, then,” he said. “And a crucifix is OK as long as the eyes aren’t open. You don’t want that in the bedroom.”

Usually nobody said anything at supper but sometimes it would go all haywire like this. I went into the backyard for a cigarette. I’ve got a velvet mesquite back there and two saguaros. All of this was here when I bought the place in 1972. The saguaros don’t have arms on them yet. A saguaro has to be seventy-five years old before it puts out an arm.

Another night, I come out of my shop in the garage for supper and he appears without a hair on his head. Not on his arms either.

“Jesus,” I say. “What have you done now?”

“This is how you foil the drug testers,” he says.

“You aren’t ingesting drugs, are you,” I ask.

“Nah,” he says. “It’s just unconstitutional to take a sample from a man’s head, from a hair. I’m protesting the unconstitutionality of it.”

As a little kid when he wanted to curse but didn’t dare or probably didn’t even know how, he’d say, “Babies!” It was pretty damn cute. “Oh, babies!” he’d say. I don’t know where he got that from.

Did he respect his mother? I’d say yes. I mean, he didn’t pay much attention to her.

—

I fixed clocks in the garage for a while but then I stopped serving the public, who were never, ever satisfied. So it’s just a personal hobby, taking apart clocks and watches and putting them back together again. There was a Frenchman centuries ago, a watchmaker, who created a life-size mechanical duck. It could move its head, flap its wings, even eat from a bowl of grain. Then it could even shit out the compacted grain. It was all gears and springs. More than four hundred parts moved each wing. They call things like that automatons.

The boy says, “Can you learn about ducks by studying mechanical ducks?”

“Of course not,” I say. No wonder his teachers don’t like him, I think.

“It’s not a dumb question,” he says, “given where we are today, studying all these computer systems and simulations and making all these performance assessments that are no more than abstractions we try to apply to the real world. Real people are complex. A real situation can’t be broken down into abstractions. I don’t support nuclear power because there’s no place to bury nuclear waste,” he says. “Nuclear power cannot be separated from nuclear waste.”

I think, This boy just needs to get laid, but I say, “Why are you worrying about nuclear waste, you should just go out and get a job and keep it, make some money for yourself.” But I don’t have a job and haven’t for years, so my words ring somewhat hollow. Mother’s job is sufficient for us. There’s a preacher says a family of four can live handsomely on fifty thousand dollars a year before taxes and if they make more they should give that amount away to others. And we’re just a family of three. Do they still call people like us a nuclear family?

—

We went to New York City once. To this day I don’t know why she insisted on it. “Why don’t we go to the Grand Canyon?” I said, but she wanted to do something different. We’d seen the Grand Canyon. She wanted to go to that restaurant, Windows on the World, was it? And she wanted to take in some musical theater. That’s exactly how she put it, “I want to take in some musical theater.” She’s had a job for years with P & R, working with heavy machinery, loppers and saws and stuff, and first thing at LaGuardia she falls on the stairs and sprains her ankle. It’s all she can do to hobble from bed to bathroom in the crummy little hotel room we have. So I’m supposed to be showing the boy New York City. He was around nine. We had just emerged from a subway, the boy and I, totally disoriented, and this Mexican guy passes by and grunts at me and lifts his chin at this woman standing beside us waiting for the light to change and she’s blind with dark glasses and a cane, clearly blind, and the guy’s saying, without speaking — Do your duty, man, I’m going the other way.

The blind don’t grab on to you like you’d think or clutch your hand. She just put her finger on my jacket with the lightest touch.

“There’s a big grate here,” I say, thinking the last thing we needed was for her to get her stick snapped off in one of the holes in the grate. We cross the street and she angles herself to cross another one and I say, “Do you want us to stay with you for this one as well?” and she says, “Thank you very much, but only if you’re going in this direction, of course.” She had the lightest, nicest, most refined voice. It was surprising. And then the boy bawls out, “We don’t know where we are and we don’t know where we’re going!” And she says, still in that lovely voice, “Oh, now you’re beginning to frighten me.” Well, I was furious at him, very, very furious. We ushered the lady across the street and then I dragged him back down into the subway and we went back uptown to the hotel and we stayed there for two days. I was the only one who went out and that was just for crackers and Coke. The boy kept saying, “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry.” That was what he’d do. He’d do something, give somebody he shouldn’t some lip and then back right down. We didn’t see anything of New York City and that was the last time we left Arizona.

—

I go into the bird-food store for Suet. I’ve got some Suet feeders I made. The cheaper stuff you buy in the big-box places and the hardware stores isn’t rendered and can spoil. Most people don’t know this. They’re the same ones still putting that red-dye shit in the hummingbird feeders. Every time I go in there someone’s asking what they’ve got that will keep the doves away. I don’t want the doves. How can I get rid of the doves? And the clerk’s fussing around trying to sell them some contraption made from recycled materials for fifty bucks that only birds who feed upside down can get at. So I say, one customer to another, “A Taser. Try a Taser.” And they look at me sort of interested until I finally say, “I’m kidding.”

—

He found a dog out by the raytheon plant and brought her home. She looked like a puppy but who knows. Her teeth weren’t particularly white. He called her Vega.

“What the hell does that mean?” I say. “How did you come up with that?”

“It’s Arabic,” he says.

“You’re just asking for trouble, aren’t you?” I say. “Why would you give a dog an Arab’s name? It doesn’t even sound Arabic, it sounds Spanish. What’s it in Spanish?”

“Open plain,” he says.

“That’s some stupid name for a dog,” I say. “Open plain.”

I called her Amy. He stopped caring for her after a few weeks anyway and I fed her and trained her a bit. I had the time, not working. And you’ve got to have time, god knows, with the training exercises.

Sit…good girl…down…no! Stay…good girl. Twenty minutes twice a day. You’re never supposed to repeat a command.

We got all the way up to Day Fifteen, which is pretty much the end of it. That’s when you get them to sit and stay and you disappear and say hello to an imaginary person at the door and you come back and then disappear again and talk to people who aren’t there. That was amusing to me because no one ever came to our door, which was the way I preferred it. Sometimes the boy would have a friend over, but not often. Kids, they’re in a different lane. Slow. They move slow, they talk slow. Everything slows down.

—

The boy says, “What’s the point of training that dog? She’s not even good-looking.”

It’s true, Amy wouldn’t turn any heads. And I say to him, “What do you know about good-looking?” Clean up that goddamn acne, boy, I wanted to say, for I can be petty with him at times, but I didn’t.

“A man doesn’t have to be good-looking,” he says. “He’s just got to have presence, he’s got to be in command.”

“Absolutely,” I say. “You’re really in command at all the fast-food joints you keep getting fired from.” He’d been fired from one for eating salad back in the kitchen with his fingers, right out of one of those bowls big as an engine block. His fingers.

“It’d have been the same if I used a fork,” he says.

Then the next place he’d told the manager she was sitting on her brains.

“I like Amy,” he says. “I was the one who found her, remember?”

Backing right down like he always did.

—

Sometimes Mother wants to make something special for dinner, like a soup. She asks me to go to Safeway and get a can of coconut milk and some cilantro. I can’t imagine a worse-sounding soup but if she’s willing to make dinner, I’ll eat it. I’m not about to make dinner. So Amy and I drive over to the Safeway. The Brownies are out front at a little table selling cookies. They’ve always got somebody out front selling something, even original oil paintings. Sometimes even politicians set up shop there. So I bought a box of cookies. You’d have to be some sort of wicked not to buy cookies when confronted by a little Brownie. Of course I can’t find the damn coconut milk and I’m wandering around until some kid says, “Can I help you, sir?” and then ushers me smugly to the proper shelf. I’m going through the checkout and the checker says, “Do you need any help out with this, sir?”

All the way back to the truck, I mutter, “Do you need any help out with this, sir, do you need any help out with this, sir?”

They’re all automatons.

—

He took a poetry class at the community college. “That’s lovely,” I say. “It’s quite beyond lovely,” I say, sarcastic.

“We’re studying Rimbaud,” he says. “He was French, too, like your watchmaker, the one who made the duck. Isn’t that interesting?”

“Why is that interesting?” I say.

“Listen to this,” he says. He opens up this little paperback book and he’s highlighted these lines in blue Magic Marker. He says, “For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn’t to blame. To me this is evident: I give a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths.”

“That ain’t even grammatical,” I say.

“For I is someone else,” he says somberly. “If brass wakes up a trumpet it isn’t to blame.” Then he smirks at me. He’s been working on this smirk.

“Now that’s the translation,” he says. “But for class I’m going to translate the translation.”

“Somebody should translate you,” I say.

“No one’s going to be able to translate me,” he says.

—

He said some old woman came in to tutor them sometimes and she smelled like laundry.

“Laundry,” I said. “Clean laundry, I hope.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said.

“You shouldn’t need tutoring now, should you? You’re in college, community college, you’ve been going there for years.”

“She’s one of those do-gooders. I told her about Rimbaud and she said he was the first modernist.”

“What the hell’s that mean?”

“The beginning of the way we are? He was a savage dreamer, Rimbaud.”

And he delivers that smirk.

“Daddy,” he says, “you don’t think I can do anything.”

“I’m not going to engage you on that one,” I say. “You’ll make your mark or you won’t.”

“What you’re wanting to do is stop time,” he says, “and that’s dangerous.”

“I don’t want to stop time,” I say. “Time don’t stop because I’m working on a broken watch.”

But he looks at me as though he thinks it does. “I see things in parts, too,” he says.

“Don’t you need to be wearing a cleaner shirt?”

“Do you think I do?”

“That one’s filthy. I’ve been looking at it for days.”

“Are you thinking other stuff when you think that?”

“God almighty,” I say. “Just go put on a fresh T-shirt.”

“When I think something it rethinks it for me,” he says.

—

“We’ve got to be tolerant,” Mother says to me. “You’re not a tolerant man and that hurts, that shows.”

“Tolerant,” I say. I don’t know when I got into the habit of repeating a single word. Just picking it out of her conversation.

“He might be neuroatypical, that’s what Tom says.”

They all annoy the hell out of me over at P & R but Tom takes the cake. He’s so fat I don’t know how he can tie his goddamn shoes.

“Tom says neurodiversity might be more crucial for the human race than biodiversity.”

“Tom’s handling too much weed killer,” I say. “He’s not a friend of the earth.” Which reminds me of something the boy lobbed at us the other night about Albert Einstein’s last words. He’s staring off to the side of us as we’re sitting in what he loves to refer to emphatically as the living room and he says, “Albert Einstein’s last words were: Is the earth friendly?”

I say, “I doubt that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says. “It’s true. I think of what I’m going to have for last words sometimes.”

“Let’s hear ’em,” I say.

“It’s not going to be a question.”

“I can’t imagine your last words being a question,” I say.

He glances up at me and decides to be pleased. Usually he won’t look right at a person. He says eye contact is counterproductive to comprehension and communication. He’s got any number of ways to justify himself, that’s for sure.

Mother continues to go on about Tom and Jimmy and Christina and their theories about the boy, whom they’ve never met but think they know from her going on and on about him, I guess. She’s got quite a little socializing network going on for her down at the park. She had a chance to work over at Sweetwater, the marsh they’ve built out by the sewer treatment plant. She would have made more money but said she’d be lonely with new people. She didn’t want to leave her friends. She don’t like change.

“Neurotypical,” I say. “Kindly tell me what the hell TomTom’s talking about.” I call him that because two normal-size men could fit in his bulk.

“Neuro-a-typical,” she says.

“Oh, goodness, pardon me,” I say. “And why exactly are you discussing our family with those dipshits? Our family is no concern of theirs. TomTom’s living with one of those women that looks like a man, isn’t he? Let him worry about the atypicality of that.”

“She’s sweet,” Mother says. “And anyway, Tom wasn’t saying anything bad about him. He was just trying to make me feel better. I told my friends about them not letting him back in those classes he was taking.”

“I don’t want you talking to them about the boy,” I say. “And I want to remind you, you’re the one who wanted one, not me. Just one, you said. One and done.”

—

“You’re the low-hanging fruit,” he says to me and Mother. She just purses her lips and pushes her fork around a serving of store-bought pie.

“And I suppose you’re not,” I say. “You’re the high-hanging fruit.”

You’ve just got to find him hilarious sometimes.

“They’ve used up what’s easy, like you. They’ve just used you up. But now they’re going to have to deal with the likes of me. And there’s no formula.”

“The likes of you,” I say.

He stands up so fast he knocks his glass of milk off the table. But then he catches it. It was flying laterally for an instant and damn if he didn’t catch it. But then he storms out of the house and Mother tears up. Then the phone rings and it’s one of those robo-calls you can’t shut off until they’ve said their piece.

—

It was around eleven in the morning. A beautiful desert day. You forget how pretty the sky can still be. Mother was over at the park fixing a sprinkler system for the fortieth time. I think they break them deliberate so they’ll have something to do. I’m in my shop thinking like I frequently do that the third cup of coffee tastes funny and then all hell breaks loose. People banging on the door and screaming and shouting and I even hear a helicopter overhead. And I say, “Stay, Amy, stay, stay,” and walk out of the garage and there’s law officers out there screaming, “sumabitch, sumabitch” and “the congresswoman” and “sumabitch” again, even the women, all of them in uniform and with guns, and I think whatever I was thinking a minute ago is the last peaceful thought I will ever have. Though sometimes now I try to pretend he’s still in the house, in his room with the door closed. I pretend he’s still living with us and eating with us and getting by with us. But of course he’s not and he isn’t.

No, we were never afraid of him. Afraid of Jared?

The Girls

The girls were searching Arleen’s room and had just come upon her journal. The girls were thirty-one and thirty-two. Arleen was of a dowdy unspecific age, their parents’ houseguest. She had arrived with the family’s city pastor, an Episcopal priest, who had been in a depression for a number of months because his lover had died. The priest spent most of his time in the garden wearing only a bright red banana sling, his flabby body turning a magnificent somber brown. The girls were certain their parents regretted inviting him, for he was not at all amusing, the way he frequently could be, in the pulpit.

Arleen was presently occupied with washing her long hair in the shower down the hall. It had taken the girls many clandestine visits to her room to find anything of interest. The journal was in the zippered pocket of her open suitcase.

“I know I looked here before.”

“She must move it around.”

“Should we start at the beginning or with the last entry? That would be last night, I suppose.”

“That was the Owl Walk. She went on the Owl Walk with Mommy and came back and said, so seriously, ‘No owls.’ ”

The girls found that hysterical.

The sound of water on the curtain ceased and the girls hurried downstairs. They made tea and curled up on the sofa with their cats. There were two cats living and two cats dead. The dead cats were Roland and Georgia O’Keeffe, their cremains in elaborate colorful urns on the mantelpiece. The ceramic feet on Roland’s urn were rabbits, the ones on Georgia O’Keeffe’s, mice. The urns had been conceived and created by the girls.

“Good morning, Arleen,” they said together when she appeared, her hair wadded wetly on her back. She peered at them and smiled shyly. The back of her blouse was soaked because of the sack of hair. She wore khaki shorts. They were the weird kind to which leggings could be buttoned to create a pair of trousers.

“I was hoping,” Arleen said, “that the kitty litter box could be taken out of the bathroom?”

The girls and the cats stared at her.

“It smells,” Arleen said.

“It smells?” the girls said.

There was silence. “I took a lovely long walk early this morning,” Arleen said. “I bicycled out to the moors and then I walked. It began to rain, quite hard, and then it suddenly stopped and was beautiful.”

The girls mimed extreme wonder at this remarkable experience.

“It reminded me of something I read once about the English moors and the month of April,” Arleen said. “April, who laughs her girlish laughter and a moment after weeps her girlish tears is apt to be a mature hysteric on the moors.” She looked at them, smiling quickly, then dipped her head. She had a big ragged part in her hair that made the girls almost dizzy.

“April is far behind us, Arleen,” one of the girls said. “It’s June now. You’ve been here almost two weeks.”

Arleen nodded. “It’s been very good for Father Snow.”

“What is your home like,” the other asked. They’d found one couldn’t be too obvious with Arleen.

“It has stairs,” Arleen mused. “Very steep stairs. Sometimes I don’t go out, because coming back there would be the stairs, and often when I am out, I don’t return because of the stairs. Otherwise it’s quite adequate.”

“Are you fearful of crime?” the girls said. They widened their eyes.

“No,” Arleen said. She had very much the manner of someone waiting to be dismissed. The girls loved it. They spooned honey into their tea.

“Did you have a nice birthday, Arleen?” one asked.

It had been announced several evenings before by Father Snow that it was Arleen’s birthday. The girls had remarked that birthdays were more or less an idiotic American institution regarded with some wonder by the rest of the world. Arleen had blushed. The girls had said that they did not sanction birthdays but that they adored Christmas. Last year they had given Mommy and Daddy adagio dance lessons and a needlepoint book, the pages depicting scenes from their life together — Mommy and Daddy and the girls.

No one had given Arleen anything on her birthday but she and Father Snow had taken the opportunity to present their house present — a silver-plated cocktail shaker engraved with Mommy’s and Daddy’s initials.

“We were looking for something suitable but not insufferably dull,” Father Snow said.

“No, no, you shouldn’t have,” Mommy said.

“We have ten of those!” one of the girls said, and they rushed to haul them out of the pantry, even the dented and tarnished ones. The cocktail shaker had proved to be a most popular house present over the years.

“I had a lovely birthday,” Arleen said. She looked at her wrist and scratched it. “Is Father Snow outside?”

The girls pointed toward the garden. They had long pale shapely arms.

Arleen nodded vaguely and turned to leave, stumbling a bit on the sill.

Between themselves, the girls referred to Father Snow as Father Ice, an irony that gave them satisfaction, for his fat sorrow elicited considerable indignation in them. Where was his faith? He didn’t have the faith to fill a banana sling. Where was his calm demeanor? It had fled from him. He was the furthest thing from ice they could imagine, the furthest from their admiration of ice, the lacy sheaths, the glare, the brilliance and hardness of ice. There had never been enough of it in their lives. A little, but not much.

Cuddling and kissing the living cats, the girls walked to the kitchen window and looked out into the garden. Arleen was on the ground at Father Ice’s feet, her head flung back, drying her hair. Father Ice was talking with his eyes shut, tears streaming down his cheeks.

What a pair! the girls thought. They kissed the cats’ stomachs. Father Ice’s mouth was flapping away. His lover, a gaunt young man named Donny, had cooked for Father Ice and pressed his vestments. Father Ice had broken down at dinner the previous night over a plate of barbecued butterflied lamb, recalling, it could only be assumed, the manner in which Donny had once prepared this dish. He had just recovered from having broken down an hour earlier at cocktails.

The girls, through the glass, watched Arleen closely.

“She’s in love with him, can you believe it? That is not just friendship.”

“That kind of love is so safe.”

The girls had never been in love. They did not plan on marrying. They would go to the dance clubs and perch on stools, in their little red dresses, their little black ones and white ones, darling and provocative tight little dresses, and they would toss their hair and laugh as they gazed into each other’s eyes. There were always men around. Men were drawn to them but one would not be courted without the other, even for amusement — they would not be separated. They were like Siamese twins. They were not Siamese twins, of course, they weren’t twins at all, nor were they even born on the same day a year apart, which was why they didn’t care for birthdays. Men did not mind the fact that they would not be separated. It excited them agreeably, in fact. They didn’t believe they didn’t stand a chance in the long run.

The girls dropped the cats and moved away from the window, retiring to the large glassed-in porch on the south side of the house to work on their constructions. These were attractive assemblages, neither morbid nor violent nor sexually repressed as was so common with these objects, but tasteful, cold and peculiar. One of the several young men who were fascinated by the girls made the beautiful partitioned boxes in which selections were placed. One of them contained a snip of lace from Mommy’s wedding dress. They hadn’t asked her for it, but she hadn’t recognized it when she saw it either. There were many things of that nature in the boxes.

They heard Mommy’s voice. She was saying, “Now how would you describe the sound it made? An asthmatic squeal is what the bird book said though I wouldn’t describe it like that. It certainly didn’t sound like an asthmatic squeal to me.”

Arleen muttered something in reply. She had apparently come back into the house. It was a three-story nineteenth-century house with fish-scale shingles and wide golden floorboards. It was a wonderful house. Mommy and Daddy almost always had houseguests in the summer. The girls didn’t like it, it was as though Mommy and Daddy didn’t want to be alone with them in these loveliest of months. The houseguests didn’t stay long, usually no more than a week, but no sooner did they depart than others would arrive. The girls found few of them remarkable. There had been one young woman who held their interest for a weekend by drawing in pencil dozens of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic buildings, clearly intended to be visions of the starved or the drugged. They watched her closely, thinking her tremendously chic and fraudulent, and were disappointed when she left abruptly, taking, for it was never seen again, one of Mommy’s Hermès beach towels, the one with the Lorraine cross.

Most of the guests never returned, but Father Snow had been invited several times. Priests were freeloaders, in the girls’ opinion, and although Father Snow could give a good performance in the right surroundings — they had observed this at high holidays — he was no exception. They had not encountered Arleen before. At first, certainly, she had not appeared to be a problem. She was shy, deferential and plain. She wore red sneakers, the left one slit, she admitted, to accommodate a bunion. She did have lovely auburn hair. The one story she told concerned her hair. She had lovely hair as a child as well and had worn it in a long braid. She had cut it off one morning and given it to a man she had a crush on, a married man, a post office employee or some such thing. It had not been returned and the man had moved away. The girls loved that story. It was so droll it was practically retarded.

The girls heard Mommy’s voice again and cocked their heads. She was planning the marketing. If Arleen would like to go into town they could get flowers and liquor and food as well and Arleen could give her opinion about a sweater Mommy was considering buying. Daddy said that when you look death in the eye you want to do it as calmly as a stroller looks into a shop window. But Mommy never looked into shop windows like that. She looked into them with excitement and distress. Sometimes what Daddy said didn’t take Mommy into account.

“Girls!” Mommy called.

The girls put aside their constructions and glided into the kitchen, where Mommy was putting away the tea things.

“Arleen said she saw the cats playing with a mockingbird earlier. She said they had snapped its legs clean off.”

“Clean off?” the girls repeated, marveling at the infelicitous phrasing.

Mommy nodded. She was wearing a lovely floral dressing gown and silk slippers just like the girls.

“Those weren’t our cats,” one of the girls said, “our cats are sweet cats, old stay-at-home cats, they play with store-bought toys only,” knowing full well that even this early in the summer the cats had slaughtered no fewer than a dozen songbirds by visible count, that they were efficient and ruthless and that the way in which they so naturally expressed their essential nature was something the girls admired very much.

“Are you aware,” Arleen said, “that domestic cats kill four point four million birds every year in this country alone?”

“Awful,” Mommy said faintly.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, don’t you listen to such dreadful things. Such dreadful things don’t happen in our garden,” the other girl said, hugging her, pretending to hang off her, clutching at her soft waist with her narrow hands, prattling on until Mommy made a smile.

“On a lighter note,” the girls then announced, glaring at Arleen, “we are going to the beach.”

There they spent the remainder of the day, nude and much admired, glistening with frequently applied oil. They talked about Mommy and Daddy. This they did not usually do, preferring to keep them inside themselves in a definite and distinct way, not touching them with words not even inside words, but just holding them inside — trapped, as it were — and aware of them quite clearly without thinking about them, fooling around with them in this fashion.

But Mommy and Daddy were changing. In the girls’ eyes, they seemed to be actually crumbling. This was of concern. Daddy was smoking and drinking more and surrendering himself to bleak pronouncements. He was sometimes gruff with them as though they were not everything to him! And Mommy’s enchantment with life seemed to be waning. They were behaving uncertainly, and it was harder for them to be discriminating. Daddy had wanted to burn like a hot fire, and he had not. Clearly, he had not. Something was hastening toward him, and Mommy too, at once hastening but slowly, cloaked in the minutes and months.

The girls returned home subdued, coming through the garden and passing beneath the rose arbor where the bird’s nest was concealed prettily among the climbing canes. The girls grimaced at it, knowing it contained two rotting eggs, having investigated it some days before. They had not informed Mommy of the nest’s pulpy contents and they never would, of course.

In the kitchen there was a message for them, written in Mommy’s rounded hand on heavy stationery.

Father Snow and Arleen have gone downtown for ice-cream cones. Daddy and I are taking our naps.

The girls skipped upstairs and into Father Snow’s room. There was nothing there but two black round stones on the table by the single bed.

“He doesn’t think that’s him and Donny, does he?”

“How ghastly.”

In Arleen’s room, they immediately went to the suitcase but couldn’t find the journal. The journal was missing again, it was nowhere. Then they found it. But they had been absorbed to such a degree in their search that they scarcely noticed Arleen standing in the doorway. She was a smudgy thing, round-shouldered, carrying a whale-shaped purse, a wretched souvenir of this perfect island.

Then she was gone.

“Well, that was considerate of her.”

“It is our house.”

But just as they opened the book, which had a disgusting pink and rawly fibrous cover, Arleen appeared again and spoke the words as they appeared on the first page.

“Headaches…Palpitations…Isolated…Guilt…And that’s a sketch of a photograph your mother showed me. It’s you and your parents when you were little girls.”

The girls peered at it, at a loss. The woman had no talent whatsoever. On impulse, they bent forward and sniffed it.

“Your mother thinks of her heart as a speeding car,” Arleen said. “Too big, too fast, out of control, no one at the wheel. And her head too, also speeding…Farther on, there are accounts of some of her dreams.”

“She didn’t tell you her dreams!” The girls didn’t believe it for a moment, that Mommy would tell this troll her dreams.

Arleen gently tugged her journal from their hands, smiled thinly at them, and left.

The girls sat for several moments in a perturbed silence. Later, in their own room, which constituted the entire third floor and was exotic and theatrical, they bathed and dressed and put up their hair. It was now dusk, and the downstairs parlor where they were all to gather for cocktails was filled with a golden light.

The girls tiptoed down the stairs. Daddy was telling Father Snow about a former houseguest who claimed he could get out of his body anytime he wanted to and turn around and look at it. The girls remembered that weekend. They rolled their eyes.

“I never believed him,” Mommy said. “But then it’s a very subjective matter, I would think.”

“Must have gotten a taste for it,” Father Snow said.

“I never would, I don’t think,” Mommy said.

This was regarded as amusing by all. The girls were scandalized by the friendship between Mommy and Daddy and this weird duo. They couldn’t bear it for another night.

“Oh, girls, you look lovely!” Mommy exclaimed.

Father Snow was stirring martinis. He wore a jacket and tie. Arleen was wearing…something dreadful. The drinks in their crystal glasses were passed around. Father Snow liked to offer a small prayer before the cocktail hour began. To the girls it was merely one of his excruciatingly annoying habits. Prayer is a means of getting rid of some of our own ignorance about ourselves, Father Snow had always said. Mommy and Daddy and Arleen bowed their heads. The girls, as they always did, looked around the room. At the mirrors, the embroidered footstool, the good Chinese rug, the little brass clocks, the wallpaper of rose madder. They adored it, all this was theirs.

“A toast,” Father Snow said, “a toast to those not with us tonight.” He looked at them unhappily. “We all have to do this at once,” he said. They all took a sip of their drinks.

“Was Donny your first best boy?” one of the girls asked brightly.

“I wish I could snap out of this,” Father Snow said.

“Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work,” the other girl said with concern.

“I am thinking of resigning my parish,” Father Snow said, chewing on an olive, “and dealing with people on a one-to-one basis. Seeing them through. One by one.”

Daddy remarked that he and Mommy were with him one hundred percent on that.

“Poor Donny,” Father Snow said. “He led a fairly incoherent existence and then he died.”

“But that’s because he was so typical,” one of the girls said. “And there is nothing wrong with that, absolutely nothing. But what was the matter with his teeth? He had like a high-water mark on his teeth.” The girls found the ensuing awkward moment quite satisfying.

Father Snow blinked. “I love him very much.”

The girls sighed. He seemed to them like a mollusk at that moment. He was hardly worth the effort.

“Mommy,” one said, “tell the story about the night Daddy proposed.”

“Oh,” Mommy said, “yes. He knelt before me and said, ‘Let’s merely see each other every day for the rest of our lives.’ ” She passed Arleen a cracker with a bit of foul and expensive cheese daubed on top of it. This was declined. “Almost thirty-five years ago now.”

“Tell the whole story,” the girl squealed. “We love the story. Tell how Daddy ran over that man who was standing beside his disabled car on the highway that winter night, but Daddy didn’t stop even though he knew he’d very likely killed him because you were going to a concert. It was the night Daddy was going to propose to you and he didn’t want your life together compromised or delayed. You had your life before you!”

Father Snow visibly paled.

“It was Janácˇek’s ‘Fairy Tale’ that evening,” Mommy said. “Debussy and Beethoven were also on the program.”

Father Snow looked very ill at ease. Mommy reached out and squeezed his hand. “If this happened,” Mommy said, “you’d be able to accept it, wouldn’t you? If it had happened, you’d understand.”

Father Snow squeezed back. “Only if it had,” he said.

“That story has not been previously aired in public,” Daddy said.

The girls closed their eyes and hummed a little. They loved the story — the night, the waves of snow descending, the elegant evening clothes, the nonexistent girls, some stranger sacrificed.

Father Snow drained his drink. “I’m going to make another batch of these if I may,” he said. He extricated his hand from Mommy’s and dumped more gin in the shaker, swirled it once and poured, without ceremony. Some situations simply did not allow for the sacralization of the ordinary, which he otherwise made every effort to observe.

He swallowed and groped for Mommy’s hand again, recoiling slightly when he found it.

“Do you think we could do something about it?” Mommy said tentatively. “Is it possible after all these years?”

“Repent?” he said, his voice cracking. “Repent,” he said.

Mommy looked at him with some annoyance. “Is that all? I’ve always thought that was a rather common thing to do.” She wanted to offer more cheese to all but her hand was trapped. “I do feel sorry,” she said. “We do.”

“But the word is misunderstood!” Father Snow said. “The word translated throughout the New Testament as repentance is, in the Greek, meta-noia, which means change of mind. Meta means transference, as in metaphor—transference of meaning. Transformation.”

“Repent,” Mommy said. “So unhelpful. So common, really.”

“The English word repentance is derived from the Latin poenitare, which merely means to feel sorry, suggesting a change in the heart rather than in the mind. Poenitare is a most inadequate word that doesn’t reflect the challenge involved,” Father Snow said excitedly.

“We’ve had a good life,” Daddy said, smoking. “Full. Can’t take that away from us.”

Father Snow looked at his drink. The moment of exhilaration had passed. He was now merely drunk and again missing Donny. “Very difficult. Another way of thinking, a different approach to everything in life…” he said uncertainly.

The cats came into the room and leapt up onto Arleen’s lap. The cats would do this to people they sensed hated them, and this amused the girls. But Arleen stroked them, first the one, then the other. From one’s side she plucked a bloodsucker the size of a swollen dime. She held it between her fingers, a fat full thing with tiny waving legs, and dropped it in the dish Daddy was using as an ashtray. From behind the ear of the second cat, Arleen snapped off another. Its removal occasioned a slight clicking sound. She dropped it beside the other one. The things stumbled around in the ashes in the little china dish. The attractive floral pattern that was so Mommy, that Mommy admired on all her china, was totally obscured. In this pretty room, this formal room with the silk shades, the portraits of ancestors and the lark beneath the bell jar.

“That’s disgusting, Arleen,” one of the girls said. They had no doubt that she had produced them fraudulently. Their pets, their darlings, could not possibly be harboring such things. “Are you a magician? Isn’t that unchristian?”

“No, no,” Arleen said, ducking her head shyly. “I’m hardly a magician, I’m an adviser, a companion.”

“Arleen’s no amateur,” Father Snow said.

“A companion?” the girls said.

“The woman can listen to anything and come to a swift decision,” Father Snow said. “I rely more on the ritual stuff. Words. Blah, blah, blah.”

Arleen turned to Mommy. “You should get rid of them.”

“The cats?” Mommy said. “Oh, I know, sometimes they spray.”

“No, the girls,” Arleen said. “High time for them to be gone.”

The girls gaped at her.

“Your mother’s not well, you’re killing her,” Arleen said simply.

Mommy looked at them. She looked as though she didn’t know what to think. Daddy rested his burning cigarette in the dish, then ground it out and lit another. The ashes moved with continuing, even renewed, effort.

Mommy quickly spread more cheese on the crackers, wads of it, a bit more than was nice, actually. She stood up to pass the plate, tottering a bit.

“Oh, do sit down,” one of the girls said, exasperated.

She did, abruptly, looking puzzled.

Father Snow said, “Clarissa, are you all right?” for Clarissa was Mommy’s name.

“Dear?” Daddy said.

She smiled slyly and gave a little grunt. It was all so not like Mommy. She swayed and slid to the floor not at all gracefully, entangling herself in the cord of a lamp and striking her head on the lintel of the fireplace.

The girls clutched each other and cried out.

Arleen moved to cradle Clarissa’s head, and Father Snow, with surprising sureness, crouched beside them both. He had quite regained his composure, as though for the moment he had put the old dead behind him and was moving on to the requirements of the quickening new.

Revenant

Cliff’s father had made all the arrangements for his own funeral and when he died his lawyer called and informed Cliff of the time and place, a small church graveyard on an island that held no associations for Cliff or, as far as he knew, his father, though the two of them had been estranged for some time.

“The stone’s not ready yet. Deer Isle marble. No name, no dates, just the words And you, what do you seek?”

Cliff said nothing.

“It’s certainly different,” the lawyer offered. “That might be what’s taking them so long.”

It was winter then. He was twenty-eight. For a year he had been working in the city at a publishing house, one of the best, and spending the weekends with a woman and her two-year-old son in a little house in Connecticut that her grandmother had left her. Her own parents had died some time before. She had no one either. Well, she had the child.

The island lay in a frigid haze. Only two ferry runs a day were scheduled at that time of year — one left at nine in the morning and returned to the mainland immediately, and the other left the island at four in the afternoon. The crossing took forty minutes.

Cliff drove into the hold, which was brightly lit with yellow bulbs. The light made everything colder. There were two new SUVs and a truck loaded with lumber and pipe. Cliff was wearing a suit and fine shoes with thin socks; he had dressed carefully for the occasion. He had a coat and gloves but they were more formal than warm. He should have dressed more warmly. He would have brought something to read but again he thought, My father has died. He did not want to be reading. The service would be at exactly twelve o’clock and would probably last no more than fifteen minutes. He had been told there was an inn near the ferry dock that served food, but the island did not do much to accommodate the casual visitor. There was no town. There was a golf course and a Coast Guard station and the beaches were rocky and mostly private. It was an island of estates invisible down winding roads.

He tried to picture a woman at the graveside, a beautiful weeping stranger. He hoped for this, expecting some disclosure still about a life, his father’s, that was so unknown to him.

When the ferry began to move, he got out of the car and went up to the cabin. The steel of the floor was painted blue and the oak benches were highly varnished. There were four passengers and an enormous dark dog, a Newfoundland. There was a handsome elderly couple, the truck driver and, sitting with the dog, a young woman about twenty. They all looked at him briefly except for the truck driver, who was holding a paper cup of coffee but appeared to be sleeping. The girl was reading, and the jacket of the book she was holding said starkly The Poems of Yeats. After a few moments she put the book down and glanced at him.

“ ‘The Cap and Bells,’ that’s a nice one,” he said.

She smiled at him tightly and picked the book up again.

He had always liked poetry.

He sat quietly on one of the varnished benches. No one spoke but they seemed comfortable, at ease. He did not feel at ease. He thought for a moment that if they knew his situation they would be kind to him. Then he felt ashamed.

It was black outside the windows. The crossing to the island was smooth and he tried to remain aware of it.

Something struck the window. He stared, but saw nothing. The others, too, looked at the window. Even the huge dog raised its head, which looked warm and moist and trembled slightly, like something baking. When he had been a child, someone had told him that every dog’s heart was the same size, it didn’t matter how big the dog was. This had troubled him for years. He had never owned a dog himself.

He closed his eyes and not long after heard the engine slow. He rose and went outside. He could see the dock ahead, the battered boards of the cradle shining greasily beneath a single large light. He went down and sat in his car. He found the directions the pastor had given him to the church and studied them again. They were not complicated. The pastor had not known his father but was in receipt of the cremains.

A deckhand appeared and pulled the gates of the hold back. The sound of the engine rose as the ferry slowed and rocked against the boards. Cliff watched the docking procedure carefully. When the deckhand gestured to him, he realized he had been dreading this, leaving the ferry first, driving ahead of the others up the road.

The car clattered over the steel plates and plunged up the road, skidding a little. The other vehicles followed. Within a few moments he had passed the darkened inn and, a mile later, the church and its attendant graveyard. Still, they followed. He should have turned toward the church, since it was the reason he was here, after all. He felt humiliated. The road branched and he bore to the left. The others followed, as though intent on tormenting him. Finally he saw the truck turn off. Wet trees lined the road and stone walls glittered through dead vines. One car turned down a lane but one still followed. His head felt illuminated. He saw a fox in the road and slammed on the brakes. The fox vanished and the car behind him sped by, the girl at the wheel, the huge dog filling the backseat. He pulled over and paused a moment. On the shoulder lay another fox, long crushed. But it hasn’t happened after all, came the incoherent thought, and he was frightened.

—

Cliff loved his work as an editor. He loved the old offices, the ruthlessness and formality of the meetings. He didn’t have any authors of his own yet. He had worked on a few anthologies and guidebooks and had one historical novel on the fall list. During the week he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast brownstone in the West Eighties. His room was small, had a bright worn Turkish rug on the floor, and the bed was high and narrow. A Steiff animal collection filled one of the shelves, and a vacuum cleaner was stored in the closet. The only breakfast provided was English muffins and strawberry jam and he couldn’t keep any food of his own in the refrigerator. He was always hungry. On the weekends he took the train to Connecticut and stayed with Ricky and the boy, Richard. He liked the idea of having an attractive family that he had not been responsible for creating.

One of the senior editors seemed interested in his progress, a man named Franklin Woolf, but everyone called him Loup. He was erudite and viciously funny. You want to be the last to leave the room when he’s in it, one of the other junior editors warned Cliff, though he was eager to learn and knew he could learn a lot from him. Loup arranged to have him move into the midtown writing studio of one of the house’s venerable authors, who had relocated temporarily to Mexico. It was full of books and had good light and a kitchen, and the bathroom was his alone. It was a far better arrangement than the brownstone. The author was working on a “volcano” of a book but everyone knew he had stopped writing, that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody went to Mexico anymore to write books. The man was finished.

—

One of the assistants died and most of the office attended the funeral. He was younger than Cliff, just out of Bard. He’d drowned, horsing around in some lake on a long holiday weekend, and now he was dead. Then, less than a week later, a beloved agent died from the complications diabetes often brings. That was a memorial service, and the first time Cliff heard Loup speak in such a venue. Although Cliff had not known the agent, he found Loup’s words moving, even thrilling in a peculiar way. He was by far the best speaker there. Life seemed sweet and carefree and cruel, futile, almost comprehensible. He could have described to no one what Loup had said.

“Jesus,” Loup muttered to him afterward, “let’s go get a drink.” It was three o’clock in the afternoon and they went to the Carlyle. As they were handing over their coats to be checked, Cliff saw Loup glance at the Phi Beta Kappa key he wore as a lapel pin on his coat. A diligent student, he had graduated from a midwestern college of no great reputation. He wore the pin with some secretiveness but casually, as though it didn’t matter. And it did not matter, because he hadn’t gone to the right school.

Loup bestowed on him the slightest of smiles. Cliff was too nervous to even get drunk. Later, when he returned to the writer’s studio, he removed the pin and threw it in a drawer.

—

Loup was going through boxes of manuscripts, a dozen of them that had been on his desk for a month. He was now disposing of them rapidly. He would pick an even-numbered page and give it his full attention. One page could tell him everything. Sometimes the decision was made on a single line. It was all true, what writers suspected.

He called Cliff into his office and read aloud, “I looked out the window. I could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees.” He said to Cliff, “What the hell does that mean?”

“I like it,” Cliff ventured. “It’s not bad.”

“So give her a chance. If we don’t change her life, somebody else will.”

—

Loup and Cliff swept into memorial services together, two fine-looking men in dark coats. There were so many occasions, at least once a month, in cathedrals and supper clubs, in arboretums, in chapels, under bridges, in theaters. A dignified lament seemed almost perpetual, resting lightly over the vigor and flash of the city. There was nothing suspicious or extraordinary about the numbers, nothing particularly unnerving about the manner in which the usual course of nature was accomplished upon those taken. Surprises were not infrequent, although there were no suicides. The enemy agent appeared in its own time, arrived on its own schedule. A translator died in a domino car wreck in a dust storm on a New Mexico interstate. A poet was murdered by his wife. The founder of an old, stubbornly prestigious quarterly collapsed, having just excused himself from dinner.

And after the funeral it felt good to be drinking and talking, unfazed, strengthened, made alert by his attendance at these courteous rituals where Loup often spoke in his oblique, heretical, much-admired fashion, addressing those gathered in a courtyard holding flutes of champagne or standing barefoot in the verge of some gently receding tide or assembled in some vast prewar apartment — not every war bestows upon the time just preceding it such desirable architecture — or moteless, light-filled loft, where the faces seemed as idealized as masks, some but not many half barbaric with grief. They thought Loup was telling them they were still winning, for their hearts, though they might be cold or troubled or uncertain or even without honor, had not yet died within them. They were winning. The day belonged to them still, though tomorrow was promised to no one.

On the weekends, Ricky tried to match him drink for drink. He increasingly arrived hours later than he had promised. The neat little house felt stifling to him. The boy’s face was flushed but he was sleeping, drugged with the heat, wearing only a dazzlingly white cloth diaper.

“Why don’t you open some windows?” he demanded.

“I kept the house shut up to be cool,” Ricky said. “Gramma did and it was always cool.”

“It’s like being in an oven,” Cliff complained.

“I guess I wasn’t thinking. I was just waiting for you.”

He moved quickly through the house, noisily pushing up windows. They had to be held in place with sticks, cracked croquet mallets, the rungs of old chairs. That was how the old woman had done things. A fragrant breeze slipped in immediately from the meadow but did not mollify him.

In the morning, they sat out on a redwood deck the grandmother was having built the month she died. Cliff had tried to finish the work himself and done it badly but Ricky didn’t seem to notice. She liked having breakfast on the ugly deck, which she’d made even uglier with pots of geraniums everywhere. Farther away, near the marsh, red-winged blackbirds swayed on the tips of tall grasses.

Ricky was reading the newspaper avidly, as she always did. Her morning homage to the newspaper. Finally she put it down.

“What?” she said. “You’re restless.”

“I have a lot of work to do.”

“You could have brought it with you. I don’t mind.”

“I better go back early. Maybe after lunch.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. She began pinching dead stems off the geraniums.

“Those things have a helluva smell,” he said.

“I like roses better but I’m not good with roses.” After a moment she said, “Don’t be unhappy with me, Cliff, with us.”

“I’m not unhappy,” he said. “Don’t start that stuff.”

—

On the ferry, the girl had been stroking the dog’s head as she read. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him again. He must have been staring at her without realizing it.

“Rilke’s my favorite,” he said. “He wrote about dogs a great deal. He wrote about going into them, you know? He’d have been fascinated with your big fellow.”

“My big fellow,” she said slowly.

“It’s apparently why Rilke left his wife, why he left home. Because he wasn’t allowed to ‘go into the dog.’ Or if he did he would have to attempt to explain it, which spoiled everything. He loved easing himself into the dog, into the dog’s very center, into the place from which the dog existed as a dog, the very place, he said, where God would have rested when the dog was complete, to watch him.” He spoke quickly. Usually he didn’t talk much. He felt a little breathless.

“I’d like to make something clear to you,” she said. “Do you think that would be possible? I mean really clear.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I think you understand me,” she said.

After she had sped around him on the road, he drove for a time, disoriented, across the island. Then he returned to the church and the graveyard. There were a few large marble stones, pink as uncooked bacon, then some low granite pillow stones, as he’d heard them called. It was not an old cemetery. There was probably an older one somewhere on the island. He couldn’t see that any earth had been freshly excavated. He hoped that they remembered, that they knew what they were doing. He got out of the car and walked toward the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the burying ground. With relief he saw some shoveled earth, some waiting earth. He returned to the car and poured a cup of coffee from the thermos he’d brought. It seemed he had known more about everything before his father’s death, which had just been six days before, and now he would know less and less. He looked at the church and the graveyard and the parking lot where gulls stood hunched. On the beak of each one was a perfect red dot like a drop of blood. He couldn’t understand any of it. The church had no spire. It had an architectural suggestion of a spire.

He walked toward the church and the gulls shuffled away from him and spread their wings but did not fly. The door was unlocked, so he went in, without looking at the sanctuary, and found the bathroom. When he came out he saw the pastor’s office and put his hand on that door too, but it was locked. The church was as cold as the outside, maybe even colder.

He sat down self-consciously in the last pew. There was a child’s mitten on the floor. Less than an hour had passed since he’d driven off the ferry. He sat in the cold. The church felt like the shell of something, something unlucky. The flowers from the Sunday service were still in their vases, browning. The silver vases, however, shone. This was Wednesday.

He could see his own breath before him and his teeth began to chatter. He nudged the child’s mitten away with his foot, under the pew in front. The pews were as heavily varnished as the benches on the ferry. He stood and walked past the pastor’s study into an open room full of rummage, games and glasses, shoes and clothes. On a coatrack there were a number of worn sweaters and jackets. He put his ungloved hand idly in the pocket of one of the jackets and touched cigarette butts and rubber bands. He wondered if any of his father’s things were in this room. He would not have recognized them; he had last been with him two years ago and it hadn’t been anywhere his father lived, just a restaurant in the city. He remembered a plate of bloody meat. Apparently the restaurant was cherished for its firm, fresh, bloody meat. The evening with his father had been all right, though he couldn’t remember all that much about it.

The hand he had placed in the jacket now felt dirty, tingling, even a little numb, as if it had been bitten by poisonous insects. Cigarette butts and rubber bands and death the promised end. He went back to his car, turned on the heater and drove into the interior of the island again. He didn’t see the crushed fox this time and kept going. There were moors with scrub pines, thickets and ponds. There were no houses here in what was common land, a conservancy, crisscrossed by rough trails. He drove aimlessly and slowly through the moors, then stopped on a high knoll. Some distance away he saw a vehicle creeping along with a dog trailing behind it. It was the Newfoundland. This was how the girl exercised him. The bitch, he thought. Oh, the lazy bitch. He sat slumped in his seat, despondent, hating her, following the lumbering dog with his eyes. They didn’t approach him. She must have seen him there, his white car on the moors, but she was selecting trails now that took her farther and farther away. They disappeared from his sight.

The water of the distant sound looked like pavement, an empty boulevard. He must not allow the girl to ruin this island for him, this unknown place where his father would be buried forever. He had to give his father his full attention; it was absolutely essential. He looked at his watch. It was still some time before the burial. He remembered thinking then that the pastor should have invited him to his house during this interval. It would have been nice.

—

The writer who could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees made quite an impression. But her agent double-crossed Cliff and her next contract was with another house. Still, Cliff was credited with having good instincts and given better opportunities. His authors respected the careful work he did while he found he admired them less and less. The best books were those uninhabited by those who wrote them.

“Fierce, tactile prose,” Loup said. “That’s what we want and are so seldom given.

“There’s no fucking energy around anymore,” Loup said. “You notice that? It’s because death’s energy, death’s vital energy, is being ignored. It’s not being utilized. The more and more death, the more it’s wasted. People just let it evaporate. But not us. We know how to husband the source. I’m sure you are aware,” Loup said, “that the soul was invented. A Greek invented it in the sixth century BC. Pindar the Greek.”

—

“They told me I was washing the diapers with too much bleach and that’s why the baby’s been cranky,” Ricky said. “Do you think that could be true?”

He had so wearied of her it was like an ache in his bones.

“I’ve found a good sitter,” she said. “It took me forever to find a really responsible one. Why don’t I come along to the service for your father?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“We never do anything important together. I hardly ever see you. Afterwards we could go out, couldn’t we?”

“We’ll have another drink and go out tonight. We’ll go to that seafood place.”

It was late afternoon and the sun was falling with haste toward the earth.

“Gramma said that when dusk falls it reminds God of the hearts of men. That’s the only time he thinks of us, at dusk.”

“Your grandmother was an amazing woman,” Cliff said.

She looked at him uncertainly.

They would quarrel later. He was relieved it was finally over.

—

He had stopped at the inn before reboarding the ferry. The girl’s car was in the parking lot and in the backseat, like a judge in his robes, sat the dog.

In the dining room the tables were set with white tablecloths but no one was there. People were eating and drinking in the bar. He went into the dining room, ordered a whiskey and soda and some soup and asked for bread. He was almost trembling with hunger. He ate most of the bread with his drink.

The girl materialized from the dimness of the bar and walked across the dining room to his table. She had on jeans and a tweed jacket and was wearing dark red lipstick.

“I’m sorry I was rude to you this morning,” she said. “I feel badly about it. It was interesting what you were saying.”

He picked up the last piece of bread in the basket and began chewing it. “The bread here isn’t very good,” he said.

“It’s better on the weekends,” she said. “Or it sometimes is.” She laughed.

“Would you like a drink?” he said.

“No thank you. I just wanted to apologize. I was so awful. I’m like a different person in the morning.”

She was being terribly pleasant. “Yes,” he said. “You seem like a different person.”

The waitress was coming across the room with the soup.

“I’ll leave you in peace now,” the girl said, and went back to her friends.

He ate the soup. A few minutes later the waitress returned with a fresh drink. “It’s on the house,” she said. He took it and ordered another. A drink someone bought for you didn’t taste any different than a drink you bought yourself. No one else came into the dining room.

As he left, the girl called out good-bye to him.

“Bye-bye,” he said. She meant nothing to him.

It was growing dark and he could barely make out the great patient bulk of the dog in the car next to his own. He thought about being watched from the inside. He would not want to be watched from the inside.

—

Now he and Loup were sitting in a corner of the bar they frequented. They had been regulars here for months. Cliff had finished telling him the story of the island, his father, the girl. He had missed the service at the graveyard. He must have fallen asleep in the car or been thinking of the girl, wishing her ill and the dog too, hoping for something to enter their lives and break her heart. When he had looked at his watch it was well past noon. Even then he had done nothing until it was hours past the moment for which he had come, the committal. He continued to sit in the car with the heater running. But then he had driven back across the island and past the deserted church without even glancing at the grave site to see if the earth was smooth or still disturbed.

It was a story meant to be told in a different way, he thought reasonably, protectively.

“You can go back for the installation of the stone,” Loup said. “There’s always the next opportunity.”

Cliff looked at him meekly but the older man was looking away, studying someone across the room, someone whom he had greeted earlier and already dismissed.

The Mission

A Mr. Hill was doing my paperwork.

“What will you take away from this experience,” he asked me.

I looked at him, a little wildly, I guess.

“What do you think you will learn from the incarceration experience?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Mr. Hill wore a pink shirt and looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Have you been swimming,” I asked.

“I haven’t been swimming,” he said frankly.

I thought of Mr. Hill doing a strenuous butterfly in a blue cool but overchlorinated pool deep in the earth beneath the Mission.

I had been in jail but a single day and night when they realized they had overlooked the wedding ring on my hand. I wasn’t married anymore but couldn’t get the ring off. My knuckles were swollen possibly because of the prednisone I’d been taking because I was tired, so tired. It was just a cheap gold band but I made a terrible fuss when they said they’d have to cut it off. Some of the girls had gathered around.

“They’re gonna cut off her wedding ring,” one muttered with amused awe.

I asked for Mr. Hill. He might tell them not to bother, I thought. I was only in for nine days.

But they couldn’t find Mr. Hill or he had in the meanwhile sickened or died, I don’t know.

They were determined to cut off my ring and after several attempts with a variety of implements they did. They took pictures. First the little ring was on my lumpish hand, then the poor broken thing was zipped up in a baggie for safekeeping and future retrieval. I didn’t regret the mangling of the ring as much as the disclosure heard throughout the dorm that I would be there for a mere nine days. Most of the girls were serving ninety or a hundred and eighty days. One girl, Lisa, who even with my paucity of instinctual knowledge terrified me, had been here since September and it was now June.

It was Sunday evening and on Sunday evenings there was Snack, a bottle of Pepsi and a packaged cookie. Usually you had to pay for this stuff out of the machines. Two inmates with magnificent hair distributed Snack, which was allocated by bunk number. Everyone except the guards had the most astonishing hair. I didn’t want to call any more attention to myself so I lined up with the others but someone had already used my number to double-dip.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“You didn’t pick up Snack already?” one of the gloriously maned girls demanded.

“It’s perfectly all right,” I assured her.

“Somebody take her cookie?” the other said, her eyes darkening.

“Some bitch took her cookie.”

“Really, it’s fine,” I said. “I didn’t—”

“I’m gonna find the bitch took her cookie!” She looked around with unsettling purpose.

“Please, please, please,” I said.

“She don’t want to get the bitch in trouble,” the first one said, not altogether approvingly.

They pushed a warm soda and a cold cookie into my hands.

“You can give me them if you don’t want it,” the girl behind me said.

I was DUI, which was so boring in the vast scheme of things and particularly in the louche gray world of the Mission. DUIs were beneath interest and I had already experienced girls looking right through me in a practiced way even though this would change if the particulars of my case became known. I had been drinking Manhattans all afternoon for reasons that remain obscure and when returning home had driven off the road into the city’s largest cemetery, demolishing seven headstones before my old Suburban stopped. If one of those girls had a friend or family member whose marker had been so desecrated, God himself wouldn’t be willing to help me.

The first policeman on the scene said, “You’re lucky you didn’t kill somebody.” Naturally, he was laughing.

This happened four months ago. I didn’t go to jail right away. First they took me to a place called the Pit, where more or less endless processing is conducted. There’s a water fountain and a phone. My only companion was a woman saying “Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom. Mom. Mom” into the receiver. I don’t think anyone was on the other end. I think she was just trying to pass time in the Pit.

Do you know that Kafka is buried with his mother and father in Prague? Their names are on his stone. He couldn’t get away from those people, not in life and not in death. I have never been to Prague but had I been and by some misfortune demolished Kafka’s headstone, the rage of the people there, indeed the rage of people the world over, would not exceed that of the kinsmen of those whose rest was disturbed here in our little city’s largest cemetery. The families Dominguez and Schrage and Tapia and McNeil and Byrne and Pennington…they hated me. They howled for my ruin. I’d been told their anguish was existential and therefore without limit or promise of closure. Reparation would never be enough.

They let me go after twelve hours to deal with all the horrid things that would occupy me for years — the sentencing and community service and judgments, the lawyers and lawsuits and probation officers and trials and plea bargains and financial penalties and loss of privileges and rights. Nine days at the Mission might very well be the least of my burdens.

In the bunk next to me was a girl whose eyelids were tattooed. I had never seen anything like it. She was a vandal. She went out into nature, into state parks particularly, and hacked whatever she could to pieces. She hacked up trees and spray-painted SOMA on boulders and petroglyphs and interpretive signs. She had misread Brave New World, maybe in high school, I thought, but I wasn’t going to mention that to her or anything else.

“Have you ever read Brave New World,” I asked.

She turned her head in my direction, closed her eyes, and very very slowly shook her head.

“OK,” I said. “Cool.”

You’re better off if you don’t count the days in jail. Never count the days. Time served does not go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on but Monday to Tuesday, Tuesday to Wednesday, in that manner. It’s longer that way, which is how they want it.

One girl said that when she got out there was a job waiting for her decorating cakes. But she did not have high hopes for the position. “You can’t be real creative,” she said. “It’s not as creative as you’d think.”

I just overhear these things, no one ever speaks to me. For example, I heard that Lisa was in for armed robbery and three of the five fathers of her children had restraining orders against her. One afternoon Lisa looked at a girl who had left her boyfriend for dead with a knife in his head as they were traveling by bus to Key West — just left him in the seat when she exited in Key Largo — and said, “Do you have anything you’d like to share?” Most of the girls kept food they’d bought from the machines in the drawers under their bunks. I was very frightened but the girl gave Lisa Snickers and Skittles and even a little bag of that Smartfood popcorn, all of which Lisa accepted in a gracious manner.

The next morning I saw Mr. Hill standing by the front station with some folders.

“Mr. Hill!” I cried.

“Hello, N. Frame,” he said.

“I’m not N. Frame,” I said, somewhat hurt, “unless she’s to be released today.”

“She is to be released today.”

“Then sure I am,” I said.

“No,” he said, studying me with his bloodshot eyes, “I see you are not.”

“Have you been swimming?” I said, trying to resume our old intimacy.

“You’d better go back to your bunk now,” he said, “and tuck your shirt in.”

“But it’s been nine days! I know you’re not supposed to count.”

“Whoever told you that?” he said. “Of course you’re supposed to count the days.”

Not long after, the girls who distributed Snack were released and the girl who would have the job at the bakery and even Lisa. She strode away, her mighty bronze and black hair swinging.

I started counting the days.

When I counted a certain way I had not been there anywhere near nine days.

New girls arrived. They didn’t need to know me either because the reality is DUIs will never be among the elite at the Mission. One of the new ones — she was just in for violating probation — managed to hang herself. No one could figure out how she got away with it. Like everyone else she had been asked a dozen times throughout the admission process if she harbored suicidal thoughts but she must have lied.

For a while afterward there were more guards, even men, boys really. The boy guards always looked uneasy. There’s a shitload of girls in the bathroom, we heard one of them say anxiously. Somehow the numbers had gotten away from them. There are supposed to be only seven of us in the bathroom at any given time.

The girls gave one another facials at the picnic table in the little cement yard where we were allowed to go at erratic times. The times became even more erratic, if that was possible, after the hung girl. Her name had been Deirdre, but no one mentioned her by name. It was just too weird to call her by her name.

A facial was just squeezing blackheads and whiteheads. Even so, I was not invited to participate, neither as extractor nor as extractee. I felt so isolated and alone, though no more than usual.

My lawyer said, “You’re better off where you are for the time being. The environment out here is not conducive to…” She paused.

“To what?”

“Conducive to your privacy, to your ability to come and go.”

“I want to be able to come and go out there.”

“Don’t we all,” the lawyer said. “I mean in the deepest sense.”

From the very first I had found her annoying.

“But I didn’t hurt anyone.”

“A felony’s a felony,” she said.

I spent my days attempting to read a little pamphlet entitled The Room. It was about file cards and Jesus. It was pretty depressing. It was trying to provide hope but I didn’t find it hopeful. Too, the problem might have been with the lighting, which was deliberately terrible. It took forever to read anything.

Then I saw Mr. Hill again. I rushed to the red line painted on the floor. He nodded for me to advance.

“Hello, N. Frame,” he said.

“Hello!” I said. Thinking quickly, I added, “I am to be released today.”

Then I wanted to take it back because by my calculation N. Frame had been released many days before.

“I’m afraid not,” Mr. Hill said. “You’re a recidivist and your time with us starts all over again.”

Despite myself I thrilled to his use of the word recidivist, which is a lovely-sounding word.

“I’m really not N. Frame,” I said. “But for my own actions I take full responsibility. I am so contrite.”

He looked at me wearily.

“I am,” I said.

“Nothing you do will be enough,” he said. “No compensation will suffice.”

“I know, I know, I know,” I said.

He shifted the folders he held from one hand to the other. “Enhanced punishment,” I heard in part.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, for enhanced was a lovely word as well, though I believe in this context it wasn’t as nice as it sounded. “Am I a recidivist or did my sentence just get worse regardless?”

Even before I finished I felt the unworthiness of my question. I retreated to my bunk and I thought of Mr. Hill returning to his residence beneath the Mission, where the light was good and where water moved as if it were alive and where possibly dozens of the pressed pink shirts I admired were in orderly rows. Our clothes smell of metal — our soap and socks and even the candy that we keep. It all smells unconsolingly of metal.

It was very late and all was quiet. There wasn’t a dream moving.

The girl with the tattooed eyelids said to me, “There is no Mr. Hill.”

I felt better immediately.

Her eyes were shut, of course. There was a design on her lids but I had always felt that any attempt to determine what it was would be most unwise and I feel that way still.

Another Season

He had taken the boat from the mainland when he was still a young man and stayed on. He remembered the first night being the hardest, as they say the first night of being dead must be. But he was not newly dead, he was entering for the first time what would become his life. He slept that first night on the beach, curled behind a boat, and his dreams were no longer those of his childhood — the plastic ball enclosing a plastic lion crushed by the doctor’s car as over and over the doctor’s pale car arrived at the anguished house.

He woke to a stinging rain and a strong east wind. The road to town was dark with little birds, dovekies he was later told, little auks blown in from the storm. He scooped up as many as he could catch and placed them in the bushes.

“Not there, not there!” a man in yellow oilskins shouted. “They live only on water, they can’t lift their bodies into flight from land!”

Together they carried dozens back to the sea but as many others died exhausted in their hands.

Later the man in oilskins said to him, “What is your name?”

“Nicodemus.”

“Not Nick?”

“Nicodemus.”

“He was the gentle one.”

The man was long retired from some successful industry. Now he was a hobbyist, a birder. He offered to hire Nicodemus as a handyman for his own grand residence, which he would vacate after Thanksgiving. In a matter of weeks, Nicodemus knew everyone on the winter island. He fixed pumps, caulked boats, split wood. He shingled roofs with the help of the waning moon.

Still, nothing was familiar to him here, neither morning nor evening. In the southern dusk, the dark grew out of the sky like a hoof of mud dissolving in a clear pool. But on the island, dusk seemed to grow out of nothing at all. Dusk and night being a figment of fog, an exhaustion of wave, the time when blackness sank into the town as if buildings and trees were a pit to be filled.

A deer fell on the once friendly hillside, the crack of the gun sounding a playful instant later.

His benefactor died on the mainland in a traffic accident. The great stone house was sold immediately. Nicodemus stayed on, in a single-room cottage on the grounds. In the South it would have been called a shack. He became more solitary; his health was not good, but his strength never failed him, he was very strong.

The new owners’ big Airedale had had surgery. Nicodemus carried the dog into the house and laid him on pillows and comforters that had been arranged on the floor by the fireplace.

“When do the stitches come out,” Nicodemus asked.

“They don’t take them out anymore,” the new owner said. “They dissolve on their own when their work is done.”

The man’s wife was slouched in a wing chair reading a paperback book. She looked at the dog and said, “Poor guy, poor Blue.” Then she glanced at the book again. “Lem hated the film Tarkovsky made of Solaris. I want to see Stalker again. I think it’s his masterpiece. What a genius.”

“Would you like a drink,” the man asked Nicodemus.

He shook his head.

“I’d like a drink,” the woman said. “Something fun, not just a gin and tonic.”

“A martini?”

“That’s not fun, that’s trouble. Oh, don’t bother to make me anything.”

“Breakfast of Champions. That’s what Kurt Vonnegut called a dry gin martini.”

“Oh yes,” she said, mollified. “He’s a genius. When he speaks, it’s genius speaking.”

The dog did not recover. Within the week Nicodemus was called upon to bury him.

“I can’t do it,” the man said. “I loved Blue so much. I just can’t see him now, do you understand?”

“Yes,” Nicodemus said, though he did not.

“I don’t like that man,” the woman confided to her husband. “Do you know the story of that servant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s? He went berserk and killed Wright’s mistress and her children, others too, with a shingling ax. He served luncheon, then killed them and burned the house down as well.”

“Nicodemus is not a servant,” he said, laughing.

“Yes he is, he’s dying to serve, that one, believe me.”

Her husband laughed again and shrugged, but she had decided. She didn’t like Nicodemus, his silence, his solitariness.

“I think he’s illiterate too,” she said. “I bet he is.”

At the end of the summer, he was let go. It was all right. He found another place, a real shack this time, out by the old haulover, past the striped lighthouse that the summer residents had moved back from the eroding cliffs at enormous expense.

Fewer than a hundred people lived on the island in the winter. The library and church were closed. The hotel was boarded up and the flags put away. The numbered planks of the beach club’s pier were stacked in the ballroom. There was a single fire engine but no school. Someone taught him backgammon, baffled that he didn’t excel at darts. He drank bitter coffee at the grocer’s store.

A scalloper opened the door and announced, “I must bring back the can of corn I bought yesterday. I thought it was pineapple.”

The bakery remained open. Her specialty was still Parker House rolls.

“Maybelle come in the other day and she says she’s got two husbands. ‘Why, Maybelle,’ I start, and she says, ‘One drunk and one sober.’ ”

The ferry came three times a week in winter, sometimes not even that when ice choked the passage. But the winters were no longer as cold as they had been, the storms as dire. The dovekies had only that one year been blown ashore, the year he had arrived, now a long time ago.

He could no longer work as he once had. Sometimes, he couldn’t catch his breath and at those times he would think, You’re my breath, you belong to me. We have to work together. You need me too, he’d address his breath. But oddly, he didn’t really believe his breath belonged to him. It was a strange thought that didn’t trouble him particularly.

Each summer, more and more people arrived on the island with their enormous vehicles, their pretty children and roisterous pets. It was another season and each summer Nicodemus liked them a little less and they liked him a little less as well, no doubt. There were more creatures dead in the summer. Drowned dogs, car-hit cats and deer and foxes. All manner of birds, gulls, herons and songbirds bright as gold coins. One night in August, on one of his late strolls, for he no longer slept well, he came upon a flock of wild ducks that had attempted to walk across a road that bisected two ponds, a habit safe enough at certain hours and one accommodated mostly with tolerant amusement. But some vehicle had torn through them and continued on, leaving a crumpled wake of the dead and the dying.

Nicodemus picked them up and placed them beside the marsh’s shores. Others he put in his jacket, attempting to calm and warm them before their inevitable deaths. This was observed by some who passed by, including Brock Tilden, the owner of a new guesthouse. He admired the thoroughness with which Nicodemus returned the unfortunate site to a relative sense of serenity, even carrying some of the birds off with him, perhaps to eat, Brock thought, for Nicodemus was known to be both odd and resourceful.

Brock was a big booster of the island and its potential. He was a gracious hotelier and many who stayed in his pleasant rooms were so charmed by his enthusiasm and helpfulness that they went on to buy or build places of their own. Brock’s idealized version of the island relied heavily on the picturesque and the modestly abundant — he had organized the first daffodil festival in his gardens only that spring — and the dead animals that were increasingly littering the roads and lanes had become an aesthetic problem, demanding a solution.

He conferred with several of the other business owners and they sought out Nicodemus and presented a proposition. They would provide him with a truck, a gasoline card at the dock’s pumps and two thousand dollars a year to make the island appear as though death on the minor plane were unknown to it.

“On the minor plane,” Nicodemus said.

“Well, yeah, we can’t do anything about the big stuff,” Brock said, thinking irritably about the prep school boy suiciding by his daddy’s basement table saw in June just as the season was starting, or the stockbroker all over the news who was found with an anchor line tied around his ankle. “But we can maintain a certain look that sets this place apart. Dead animals are disturbing to many people. There’s also the ick factor.”

“What about litter,” Nicodemus asked.

“We’ve got people for litter. This job is yours alone. We’ll put it in the beautification budget.”

The truck was old but the heater worked and the clutch didn’t slip. The bed was wood and had slatted sides. Nicodemus drove slowly along the roads with a red cloth hanging from the tailgate and when he saw the carcass of a dead bird or animal that had been killed due to a momentary and fatal lapse in watchfulness or timing, he would signal a stop, paddling his arm from the window, and step down to the sand-straddled road. He would always pick them up with his ungloved hands and lay them carefully in the truck. He stroked the clotted fur, arranged the stiffening limbs and curved talons, then wrapped them in scraps of sheets and towels. He put the dogs and cats he deemed to have been pets in coffins of cardboard in case they would be claimed and restored to someone’s futile care. He printed descriptions on cards and posted them on the grocer’s public board along with the advertisements for massages, pellet stoves and dories. If they were not claimed in two days he would bury them in the meadow ringed with pines behind his shack. It was the blackness of their eyes that touched him, the depthless dark of their eyes.

In the winter nights, the sea could have been dark fields or an endless forest of felled trees.

In his room, he ate from chipped plates and forks marked with another’s initials, and kept letters that had never been for him neatly tied with string. He had a postcard of a lion in a zoo and one that spoke of a William he had never known from an Elisabeth who promised she would soon arrive. He took the letters from the dump, from the sunken spots in the ground that the flames couldn’t reach. The gulls wobbled in the smoke’s heat when the island’s trash was burned there, and the letters smelled of orange rind and ash.

All his worn furnishings came from the dump. “What do you do with your money, Nicodemus?” they teased him. He didn’t know, he had no idea where it was and didn’t need it.

He was gaunt, but clean and neat. His hands became the most remarkable things about him. They were beautiful, unworn by the work he did. “You need a good pair of gloves, Nicodemus,” they said. But he didn’t wear gloves even on the bitterest days, when even the sandpipers’ heartbreaking cries were quieted by the cold.

In the summer, the children called him the Undertaker. They would sometimes kill small things for sport and say, “The Undertaker will take care of them now.”

He slept little. He didn’t think he slept at all, but that was an illusion, he knew. He would think of himself as resting beneath a large black wave, just before it curled and fell, wondering: Why am I this Nicodemus? Why am I not another? When I die, will I become another? Does God love all equally? Does he love the living more than the dead?

It seemed to him that God must love the living more, but could he love the dead less, having made them so?

That summer was the hottest anyone could remember. The flowers browned against the white fences, the berries withered before they were blue. At the ends of the roads, there were dark mirages and the boats seemed to ride on glass.

One night, as he buried a shattered animal, he placed a note in its grave.

Later, he thought, I must not do that again.

—

He wore his wool shirt, his heavy serge trousers, and he was shivering from the heat as he drove down the road. The boy who always begged to travel with him when he worked was waiting as he always was and Nicodemus, for the first time, stopped and picked him up. Everyone knew the boy. He wasn’t a bad boy, but if someone asked if they liked Peter their answer would be, Not yet.

They found a deer first, then two raccoons, small and large, the warm wind still purling through their fur. Nicodemus stayed in the cab while the boy heaved the bodies into the back. The following day he picked the boy up again, though he could barely look at him. But after that, no more.

They found him in his shack, his beautiful hands crossed on his chest, his mouth agape in the awful manner of the dead. He was old and he’d had a strange life. It was unsustainable, really, the life he was leading at the end, the kind of work he’d devoted himself to.

They missed Nicodemus. And Peter was no more than an epigone, they agreed. Still, they had to say that the boy managed to keep the island just as clean.

Dangerous

A year after my mother moved farther out, she became obsessed with building a tortoise enclosure. This was in preparation for receiving a desert tortoise—Gopherus agassizii—or, as the Indians would say, or rather had said, komik’c-ed—shell with living thing inside. That’s the Tohono O’odham Indians. My mother said she’d read that somewhere.

I was recently at a party and found myself talking to a linguist who told me that we had been pronouncing komik’c-ed incorrectly but that it meant pretty much what my mother claimed it did.

Sometimes I drink too much but mostly I don’t. I go to AA meetings on occasion but I can’t really bond with those people and never see them socially. They’re nice enough but some of them have been sober for twenty-five or thirty years. I have a copy of the Big Book and sometimes I read around in it but it never makes me cry like Wordsworth’s Prelude, say. I don’t have The Prelude anymore. I misplaced it, unbelievable, but it was falling apart with my looking at it so much and I moved away too after my father died so it was probably misplaced then. My mother is a widow now for two years but she never worries about her situation or talks about it like some people would. She never let on to me or others that she was sorrowful or lonely. I’m twenty-one. It could be argued that there are worse ages to lose your father than in your twentieth year but I found it to be a difficult time, mostly because I was just old enough to try to take it in stride. Sometimes I think it would have been worse if I was eight or even twelve and I don’t know why I indulge myself like that. It doesn’t make me feel better and I admit I have no imaginative access to the person I was then. I can’t imagine that girl at all. I certainly can’t imagine having a conversation with her. My mother told me that when I was eight all I wanted to do was swim. Swim, swim, swim. Then I stopped wanting to do this. When I was twelve she said that my most cherished possession was a communication badge I’d earned in Girl Scouts. It showed a tower emitting wiggly lines.

Which is odd because communicating is not a skill I naturally or unnaturally possess. I’d prefer to think of myself as a witness, but honestly, I doubt I’m even that.

The apartment I moved into is a shithole but convenient. Bars, restaurants, automobile services galore and a Trader Joe’s where you can buy pizzas fast-frozen in Italy and coconut water from Thailand, not that they’re unusual anymore, it’s what’s come to be expected. The apartment complex is clean, inexpensive and devoid of character. We tenants just refer to it as a shithole because it’s so soul-sucking. We don’t really believe our souls are being destroyed of course because we feel we have more power over our situation than that. The facility has a good view of sunsets in the summer when they’re not at their most legendary and it’s too hot to sit outside and view them anyway.

Shortly after my father died and I moved into the shithole without even my Prelude to remind me of loftier, simpler and more beautiful emotions, my mother sold our house in the foothills and moved into a run-down adobe on thirty acres of land in the mountains. Is there any kind of adobe other than run-down? I think not.

After a while she began to speak frequently of a neighbor, Willie, and his water-harvesting system. He had a twenty-six-thousand-gallon belowground cistern and got all his water from roof runoff during our infrequent but intense rains. I feared Willie might be a transitional figure in my mother’s life but he turned out to be an old man in a wheelchair with an old wife so cheerful she must have been on a serious drug regimen. They did have an ingenious water-collection system and I was given a tour of all the tanks and tubes and purifiers and washers and chambers that provided them with such good water and made them happy. They also kept bees and had an obese cat. The cat, or rather its alarming weight, seemed out of character for their way of life but I didn’t mention it. Instead, I asked them if his name was spelled with an ew or an ou. They found this wildly amusing and later told my mother they’d liked me very much. That and a dollar fifty will get me an organic peach, I said. I don’t know why my mother’s enthusiasm for them irritated me so much. Soon they were gone, however, both carried off by some pulmonary infection that people get from mouse pee. A man my mother described as a survivalist later moved into their house and I was told little about him other than he didn’t seem to know how to keep the system going and ended up digging a well.

It was Lewis with an ew that kept bringing diseased rodents into the house, is my suspicion.

From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city’s botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly. Some miscreant would shoot it full of arrows or smack holes in it with a golf club.

My father would splice the frames and speed them up so I would start off on my circuit, disappear for a moment and emerge a year older, again and again a year older, taller and less remarkable. I began as a skipping and smiling creature and gradually emerged as a slouching and scowling one. Still, my parents appeared unaware of the little film’s existential horror. My mother claims that she no longer has it, that it no longer exists, and I have chosen to believe her.

On the other hand I find it difficult to believe that my father no longer exists. He lives in something I do not recognize. Or no longer recognize and never will again. There are philosophers who maintain we are not our thoughts and that we should disassociate ourselves from them at every opportunity. But without this thought, I would have no experience of the world and even less knowledge of my heart.

I’ve had a comfortable life. I’ve not been troubled or found myself an outcast or disadvantaged in any way. This too was the case with my mother and father. Lives such as ours are no longer in vogue. Since I’ve lived in the shithole, however, I’ve found that another’s perception of me can sometimes be unexpected. For example, the other night I was looking at some jewelry in an unsecured case at Hacienda del Sol, waiting for my friends to arrive so we could start drinking overpriced tamarind margaritas, and this hostess stalks up to me and says, “Can I help you”…in other words, You look beyond suspicious, what are you even doing here…

She appeared a somewhat older version of one of the paramedics who arrived at the house the night my father died, though it was unlikely that anyone would go from being a paramedic to being an employee at a resort that had seen better days and was, in fact, in foreclosure. Though perhaps she had accumulated a record of not saving anyone and had lost her position as an emergency responder.

“Do I know you,” I asked. Or maybe it was “Have I seen you before?” because I had never known her, even if she’d been the one to feel my father’s last breath leave his body. She threw me a dismissive look and returned to her station to greet and seat a party of four, whom she’d evidently been expecting as they had planned ahead and made a reservation.

My point is that however fortunate your life or — considering the myriad grotesque ways one can depart from it — your death, it’s usually strangers who have their hands on you at the end and usher you down the darkened aisle. Or rather that was one of my reflections as I waited for my friends with whom I would commence a night of serious drinking.

—

So my mother is out there alone, in what I swear is one of the darkest parts of the mountain, with only a rarely-in-residence survivalist for a neighbor, and she is erecting a three-hundred-square-foot protective enclosure for a reptile that isn’t even endangered, though my mother claims it should be.

I don’t go out there much to visit, not nearly as often as I should, I suppose, but I’m aware that the work is proceeding slowly. My mother is insisting on doing everything herself. The most strenuous part is digging the trench, which Fish and Wildlife guidelines mandate should be fourteen inches deep. The trench is then to be filled with cement and a wall no less than three feet tall built on top of it. All this is to prevent the tortoise from escaping, for this is to be an adopted tortoise, one that has been displaced by development and should not be allowed to return to a no longer hospitable environment. At the same time, everything within the enclosure should mimic its natural situation. There should be flowering trees and grasses, a water source and the beginnings of burrow excavations, facing both north and south, that the tortoise can complete.

The site my mother had chosen was several hundred yards from the adobe. Wouldn’t it be easier, I asked, if she just enclosed an area using one of the house’s walls? Then she wouldn’t have to dig so much, it would be more of a garden, and she could bring out a table and chairs, have her coffee out there in the morning, maybe have a little fire pit for the evening — no, not a fire pit, certainly, what was I thinking? But possibly her aim should be the creation of a pleasant and meditative place that she could utilize for herself as well as for this yet unacquired tortoise.

Actually, I think a space for meditation is the last thing my mother needs. I don’t even know why I mentioned it. She didn’t respond to my suggestion anyway. She simply said she wasn’t doing this for herself.

The earth on the mountain is volcanic and poor. Some of the stones my mother dislodges are as big as medicine balls. She uses some sort of levering tool. Still, it’s dangerous work, as every part of the grieving process is if it’s done correctly. Don’t think I don’t realize what my mother’s up to.

“If you injure yourself your independent aging days might as well be over,” I said. She laughed, which I hoped she would. “Where did you come across that dreadful phrase,” she asked. “Someone in the shithole,” I answered, and she laughed again. “Why are you punishing yourself,” she said, “by living in that place?”

One of my acquaintances here is a widow too, but she’s only ten years older than I am. Her husband died in one of those stupid head-on wrecks blamed by the surviving driver on the setting sun. It blinded me! She kept his shoes. People would visit her and there would be his running shoes in the bathroom, his boots by the couch, and if he’d been old enough for slippers they would have certainly been by the bed. They’d been in the home they had before she moved here, now sort of on display, she told me, sort of stagy. Everyone who saw them was moved to tears and she kept them out longer than she should have, she realized that. Then one day she just threw them away — they were too beat-up to give to charity — and she got rid of a lot of other things as well and moved into the shithole.

We can’t keep pets here. It’s one of the rules and is strictly enforced. No one cares. I mean no one tries to smuggle a pet in. They don’t feel the lease violates their rights. Several years ago there was a tenant with a Great Dane who went off one morning and shot up his nursing class at the university because he’d received a bad assessment, killing his instructor and two fellow students before killing himself. There was no mention of what happened to the dog afterward, not a single mention. Information about the dog is unavailable to this day. I sometimes think of this guy who wanted to be certified as a nurse, and not only what was he thinking when he set off that morning to murder those people but what was he thinking leaving the dog behind with its dog toys and dog dishes and dog bed? What did he think was going to happen?

Tortoises spend half their life in burrows, from October into April. Should you see a tortoise outside its burrow in the winter months it’s not well and veterinary assistance should be sought.

“So,” I say to my mother, “have you met this tortoise?”

She said she hadn’t, but had filled out all the paperwork and was on a list. She’d be contacted when the enclosure was complete.

“So you don’t know how old it is or whether it’s a he or a she or whether it’s a special-needs tortoise with a malformed shell or a missing leg.”

“I don’t,” my mother said.

“I would think that after going through all of this, all the womanhours and expense, you’d want a perfect tortoise.”

“Well,” my mother said, “maybe I’ll get one.”

My mother used to be much more talkative. There used to be a lot more going on, more being said, lots of cheerful filler. Maybe that’s why I go to AA as much as I do because at least people are telling stories, pathetic and predictable as they may be, and all manner of reassurances and promises are being made. When I go into my mother’s little house now, I don’t recognize much. There seems to be very little remaining of the life I had known, been cocooned in, you might say. I should have emerged from it in glorious certitude by now.

Often I think, and it is with a certain dismay, that I will age out of the shithole one day, for it is a young crowd who reside here briefly and then move on. The ones who stay don’t remain in touch with those who leave. What would we speak of with one another? When someone vacates, the manager comes in, paints the walls, sands the floors and cleans the windows. New tenants arrive quickly — it’s cheap, practically free! It’s convenient! We’re not crazy about them at first but we gradually enfold them. No point in playing favorites here. We’re all pretty much the same.

My mother finally finished the trench. It was pretty impressive when you think it was all accomplished by her hand. Then she bought some rebar and a cement mixer and in really no time it was all filled in and ready to accept the blocks. But then matters slowed down again. It was June and the heat was beginning to build. She’d be working, covered head to toe and with a hat and welder’s gloves, but gradually she’d only get a few hours in between dawn and dusk. The rest of the time I don’t know what she did — waited in that little adobe for dawn and dusk, I suppose. She didn’t have air-conditioning, just a rattling, inefficient swamp cooler in need of new pads.

“What she’s doing doesn’t sound healthy,” the young widow in the shithole said. “You should take her out to dinner or something. Get her out of there. Insist on it. Or she should take up running. I should take up running, I know. And what kind of a companion is a tortoise going to be? You’re not even supposed to pick them up much, are you?”

“Fish and Wildlife claim they’re very personable,” I said.

“Those people are morons. Didn’t they want to open a hunting season on sandhill cranes?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’ve probably never even seen one. But I’m from Colorado, so I have. They’re very elegant and even have this elaborate dance they do. They mate for life. When one’s taken and the other’s left, that’s loneliness — real loneliness.”

She is pretty intense at times but also can be superficial — as with those shoes, which I have the grace not to mention.

Certainly my mother did not need to be taken out to dinner. People aren’t much help to one another under most circumstances, is what I’ve found. I’m reminded of the evening I dropped in at AA and a ruddy-faced woman came up to me and said, “I hear you’ve lost your mother, I’m so sorry.” And I said, “No, it was my father who died.” And she said, “Oh, I’d heard it was your mother.”

And that was it.

—

It was the Fourth of July when I managed to get out to my mother’s house again. The blocks had been cemented in place and were ready to be plastered and my mother had found a gate that she’d installed and painted blue. It swung inside, though, rather than outside, which I found somewhat awkward.

We were in the kitchen of the adobe eating toasted bread and some cold soup my mother had made. I had brought a bottle of wine but my mother, incredibly, did not have a corkscrew. You could barely see the enclosure from the house. It was so strange to me that she wouldn’t want to be closer to it when it was finished and had its occupier, though to be truthful I could not imagine the creature inside very well or the relief that seeing it would provide.

“Mom,” I said.

“I’m good,” my mother said.

Her face was sun-darkened and her thinning hair looked as though it would be crisp to the touch.

“Do you ever think of heaven,” she asked.

“No.”

“Good.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t want you thinking of heaven.”

We never did, did we?

I wished I were twelve again and could ask questions and pretend the answers were what I needed.

“How about divinity,” she asked.

“Gosh no,” I said, “that’s even harder to think about, isn’t it?”

She said the exciting work was about to begin — the preparation of the inner keep.

“Is that what it’s called?” I wondered, and she said that’s only what she called it.

I managed to get the cork out with a screwdriver. It seemed to take me forever. My mother accepted a glass of wine without comment and we resumed talking about the plants she would put in that would provide food and shade for the tortoise. I wondered what she would do when everything was complete since it was very close to being complete. Grief is dangerous work, I thought again, but when you have overcome it and it passes away, are you not left more bewildered and defenseless than ever?

I didn’t know what she meant by divinity, but that strange word was not mentioned again.

—

“Your mother is trying to contain her grief in a beautiful garden of her own devising,” the young widow said. “Or maybe it’s not grief at all. Maybe it’s something else, early-onset something. I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to simplify your mother’s situation in any way. Or yours. Or even mine, for that matter. You know what grief hates? Analysis or comfort of any kind.”

I believed she was wrong. Grief thrives on comfort. Comfort is the vehicle by which it can go anywhere, inhabit anything. Still, I said, “What does it love then?”

“The ones for which we grieve,” she said. “The lost. Grief knows how to love them because we don’t know how to do it anymore.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Take Larry’s shoes, for example. What did I think I was doing? I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“They say there are many ways to grieve,” I said. “There’s not any right way to do it.”

I could not help but speak falsely to her, I don’t know why. She sighed and shook her head. The skin around her mouth was broken out in tiny pimples but her hair was pretty, dark and glossy like a healthy animal’s. She seemed younger than I, impossibly young, and I did not want to discuss such matters with her anymore. She didn’t drink, which made my avoidance of her easier, but I was left with her perception of grief. I began to think of it as something substantial and assured and apart, more competent and attentive than I, and no longer mindful of me and my poor efforts.

I then began to fear that my mother would be denied the very thing she had so inexplicably sought after my father’s death. She would never receive komik’c-ed. The program would have closed down. Even from the little I’d been told, the arrangement seemed unwieldy and misguided. The tortoise had to be microchipped and someone in an official capacity had to check on its health twice a year. There weren’t public funds available for these things.

Instead, it turned out that my mother had not built the home for the as-yet-unrealized tortoise on her land. A real-estate agent came out to see if the adjacent lot would appraise out to make it worthwhile to subdivide and noted the error. The enclosure was well within her client’s property line and had to be removed.

“Appraise out,” my mother said. “Who comes up with these dreadful phrases?”

I agreed that language was becoming uglier the more it was becoming irrelevant to our needs.

My mother took on the task of dismantling everything she had accomplished. She broke up the walls and trucked away the rubble. She even dug out the filled trench. Then she rough-raked the ground and rolled some of the large stones back into place. She left the few flowering shrubs and grasses she had so recently planted, but without protection the birds and animals that are so seldom seen quickly consumed them. Such is their need.

Eventually I moved out of the shithole, though I still go to AA. I’ve even stopped drinking. I would say then that all is continuing here. Is it the same way there?

In the Park

Ranger Preyman slipped the photograph into the display case. Then he sat down under the ramada and waited for someone to approach it. He was supposed to lead the tour at eleven but he knew from experience that he would not accumulate a group. Gaunt and sweating in his uniform, he looked on the verge of flying apart, and tourists instinctively avoided him. At times he actually sweated blood. Blood vessels close to the surface of his skin ruptured into the exocrine glands. The condition had a name. He was grateful it didn’t often happen. It was the beginning of the rainy season although there had been no rain yet. The crowds of the winter had diminished. A woman on the bench behind him was complaining to her companion about a dog she’d picked up at the pound. He was a beautiful dog, smart and obedient, but he was always looking for someone. He would go up to cars and peer inside. When she took him for a walk, he was always looking, looking. It was getting her down. He didn’t appreciate his new situation, the fact that he had been saved; she was seriously considering taking him back to the pound. Preyman had noticed that people seldom spoke about what they were experiencing at the time. They saved it for later. He’d overheard a man on the boardwalk saying, They’ve built a hotel on the Mount of Olives. I just couldn’t get over that. Here it was Florida, the Everglades, in the park.

The photograph was of an alligator with a great white heron folded in its mouth. The bright colored feet, the long bill, everything was there, an entire large bird. Alligators shared their water-hole homes with all manner of creatures, until they didn’t. One didn’t register the bird at first, it was just another picture of an alligator with open jaws. Then came the awareness of the delicate collapsed presence within.

But people had become wary of looking into the display case, Preyman had found. There were too often pictures of plowed fields pressing at the gateway to the park, of animals caught dead on the center line, of cities and trash, of the outside crawling closer. It wasn’t Nature, it all lacked subtlety, possibility. None of it was equivocal enough. People preferred the equivocal, they found comfort in it. They were heartened by the news that more panthers were killed by one another than by mercury or cars. Preyman was doing them a favor with this picture. Even so, no one gave it a glance.

Eleven o’clock came and went. No one seemed desirous of Preyman’s expertise, his dismal numbering of extirpated plants and declining species, his depressing accounts of water, water withheld, water diverted, water dirtied and wasted. They had already taken him off the list of rangers who led the children on informative hikes. He was incapable of telling groups of fourth graders how they could save the park. They couldn’t save the park! He took off his hat and ran his shaking fingers through his soaked hair. A group of foreign tourists walked by, talking quietly. They approached the place as though it were an aspect of work, something to check off their life list — another biosphere preserve. Preyman stared past them at the photograph. He did not take pictures himself. When his mother died, there had been film in her camera and he had brought it to be developed. None of them had come out. It was the fault of someone new in the darkroom. They had apologized and offered to give him free film. It was part of the new responsibility, to admit to mistakes that had been made, to irredeemable errors. His mother had been out of her mind when she died. Out of her mind.

He unlocked the display case and removed the photograph, then, trembling, walked through the parking lot to his Jeep for a cigarette. He passed the life-size bronze statue of a panther. Two children sat on it, drinking from boxes of juice. The Jeep was parked several hundred yards away, near one of the park’s canoe trails. Preyman smoked several cigarettes and fieldstripped them. His hair tingled.

One of the girls who worked in the concession pulled up in her little car. They wore plastic name tags with their home states below their first names. This was Cynthia Massachusetts.

“It’s a small world…we’re all in this together…only the species, man, can correct what the species, man, has wrought…I am part of the web of life…I gave blood to an Everglades mosquito…wave a pint jar through the air, you’ll come up with a quart of mosquitoes…reduce, recycle…this is a park in peril…it’s worth preserving, don’t you think…” She grinned at him and put on a pair of green sunglasses. His disheveled shape was twice reflected. “It’s a full moon tonight,” she said. “Make your request early to be chained to the gates. Lock your car, secure your valuables and have a good one. Pete,” she said, “cheer up.”

Cynthia Mass got out of the car and jogged off. She was all right. So was Madeline New York and Jim Arkansas. Bruce Oregon was a pain in the butt. They were all much younger than he was.

It was quiet except for the ticking of the girl’s car beside him. Farther down the row, a raven was investigating the interior of an open convertible. It picked up a pen, then dropped it. Over the parking lot was the sky that belonged only to Florida. Immense ragged clouds moved freely past. The raven selected an empty beer huggie and flew off with it. From a break in the buttonwood trees a young couple appeared, portaging a canoe. They stopped when they saw him and put the canoe down. Preyman felt they were looking at him anxiously. His mind had been utterly blank for a few moments. He rubbed his jaw and put his hat back on. “How you doing?” he said.

“I think there’s something you should see,” the boy said.

“And maybe get,” the girl said.

“We didn’t want to get it down, we thought we should report it so you could make the right kind of notes about it. It’s a wood stork, a mile, maybe a mile and a half past Bear Lake, not on the water but deeper into the strand. It’s hanging in a tree, tangled in a fishing line. It hasn’t been dead too long.”

“It’s like something out of the tarot,” the girl said. She had made up her mind. This was the way she would remember this.

Preyman looked at them. He was behind his sunglasses too. They were all behind their sunglasses. Someone died here last night and in great pain too, his father used to say when Preyman visited him. But it couldn’t always have been true, not the night before each time he came to call, not every time, it wasn’t likely. People hung on in nursing homes, it’s what they did there. If you could get me a warm Coca-Cola, his father would say, it would give me great pleasure, I promise. He had been a minister and Preyman had been in awe of him and liked to listen to him. But then it had come down to just the someone dying business and the warm Coke business.

“I’ll take care of it,” Preyman said. What could he mean by that? The words had no possible meaning.

The boy nodded. “I could give you better directions.” He began describing the place they’d beached the canoe, the trail, the distance traveled beyond the mahogany grove. Preyman shut his eyes behind his glasses.

When the boy finished, Preyman said, “Thank you very much.” He opened his eyes.

“Wood storks used to nest in the park but don’t anymore, is that right?” the girl said. “They’re pretty rare? I read that.”

“Wood storks are an indicator species,” Preyman said. “They sort of function as a pressure gauge. That’s actually what we use them for now, almost exclusively, a pressure gauge.”

They watched him uncomfortably. Throughout all this, they had been some distance from Preyman and his Jeep. The girl rolled her shoulders. She was dressed in brown. Her bare lean legs and arms were brown from the sun and she wore a handkerchief around her neck. She bent down and picked up her end of the canoe.

Preyman smiled at them. He could still perform this vital variation on his face, he was sure of it. He stood in place a moment longer and had another cigarette. Then he climbed into the Jeep and drove away as they were tying the canoe down on the roof of an old station wagon. He drove onto the main road, then turned down an official-use road, swinging the gate shut behind him. It was wide, of crushed stone, and led to several trailers and some cannibalized swamp buggies and airboats. He stopped at the end and took out his pack, water, knife and netting. There was no trail from here to the place the boy had mentioned, but he knew how to reach it. It wasn’t far. Nothing was very far. He had probably covered pretty much every foot of the park and he’d worked here only a few years. Hurricanes would sometimes make a place inaccessible but it didn’t stay like that for long. It had all been touched by someone and not touched lightly. It had been piteously easy to find the rookeries. They set fire to the hammocks after they’d collected a few tree snails or orchids, to make them rarer. They set fire to the hammocks to drive out the game. They set fires to kill the deer who hosted the ticks they thought were killing the cattle they wanted to raise. Everywhere there were borrow pits and the remains of old attempts to drain. It was warm and still and quiet. After an hour of hiking, his head felt hot and his eyes burned with sweat. He would cut the creature down, bring it in, someone would take pictures and these would become part of an educational exhibit…

In bright illusion on the ground before him was a plastic guide to the birds, slipped from someone’s pack or pocket. It was the size of a letter, the birds crowded on both sides for easy identification. He looked at it warily and did not touch it, knowing that what he was seeing had finally become only a symbol of what was now invisible. Too, he knew it wasn’t actually there. His foot passed over it and it vanished.

There was a lovely poem about a kestrel by an Englishman, a lovely, lovely poem. Florida had a kestrel and it was called a killy hawk, a killy hawk.

He was deep in the hammock now and it was still quiet, darkly green with broken light. When he saw the man in the clearing he sat down with a sigh. The man was digging a fern from the deep grooved bark of an oak. He had some sort of tool, a useful little tool to do this with. It was his father quite clearly and the fern was a hand fern, it really looked like a hand with spread fingers. Preyman’s father had preached for thirty years and never given the same sermon twice, though he frequently discoursed on the line And it was night from the Fourth Gospel. He loved the line, the immaterial night, glorious, full of promise. His father’s interests were not of this world. The Greek was en de nux. Preyman had learned some things…When his father retired he had lived in a condominium building in Miami called Ambience — they’d had a laugh or two about that — and then he’d had a stroke and died in a nursing home, an innocent, which did not keep him from dying in terrible fear. His father’s long hands cupped the fern now, the roots falling through his white fingers and dangling in the air. His father was dead, the fern was extinct, the last taken years before from the Everglades. Preyman felt the reassuring logic of this but then it passed over him, no more than a gust of rancid air.

I must arrest this, Preyman thought, I must arrest what this is, and he opened his mouth with a cry to do so.

Cats and Dogs

Lillian was telling her daughter about the period in her life when she killed cats.

“I had a system going. I would bait a Havahart trap with a bit of sardine on a saucer and put it out in the yard just before retiring. In the morning, I would hurry out in my bathrobe, and if I was successful, which I almost always was, I’d place the trap with its disbelieving victim on the step at the shallow end of the swimming pool and in less than thirty seconds, maybe twenty, that would be that.”

Toby was barely listening to her. She was looking at her mother’s permed hair, which resembled molded plastic.

“Most of them seemed pretty blasé in the moment before I dunked them,” her mother said. “As though they’d been in Havahart traps before and expected delightful and challenging futures, a refreshing change of venue, maybe the country, or even the challenges of a shopping center. My last cat, though, looked much like the first. Nothing changes them. That’s their nature. I began to feel I was catching and disposing of the same cat over and over. I lost the necessary ambition. I wasn’t getting anywhere, you see.”

“You shouldn’t keep telling that story, Mama,” Toby said. “Aren’t you afraid there’s going to be an accounting?”

“Oh, you,” her mother said vaguely. “You’re just needling me.”

“You want to go over and see Daddy? Let’s go over and see Daddy for a while, then I have to go.”

“My first stroke,” her mother said. “I remember it as though it were yesterday.”

“Well,” Toby said, “it wasn’t.”

“There was a sound like cloth ripping. The thing zigged through me just like that and then I was on the floor for no one knew how long before anybody came.”

It was Halloween in the twin assisted-living facilities; her mother was in one, and across the courtyard her father was in the other. Both buildings were decorated with orange and black bunting, and cardboard witches and ghosts tacked to the walls. There was a mound of plastic pumpkins by the receptionist’s desk. What a place to be observing Halloween! Staff was crazy in here. That’s what they called themselves. They were undoubtedly hitting the pharmacy day and night in order to maintain their gay demeanor.

“Where are you now,” Lillian asked. “Whatcha up to?”

Toby sighed. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“That is not entirely true,” Lillian said. This woman before her who suddenly seemed angry was like everybody, anybody who had ever lived.

“I told you before, Mama, if you keep not knowing who I am, I’m going to stop coming here.”

“You’re my child,” Lillian said. She hoped she didn’t sound bewildered. She wanted to sound affirmative, torrentially affirmative, like a great artist.

Toby was not appeased. She felt distracted by Staff, who was spraying cobwebs from a can onto the windows.

“I sold the house today,” Toby said loudly. “I just closed on it, right before I came over here.”

Her mother frowned. “We’ve discussed that,” she said. “Was it fun?”

“A young couple bought it.”

“Why did a young couple buy it?”

“Let’s go over and see Daddy before you drive me out of my mind.”

Toby nudged the brake off the wheelchair with her sandaled foot and they proceeded down the corridor and into the courtyard. There were several benches, unoccupied, and two trees whose limbs looked smooth and severed like human stumps, with the skin drawn tightly forward and folded over into a tight tuck. Yet on the tips of these eerie branches were lovely white and still-fragrant flowers. And these trees were not at all uncommon at this latitude.

Toby had made a good profit on the house, the last one her parents had lived in together. She had capitalized on something legally exotic. Her mother and father had been in the house less than six months when they learned from a neighbor that a murder had taken place there, just one, but involving almost every room, upstairs and down, in what could only have been a long, drawn-out process. Toby took advantage of a gray area in the law and sued the real-estate agents for selling them a stigmatized property. The lawyer had been delighted by the largeness and grayness of the area. The house appeared to be making every effort to be charming and forthright, but in a court of law it was considered psychologically impacted and the real-estate company was found liable for not informing the buyers of its past. The money involved was not considerable but it was still amusing to have. After her mother’s stroke and her father’s tumble, Toby had put the house on the market herself with full disclosure and it sold eventually to a couple who’d had a loved one murdered (the relationship here was blurry) and required intensive counseling. Now they could accept sudden and untoward death, even reside with it. They made their money in video.

They signed all the papers at the house on the hood of the couple’s car. It had been hand-painted with images of fish, following one of the customs of the town to fancifully paint old cars with complex, detailed scenes of virtually vanished worlds. The fish had inaccessible startled faces and curving silver bodies. Each scale, carefully delineated, shone. It was all carefully, glowingly done; the water was rendered crystalline. The vehicle itself, however, had bald tires, a cracked windshield and a dragging tailpipe.

“Video pays the bills,” the girl said. Her name was Jennifer. “But it’s our nutty money that makes life worth living. Boyfriend sells his sperm to fertility clinics. He has the highest IQ in the business, practically.”

“Of course the doctors make a lot more,” boyfriend said.

“I can’t believe people would freak out just because this lovely home hosted a sad event,” Jennifer said. “People get so unnecessarily freaked. We’re on this earth with a part to play but instead of playing the part as an actor does, some people think the part is really them and they freak out all the time. Listen, you can hear the ocean from here.”

“That’s the freeway, I think,” boyfriend said.

“It sounds OK, though. I mean, if they can make a freeway sound like an ocean, so much the better.”

Toby had never lived in this house. It meant nothing to her. Even if she had lived in it, its sale would have been of minor significance. She didn’t consider a house as a large cradle or nest. For the last several years she had moved around a number of properties her father had bought for back taxes at the courthouse when the owners could not be located; he had busied himself in his retirement by acquiring houses in this fashion. They were all dumps and Toby was in the process of disposing of them in an accelerated manner. She was at present occupying an oddity built decades before that had never been remodeled. Its roofline was angled like wings. The ceilings were crazed and water-stained, an avocado green shag covered the plywood floors, the bathroom wallpaper depicted toreadors and bulls, rather a single toreador and a single bull over and over again. The wood was biscuit-colored and flimsy, the rooms small, the foundation cracked, the malfunctioning kitchen appliances a grotesque shade of ruby. The yard was large. There had once been flower beds, all in ruin now, and a small pond was spanned by a concrete arch from which a concrete fisherperson “fished.” The place was a hoot, though Toby felt it worsened her sinus condition.

This house, though, her parents’ last house, was proper, formal, clean and patient, even though it was unlucky. It was aware that it was unlucky. It had been sold with all furnishings, dishware, linens, even the Oldsmobile in the garage.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do,” Toby asked.

They looked at her blankly.

“To the house.”

“Oh, tear it down,” boyfriend said. “We really wanted more of a yurt.”

“He’s kidding,” Jennifer said.

“It’s entirely up to you, of course,” Toby said.

“He’s kidding!”

“Maybe we’ll slap some paint on the Olds, though. Coral reef.”

“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Jennifer enthused. She carried a child’s lunch box as a purse and from it she pulled a money order made out for the full purchase amount as well as three small cupcakes with orange frosting, which she distributed.

Toby swallowed hers without thinking, then said, “Oh, I…is there something in this?”

“Just a little celebratory weed,” boyfriend said.

“Chink, chink,” Jennifer said, swallowing. She flung her arms wide, almost clipping Toby with the lunch box. “I’m going to plant stuff all around here. My granddad had a wisteria vine and he said that when he went out to look at it, it would lean forward and lay its head on his shoulder, it liked him so much. That thing was huge. Once, when he wasn’t around, I hit it with a croquet mallet. I was pissed at Granddad because he put my favorite sweater in the dryer and ruined it. It was, like, the size of a chinchilla’s sweater.”

“A Chihuahua’s, I think,” boyfriend said.

“Kids today would’ve taken the mallet to Granddad,” Jennifer went on, “but I took it to that vine — oh, did I. It flew away in big green and purple chunks and never came back. I was such a bad girl then, a demon!”

“But then you found Jesus,” boyfriend said.

“You found him?” Toby said. “Where?”

“What he means is Jesus found me,” Jennifer said kindly, “and I take comfort now in knowing, knowing, that in my granddad’s heaven a wisteria vine grows.”

“That is so unlikely,” Toby said.

“Say?”

“Unlikely,” Toby said. “Doubtful. No way.”

Jennifer removed her sunglasses and looked at Toby coldly.

“Maybe you should leave now,” boyfriend said.

“Certainly,” Toby said. She felt somewhat woozy from the cupcake. “Our transaction is complete,” she said, in a simper she was aware was taking up entirely too much of her face.

“She can still pack a heck of a wallop,” boyfriend warned her.

So had the sale ended on its awkward note.

Still, the cupcake had managed to whisk her in gleeful transit to the convalescent home — a distance of some twenty miles through normally aggravating traffic — before it dumped her without warning behind her mother’s wheelchair on the back of which some impish Staff had affixed the sticker THIS IS NOT AN ABANDONED VEHICLE.

“Look!” Lillian cried. Her heart was beating eagerly, stupefied. “Look!” But she then realized it was no more than water from a lawn sprinkler fanning lightly back and forth across the grass.

“What!” Toby said. “You’re not going to get wet. Are you afraid of getting wet?”

Lillian remembered a green umbrella, furled, in the vestibule when she had been young. She feared umbrellas. “I’m afraid of umbra…umbra…umbrellas,” she said shyly.

“Don’t be foolish,” Toby said.

They found Robert in the reading room, alone at a large table, staring at a book on ancient Egypt. Here was her father, Toby thought. She waited for the next thought but nothing immediately arose.

“Hi, Daddy,” Toby said. She always expected something, but what?

He ignored her and addressed his wife. “Are you aware of this Osiris?”

Lillian studied the highly illustrated page. “Well, that’s not him, the one with the jackal’s head, he doesn’t look like that.”

“She was always the smart one, your mother,” Robert said. “Could always count on her.”

Toby scanned the text. Sibling drowned Osiris. Then chopped up body into fourteen parts and scattered them all over the place, all over Egypt. Someone found everything except for the penis, which had been eaten by fish, then put him back together again and made him king of the underworld.

“They shouldn’t have books like this lying around here,” Toby said. “Here, of all places.”

“Those Egyptians had to worry that their own hearts might testify against them after death,” Robert said. “Isn’t that something? That was one of the things those people had to worry about.”

“They worried that their own hearts would turn them in?”

“That’s right, Mother.”

“Like they were criminals?”

“I don’t understand,” Toby said without curiosity.

Robert looked at her with disapproval, though he had harbored no preference for a son. They’d had Toby when they were quite along in years. She was their wan surprise.

“You’re the one who said there was going to be an accounting,” her mother reminded her.

“I came close to saying that,” Toby admitted, “but I never did.”

They sat silently around the table, the great book of Egypt open before them.

“What are you having for dinner, Daddy? What are they serving?”

“Some sort of meat you can eat with a spoon,” he said moodily, “and orange sherbet. It’s Halloween.”

“She never liked Halloween,” her mother said. “She was never formidable enough for it.”

“Ahh, Mama,” Toby whined.

“What’s the weather out,” her father asked.

“It’s…” Toby couldn’t remember. What difference did it make? The days were mostly bright as blazes, this being Florida.

“We had a good life together, didn’t we, Mother?” Robert said.

This could go either way in Toby’s experience, and she wasn’t about to hold her breath.

“I don’t think so,” Lillian said. She was choosing not to be torrentially affirmative at the moment.

The reply, whatever it was, usually marked the moment when Toby would look at her watch and express dismay at the lateness of the hour. It was just a little sign she had taken to relying on.

“All right, Mama, Daddy, I’m going to leave now. Mama, why don’t you have supper here with Daddy, and Staff can take you back to your own room afterwards.”

“Leave me here, leave me here,” her mother said. “It’s perfectly all right. I’m just waiting my turn.”

—

Toby sat on the porch of the next house she was about to unload and looked at the street. There would be no trick-or-treaters. It was a bad neighborhood and many of the kids were undoubtedly in jail. No one had infants here. Half-grown rollicking figures in baggy pants and jackets were produced, some of whom drove low, bullet-shaped cars with tricked-out axles that allowed them to bow tip and curtsy like circus horses. One of these vehicles rolled by now without performing. A man laughed and a can of beer shot through the air and struck the rotting steps. It was unopened, however, thus indicating to Toby a modicum of goodwill.

She had no admirers at present. Since leaving her parents’ home at eighteen she’d experienced two brief marriages — one to a Ritalin-addicted drywaller, the next to a gaunt, gabby autodidact, brilliant and quite unhinged, who drank a pound of coffee a day, fiddled with engines and read medieval history. After their parting, he flew in a small plane he had built to Arizona and found employment as a guide in a newly discovered living cave. Daily, he berated the tourists by telling them that every breath they took was robbing the cave of its life, even though each of them had gone through three air locks and was forbidden to touch anything or take photographs. People didn’t mind hearing they were well-meaning bearers of destruction, apparently. According to him, he was the most popular guide there. She was amazed to learn that people liked him. She certainly hadn’t.

She sat rocking slightly in an old roof-hung swing. One chain looked just about to snap but it had looked like that for some time. A big orange moon labored up the sky.

A limousine longer than the wretched porch drew up to the house and stopped. The inhabitants were probably seeking the gin palace several blocks over, Toby reasoned. There were often singers and bands performing there. But no request for directions was forthcoming. Instead, an immense woman emerged, dressed in red and drenched in strong perfume. The limousine pulled away.

“Are you the present owner of this property,” the woman asked. “I hope you are.”

Toby narrowed her eyes and did not reply. The woman was her own age but striking, tremendous.

“I was a little girl in this house!” the woman announced. “This used to be the only house this side of the street. Next door there was nothing but a pretty field with a shed on it and the family the next street over would raise veal calves in that shed, it was a calf hutch. The man wouldn’t let his own kids play with those calves, he didn’t want them to make pets out of them and then get sad, but he let me play with them. I loved those little calves so, each one was dearer to me than the one before. On hot nights like this I’d take my sweet pillow and lay on the little bridge out back. Oh, how many wondrous nights I spent sleepless and singing my little songs of praise beneath the great wheel of heaven as I laid on that little bridge.”

“You lived here,” Toby said, uncharmed.

“Sister, I did. And I want to come home. I want to buy this precious property.”

“I’d consider selling it,” Toby said, she hoped not too eagerly. She hadn’t invited the woman up on the porch and didn’t think she would.

“What’s your price,” the marvelous woman asked. Her dress was remarkable — a divine, shrieking crimson.

Toby paused, then named a figure that made her blush, it was so unreasonably high.

“I’ll pay you twenty thousand more. I have money. I’m a success. I say this in all modesty, believe me.”

“It needs some work,” Toby admitted reluctantly.

“We all need work, sister. We’re all of us a work in progress. And no one knows in what guise the end of the familiar will arrive. We’re like darling veal calves in that regard.”

“So they used to farm around here,” Toby said. “It certainly is different now, I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Nobody farmed, sister. It was just that one mean cracker who ran a calf hutch for the restaurants in Sarasota.”

Toby felt corrected and did not care for it. She brushed a mosquito off her knee and said, “Is this a serious offer you’re making? Because I’ve had some interest and I’d have to let these other parties know. Of course they don’t appreciate the place as much as you do.” She would concede that much to the imaginary.

“I’ve already agreed to your price and more, sister. I do appreciate it. And my mother and father, they appreciate it too. They’re right out back there. Probably just about given up hope that I’d ever get back to them.”

A moment passed and Toby said, “What do you mean ‘out back there’?”

“This is our story, sister,” the woman said, straightening her smooth brown shoulders and causing the red dress to strain and shine. “They were the finest people you’d ever have the luck to meet. They were Edenists, my loved ones was, they truly believed our days are spent in Eden, that Eden was here and now. They were good and they were grateful and one afternoon just this time that year they were taking a neighbor boy out for a driving lesson. They’d promised to teach this boy, Billy Crawford, how to drive in our truck so he could get his license. It was just a kindness on their part. My daddy was a builder and his tools, his boards and paints and such, were in the old truck’s bed. He sat in the middle on the bench seat with Billy Crawford behind the wheel and my mother by the window appreciating the breeze. She’d go for a little ride at any opportunity. Why my daddy took Billy Crawford on as a student we’ll never know. You couldn’t tell that boy nothing and he never wore his glasses as he was supposed to for he was vain. He was driving, he wasn’t speeding, speed was not a factor. But what he did was he ran over this fellow’s dog. Knocked him down with the tires, didn’t even see him, and it was a big dog. From all reports, the man who was standing beside the dog, whose dog it was, became a threatening figure right away, fearsome in his grief, for who knows how long that dog had been his only friend. He was dressed in so many rags they looked like robes and he started screaming and hammering on that truck and wouldn’t be comforted or listen to reason, not that there was any reason involved, it being an accident. Billy Crawford, who might have been following my father’s directive or not, put his foot back on the pedal and commenced to drive away. But the man, his name was Rockford Wiggins, clung to the truck and hauled himself into the bed, where he continued screaming and baying, and now that he had boards and cans and tools to do his hitting with he began to beat on the window that was all that separated him from them, from Billy Crawford and my dear ones. There was a can of turpentine in the back as well and it wasn’t long before death triumphant placed it in Rockford Wiggins’s hands. He drenched himself and all those rags were like a hundred wicks so when he set himself off with a packet of matches, the whole truck went. I was told that it looked like a parcel of hell burning, in the manner that hell is popularly pictured. Well, sister, they all of them died, burnt to the bones. And a professional reduced my dear ones further to ashes because that was getting to be the trend back then. And I took those ashes and made them into bricks, for there was no one to tell me not to and no voice was raised against it. I knew some things since my father had been a builder, as I said. It was necessary to add something — three parts sand, one part lime and clay — but now the fundaments of those bricks are my dear ones. I mortared them into the base of the little bridge we built ourselves in the days that we were Edenists. And then I had to leave, sister. I had to go out in the world and make my way and fortune.”

“You’re saying there’re two bricks out back there that aren’t just bricks,” Toby said.

“I didn’t mingle the ashes. If I was to do it today I would’ve mingled them all, poor Rockford Wiggins and bratty Billy Crawford and the big dog too.”

Toby smacked at her knees. The bugs were really getting to her. “What I don’t understand is how you could imagine that anyone who bought this dump would have kept things as they were.” She smiled to show that she meant no offense.

The woman smiled back. It was the sort of smile the terminally ill might realize they’d been receiving as the days wore on.

“I’m just saying that you took quite a gamble,” Toby said. “This isn’t a graveyard. No one’s under any obligation to care for what’s here.” Or what isn’t, she might as well have added.

“My broker will call you tomorrow,” the woman said.

“I’ll need a few days to make arrangements.”

“In three days, then,” the woman said.

“You can come back in three days, then — no, better make it four,” Toby said.

The woman nodded and turned. The limousine appeared like a liquid poured from the shadows. She addressed Toby once more before she stepped into it. “It’s perfect here!”

Her eyes were certainly dishabituated to reality, Toby thought, if she believed this crummy locale to be perfect. She pushed herself off the swing and went into the house, opening and shutting the warped door with difficulty. She sat down at the kitchen table, an old pink Formica and chrome thing, and turned the pages of a phone book until she found a listing of demolition contractors. She copied down a number of names. She would call them all in the morning. She wanted everything torn up and down. The job would go to the one who could do the work most quickly. A great devotional emptiness swam up in her. She was doing the woman a favor. It had probably just been a prank anyway. There would be no call from a broker. She sneezed sharply from the mildew and held a tissue to her nose. Some people’s behavior was simply inexplicable. They outlasted their lives or something.

The great moon was now obscured by clouds. Toby picked up a flashlight and went outside, stalking across the lost but unforgotten garden to the little bridge. She bent and studied the blocks that supported the foolish thing. No two bricks were different from the rest — all pitted, common, unparticular, of uniform size and texture.

On her knees, she held the light against them. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

—

Robert had brought the great book of Egypt to dinner, and before it could be removed from his grasp had spilled milk on it. He was scolded at length. Lillian had been returned to her room and was being trussed up by Staff in preparation for her personal night. She felt compelled to speak of the cats again.

There was the trap and the pinch of food on the chipped china saucer. Never too much, not that it seemed wasteful, it just wasn’t right. And the saucer — it had to be a chipped one. A perfect saucer would have conferred something else entirely. She had meant no real harm. What if everything one did mattered. Thank God, it could not.

The Bridgetender

I am trying to think. Sometimes I catch myself saying just those words and just in my head. It seems I got to start everything in my head with something in my head saying I am trying to think. I remember how it begins but can’t remember how it ends. Even though it’s over now. It don’t seem right that it could be over and me back where I’ve always been not even knowing what it was she gave me or what I should do with it.

Because the bridge is still here and the water and the shack. And though I haven’t been to town since she disappeared, I imagine the town’s still there too. Her fancy car is still here sitting on the beach, though it seems to be fading, sort of like a crummy photograph. It’s a black car but the birds have crapped all over it and it’s white now like the sand. Sometimes it hurts my eyes. The chrome catches the sun. But as I say, sometimes I can’t hardly make it out at all. It ain’t really a car anymore. It wouldn’t take nobody anywhere.

What it is I think is that before she came I knew something was going to happen and now that she’s been, I know it ain’t. She didn’t leave a single thing behind except that car. Not a pair of panties or a stick of gum or nothing. Once she brought over a little round tin of chicken-liver patay. Now I know I’ve never eaten chicken-liver patay so it must be around here somewhere, but I can’t find it. My head’s fuller’n a tick on a dog. Full of blood or something. And my prick lies so tame in my blue jeans, I can’t hardly believe it’s even gone through what it’s been through.

She was like smoke the way she went away. She was like that even when she stayed. She’d cover me up, wrapping herself around me tight, tasting sweet and as cool as an ice-cream cone, smelling so good and working at loving me. Then she would just dissolve and I’d fill right up with her like a water glass. I can’t recall it ending, as I say, but I know it’s stopped. Black rain at four in the afternoon like it used to be. Black trees and empty sky. And the gulf running a dirty green foam where it turns into the pass.

But I can think about it beginning. So. That first morning I come back to the shack and there’s a big brown dog sitting there drinking out of the toilet bowl. He’d drained it. And looked at me as though it was me and not him that had no right being there. Drained it and sat and stared at me, its jaws rolling and dripping at me. Now, I like dogs all right but I could see this one was a bum. In the Panhandle, I had two catch dogs that was something to watch. Them dogs just loved to catch. They was no-nonsense dogs. But this can licker was a bum. Somebody’s pet. A poodle or something. The big kind. Before I got around to giving him a good kick, he pushed the screen door open with his paw and left.

I was so mad. And I was thinking and figuring how to get that brown dog, not even thinking then how queer it was that there should be any dog at all, because I hadn’t seen a thing for six months around the bridge or on the beach except wild. And I hadn’t seen another person in that time either and then as soon as I remember this, I see the girl walking along the beach with the dog.

She’s in a bright bikini and long raggedy-wet hair and I remember how long it had been since I’d seen a girl in a bikini or any girl at all because my wife had left me a long while ago, even then having stopped being a girl in any way you could think of and went back to living in Lowell, Massachusetts, the place she come from and left just to plague me. Somewhere, in that town, setting on a lawn outside a factory, is or was a chair fit for a giant’s ass. Forty or fifty times bigger and crazier than a proper chair. And she come from that town. And she sold off my dogs to get back to it on a one-way ticket on a bubble-topped Trailways.

I never knew her that well. She wore more clothes, jesus, you’d think she was an Eskimo. Layers and layers of them. I never knew if I got to her or not and she’d be the last to tell me. She never talked about nothing except New England. Everything was better there, she’d say. Corn, roads, Christmas decorations. The horses ain’t as mean, she’d say. The bread rises better up North. Even the sun, she’d say, is nicer because it sets in a different direction. It don’t fall past the house this way at home, she’d say. I was a young man then and I never cheated. I was a young man and my balls were big as oranges. And I threw it all away. She caught my stuff in her underwear.

When I think about what a honey bear I was and how polite and wonderfully whanged and how it was all wasted on a loveless woman…She had a tongue wide and slick as a fried egg. And never used it once. I guess that’s what I was waiting on but I might just as much have hoped for striking oil in the collards patch. She said she was a respectable woman and claimed to have worked in an office in Boston. But she didn’t have no respect for the man and woman relationship and she didn’t have no brain. She couldn’t bring things together in her head. I’d bring her head together all right if I ever see her again. I’d fold it up for her so she’d be able to carry it in her handbag. Selling the best catch dogs in the state of Florida for a bus ticket.

So. I see the girl in the bright bikini and all I can think of is the old lady. It’d been so long and all I could think of was that witch I once had or maybe never had. I spent all this time here over the water not imagining anything. I just see that when I see the girl. And I got scared. I felt as though I caught myself dying. Like you’d catch yourself doing something stupid.

I walked across the bridge and climbed up into the box and got the binoculars. They belong to the state but they’re mine as long as I leave them here. And, I figure, the girl’s mine as long as she keeps herself in range. She’s walking down the beach, stopping every few yards and squatting down and setting out a stick. She’s got a bathing suit on that’s like two big Band-Aids. Promising but not too promising. She had a knife strapped around her waist and wore a big wristwatch. She also had a notebook.

It wore me out watching her. She’d squat down and write something and then spring up again so graceful like she knew someone was watching her and give the bottoms of her bikini a little flip with her finger. I watched her for a long time, but she didn’t do nothing spectacular. I was real happy just watching a near-naked woman move. Every once in a while she’d go into the water and swim out a few hundred yards, that damn dog swimming beside her barking like hell, and each time when she come out it was like that bikini had shrunk a little bit more and she was falling out of it every which way all plump and bubbly white.

I watched her until she got out of sight, around a bend in the beach, and then I started looking at other things. Mess of birds in the mangroves. Mullet boats way offshore. And what I’d later know was the girl’s car parked on the hard sand under some cedars. A weird-looking vehicle. I know right away it’s from Europe or someplace foreign. A mean car shaped like a coffin. But it reminded me of sex too, you know, though I never seen a machine that reminded me of sex before. But that car set me to feeling things, like the girl, that I hadn’t felt maybe never. Though I knew what they were. And it felt so good feeling them.

I finally put up the binoculars. Wiped them off. The glass was getting milky from all the wetness in the air. As a matter of fact, I think they was shot from my never using them, never caring for them at all. Lots of things are like that. Life you know, it begins to rot if you don’t use it. Everything gets bound or rusted up. Tools especially. Gear. My tool. Ha ha.

It worried me a little about the binoculars since they belong to the state. They could hassle me about them. Like they could about the bridge. Because the bridge sure ain’t being what it’s supposed to be. If a boat ever wanted to come through and I had to wind this devil back I believe it would just fall apart, the whole apparatus, like one of them paste-and-paper bridges you see blowing up in war movies. But no boats come through anyhow. It just ain’t a proper waterway. The channel needs to be redug or a good hurricane’s gotta come through here and clean everything out. A pretty beach. Good fishing but no boats come and no people either. Something happened here years ago, I heard. A sickness or something. In the water. An attack or something coming in on the tide. Somebody died or got hurt. You know the way these things are. People remember bad news even though they might never have heard it in the first place.

So the state has let it slide. Though you never know when they’ll show up and raise all sorts of hell because things ain’t how they want them. But it was them and not me that built this crazy beach and it was me and not them that saw, on my first day on the job, the sign just above them rotting joists around the crank that says CAUTION WHEN INSTALLED PROPER THIS SIGN WILL NOT BE VISIBLE.

Well, it ain’t my concern. And I’ll tell you I never really expect the state to come and hassle me. They know they got a bargain. It takes a special man to put up with living out here. I don’t think anybody will come at all. Though I’d been waiting on this girl. It sure is easy to see that now.

So. After she got out of range, I went back to the shack and took a shower. Goddamn frogs come out of the wood and sat there while I did it. Like to have broke my neck slipping on them. Put on clean clothes and cut my nails. Prettied myself up like a movie idol, then I fell asleep right in the chair in the middle of the day. Which was unusual. And when I woke up it was practically black out and the girl was there looking at me.

She was feeding cornflakes to her dog. Piece by piece. My cornflakes. She was so brown from the sun, she was shining. And she was so warm-looking that I started to sweat. Then she come over to me and darn if she didn’t sit on my lap and blow in my ear. God, she was warm. It was like being baked in a biscuit.

So the first night went by and the sun come out. And my baby tickled me up with a pink bird’s feather. Bright pink like it come out of a cartoon. A roseate spoonbill feather, she said, for her specialty was birds. Ha ha, I said. Because I knew where her talent was.

But she was crazy about seabirds. When she wasn’t tending to me and making up inventions, she was always going on about them birds. She had a canvas bag she was always toting around and damn if inside there weren’t two dead birds, perfect in every way except for their being dead. She didn’t know what kind they was and she was toting them around until she could find a book that would tell her. And there were little speckled eggs in that bag too, no bigger than my thumbnail, with holes in them and all the insides gone. And other crap she picked up along the beach. And the knives. Dinky little things. She said they was for predators on land or in the sea but they couldn’t do no real damage, I told her that. Do in a splinter is about all.

That girl’s big pretty eyes would fill up with tears when she talked about birds. She told me to respect them because they live their lives so close to dying.

So do us all, I thought, and that was no surprise to me. It was her inventions that was a surprise and she had started in on them the first day. She never made me pretend to be things I wasn’t. Only things I was. But I believe we went through a hundred changes the days she stayed with me. We didn’t have costumes or nothing naturally but it was like we were playing other people doing things. Though all the time it was us. I was a gangster and she was the governor’s daughter, you know, or I was a bombardier and she was the inside of the plane. Or I was a preacher, maybe Methodist, and she was a babysitter. And even her dog did it because sometimes he was like a whole other object, you know. Or like he became a feeling in the shack and quit being a dog.

She messed up time and place for me. And just with her, I felt I was loving the different women of a thousand different men. We just went on for five days with them inventions and never did the same one twice. She’d go off sometimes in her fancy car, I don’t know where. I’d lie there while she was gone, not even able to move hardly nor sleep neither. Lie there with my eyes open, trying to think what was happening, listening to the sound her car made traveling over the bridge and it was like the bridge went on for miles it was the only car I’d heard traveling for so long. There were four silver pipes sticking off the end of that car. I never seen anything like it. I was trying to think, but never once did I think about her not coming back. She always come back.

On the fifth day, I went down with her to the beach. First time I been out of the shack. Hotter than a poor shotgun. No wind. We was walking over the bridge to the beach when she said, This isn’t a drawbridge. It’s a solid piece. There isn’t any grid. And so what do you tend, I’d like to know.

Well, of course it ain’t a drawbridge. Did she think I’d been here for all these years paid by the country, here every day with no vacation and never no real quitting time without knowing that the goddamn thing wasn’t a drawbridge?

I didn’t say nothing but just gave her a look telling her that she should tend to what she knows about and I’ll tend to what I know about.

The beach was full of eggs. She kept steering me around so I wouldn’t step on them. All them eggs cooking in the heat and the birds going crazy over us as we walked along. Diving down and screaming, shitting on our heads. I went down to the water to get away from them. I was still put out with the girl and wasn’t paying her any mind. She was trotting up and down the beach, slaving like a field hand, writing things down in her book. Finally she run right by me and fell in the water. Tried to tease me in. Took off her suit and tossed it in my face. Skin there like the cream in a chocolate éclair. But I paid her no mind. That day was so white my eyes ached. I was floating and felt sick. All that sun, it never bothered me before. She come out and sprinkled water all over me from her hair and even that wasn’t cool. It was hot as the air. I was mad because I felt she was thinking my thoughts weren’t real. But then I said, Come on, I been without loving too long. Because I thought her loving would pick me up. And we went back to the shack, me with my eyes closed and my arms resting on her because it hurt so bad looking out on that day. It ain’t never been that bright here before or since.

So we went back. And I was a professor and she was a dance-hall cutie. And I was a big black lake and she was a sailboat tacking over me. But that night she and that dog was gone.

There are sharks, I know. I seen them rolling out there. And the bars sometimes are tricky. They change. Fall off one day where they didn’t the day before. But it don’t really seem dangerous here. I just don’t know where she went to. Leaving nothing except that car, which like I say is sort of fading out. Rats building their nests beneath the hood. I hear them in it when I walk close.

So it’s over but I can’t help but feel it’s still going on somewheres. Because it hasn’t seemed to have ended even though it’s stopped. And I don’t know what it was she gave me. Maybe she even took something away. And I don’t really even know if she’s dead and it’s me sitting here in the pilothouse or if I was the one who’s been dead all the while and she’s still going on back there on the gulf with all them birds.

Souvenir

This is in England, in Cornwall, and a more weird dreary spot could scarcely be imagined. Nevertheless, tourists were beginning to arrive in ever-increasing numbers because they had been everywhere else. The inhabitants of the place were in many respects peculiar, poor and cruel with extraordinary dark eyebrows, but the cream teas were excellent. The dogs were polite. The gulls were big, the crows enormous.

The weather was foul.

The graveyards weren’t as full or as mossy as those in Wales, the lanes not as snug. The cooking not as delightful; few turnips, no leeks. Actually, the dogs, though courteous, didn’t work as hard as the dogs of Wales. The ones without heads were the devil’s dogs. Even the most unobservant tourist had no problem in identifying them.

Most of the ghost stories in Cornwall involved ships and drowned sailors. And these drowned people, these ghosts, were always coming back, coming back to harass the living. Or to drag a beloved into the grave with them. Sometimes they came back to smile at their mums. The stories were a little tiresome.

In the old days, ships were always going down. The people on land liked it best when fruit ships went down. Oranges floated in. Grapefruit.

In King Arthur’s town in Tintagel, there was a big run-down hotel on a cliff. The drinking room there was called the Excali-Bar. It was for tourists. The locals wouldn’t be caught dead in the place. A group of travelers were sitting this night in the Excali-Bar drinking Adiós Amigos — gin, brandy, white rum, red vermouth, bit of lemon juice, shake and stir.

A frightful storm lashed the windows.

The locals were in the chapel eating pancakes because it was Shrove Tuesday. In a few hours Lent would commence.

The locals didn’t care for the tourists. Never had. As for the tourists, they were beginning to believe what they’d been told — that Cornish culture was nothing but ghost stories and meat pies. Not that they were here for culture. They were here for a bit of the odd, a bit of the creepy.

There were seven species of seagulls in the area. That was somewhat creepy. And a village called Lizard, an odd name indeed.

The locals had polished off their pancakes and were tidying up, preparing to play their Lenten prank. This year it fell to Paul and Paul, two old men. They staggered out of the chapel into the windy, rainy night and tottered along the cliff road to the Excali-Bar.

The travelers had stopped drinking Adiós Amigos and were now experimenting with Sheep Dip — gin, sherry and strong sweet cider, stir and strain. There were two boy hikers, several married pairs, three ladies from Ohio, a transvestite, and a French couple who sat apart (quite aware that the others were thinking…The French…The French eat horses but they don’t eat corn). The transvestite was having a quiet holiday alone, if you could say that a transvestite was ever quite alone. The imagination it takes to be one…It must be exhausting…

She was dressed sensibly, sensible shoes.

Paul and Paul lurched, dripping, into the revelers’ midst. They both had suffered strokes in the past. One hand on each was cold and crabbed. Their eyes were bulging and clouded.

They weren’t going to tell any scary stories, not these two. Weren’t going to tell this crowd about the vanishing hitchhiker or the man with half a face. Or the ones about the boiled baby’s revenge and the body of water that likes to break little boys’ backs. They were just going to play a few games, give these tourists something to remember. What did they think life was, a vacation?

The travelers had been playing a game of sorts before the old buzzards’ arrival. They were secretly assigning zoomorphs to everyone present. Of course privately they all thought of themselves as cheetahs. There was not a single exception to this.

Paul and Paul had wide, rotting smiles. Once they had been young and vigorous. Clever. Handsome. Their lives before them. But they’d had to give it all up. It seemed to have been the deal that had been struck at birth.

The tourists made an effort to find them engaging. They so terribly wanted to be amused. They bought them beverages, having moved from Sheep Dip to Blimlets to Blue Skies by then. Blue Skies are gin, lemon juice, a dash of unflavored food coloring and half a maraschino cherry, if available. After a few Blue Skies it was clear to all that the two Pauls were the cabaret.

It all began innocently enough. They proceeded to engage their audience.

Each among them had to confess to a loss.

“I lost my skill at baking cakes,” one of them ventured.

“I lost a rucksack once.”

“A ring.”

“My hair.”

“My trigger finger.” The fellow raised his hand, and it was true. It was maimed. There was no trigger finger.

“My beech trees outside Lyon. Every one!”

“My driving privileges.”

“My husband.”

It was amusing how this had slipped in there, and they chuckled.

“My memory.”

They howled at this one.

“It’s true. Can’t remember…get everything mixed up!”

“You never know when the last time for anything might come!”

“Now we’re cooking,” one of the Pauls cried.

My breast…my potency…my beloved Skippy.

Time began to tear through there. Inside, their lives were passing as though in a single night. They longed for a nice Teeny-Tiny, you know, of the GIVE ME MY BONE! sort. For a spectral bridegroom or a brain on a stick, even a vampire or a cannibal. Anything but this deathly entertainment, these dreadful drinks, these hideous old gentlemen whom they were feeling more and more indebted and attached to. These Pauls, urging them on to even greater and more fearful acts of admission to loss. The time passing. The blackness pressing against the greasy windows. And the morning that had always come, delayed.

The Country

I attend a meeting called Come and See! The group gathers weekly at the Episcopal church in one of the many, many rooms available there but in the way these things are it’s wide open to everyone — atheists, Buddhists, addicts, depressives, everyone. The discussion that evening concerned the old reliable: Why Are We Here? And one woman, Jeanette it was, offered that she never knew what her purpose was until recently. She discovered her purpose was to be there with the dying in their final moments. Right there, in attendance. Strangers for the most part. No one she knew particularly well. She found that she loved this new role. It was wonderful, it was amazing to be present for that moment of transport. It was such an honor being there and she believed she provided reassurance. And she shared with us the story of this one old girl who was actively dying — that was her phrase, actively dying—and at one point the old girl looked at Jeanette and said, “Am I still here?” and when she was told yes, yes, she was, the dying woman said, “Darn.”

“She was so cute,” Jeanette said.

My fellow travelers in Come and See! listened to this with equanimity. Jeanette was as happy as I’d ever seen her — she doesn’t come every week — and enthusiastic as she shared with us how positive and comforting it is to witness the final voyage. She’s affiliated with the church somehow, she studied chaplaincy services or something, so she has a certain amount of access to these situations; that is, she’s not doing this illegally or inappropriately or anything.

I sincerely cannot remember the circumstances that brought me to Come and See! for the first time and why I continue to attend. I seldom speak and never share. I sit erect but with my eyes downcast, focusing on a large paper clip that has rested in a groove between two tiles for months. Surely the chairs must be folded and stacked or rearranged for other functions and the floor swept or mopped on occasion, but the paper clip remains.

Beside me, Harold — he’s sixty-three and the father of two-year-old triplets — says, “I believe we are here for the future, to build a better future,” blandly cutting off any communal amplification of Jeanette’s deathbed theme.

My eyes lowered, I stare at the paper clip. I dislike Harold. Triplets, for god’s sake. One day I will no longer come here and listen to these wretched things.

After Come and See! there is a brief social period when packaged cheese and crackers and cheap wine are provided. There is always difficulty in opening the cheese packets. Someone always manages to spill wine.

Jeanette appears before me. After some consideration, I smile.

She says, “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“That was my best wintery smile,” I say.

“Yes, it was quite good.”

I hope she thinks I would be a challenge, an insurmountable challenge.

Poor Pearl limps up. She has multiple sclerosis or something similarly awful and she begins talking about being with a number of her cats over the years as they died and it is not something she would wish on her vilest enemy and how she never learns from this experience and how it never becomes beautiful.

I leave the ladies to thrash this one out and exit through the courtyard, which is being torn up for some reason of regeneration. Or perhaps they’re just going to pave it over with commemorative bricks. Last year, Easter services were held in this courtyard because the sanctuary had been vandalized. Worshipers arrived for the sunrise service and found the sound system ripped out, flowers smashed, balloons filled with green paint exploded everywhere. Teenagers going through an initiation into some gang, probably. Several goats in some fellow’s yard were beaten and harassed that morning as well, the same group most likely being responsible, although the authorities claim there are no gangs in our town. No one was ever charged. The church would forgive them, that’s the way the church works, but the man who owns the goats is still upset. Perhaps the poor creatures were meant to be scapegoats in the biblical sense, cast into the wilderness of suffering with all the sins of the people upon their heads.

There is such evil in the world, so much evil. I believe Jeanette is evil, though maybe she’s more like one of those medically intuitive dogs they’re developing or exploiting. The dogs don’t suffer from their knowledge. That is, empathy is beside the point here; they can just detect that illness is present in a body before, sometimes long before, more standardized inquiry and tests confirm it. In Jeanette’s case, though some groundwork is undoubtedly required, she’s honing her instinct of arrival, appearing just before another is about to enter the incomprehensible refuge. She’ll be writing a book about her experiences next.

I leave the courtyard and commence my walk home. It’s not particularly pleasant but there is no alternative route, or, rather, the alternatives are equally dispiriting. Highways are being straightened and widened everywhere, with the attendant uprooted trees and porta-toilets for the workmen.

I navigate my passage across the first monstrous intersection, where a sign announces the imminent arrival of a dessert parlor named Better Than Sex. I would like to move to the country but the boy refuses. Besides, “the country” exists only in our fantasies anymore. When I was a child, the country was where overly exuberant family pets often found themselves. One of our dogs, Tank, who liked to wander and eat clothes and the dirt in flowerpots, was dispatched to the country, where he would have more room to run and play and do his mischief under the purview of a tolerant farmer. When I returned from school that afternoon, Tank was settling into his new home. My parents’ explanations and assurances became so elaborate that I knew something terrible was being withheld from me.

Above me, billboards advertise gun shows, mobile-telephone plans and law firms that specialize in drunk-driving cases. I looked into renting a billboard recently but my application was rejected.

THE GREATEST PROSPERITY COMES TO ITS END, DISSOLVING INTO EMPTINESS; THE MIGHTIEST EMPIRE IS OVERTAKEN BY STUPOR AMIDST THE FLICKER OF ITS FESTIVAL LIGHTS

— Rabindranath Tagore

it would have said.

The billboard people told me they didn’t know who Rabindranath Tagore was and could not verify anything he might have thought. He was certainly foreign and his sentiments insurrectionary. As well, what he was saying wasn’t advertising anything. This night I see that space I tried to claim depicts black-and-white cows painting the words EAT MORE CHIKEN on the side of a barn.

I could far more easily drive to church and spare myself the discomfort of walking through this wasteland but I am in no hurry to reach home. I never know whom I will be coming home to, whether it will be mother, father, wife or son. Often it is just my son, my boy, and matters are quite as they should be, but since the end of school things have become more volatile. We live alone, you understand, the child and I. He’s nine, and the changes in this decade have been unfathomable. Indeed, it’s a different civilization now. My parents, with whom we were very close, died last year. My wife left in the spring. She just couldn’t feel anything for us anymore, she said, and was only trying to salvage the bit of life she could.

Dusty pickups speed by, gun racks prominent. Gun racks in vehicles have surged in popularity. Even expensive sedans display cradled weapons, visible through lightly tinted windows. People know their names and capabilities like they used to know those of baseball players. Not my boy, though. He doesn’t know these things. He knows other things. For example, we planted a few trees in the yard after his mother left, fruit trees, citrus. The tree that bears the fruit is not the tree that was planted. He knows that much, it goes without saying.

It’s almost dark now as I turn down our street. It’s garbage day tomorrow and my neighbors have rolled their vast receptacles to the curb. The bins are as tall as the boy and they contain god knows what, and over and over again.

The door is unlocked, the lights are on. “Hi, Daddy,” Colson says. He’s in the kitchen making sandwiches for supper. “Daddy,” he says, “we have to eat soon because I want to go to bed.” I’m not disappointed that he’s himself tonight, though more and more, given the situation, that self seems imaginary. He likes to play the Diné prayer songs tape as we eat, particularly the “Happy Birthday, My Dear Child” track. The chants are unintelligible but then the words Happy Birthday Happy Birthday to You arise in this morose intonation and he never tires of it.

In the morning my wife is in the yard, cutting back the orange tree. We rush out and prevent her from doing more. Summer is not the time to prune anything of course and we just planted the trees, they haven’t even adjusted to being in the soil yet with the freedom of their roots to wander. She dismisses our concerns but flings down the little saw, which I have never seen before, and leaves, though were you to ask if we actually saw her leave we would have to say no. The tree looks terrible and with small cries we gather up the broken buds and little branches. Still, it will survive. It has not been destroyed, we assure each other, at least not this day. There is no question of our planting a replacement. This would not be a useful lesson to learn.

Perhaps she is annoyed because, since her absence, Colson has seldom tried to invoke her except in the broadest terms. That is because, he explains, she is only gone from us, not from the world she still inhabits. I think her arrival this morning was a shock to him and I doubt she will visit us again.

I pick up the curved saw. It looks new but now blond crumbs of wood cling to its shiny serrated teeth.

“Should we keep this?” I ask Colson.

He frowns and shakes his head, then shrugs and returns to the house. He’s through with her. I wonder if somehow I have caused this latest unpleasantness. I have never known how to talk about death or the loss of meaning or love. I seek but will never find, I think.

I toss the saw into the closest container at the very moment I hear the trash truck moving imperiously down the street. It’s garbage day. Garbage day! The neighborhood prepares for it with joy. Some wish it would arrive more than once a week.

Later I bring up the possibility of moving. We could have an orchard and bike trails and dig a pond for swimming. We could have horses. “You can pick up horses these days for a song,” I say.

“A song?” the boy says. “What kind of song?”

But I can’t think of any. I gaze at him foolishly.

“Like the Diné prayer songs,” he suggests.

“Yes, but we don’t even have to pray for horses. We can just get them.”

Immediately I realize I have spoken infelicitously, without grace. He doesn’t say anything right away but then he says, “You have to be here to prepare for not being here.”

The voice is familiar to me because it is my mother’s voice, though I find it less familiar than it once was. She’s been in a grave for over a year now, my father with her. They’d been working at an animal sanctuary in their retirement and were returning home from a long day of caring for a variety of beasts. They had borrowed my car, as they were getting new tires for their own. I had planned to drive them home that night but the arrangement had been altered for some reason. We still don’t know exactly what happened. A moment’s inattention, possibly.

The sanctuary that was so important to them was controversial, as the animals were not native to this region, though the natives hardly enjoy grateful regard here, being considered either pests or game. It has since closed, the animals removed to what are referred to as other facilities, where some of them can still be visited. In fact, Colson and I went out to see one of the elephants my father was particularly fond of. There were two in the original preserve — Carol and Lucy — but they were separated, which seemed to me a dreadful decision. We visited Carol, who is an hour closer. She has some disease of the trunk that makes it difficult for her to eat, but someone was obviously still taking care of her. It wasn’t a good visit, not at all. We felt bad that we had come. Knowing what we now know would break my parents’ hearts, I think, but when Colson talks on their behalf they do not speak of elephants, those extraordinary beings. They do not speak of extraordinary matters. Colson does not bring them back to perform feats of omniscience or magicians’ tricks. I don’t know why he brings them back. I tried to prevent him at first. I appealed to his reasonableness, though in truth he is not particularly reasonable. I threatened him with psychiatric counseling, hours of irrelevant questions and quizzes. I told him his performances were futile and cruel. I teased him and even insulted him, saying that if he considered himself gifted or precocious he was sadly mistaken. Nothing availed.

When he enters these phases I become exhausted. Sometimes, I admit, I flee. He doesn’t seem to need me to fulfill his conversations with the dead, if indeed they are conversations. They seem more like inhabitations. And they’re harmless enough, if disorienting, though this morning’s remark disturbs me, perhaps because his mother, my wife, had just made her unnecessary appearance. Really, why would she return only to hack wordlessly at our little tree? It seems so unlikely.

“Sorry?” I say.

“We are here to prepare for not being here,” he says in my mother’s soft, rather stroke-fuddled voice.

It’s as though he is answering the very question posed at Come and See! I took him there once. Sometimes someone brings a child or grandchild, it’s not unheard of. He listened attentively. No one expected him to contribute and everyone found him adorable. “Don’t ever take me into that stupid room again,” he later instructed me.

He may be right that it is a stupid room and that of all the great rooms he might or will enter, attentively and with expectation, it will on conclusion be the stupidest.

I study Colson. My dear boy is skinny and needs a haircut. He rubs his eyes the way my mother did. Don’t rub your eyes so! we’d all exclaim. But I say nothing.

Colson says, “Then you’re in the other here, where the funny thing is no one realizes you’ve arrived.”

He sits down heavily at the kitchen table. “Would you like a cup of tea,” I ask.

“That would be nice,” he says in my mother’s voice of wonderment.

But I can’t find the tea. We haven’t had tea in the house since they died. We’d keep it on hand just for them when they visited.

“I’ll go out and get some right now,” I say.

But he says not to bother. He says, “Just sit with me, talk with me.”

I sit opposite my boy. I notice that the clock on the stove reads 9:47 and the stovetop is dusty, as though no one has cooked on it for a long time. I vow that I will cook a hot, nourishing and comforting dinner tonight. And I do, and we talk quietly then as well, though nothing of import is being decided or even said.

I find it easier to be with my father when Colson brings him. Though he always seemed rather inscrutable to me he now doesn’t sadden me so. He would not accept an offer of tea that he suspected was unlikely to be provided. He was able to confer with the animals in a way my mother couldn’t, and felt that great advances would soon be made in appreciating and comprehending animal consciousness, though these advancements would coincide with the dramatic worldwide decline of our nonhuman brothers and sisters. Once, I’m ashamed to say, I maudlinly brought up the Tank of my childhood, and my father said he had been shot by a sheriff’s deputy who thought he was a stray, and that the man had also shot a woman’s horse in winter, making the same claim, and that he had been reprimanded but neither fined nor fired. Yes. And that they had lied to me, my mother and father. It was Colson who told me this in my father’s voice, Colson, who had never known Tank or felt his “happy fur,” as I called it as a child. Bad, happy Tank. He ate his dinner from my mother’s Bundt pan. It slowed him down some, having to work around the pan. He always ate his food too fast.

But this was the only time a disclosure occurred, and I am more cautious now in conversation. I find I want neither the past nor the future illuminated. But my discomfort is growing that my boy will find access to other people, people we do not know, like the woman the next town over who died in a fire of her own setting, or even one of Jeanette’s unfortunate customers. That I will come home one evening and that Colson will be not himself but a stranger whose death means little to me and that even so we will talk quietly and inconsequentially and with puzzled desperation.

The week passes. Colson has a tutor in mathematics for the summer who is oblivious to the situation and I have the office I’m obliged to occupy. Colson wants to be an engineer or an architect but he has difficulty with concepts of scale and measurability. The tutor claims he’s progressing nicely but Colson never talks about these hours, only stubbornly reiterates his desire to create soaring nonutilitarian spaces.

At the end of the week I return to Come and See! My passage through the construction zone is much the same. I suppose change will appear to come all at once. Suddenly there will be a smooth six-lane road with additional turning lanes and sidewalks with high baffle walls concealing a remaining landscape soon to be converted to housing. The walls will be decorated with abstract designs or sometimes the stylized images of birds. I’ve seen it before. Everyone’s seen it before.

Jeanette is the only one there. I feel immediately uncomfortable and settle quickly into my customary chair. There is the paper clip, as annoying and meaningless a presence as ever.

“There’s a flu going around,” she says.

“The flu?” I say. “Everyone has the flu?”

“Or they’re afraid of contracting the flu,” she says. “The hospital is even restricting visitors. You haven’t heard about the flu?”

“Only in the most general terms,” I say. “I didn’t think there was an epidemic.”

“Pandemic, possibly a pandemic. We should all be in our homes, trying not to panic.”

We wait but no one shows up. There’s a large window in the room that looks out over the parking lot, but the lot is empty and continues to be empty. The sky is doing that strange thing it does, brightening fiercely before dark.

“Why don’t we begin anyway?” she says. “ ‘For where two are gathered in my name…’ and so on. Or is it three?”

“Why would it be three?” I say. “I don’t think it’s three.”

“You’re right,” she says.

She has a round pale face and small hands. Nothing about her is attractive, though she is agreeable, certainly, or trying to be.

“I’m not dying,” I say. God only knows what possessed me.

“Of course not!” she exclaims, her round face growing pink. “Goodness!”

But then she says, “On Wednesday, Wednesday I think it was, it was certainly not Thursday, I was in this woman’s room where the smell of flowers was overwhelming. You could hardly breathe and I knew her friends meant well, but I offered to remove the arrangements, there were more than a dozen of them, I’m surprised there wasn’t some policy restricting their number, and she said, ‘I’m not dying,’ and then she died.”

“You never know,” I say.

“I hope they let me back soon.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

“I meant to say why would they?”

She stands up but then sits down again. “No,” she says, “I’m not leaving.”

“It’s disgusting what you’re doing, you’re like the thief’s accomplice,” I say. “No one can be certain about these things.”

Suddenly she appears not nervous or accommodating in the least.

We do not speak further, just sit there staring at each other until the sexton arrives and insists it’s time to lock the place up.

At home, Colson is watching a television special on our dying oceans.

“Please turn that off,” I say.

“Grandma wanted to watch it.”

He has made popcorn and poured it into a large blue bowl that is utterly unfamiliar to me. It’s a beautiful bowl of popcorn.

“You have another bowl like that?” I ask. “I want to make myself a drink.”

He laughs like my wife might have when she still loved me, but then returns to watching the television.

“This is tragic,” he says. “Can anything be done?”

“So much can be done,” I say. “But everything would have to be different.”

“Well,” he sighs, “now Grandma and Poppa know. She wanted to watch it.”

“Have you heard anything about a flu,” I ask. “Does anyone you know have the flu?”

“Grandma died of the flu.”

“No. They died in a car accident. You know that.”

“Sometimes they get mixed up,” he says.

Colson’s the age I was when I was told about the country. Ten years later I’d be married. I married too young and unwisely, for sure.

“Do they sometimes tell you stories you don’t believe?”

“Daddy,” he says with no inflection, so I don’t know what he means.

We finish the popcorn. He did a good job. Every kernel was popped. I take the bowl to the sink and rinse it out carefully, then take a clean dish towel from a drawer and dry it. It really is an extraordinarily lovely bowl. I don’t know where to put it because I don’t know where it came from.

A few days later my father is back. He was a handsome man with handsome thick gray hair.

“Son,” he says, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“It’s all right,” I say.

“No, it’s not all right. I wish I knew what to tell you.”

“Colson, honey,” I say. “Stop.”

“That’s no way to have an understanding,” he says. “Your mother and I just wish it were otherwise.”

“Me too,” I say.

“We wish we could help but there’s so much they haven’t figured out. You’d think by now, but they haven’t.”

“Who’s they,” I ask reluctantly.

But Colson doesn’t seem to have heard me. He runs his fingers through his shaggy hair, which looks damp and hot. My boy has always run hot. I wonder if he’s bathing and brushing his teeth. My poor boy, I think, my poor dear boy. Someone should remind him.

The following afternoon when Colson is with his tutor, who, I think, is deceiving both of us, though to all appearances he is a forthright and sincere young man, I drive almost one hundred miles to see Lucy, the other elephant. She is being sponsored by two brothers who maintain the county’s graveyards, some sort of perpetual care operation, though to be responsible for an elephant is quite another matter, I would think. The brothers are extremely private and shun publicity. It was only after great effort that I learned anything about them at all or the actual whereabouts of Lucy. Someone — though neither of the brothers, a friend of the brothers is how I imagine him — agreed to show me around the grounds that she now occupies, but I find that once I reach the gate I cannot continue.

I turn back, ashamed, and more estranged from my situation than ever.

When I return home the tutor has left and Colson is putting his drawings in order, cataloging them by some method unknown to me. When my mother and father were taken from us so abruptly I knew that Colson was terribly bereaved. Still, he did not want my father’s safari hat or his water-bottle holster. He did not want his watch or his magnetic travel backgammon. Nor did he want my mother’s collection of ink pens, which I suggested would be ideal for his drawings. He wanted no mementos. Instead he went directly to communication channels that are impossible to establish.

“Where were you, Daddy,” Colson asks.

“Why, at work,” I say quickly.

Surely I am back at my usual time. I seldom lie, indeed I cannot even remember the circumstances of my last falsehood. Why would he ask such a question? I kiss him and go into the kitchen to make myself a drink but then remember that I have stopped drinking.

“A lady came by today but I told her I didn’t know where you were.”

“What did she look like,” I ask, and of course he describes Jeanette to a T.

I am so weary I can hardly lift my hand to my head. I must make dinner for us but I think the simplest omelet is beyond my capabilities now. I suggest that we go out but he says he has already eaten with the tutor. They had tacos made and sold from a truck painted with flowers and sat at a picnic table chained to a linden tree. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My rage at Jeanette is almost blinding and I gaze at him without seeing as he orders and then reorders his papers, some of which seem to be marked with only a single line. I feel staggeringly innocent. That is the unlikely word that comes to me. Colson puts away his papers and smiles, a smile so radiant that I close my eyes without at all wanting to, and then rather gently somehow it is day again and I am striding through the bustling wasteland to Come and See! The reflection concerns Gregory of Nyssa. He is a popular subject but I am forever having difficulty in recalling what I already know about him. Something about the Really Real and its ultimate importance to us, though the Really Real is inaccessible to our understanding. Food for thought indeed, and over and over again.

When the meeting concludes and we are dismissed I practically hurl myself on Jeanette, who has uncharacteristically contributed nothing to the conversation this night.

“Don’t ever come to my house again,” I say.

“Was I really there, then? I thought I had the wrong place. Was that your son? A fine little boy. He can certainly keep a secret, can’t he.”

“I’ll call the police,” I say.

“Goodness,” she laughs. “The police.”

It sounded absurd, I have to agree.

“I was concerned about you,” she says. “You haven’t been here for a while. You’ve been avoiding us.”

“Don’t ever again…” I say.

“A delightful little boy,” she continues. “But you mustn’t burden him with secrets.”

“…come to my house.” I couldn’t be more insistent.

“Actually,” she says, “no one would fault you if you stopped attending. How many times must we endure someone making a hash of Gregory of Nyssa? People are so tenacious when they should be free. Free!”

I begin to speak but find I have no need to speak. The room is more familiar to me than I would care to admit. Who was it whose last breath didn’t bring him home?

Or am I the first?

The Mother Cell

She had been living there for a few months when an acquaintance said, “I think you should meet this person. She’s new. She lives over by the conservation easement, the one with the moths.” She, too, was the mother of a murderer, that was the connection, but Emily and this Leslie didn’t hit it off particularly well, though they were both fiercely nonjudgmental, of course. But then another mother, well into her twilight years but unaccompanied by caregivers, moved down less than three months later, around the Fourth of July, the time of pie and fireworks and bunting-draped baby carriages. It was as though some mysterious word had gotten out. These things happen, like when highly allergic people, practically allergic to life itself, all gravitate to some mountain in Arizona, or when a bayside town in Maine becomes the locus for lipstick lesbians overnight. Penny arrived next, followed by a few more mothers in quick succession until the influx stopped.

Nobody had to tell them outright that they had better be model citizens. When a bear mauled a young couple out at the state park, the mothers worried that the incident might be perceived as their inadvertent doing for weren’t black bears shy as a rule? And this was an extremely aggressive bear and small, hardly more than a cub, but determined and deliberate.

One mother, Francine, thought a hunter had shot the bear with a hallucinogen prior to the attack, just for fun, to see what would happen. “It must get boring for them to just shoot something and have it die,” Francine said. “Someone shot it with a mind-altering drug.”

“Most everything around here has been shot out for years now,” another mother said. “Where did this bear even come from?”

“Exactly,” Francine said.

The eldest mother had the sugar and was so arthritic she had long enjoyed the awe of X-ray technicians. She was half blind too and described herself as dumb as a box of nails, but she knew how to keep on living. Whereas Penny, who wasn’t even forty — she’d had Edward when she was sixteen — died of lung cancer without having ever smoked a cigarette, even in the worst of times.

It was Penny’s death that brought them together, though they weren’t about to take up the task of writing to her boy in prison. Penny had liked to say there was a part in each of us that had never sinned and that was the part of Edward she addressed when she wrote to him. But as the eldest mother pointed out, that was the same part that was never born and will never die. It was thus irrelevant. Better to address a plate with a covered bridge printed on it.

They still thought of themselves as being seven in number even though without Penny it was six. In general they believed that the dead remained around, fulfilling all but the most technical requirements of residency on earth, yet relieved of the banality of daily suffering. In this respect, they could argue, though they never did, that their children’s victims weren’t as bad off as commonly assumed.

Fathers didn’t flock like this, they agreed. Leslie had stuck it out with a father the longest. Their boy, Gordon, had done something terrible, just terrible. And he had been one of those kids who had never caused a bit of trouble. This was scarcely believable given what happened but there was the record, their boy, Gordon’s record, or rather the lack of it. Leslie said that after the trial, the outcome of which was never in doubt, she and the father tended more and more to behave as though they were performing before an audience. Not a sold-out house, to be sure, but a respectable enough number in attendance to ensure that the show wouldn’t close for a while. When the lights dimmed and they were alone, except for the audience, the spectators and listeners, it became all choked poise and memory pieces between them, with the occasional brilliant burst of anger and loathing.

“It essentially became vanity,” Leslie said.

The eldest mother said, “But what can you expect from men? They’re like a virus with a penchant for the heart. They got a special affinity for attacking the heart. You can recover, sure, but the damage is done.”

The fathers, it turned out, had all gone back to work. To a man they had returned to their places of employment. And they were doing all right. I’m doing, they’d say, when asked. Some had remarried. One had had his impulsive vasectomy reversed.

Barbara’s daughter had been dubbed the End of the Dream murderer by the media, for that was what the girl said in the course of her serial rampage.

“It’s only her who knows if she said it,” Barbara argued. “Her saying she said it doesn’t make it so. She was always that kind of kid, saying all kinds of crap and expecting you to believe her.”

“Was she Buddhist,” Leslie asked.

“Jesus no,” Barbara said. “She didn’t even do yoga. She didn’t do nothing until she did.”

“You can be a murderer without being a liar,” the eldest mother said.

None of the mothers had pets. The children had all had pets of one kind or another and homes had to be found for them. There were hundreds of people out there who keenly wanted murderers’ pets and by their very ambition and craving were utterly inappropriate as adopters. Sometimes these pets’ stories ended badly too.

“It takes sixty-three days to make a dog,” the eldest mother said. “Two hundred and seventy days to make a human being, give or take a few.”

The mothers were atypical in that each had brought forth only one child. In their day, two had been the norm. Now three was the new two, whereas one was the old zero.

“People had more interesting thoughts before mass inoculations,” Barbara maintained. “More generous and less damaging thoughts.”

“Who knows what’s in all the inoculations they give the little babies,” Francine said. “Oh, they tell you, but still you don’t know. How could you?”

“Minds used to move like rivers but they don’t want our minds moving like that,” Emily said. “They want to channelize our thinking, and some people can’t tolerate their minds being dammed. They noticed it right away, whereas others never do, and they can’t tolerate it.”

“Damned,” Leslie murmured.

“Exactly,” Francine said.

Francine’s boy had claimed that the family he’d slaughtered would have killed hundreds of people if they’d been left to prosper.

“You mean because they were into making pharmaceuticals or beer?” Barbara asked.

“I’m not defending him, but it could very well have been true.”

“Genuine thinking is rare,” the eldest mother said.

“I saw a sculpture of the river god once,” Leslie said. “It was the most frightening work of art I’ve ever witnessed. Someone blew it up, I heard. It was just too frightening.”

Emily looked at the bottle she was drinking water from. “How can it be pure if it’s enhanced?” she said to no one in particular.

Pam then commenced to tell a story about gods. It was rendered fairly incoherent in her telling but it concerned a group of lost Greek sailors on a fishing boat who happened upon a desolate island where they found an old man in a hut attended by a bedraggled, almost featherless though immense bird and a large old hairless goat whose nipples were nonetheless rosy and whose udders were full of milk.

Yuck, thought Emily.

“It turns out,” said Pam, “to make a long story short, that the decrepit old man was Jupiter, whose reign as supreme ruler of the universe was long past. The goat was his old nurse, Amalthea, who had once suckled him, and the bird was the fearsome eagle who once carried in its claws the god’s devastating thunderbolts. When Jupiter heard from the sailors that any temples that remained were in ruins and then realized that all he remembered had disappeared, he began to sob and the eagle screamed and the old goat bleated, all in the most terrible anguish. The sailors were so frightened that they fled back to their boat. Among the crew was a learned Russian professor of philosophy, and he was the one who told them the old guy was Jupiter and—”

“There just happened to be a learned Russian professor of philosophy on this fishing boat?” Emily said.

“That’s a melancholy story,” Leslie said. “I’m not sure why.”

“Birds are sad,” Francine said. “Remember when Penny was here and she tried to establish a sanctuary for unwanted parrots and the town shut her down? They said there was no permitting process for such a thing. Penny said those birds cried when they were taken off her property. They knew. They knew their last chance had come and gone.”

The mothers were silent.

Then Barbara said, “Well, I don’t know why you told that story about the old god, but the nice thing about it was that he wasn’t alone at the end.”

“What about the one we got now,” Emily asked.

“The one what?”

“The god we got now. Do you think somebody in the future will be telling a story about finding him exiled to some desolate island and crying when he learns that everything he had fashioned and understood has vanished and that he is subject to the same miserable destiny as any created thing?”

“Probably,” someone finally said.

“I feel uneasy even thinking about the river god,” Leslie said. “But it’s gone now, I’ve heard, blown up. They’re not even calling it an act of vandalism.”

“If we lived in Palestine,” Pam said, “and my boy had done there what he’d done here, the Israeli people would have blown up my home.” She imagined herself being allowed to take from it whatever she could carry, though, but maybe not.

One of the mothers said that was called collective punishment.

“They might as well have blown up my home,” Barbara said. “I’ve never had one. I butterfly around and always have.”

She was living in a motel out on the highway that was next to a burned-out gas station and a knife outlet. The management of the motel was doing its part for the environment by changing the sheets and towels only after repeated requests, a notion picked up from the pieties of the better chains. Barbara was getting by with a debit card she’d found behind the bed. It was in the original paper sleeve with the PIN written on it. Some poor devil with shaky handwriting was out in the world not realizing his account was being discreetly drained.

The eldest mother made every effort to flex her arthritic hands and modestly succeeded. She couldn’t lift a finger to save herself even if that was all it took, which it never was. She felt the darkness closing in without exactly seeing it. This was not unusual. Life was like a mirror that didn’t know what it was reflecting. For the mirror, reflections didn’t even exist. Whenever she saw a mirror where she didn’t expect it, she thought: Poor old woman, how sad she looks.

“I had just said to the waitress that what I’d like was a nice cup of coffee,” one of the mothers was remembering, “when the police came in. I had to go with them and tell them what I knew. Of course I knew nothing. He had never presented his dark plan to me. I sometimes feel he committed that crime in another state of existence.”

“We don’t live in the same time as our children, if that’s what you mean,” Pam ventured graciously.

“But here we are,” Leslie said. “It doesn’t seem right, does it, and what are we supposed to do now? What shall we do?”

Bathed in tender moonlight, everything looked lethal, the weeds in their beds, the bottled water, the ladder on its side, the painted nails of the mothers’ feet in sandals.

“Have any of you performed community service,” Emily asked, and then blushed at their silence. Clearly what had been done by the offspring of those in the garden was beyond the salve of community service.

“When I first got here,” one of the mothers said, “I would take electric bills out of people’s mailboxes and pay them.”

“Did anyone ever make themselves available for comment,” Barbara asked. “I instinctively knew not to make myself available. And they respect that. Even the persistent ones give up after a while.”

“I retained a spokesperson but it was a big mistake,” Pam said. “Did anyone come up with an extenuating circumstance in the sentencing phase?”

The mothers shook their heads.

“Well,” Francine said, “Allen called 911 when his girlfriend cut off her fingers and toes, though admittedly anyone would have sought emergency assistance. But it certainly might have affected him, seeing his girlfriend of only a few months cut off her fingers and toes.”

“What did she think they were?” Emily wondered. “That she’d want to get rid of them.”

“Did you say minutes,” Barbara asked. “That’s like—”

“Months,” Francine told her. “A girlfriend of a few months.”

“I thought you said he was a sociopath.”

“He was a sociopath, a harmless sociopath at the time. He didn’t care for society or crowds. He didn’t like traffic, bars, sitting on planes. Then he found a girlfriend. I had great hopes for her but it turned out she was nuttier than he was.”

“In her fashion,” Emily said.

“One human family,” the eldest mother said. “That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve got to remember. This is Thyself. It should always be spoken of any creature to keep us in mind of the similarity of their inmost being with ours.”

“This is Thyself,” Pam repeated. She made fists of her hands and struck her breasts softly.

Emily thought of the several minutes she had spent yesterday looking out her window at the neighbor’s cat taking a dump. It didn’t cover up its deposit after it finished, just shook itself and walked away. It was a large white cat with a shining red sore on its head. The neighbor said she was allowing the matter of the sore to run its course. The cat still had a good appetite.

“I live beside a woman who lost a boy in the war, and she lords it over me something awful,” Leslie said. “She’s a police dispatcher, and when I smile at her in greeting she hisses at me, actually hisses. She planted a cherry tree, I guess for the boy, and it got the gall. It’s a few years old now and it’s got this enormous gall. I know it must be breaking her heart. I want to tell her that some galls can be beneficial. They return nitrogen to the soil, which is good. Or in other ways they can be beneficial to man.”

“You know a lot, Leslie,” Pam said, “but I don’t think this would give that woman any peace, coming from you.”

“It would be suicide to speak like that,” one of the mothers said.

“We must behave here as though we didn’t exist,” the eldest mother said.

“Didn’t exist?” said Barbara. “But we do.”

“What I like about our group is that it isn’t a support group,” Francine said. “I couldn’t handle a support group. I would consider it suspect in the extreme.”

They all agreed that any kind of support group for the mothers of celebrity killers would be in poor taste.

“Ours is a delicate situation,” the eldest mother said. She requested that someone, it didn’t matter who, light the candles.

Leslie said, “My first thought in the morning and my last thought at night is: We are going to be asked to leave.”

“I’ve still got the Popsicle-stick box he made as a kid,” Francine said. “I keep the kitchen sponge in it.”

“That can’t be sanitary,” Emily noted.

“I threw away the handprint. You know how they make plaster-of-paris casts of little kids’ hands for Mother’s Day in kindergarten and mount them on blocks of wood?”

“That would be worth something on eBay,” Barbara said. “People are such creeps.”

“What have we been discussing tonight, actually,” Leslie asked. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’ve been talking about God.”

“That’s a stretch,” Barbara said.

“I’d say that saying that is making a pretty safe bet,” Francine said. “It’s sort of vague. Not to hurt your feelings, Leslie.”

“OK,” Leslie said.

“It’s like each time we meet, you think we should have a subject or something. It’s not as though we’re going down a stairwell, one step at a time, putting what’s happened behind us, one step at a time.”

“OK, OK,” Leslie said.

The candles would not light as the cups they were in had filled with the rainwater of days past. “We should be going anyway,” one of the mothers said. Candles always discomfited this one. Vigils, sex, dinner, prayer…they had too many uses.

“I wish I had dropped him as an infant out of his snuggle sack on the rocks,” Barbara said loudly.

Emily had heard her voice this absolutely useless sentiment before. It was always a sure sign that the evening was winding down.

“We’ve settled nothing,” the eldest mother said. “We cannot make amends for the sins of our children. We gave birth to mayhem and therefore history. Oh, ladies, oh, my friends, we have resolved nothing and the earth is no more beautiful.”

She struggled to her feet and was helped inside. Her old knees creaked like doors. She always liked to end these evenings on an uncompromising note. Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful.

Craving

They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That’s what she’d thought: Why, he’s falling to pieces. The place was called Gary’s.

“Honey,” he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face, gently at first but then harder. “Oh, honey,” he said in alarm. His tie rested in his Mignon Gary as he was pressed forward. He was overweight and pale but his hair was dark and he wore elegant two-toned shoes. Before this, he had whispered something unintelligible to her. No one watched them. Sweat ran down his face. His drink toppled over and fell on them both.

She was wearing a green dress and the next day she left it behind in the hotel along with the clothes he had been wearing, the tan suit and the tie and the two-toned shoes. The clothes had let them down. The following night they were in a different hotel. It was near the coast and their room had a balcony from which they could see the distant ocean. They knew how to drink. They sought out the slippery places that tempted one to have a drink. Every place was a slippery place.

Denise and Steadman watched the moon rising. Denise played the game she did with herself. She transferred all her own convulsive, compulsive associations to Steadman. She gave them all to him. This was not as difficult as it might once have been because all her thoughts concerned Steadman anyway. Though her mind became smooth and flat and borderless, she wasn’t thinking anything so she never felt lost. It was quiet until a deeper silence began to unfold, but she was still all right. Then the silence became like a giant hand mutely offered. When she sensed the giant hand, she got up quickly. That giant hand was always too much for her. She went into the other room and made more drinks. They took suites whenever possible. The gin seemed to need a room of its own. She came back out to the balcony.

“Let’s drink this and go get something to eat,” she said.

They found themselves in the dining room of the hotel. It was claustrophobic and the service was poor. They sat on a cracked red leather banquette under a mirror. On a shelf between them and the mirror was a pair of limp rubber gloves. Denise didn’t bring them to Steadman’s attention. She reasoned that they had been left behind by some maintenance person. They gazed at a table of seven who were telling loud stories about traffic accidents they had witnessed. They seemed to be trying to top one another.

“The French have spectacular wrecks,” a man said.

“I love that Jaws of Life thing,” a woman said. “Have you ever seen that thing?” She had streaked blond hair and a heavily freckled bosom.

“I saw an incredible Mexican bus crash once,” a small man said. But his remark was immediately dismissed by the group.

“A Mexican wreck? There’s nothing extraordinary about a Mexican wreck…”

“It’s true. The landscape’s such a void that there’s not the same effect…”

Steadman and Denise listened attentively. Denise didn’t have a car-crash story and if she ever did she wouldn’t tell it, she decided.

The waitress told them the previous couple at their booth had given her a five-dollar tip but had torn the bill in half, forcing on her the ignominy of taping it back together. She said she despised people, present company excepted, and told them not to order the veal. If they ordered the veal, she told them, she would not serve it, which would be cause for her dismissal but she didn’t care.

They decided to have another couple of drinks, and return to their room.

The room was not welcoming. It had seen too many people come and go. It was wearying to be constantly reminded that time passes and everything with it, purposelessly.

Denise watched Steadman place himself on the bed. He lay on his back. The room surrounded them. For a while, Denise lay on the bed too, thinking. Where had it gone, it had gone someplace. The way they were. Then she went into the other room, where the writing table and television set were. Their new traveling bags were there, big soft black ones. She turned off the lights, feeling a little dizzy. She wrung her hands. They should go someplace, she thought. There was tomorrow, something had to be done with it. She reviewed the day’s events. Her mind was like a raven, picking over gravel with its oily, luminous feathers. She could almost hear it as it hopped across the small stones but she couldn’t quite, thank God. Then she heard someone passing by in the corridor, laughing. A thin breeze entered the room and she thought of the distant water as they had seen it from the balcony, folded like a package between two enormous buildings. She looked at their bags, heaped in a corner. Night was a bad time. Night would simply give her no rest. Steadman was quiet now but he might get up soon and they would have their conversation. It was a mess, they were in an awful mess. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand this and so on and so on…Her eyes ached and her throat was dry, she hated this room. It, it just didn’t like them. She could hear it saying, Well, there’s a pathetic pair, how did they ever find each other? She’d like to set fire to the room. Or beat it up. She could hit, no question. There was someone passing in the hall again, laughing, the fools. The room stared at her lidlessly. Perhaps they could leave tonight. They would go down — Denise and Steadman, Steadman and Denise — past the night clerk trying to read a book—10,000 Dreams Interpreted. She remembered what the book looked like: red and falling apart. They had done this before, left in the night when the moon was setting and the sun rising. To get out while the moon was setting, that’s exactly what she wanted. She lay down on the floor. The room was not letting them breathe the way they had to; it was scandalous that they’d been given this room instead of another. Listening to Steadman breathe, she tried to breathe. She wished it were June. It was June once and they were somewhere and a mockingbird sang from midnight to daybreak, or so it seemed, imitating other birds, and Steadman had made a list of all the birds he recognized in the mockingbird’s song. He learned things and then remembered them, that’s just how he was.

Denise crept across the carpet toward Steadman’s bed and held on to it. His face was turned toward her, his eyes open, looking at her. That was Steadman, he knew everything but he didn’t share. He made her feel like a little animal sometimes, one with little animal emotions and breathing little animal devotions. She would ask him for the list very quietly, very nicely, the little piece of paper with the names of the birds, where was it, he was always putting it someplace and she had already gone through their bags, their beautiful traveling bags, ready for the larger stage.

“Steadman,” she said reasonably.

But how could he hear her? This annoying room was listening to every word she uttered. And what did it know? It couldn’t know anything. It couldn’t climb from the basement into a life of spiritual sunshine like she was capable of doing, not that she could claim she had. The individual in the hall howled with laughter at this. There were several of them out there now, a whole gang, the ones from the dinner party, probably, the spectacular-wrecks people, just shrieking.

At once Denise realized that the gang was herself and it was morning. Her hands hurt terribly. They were as pink as though they’d been boiled. She’d hurt them somehow. Actually, they were broken. Incredible.

She stared at them in the car on the drive to the hospital. Those hands weren’t going to do anything more for Denise for a while.

The doctor in the emergency room wrapped them up, the left first, then the right, indifferently. Even so, some things fascinated him.

“We’ve got a kid on the third floor,” he said. “He was born with all the bones in his head broken. Now there’s a problem. Are you aware that our heads are getting smaller? Our skulls are smaller than those of our brothers in the Paleolithic period. Do you know why? I’ll tell you why. Society’s the answer. Society has reduced our awareness skills. Personal and direct contact with the natural world requires a continual awareness, but now we just don’t have it. We’re aware of dick-all.”

Denise looked at her hands covered in the casts. They were like little dead creatures safely concealed in snow-covered burrows. Ugly dishes don’t break, she thought. But they had.

“Try to stay alert, miss,” the doctor said, playfully slapping her now utterly exempt hands.

Then they were driving slowly away from the coast through small towns. “I’m tired, Denise,” Steadman was saying. “I’m really tired.”

“Yes, yes,” Denise said. She was thinking of all the nice things she would do for this man she loved.

“I think we should stay somewhere until your hands are better,” he said. “Rent a house. Get some rest.”

“I agree, I agree. No more hotels. We’ll get a house for a while.” She was crazy about him, everything was going to be fine.

He turned off the road at a sign that said CAFE REALITY and into a parking lot. Actually, it said CAPE REALTY. Denise laughed. “And we’ll stop drinking,” she said. “We’ll just stop.”

“Sure,” Steadman said.

“I don’t want to see a lot of places, though,” Denise said. “I don’t want to choose.”

She sat in the car. She had ruined that room back there. Embarrassing, she thought. But the room had fought back. It made one think, really.

Steadman returned to the car and put several photographs of a house on her lap. It had a porch in front and a pool in back and was surrounded by a tall, whitewashed wall.

“I’m going to use this month wisely,” Denise assured him.

“Good,” Steadman said.

The important thing was to stop drinking. If she could get twenty-four hours away from last night, she could start stopping. Maybe they could get rid of all the glasses in the house. Glasses were always calling to you. Maybe this house wouldn’t have any. Their drinking had brought them here. Denise was determined to learn something, to leave this place refreshed. She yawned nervously. Steadman’s forehead was beaded with sweat, the back of his jacket was dark with sweat as he lifted their bags from the trunk.

In one of the rooms, a young woman was sweeping the floor. “I’m the cleaning woman,” she said. “Are you renting this place? I’ll be through in a minute.” She wore shorts and red high-top sneakers. “I’ll put on a shirt,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was coming. I always sweep without a shirt.” With her was a small dog with black saucery eyes, thick ears and double dewclaws.

“What is that,” Denise asked. It was one of the strangest dogs she had ever seen.

“Everyone asks that,” the girl said. “It’s a Lundehund. It’s used for hunting puffins in Norway.”

“But what’s it doing here?”

“He comes with me while I clean. You’ll probably ask next how I ended up with a dog like this. I can’t remember the ins and outs of it. I started off wanting a Welsh corgi, the ones you always see in pictures of the queen, greeting her on her return from somewhere or bidding her farewell as she departs. I’m not English, of course. I’ve never been to England. The Lake District, the Cotswolds, the white cliffs of Dover…you couldn’t prove any of them by me. I was born in this town and I’ve never been anywhere else. But I make sure that everything I have comes from other places, though I try to avoid China. This shirt comes from Nepal, and my perfume’s from Paris. I realize it’s wrong to subject caged civet cats to daily genital scrapings just to make perfume, but it was a present. My sneakers were put together in Brazil and you’re probably about to say that Brazilian laborers make only pennies an hour, but I did purchase them secondhand. See the little stones in these earrings? They come from Arizona. Navajoland.”

She had put on a shirt and was buttoning it as she spoke.

Denise wasn’t going to allow the cleaning woman to unnerve her. Her hands throbbed and itched. She had to drink a lot of water, lots and lots of water.

“You shouldn’t be here, should you,” she said to the Lundehund. “You should be scrambling up and down rocky crevices, carrying birds’ eggs in your teeth.”

It was disgusting and sad, Denise thought, but a great many things were. One’s talents should be used.

The woman and the grotesque dog were clearly fresh catastrophes. She was trying to begin and then these catastrophes appeared immediately. Though it wasn’t what you thought that was important, but how you acted. Or was it the other way around?

Denise took leave of them and went into a narrow monochromatic room that overlooked the pool. There were empty bookcases over a single bed and numerous indentations in the hardwood floor as though a woman wearing high heels in need of repair had moved back and forth across it, again and again. Her own shoes, too, were run-down. She kicked them off. She sighed, and later it seemed the water in the pool was darker and the shadows were different. Her hair smelled of gin, and her skin. There was someone in the pool, a man, but he left quickly when she got up. It was just the liquor leaving, she thought. She could understand that. The doors in the house were sliding ones she could move with her foot. Her hands bobbed in the casts beside her as she walked. Steadman was where she had last seen him but he was sitting down. The cleaning woman was holding him in her arms and he was weeping loudly.

“I just saw your husband,” Denise said. “He was swimming in the pool. No one should be using the pool now that we’re here, should they? We’ve rented this place, after all. And we don’t need a cleaning woman either. This place is clean enough. We’ll keep it clean.”

“I don’t have a husband,” the cleaning woman said. “You have a husband.” Her shirt was off again, she just couldn’t seem to keep that shirt on. She had been combing Steadman’s hair back with her fingers. His tears had dried and he looked like a boy, washed and fresh.

While Denise was musing on this, the Lundehund rose softly up against her side and began chewing on the casts.

“Get down,” the cleaning woman scolded him. “That’s a naughty boy.”

“You should allow dogs their pleasures,” Denise said. “They don’t live long.” She had intended this remark to make the woman sad, but apparently everyone realized the truth of it. It had no effect because it was something that was already known.

“You’re in terrible shape,” the cleaning woman said. “Both of you. Let me come a few hours each day. I’ll make the meals and keep things tidy. Drink, drank, drunk, no more. That was there but now you’re here. This is the subjunctive here. Look,” she said, “it’s going to be all right.”

It’s like when a person dies and someone says it’s going to be all right, Denise thought. So stupid! This woman wanted to be Steadman’s mistress, she could tell. She’d been pressing her lips against his temple and laying her long breasts against his chest. But she could only be the mistress of some delusion, Denise thought triumphantly. The woman gathered up her things, the Lundehund’s nails clicked across the floor, the door closed and they were gone.

Denise looked at Steadman. She was crazy about him. Though it wasn’t easy, this house. It was small and hot in the dark. They hadn’t had a drink in hours. She looked at Steadman’s watch: sixteen hours, exactly. Maybe they shouldn’t try to get better here. That was the problem with houses. They belonged to other people, even if those people were far away, but a hotel room didn’t belong to anybody. Maybe they should just get back in the car. This was the law, the doctrine, of maybe. She believed in this, and in her love for Steadman, and these were her beliefs.

She smiled at him.

“Denise,” he said. “Please.”

She was standing in the dark and he was still sitting. She wanted a drink badly. She closed her eyes and swallowed. You are what you drink, she thought, but here they were nothing, they were nowhere. Maybe she should say farewell to love, she thought. It gives you more balance. She should have considered this long ago. She stared at Steadman in the dark.

At last he said, “Groceries.”

She had been thinking about the state they were in. They executed people in this state for certain things, but before they could do it the person had to realize what the results, the significance, of execution would be. That was the law. So of course you pretended you didn’t realize. As long as you could do that they had to leave you alone.

“So,” Steadman said. “What do you want?”

She felt a little Februaryish, as she always did in that forlorn, short, spiky month.

“Let’s not get groceries now,” she said. Groceries meant more than food. They implied duration. She didn’t want that here. “There’s nothing to drink here. It’s fantastic, isn’t it? Let’s lie down. Would you hold me? I can’t hold you.”

She raised her hands, moving them up and down in their white casts. She remembered a bar they’d been in. Was it Gary’s? There were framed hunting and fishing pictures on the walls. A woman was holding two snow geese by their necks. She held them high, in gloved hands, close to her head, as though they were earrings.

“Where are you going,” Denise asked.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Steadman said. He ran his hands across his face.

“You’re not going to get a drink, are you?”

“No,” Steadman said. “I am not.”

Denise wandered back into the bedroom again. The man had returned to the pool and was swimming with powerful strokes. She heard herself speaking to him, asking him to leave. “Be reasonable,” she said. “We’re here now. You can’t be here now that we are.” She said this and that, choosing her words carefully, shouting from inside the house. The man pulled himself out and stood, dripping. Then he crouched and she was afraid of this, she had worried that something like this would happen, that he would begin to dismantle the pool somehow, that he would begin by pulling at the big submerged light at the deep end, rotating it, twisting it out. Water was spilling and buckling everywhere and the light was trailing its cord behind it, like a huge white eye on its long stalk.

Denise couldn’t stay here a moment longer. She was trembling, she had to get out. They would get in the car, she and Steadman, they would drive away and never come back. They loved driving in the dark and drinking, mixing cocktails in paper cups, driving around. They had done it a lot. They would mix up some drinks and go out and tease cars. That’s what they called it, Steadman and Denise. They’d tailgate them, pounce on them out of nowhere. Crazy stuff.

“Steadman!” she called. He knew what she wanted, he knew what they would do, that this had been a mistake. He opened the door to their car, and she smelled the lovely gin. It was in a glass from before, wedged between the seats.

They drove down the street, picking up speed. They passed a house with a wrought-iron sign hanging from a post. The design was of a wrought-iron palm tree and the wrought-iron waves of a sea. Below it, where the custom lettering was supposed to be, it said YOUR NAME. Delightful! Denise thought. They had ordered it just the way it had been advertised.

“God, that was funny,” she said. People could be so funny.

“It really was,” Steadman said.

They were driving fast now. They were so much alike, they were just alike, Denise thought. “Roll my window down, please,” she said.

Steadman reached across her and did.

“Oh, thank you,” she said. Warm, humid, lovely air passed across her face. “Go faster.”

He did. She giggled.

“Slow down,” she said, “speed up. That road there.”

Steadman did, he did.

They had left the town behind. “Turn the lights off, maybe,” she said.

They rocketed down the road in the dark. Before them was nothing, but behind them a car was gaining.

She turned and saw the two wild lights moving closer. They’re going to tease us, she thought. “Faster,” she said.

But the car, weaving, was almost upon them and then, with a roar, was beside them. It was all outside them now.

“There it is, Steadman,” Denise said. It all just hung there for an instant before the car swerved around them and turned in inches beyond their front bumper. Then, whatever was driving it slammed on the brakes.