There's Something I Want You to Do

Lust

“Sir,” the security guy says, “please move away from the gaming table while you are on the phone.” Benny finishes his call to his friend Dennis, who has been giving Benny advice, and he slips his phone into his pocket.

The guard, dressed in a tight sport coat, nods affably, an action that does not seem to come easily to him. He looks like a college-educated brute. He has a crew cut, a Bluetooth in his ear, and a thick neck that tests the collar button on his white shirt. Like those of every other mean motherfucker Benny has ever known, the guard’s eyes are as blank as the lens of a camera.

Benny returns to the blackjack table in the Gray Wolf Casino outside the town of Phelps Lake, Minnesota, where he has been trying to lose all the money he has in the world and to mess up his life in a thoroughly convincing way. He’s acting out, and he knows it, and his friend Dennis, over the phone, has been telling him so. Nevertheless, he’s not succeeding. Two guys seated at the blackjack table have observed Benny with polite disbelief. He had been hoping for a spell of bad luck, but all he can do is win.

Quoting from Touch of Evil, he texted Dennis a few hours ago to say that his future was all used up, but he was winning at blackjack nevertheless. Dennis called him right back.

“What’s this about your future being all used up?” he asked. “That’s from Touch of Evil.”

“Well, she left me, didn’t she?”

“You are in the grip of romantic mindlessness,” Dennis told him. “I like that.” The man has earned the right to say such things to him. After all, he’s attached to a morphine drip and is lying in a hospital bed. “Go on playing if you’re winning, Sport,” Dennis advised, between coughs. “Never buck a winning streak.” Dennis, who is Benny’s age, likes to make pronouncements. They’re part of his impeccable style.

“I’m roadkill,” Benny said.

“No. You’re just aggrieved.” Dennis coughed again. “Don’t forget: the best part of breaking up with a girl and finding a new girl is that all your stories are fresh again.”

Black crows of the spirit have been pecking at Benny for eighteen hours — his imagination is inflamed with metaphors, and the metaphors themselves are vampires, sucking the blood from his veins. His girlfriend, Nan, the former love of his life, a tall black-haired beauty in her first year of law school, good-hearted but fickle, broke up with him last night, having traded in Benny for a fellow law student, a triathlete. Nan, too, is a triathlete. “The stars aligned,” she told Benny with faux sadness that masked her glee. “His stars and my stars.”

Despair seized hold of Benny. Who fights the stars?

The previous night, Benny could see that Nan was doing her best to be diplomatic and kind, a misguided charity that made everything worse. She said, almost in sorrow, that this brand-new fellow with a body she couldn’t quite get over was her fate, her destiny. What sealed the deal — Nan’s phrase — was that the new guy is wildly compassionate and wants to practice what she calls “poverty law” once he passes the bar, making him a shining-armor knight riding to the rescue of the creepazoidal unwashed. Whereas Benny, as a boyfriend, constituted something else: a little oasis where her caravan had briefly stopped, one of those nice-guy interludes for which she would always be grateful.

“I just never fell in love with your niceness,” Nan said. “I tried. I guess I couldn’t. You’re not to blame — you’re a great guy, a model citizen. This is all my fault. I’m impaired.”

Sitting in a downtown Minneapolis bar with large plate-glass windows, over drinks, she had announced her breakup intentions and in a moment of possibly indeliberate cruelty had held up an iPhone photograph of the shining-armor knight triathlete in question. She displayed her phone full-frontally with the screen facing Benny. Benny ignored it, and he ignored her unsettled facial expression as she said, “There he is. That’s him. He’s crossing the finish line. Really, can you blame me?”

No one stages a scene in front of plate glass during happy hour, and Benny did not. He sat listening with studied impassivity and noted glumly that Nan had prettied herself for this confrontation — blouse with plunge, heels, necklace, red nail polish — in case of a scene. She’d want to make a good impression on witnesses if there was a first-ever Bennyish outburst. Her lacquered beauty enraged him, so he sat quietly seething, radiating bogus serenity.

“You’re not looking at the picture,” Nan said. “I said I was sorry about all this.”

“Exactly right. I accept your apology.”

“Please don’t shout.”

“You wish I were shouting,” Benny said, ostentatiously whispering. “You can hardly hear me. My dial is turned all the way down. We’re in the negative numbers now.” His hand shaking, Benny took a sip of his festive Bloody Mary. “So what’s this guy’s name?”

Nan peevishly put her phone back into her purse. “What? His name?”

“Yeah. You know, his name.”

“Well, his name isn’t him. A name is so…whatever. His identity is his own,” Nan said in a vague monotone, watching a toddler walk by outside clutching a teddy bear in one hand, his other hand in his father’s. “Okay,” she said, apparently gathering her thoughts while rubbing her left knuckle with her right thumb. “So maybe I’ll tell you.” Clearly the name constituted a difficulty, a distraction. Benny waited for whatever she would say, and while he waited he noticed that she gave off a scent of lavender, which, he feared, was from massage oil.

“Go right ahead,” Benny said, sensing an advantage.

“Okay, but you’re going to laugh. I know you. His name’s Thor.”

“Thor?” Benny exclaimed. “That’s a good one. He must be from around here. That’s a real Minnesota name for you. Is he a Lutheran?”

“See, I knew you would be like that. Under your nice hides the snide. And I have to point out that you’re being defensive. Talk about the predictability factor! Like I said, I feel bad for you and I blame myself, but I’m glad I’m moving on to those green pastures they all tell you about.”

On the other side of the plate-glass window, civilians went about their business, seemingly indifferent to the wars of love, and from time to time they glanced in at Benny and Nan, the pleasant-looking young couple sitting at a bar table, apparently lost in conversation. The midsummer sun eased itself behind an office building, casting a conical shadow that pierced Benny with melancholy, while the bar slowly filled up with professional-managerial types getting off work in time for happy hour, the men loosening their collars, the women quickly, almost surreptitiously, checking their faces in the mahogany-framed mirror above the bar. To the side, a couple of outcast full-figured ladies in slimming dresses leaned toward each other in the corner, whispering.

The stars wheeled in the empty space of Benny’s desolation. He would tell Dennis about the wheeling stars. Dennis would be amused.

He took another sip of his drink as he fought off soul-nausea and the urge to beg. The in-surge of employees getting off work was tidal now. They were making a racket. He would not tell Nan how much he had loved her, the size and mature intensity of that love, its ability to give his life meaning. A man does not beg to be taken back, he reminded himself. Begging qualifies as the primary criterion for admission to loserdom, that territory inhabited by platoons of nice vanilla guys who belong in civilized places like Denmark and Sweden, not here in the United States, where they are held in contempt and trampled.

He habitually carries images around in his head. Chained to his consciousness at that moment as he sat across from her was one of Nan. The morning after their first night together, she had stood over his little apartment’s gas stove scrambling some eggs for them both, the sunlight streaming through the east window backlighting her hair in glory. She wore a cream-colored nightgown that set off her tanned skin to good effect. Benny and Nan had shared a nearly sleepless night of lovemaking. By morning they were love gods. He rose out of bed with the succulent sea urchin taste of her clitoris still on his tongue. Inspired by the sunlight and her bare feet on the linoleum and her expression of sleepy sensual concentration and the smell of the garlic and the salsa in the eggs, he thought he was the luckiest man alive at that particular hour, that morning, on the planet. Wilhelm Reich was correct: orgasms constituted the meaning of life. The kindly knife of sentiment stabbed at him again and again.

It occurred to him that maybe he hadn’t actually known Nan as a person, despite his memories of her. She had said, several times, jokingly, that he was self-deluded. Perhaps she was inexplicable, or maybe he was. Returning to the present moment from his reverie, he tried to look at her across the bar table. Her inexplicable mouth was moving in a half smile: she was saying inexplicable things about how she had felt that way then and felt this way now. More apologies came out of her.

Following the nausea and the stabbing and the pecking crows and the murderous rage, sadness dropped over him like a cone, inside of which all the oxygen consisted of more sadness. Time undoubtedly passed at Whiskey Sour’s, and the waitress replaced his drink with another. Had he said anything? He couldn’t remember if he had spoken up or had remained silent as the bar filled with merrymakers, and Nan continued to explain whatever she was explaining. His Bloody Mary glass somehow emptied the Bloody Mary into his mouth. The celery stick in the drink poked at his lip. His mind raced and stopped, raced and stopped. Nan — composed, elegant — sipped her Tom Collins and dabbed her bread in olive oil as she spoke. What was she saying now? One woman over at the bar suddenly screamed with laughter. Thank God, Benny thought: someone can scream.

As the bar grew noisier, Benny and Nan gazed at each other without tenderness, in the hard labor of separation. He felt the first wellsprings of hatred — liberating, a breeze from the soul’s window. You have to hate them first if you’re going to break up with them. Gathering himself, he nodded at her, stood up with what he hoped was quiet dignity, and left her with the bar bill. At the entryway, like Orpheus, he turned to see her one last time. Would she follow him or at least keep an eye on him as he walked away? Certainly not: she was gazing through the window glass toward the street, studiously ignoring his departure and, worse, wearing a grim smirk as she reached back down into her purse for her phone. She’d give this Thor the good news: free, now and forever. Free to be you and me! No more Benny! She didn’t look up as she tapped the letters.

—

All night Benny fought the beast of jealous rage, and he drank. Four a.m. found him in a whiskey stupor, lying on the floor in his apartment, cursing Nan and contemplating creative bedlam.

By morning, he had acquired an atom-smashing headache. His brain was a particle accelerator, throwing off broken pieces of thought. He emptied the savings account meant to pay off his student loans, transporting the cash out of the bank in a brown grocery bag he’d brought with him. The oversaturated sunlight blazed down on his hair, and his car’s interior smelled like a bakery oven. Back at home, cash in hand, he wrote a letter to the dean of admissions of the architecture school he had planned to attend in September, saying that he would not be arriving this fall, or ever. Then he called Dennis.

“Nan broke up with me,” he announced.

“No kidding. How come?” his friend asked.

“This guy. She says she…I dunno. She fell in love with him or something. Law school guy. Love bloomed in the lecture hall. His name’s Thor, if you can believe it.”

“Too bad.”

“Also he’s a triathlete.”

“A triple threat. How could you possibly compete with that?”

“Couldn’t,” Benny said. “I’m going to take all my money and gamble it away.”

“That’s a really good idea. An excellent idea. Where you going?”

“Phelps Lake. One of those Indian casinos. Hey, you want me to visit you first? This morning? How’re you feeling?” Benny hadn’t been over to the hospital for two days now.

“Naw. Go up to the casino and gamble all your money away and then call me or just come down here and give me the full rundown about how you’re totally broke and ruined.”

Benny’s idea is that he’s keeping his friend alive by sending out stories from the battlefield. Before he got sick, Dennis was a real player. In any particular room, if Dennis hadn’t made a pass at an attractive woman, it was just an oversight. He had coached Benny in the complicated norms of seduction, separation, and betrayal.

Accordingly, Benny had loaded himself and his life savings into his rusting and dented Corolla and driven eighty-seven miles north on the interstate, past the antiabortion billboards and the federal prison in Sandstone, and now here he is, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals, a recent college grad playing blackjack at a casino staffed by Native Americans. He’s bleary and hungover and soul-sick. The trouble is, he’s on a lucky streak and has won three hundred dollars, and he just keeps winning. A curse is on him: he cannot lose. More people are gathering around to watch this desperate, bloodshot young man, and they’re stupefied by his behavior. What they regard as a blessing, he believes is a catastrophe: look at the expression of dismay on his face as his winnings accumulate! Once in a while, the gates of the City of Ruination are closed to visitors. He knocks; he cannot get in.

—

Behind him, the casino zombies are living it up. Air thick with cigarette smoke and fetid hopelessness circulates dully around him, and the blinging electronic music from slot machines projects a kind of hypnotically induced amusement-park ruckus. Having won again on a double down, Benny backs up from the blackjack table and decides to survey the main floor. He will call Dennis later.

Ghouls smoking cigarettes drop tokens into the slots. The machines continue to sing their manic little robot ditties. Here and there, officials survey the operation, pretending that they are merely there to help. It’s a low-rent casino, and the patrons are more humble than you might expect — shabbily dressed, glowering, half-mad with unrecoverable losses. An old couple, holding on to each other for stability, newly broke, shuffle past Benny and nod in a stubbornly friendly way to him, this being Minnesota. She’s wearing a cap that says SAY HI TO GRANDMA! and his cap says GONE FISHIN’! A red-haired middle-aged woman at a slot machine to Benny’s right labors away at losing money, and on her T-shirt are the words WHOA IS ME!

Behind him, a man speaks to a woman, probably his wife. They’re both wearing wedding rings. “He looked like a faggot undertaker,” the man says in a thick Minnesota accent, “and I know I’m half-right.”

That does it. The spell breaks. The romance of self-destruction can only go on for so long, and it can’t go on here among these politely unpleasant people. This isn’t Las Vegas, a professionally designed entryway to Hell, where experienced Technicolor devils have been in comfortable residence for decades tossing Mom and Pop down into the pit. It’s just lowly Phelps Lake, where small lives become slightly smaller. Time for Benny to go back to his life, to return to the cities, and drop in on Dennis.

He seems to have sobered up. His headache has gone away. He checks his watch.

Now he’s standing near the entryway door, close to the last-chance slots, and is about to return to his car with his winnings when a man wearing a green tie over a white shirt approaches him with his hand out as if in greeting. The man’s thinning hair is arranged in a halfhearted comb-over, and his eyeglasses sit on his nose at a tilt, the right lens lower than the left. He looks, it is fair to say, like a survivor of a plane crash dressed up to go on a talk show. On the approaching face is a Mr. Potato Head expression of rigid bonhomie.

“Hello, there. I saw you looking at me,” the man says, shaking Benny’s hand, “from across the crowded room, and you were wondering who I was. Who is that man, you were thinking.”

“No,” Benny says sourly. “I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

“It often happens,” the man says, as his hand continues to shake Benny’s. “People see me and it’s like, ‘I know that guy. Who is that guy? Is he famous?’ ”

“I didn’t think that.”

“Well, you will. I have one of those recognizable faces.”

“I don’t recognize it,” Benny says. “Please stop shaking my hand.”

“Will do,” the man says cheerfully. “Do you recognize me now?”

“No.”

“You could say I’m the greeter here.” Finished with shaking, his hand returns to the man’s side. “You could say that I’m the spirit of fun. Ha ha! I like for everybody to have the best possible time here at the Gray Wolf.”

“I have to go,” Benny tells him. “I have to get back.”

“What’s your hurry?” the man asks. “By the way, I’m Nathaniel Farber.” Again the hand comes out, and, unthinkingly, Benny takes it. The shaking recommences. “I was in pictures.” He waits. “The movies,” he says, to clarify.

“Pleased to meet you.” Benny pulls his hand away abruptly. “I have to go.”

“Sometimes people say, ‘Not the Nate Farber!’ Usually they say that. Or they cry out with recognition.”

“I must be the exception that proves the rule.”

“They say, ‘I saw you in Moon over Havana. And I saw you in Too Many Cats! You were so funny!’ ”

“Are those movies?”

“Major studio productions. One at Warner’s, the other at Metro. Of course, that was some years ago.” Fleetingly, the rictus dies on the face of the showbiz veteran. “What’s your name, young fella?”

“Benny.”

“And what brings you to our Gray Wolf Casino, Benny?”

“I was trying to lose my life savings. I was upset.”

“And did you succeed, Benny?”

“I did not. I won a few hundred dollars.”

“Goes to show, Benny, how unpredictable the future can be. The stars, dear Brutus, are not in ourselves. Would you like my autograph?”

“No, thank you.” Nathaniel Farber’s breath, floating like a soap bubble in Benny’s direction, smells of mouthwash tainted with vodka.

“Are you leaving? Please stay. We here at the Gray Wolf feel that you haven’t yet enjoyed yourself to the outer limit.”

“Actually, I have an appointment, sort of, with someone in Minneapolis.”

“A sort-of appointment? I never heard of such a thing.”

“You have now.”

“Who is she?”

“He. Not ‘she.’ He. His name’s Dennis. He used to teach film at the university before he got sick. He’ll know who you are. Excuse me, but I have to go.”

“Why doesn’t he teach film now?” Nathaniel Farber asks.

“He’s dying,” Benny tells him. “But I’ll tell him all about you anyway.”

—

On the way back, he runs into a rainstorm. The car shakes from side to side from the force of the crosswinds. Overhead, the clouds have a horror-movie look. On the freeway, cars coming in the opposite direction have their headlights on, and their windshield wipers are oscillating at high speed. Inside the cars, the drivers have the stricken I-was-there faces of trauma survivors. Soon enraged supercharged raindrops mixed with BB-size hail pelt the front windshield like liquid bullets, the impact sounding metallic as the projectiles hit the glass more forcibly with each mile, until the windows fog up, and Benny pulls over to a rest stop, where he waits out the storm.

—

“Guess who I saw at the Gray Wolf Casino?” Benny asks upon entering Dennis’s hospital room. “Nathaniel Farber. The old actor. They hired him as an official greeter up there.” He sits down next to the hospital bed, facing away from his friend, who does not like to be looked at in his present condition.

“No kidding. Moon over Havana. Billy Wilder used him once. He played a health inspector. Our grandparents’ generation — he always reminded me of Gene Raymond. Just a minute, just a minute,” Dennis says, staring at the TV set hanging from the ceiling. “Storage Wars is on. I gotta see what’s in the locker.” The gap in conversation allows Benny to examine his friend’s face, which has grown gaunt. His eyes have that staring look. He wears a maroon-and-gold stocking cap.

“I won a few hundred dollars up there,” Benny says. “I couldn’t lose. By the way, where’s your mom?”

“Downstairs in the cafeteria. She likes the hubbub. It’s a contrast to here.”

“How long will she be in Minneapolis?”

When Dennis doesn’t reply, Benny turns to him and sees that his friend has fallen asleep, probably from the morphine. Or perhaps he’s had a pain spasm. Benny reaches over and shuts off the TV set.

“Hold my hand,” Dennis says, his eyes still closed. Benny takes Dennis’s hand in his own, and they sit there for a moment in silence.

“Can you believe that she left me? For a law student?” Benny asks.

“Can you fucking believe this? I’m dying,” Dennis says, with his eyes still closed. “I talked to my oncologist yesterday. He had just looked at the new X-rays. He said, and I quote, ‘Dennis, if I told you your cancer hadn’t spread, it’d be like saying that shit doesn’t stink.’ ” He sighs. “He needs to practice his bedside manner. What happened to tact? Tell me again about what she said to you last night.”

Benny tells him the story again: Nan’s new guy, Thor, the runner, dedicated to practicing poverty law once he passes the Minnesota bar, has replaced Benny in her affections. Dennis’s hand feels cold and dry in his own. Once again he seems to fall asleep. “I can’t even think about architecture,” Benny tells Dennis. “All I can think about is her. She’s got me in her grip.” Dennis nods. “Buddy, is there anything I can do for you?”

“Get the nurse,” Dennis says. “I need more morphine. Like right now. Pronto.”

Benny releases Dennis’s hand and walks down to the nurses’ station and tells the woman — Lucille, her name is — who’s in charge of his friend that his friend is in pain again and needs more morphine immediately. Lucille says she’ll be down in ten minutes, and Benny returns to room 530.

“You’ve been losing weight,” Dennis says dreamily, before coughing uncontrollably. “So have I.”

“I’ve been running. I gotta try to look good.”

“You’re going to end up like Nathaniel Farber, that line of thinking.”

“Why?”

“Any man over the age of thirty-five who isn’t overweight is a narcissist.”

“That’s kind of oversimplified.”

“No, it isn’t,” Dennis says. “You met Nathaniel Farber, didn’t you?”

“Don’t leave me here,” Benny tells Dennis, after a long silence. “Don’t go away.”

“Don’t leave me here,” Dennis repeats, holding his hand out for Benny to take. “Don’t go away.” After another long silence, during which they both hear a car horn honking outside, Dennis asks, “What was her name again?”

“Nan.”

“Oh, right. I introduced you to her.”

“Yeah,” Benny says. “I guess you did. At that party.” If you invited Dennis to a party, he would always hold out on you, in case there might be a better party elsewhere.

“We had a thing,” Dennis says. “Nan and me. For two weeks. I told you that. She was cute. Don’t be offended, but I slept with her. I slept with all of them. Maybe that’s why I got cancer. Or maybe it was the cocaine. There’s a theory about cocaine and…” He winces. “It’s all disinformation.”

“But that was just lust, what you had,” Benny says, wanting to rouse Dennis to argumentation after another pause, with the hospital’s ventilation system whirring in the background. “What we had, Nan and I, well, that was special.”

That morning when Nan had made scrambled eggs in Benny’s apartment kitchen, she had added salsa, and when she approached the kitchenette table where Benny was sitting, wearing only his boxer shorts underneath which his dick was again hardening to pay her tribute, she carried the serving plate toward him with a expression of the purest happiness and anticipation, and at that moment, though never afterward, she walked toward him looking like a gift, like all the colors of the rainbow. If that wasn’t love, what else could it be?

“You’re funny,” Dennis says to Benny, as Lucille comes in, closing the curtain around Dennis momentarily. When she draws the curtain again, his face has relaxed somewhat.

“Well, there are other fish in the sea,” Benny tells his friend. “That’s the cliché with which I comfort myself. Other fish, other seas. I’ll be feeling one hundred percent soon.”

“You’re funny.”

“But I need coaching. From you.”

“You’re funny.” Then he says, “You’re going to be on your own in no time flat. Where’s your hand?” Benny takes his friend’s hand again.

“How come this?” Benny asks.

“I’m scared.”

“Well, you have a right to be,” Benny says, before he realizes how undiplomatic that is. “I only meant that…”

“I know what you meant.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t worry. Did I tell you…they found a hospice for me?”

“No. You didn’t tell me.”

“It’s out in Hopkins. It’s cheap. At last: a hospice I can afford. Where are the girls now?” Dennis asks. “Where have the girls all gone? I haven’t had a lot of them visit me. Maybe they’ll drop roses on my casket.”

“They’ll be here.”

“Describe them. Do me a favor. Tell me a story. Let’s fill the time.”

“Well,” Benny says. He tries to think of what would comfort his friend. A paradise, not of virgins but of experienced worldly women, funny, quick-witted, sharp-tongued women, moviegoers who know the difference between early and late Ozu, or Kurosawa, of the styles of screwball comedies, of Stanwyck saying, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” but instead, sitting next to the bed and holding the hand of his friend, who seems now to be drifting into unconsciousness, he launches into a verbal dreamworld of tits and ass, blowjobs, ecstasy, a little touch of verbal porno here at the bedside, to keep his friend’s spirits up, at least for a while.

Sloth

For an hour the doctor could think of nothing worth doing and no reason to rise from his chair, so he sat in a corner of the coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis, four blocks away from the hospital, with the newspaper’s sports section spread out in front of him, unread, the evening traffic outside going by with the characteristic hiss of tires on wet pavement, a sibilant personal sound like whispering. He gripped a double espresso but did not drink it. Wind gusts whipped the decorative downtown trees. That day on rounds he had checked in on one of his patients, a little girl whom he had diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome. She had developed endocarditis, an infection of the heart that had not been caught before some damage to the valves had occurred. This infection had been followed by a stroke. The family had gathered in the ICU’s waiting area, and one aunt had said loudly to the assembled relatives that her niece, lying there, was unrecognizable, and the doctor could tell — from years of similar scenes — that she, the aunt, was eager to assign blame to someone, starting with the pediatrician (himself), and then advancing up the scale of responsibility, to the radiologist, the surgeon, and at last God. With each new step the accusations would grow more unanswerable. Nevertheless, the arias of blame would soon begin, and they would have their predictable and characteristic melodies of resentment, rage, and malpractice. They were unstoppable. The lawyers would accompany her and provide the harmonizing chorus. For now, thinking of his patient, Dr. Jones could not go home or move in any direction, and, once again, sitting with his back against the coffee shop’s brick wall, the newspaper in front of him detailing the Twins’ latest loss to the Royals, he considered pediatric medicine the very worst of all specialties, a curse upon every physician who had ever practiced it, a field that he should never have gone into and would like to quit for some other better job, like selling boats. People were unusually happy when buying boats. Boat salesmen were dispensers of cheer. By contrast, the observance of pediatric medicine put the insane cruelties of God fully on display. His teachers in medical school had warned him about these psychic difficulties, but they had not warned him sufficiently, and just today one of his colleagues asked him whether he had started “laying crepe” with the girl’s relatives, doctor-talk referring to prepping family members for the patient’s untimely demise.

He had been hoping that his friend Benny Takemitsu, the hack architect, might stop by the coffee shop on a break from his evening run, but there was no sign of him, so with great effort, Dr. Jones, who was a bit stout, at last found some resource of energy and rose from his chair and headed toward the Mississippi River, where lately he had been granted certain…visitations. The visitations were products of his exhaustion. He’d considered talking to his psychiatrist friend, Dr. Gloat — his actual name — about his hallucinatory visitors, but Gloat would probably prescribe an antipsychotic like clozapine or aripiprazole, part of that class of drugs that were chemically like a wrecker’s ball set loose in the brain. Or he could call on another pal, a gerontologist, who might diagnose him with Lewy body dementia, an affliction that included voices and full-scale hallucinations of the sort that Dr. Jones had been experiencing. With a diagnosis like that, they’d put you in the bin. Despite his visitations, he recognized inwardly, as the spirals of intuition turned gently and logically, that he wasn’t demented any more than he was psychotic. Nor was he delusional. He was just seeing things as the shamans once did, the holy men and women. He was becoming a holy man. Such a change was unprecedented in his professional experience. The prospect of going mad, or holy, did not seem to be that much of a catastrophe to him as long as he could keep calm while the specters appeared. Perhaps some bed rest would be indicated. The trouble with mad people was not the hallucinations or the garbled speech, but the panic they felt, which could be contagious and often created a vulgar effect among the villagers. Elijah Elliott Jones, M.D., considered himself a scientist. Scientists should remain calm, even if they become sanctified.

He ambled down Second Street past the Mill City Museum, facing Mill Ruins Park, where a grain mill had exploded a century ago and the rubble had been left more or less as it once was, for tourists to gawk at. The location was billed as the Cradle of Carbohydrates, and indeed the flour for American bread had been shipped out of here for decades: Gold Medal flour, Pillsbury’s Best, all of them, although not anymore, manufacturing having gone global in search of cheap uninsured labor. The light had a peculiar shellacked quality this evening, with a surface glitter and sheen, as if designed for a movie. He made his way to the Stone Arch Bridge, built of limestone and granite in 1883 for use by the Great Northern railway. The Empire Builder himself, James J. Hill, had seen to its construction. Grain from the farms of the upper Midwest had arrived here on his railroad, had been stored in his silos along the river, and had been milled with the power of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls. The riffraff railroad workers, their jobs finished, would drift toward the whorehouses and bars on Washington Avenue, but the riffraff had disappeared decades ago, along with their jobs, and Washington Avenue, following urban renewal, had gone upscale and pricey and was now full of spoiled and contemptible young professionals. Dr. Jones had almost seen the ghosts of the old workers, those tough sooty characters. He was very close to that realm. Tonight, before crossing the river, he took out his cell and called his wife, Susan, to say that he would be late in arriving home, but she had already gone to bed, and the doctor ended up speaking to their antique answering machine, the one with the microcassette. The doctor loved spunky defunct technologies. After having decided to stay on this side of the river, he chose a park bench in shadow some distance away from a sleeping bum stretched out on a bench next to the bum’s cherished bag of discarded aluminum cans. The doctor sat and closed his eyes. He felt himself falling into the other world.

—

When he bothered to turn to his right, he noted that a silhouette had materialized next to him, the famous outline of the old filmmaker encased in layers of fat. The director’s sadness and loneliness drifted up from his bulk like a corpulent mist in the still air. In his right hand he held a ghost cigar that produced ghost smoke. He wore a spotless dinner jacket, although he gave the impression of having been in the park for years, sitting there exposed to the elements. “I was wondering who it would be this time,” Dr. Jones said. “But somehow I never expected to see you of all people here. Didn’t they let you in? To heaven, or whatever they’re calling it now…?”

“Good evening,” the director said, bending slightly toward Dr. Jones out of a habitually polite formality. His voice had the familiar sonorous rumble, mixed with audible memories of his Cockney upbringing. His face had an odd phosphorescence. “No, they didn’t let me in. Not as yet. The rules are quite complex, you see. One must wait. There are pages of rules written with blood mixed in ink, thick volumes of these rules stretching from the floor to the ceiling, which is way up there, so high that no applicant has actually seen it. You can’t imagine a room without a visible ceiling, and yet it must exist. Spiritual exercises are required, of a sort not dreamed of by the Jesuits of my youth. Those Jesuits would whip a boy’s upraised hands, palms out, to intensify the pain. They enjoyed cruelty, some of those Jesuits,” the old man said, with a trace of envy mixed with bitterness. “They were very clever in those days: they liked the boys to cower. They quite enjoyed it. It is a form of control, you understand, to cause someone to cower in fear. Fear supplied the voltage of their faith, and fear became their métier. So I was trained by masters. But as it turns out, one has to overcome…certain tendencies. As at one time I was a director, now I am directed. Tell me, have you ever thought about suspense?”

“Your specialty,” the doctor said.

“Yes, once.” The director nodded sadly, out of a bottomless melancholy. “All that caring about what happens next.” He waited. “Now nothing happens next.” He took a puff from his cigar, and the exhaled smoke formed itself into the shape of a cat, which sauntered away in the night air.

“Why do they have you sitting out here, night after night? For months? Years?”

“Penitence,” the director said. “I sit in the rain and snow observing the river. But that is not our subject. We were talking about suspense.” The director looked over at Dr. Jones. “You could lose some weight,” he said with a ghostly smile. “For the lifeboat movie I invented a nonexistent weight-reduction drug, Reduco, that you might want to try. But, yes, we were talking about suspense. For example, that homeless man over there—”

“Wait a minute,” the doctor said. “How can I try Reduco if it doesn’t exist?”

“The same way that you watch a movie about people who never walked the Earth. You swallow a pill containing dreams. Please don’t interrupt. Anyway, that man who looks like a bum is actually in flight from people who are pursuing him for reasons that I shall disclose once I think of them. He is in disguise. He merely looks like a bum. Underneath the shabby clothes and three-day growth of beard is Cary Grant. Perhaps Cary Grant has possession of some secrets related to international negotiations, but I believe it is more likely — yes, indeed I can now see it — that through a case of mistaken identity our friend here was targeted as a terrorist guilty of terrible, malicious sabotage that resulted in the darkening of an electrical grid covering much of the north-central United States. An accused saboteur, his face in all the newspapers. Did you know how easy it is to disable a nuclear reactor? No? A few broken valves, a bit of sand…And so here he is, our bum, hiding out, disguised, on the banks of the Mississippi River, accompanied by his grocery cart and bag of aluminum cans. But over there, just upstream, a mile away from where we sit, the true terrorist, whom we shall call the Arab, approaches, gripping his knife, intent on murder.” The old man paused, savoring the doctor’s interest. “The Arab approaches our scene with his knife blade out. The sharpened knife blade reflects the streetlight; it shines. And now misty rain begins to fall. The Arab has already killed others, in one instance just this morning at the Minneapolis Farmers Market in broad daylight, so that the victim’s blood splashed all over the cauliflower and the yellow squash. Blood splattered everywhere on the produce, quite a mess to clean up. There will be a chase across the river, through the hydroelectric plant right down there, ending in the caves far underneath us, below, the caves of the Mississippi, the endless caves, where the Girl is tied up. I haven’t mentioned the Girl, but she’s down there now. Imagine her: a blond beauty knotted up with hemp. Imagine the rope tight around her wrists and her ankles. We already know about her, don’t we? Beneath our feet resides an underground labyrinth, and there she is, our blonde. Her cries are piteous. We desire her, like oysters. An endless labyrinth. Cary Grant finds her, but the Arab approaches them both, with his knife. The movie will go on for days.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Well, what does sound like me?”

The doctor thought for a moment. “ ‘Mother…’ ” he recited. “ ‘Mother…what is the phrase?…Mother isn’t quite herself today.’ ” The director nodded. After a moment, Dr. Jones thought of another line. “ ‘And you know what else, Doctor? I don’t think Mozart is going to help at all.’ ” This time the old man’s face took on a downcast expression. The line seemed to cause him pain. “ ‘That plane’s dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops,’ ” the doctor recited more happily, getting into the spirit of things.

“Stop,” the old man commanded. “Cinema is not the writer’s medium but the director’s. All the same, none of those lines is my favorite.” He sat waiting for the doctor to ask him the inevitable question, and when the doctor did so, the director answered, “ ‘Do you know the world’s a foul sty?’ ” After a pause, he said, “That was my favorite line. I wrote it. It’s not Thornton Wilder’s line; it’s mine. Joe Cotten read it very well. Even the moronic masses got the point that time around.”

“That’s not a very nice line,” the doctor said.

The old man shrugged in response. “Fuck nice. Do you know,” he said, “that even now as we speak, your friend Benny Takemitsu is being mugged elsewhere, nearby, down by the Federal Reserve Building? The perpetrator of this crime is a young idealistic gay man who needs the money for painkilling drugs. He has assaulted this Takemitsu with a baseball bat. In the montage, the baseball bat hits the back of the knee, and we cut to Takemitsu’s face, astonished with pain. Then in a medium shot, Takemitsu falls. Then we see in an insert the assailant’s hand reaching for the victim’s wallet. Your friend will be all right, however.”

“How do you know?”

“The dead know everything,” the director said. “But such knowledge does us no good: we cannot move from our fixed positions. Approaching death and then following it, the camera cannot move. The camera must…never move. For example, you were about to ask me if I would like to walk with you back to your car, for your trip homeward. I cannot. I must stay here on this bench of desolation until my penitence and contrition are complete. I must apologize to the Girl, the one at whom I threw all those birds. I made her a star. There are others to whom I must apologize once they reach this realm. According to the rules written in blood and ink, the rules that reach to the ceiling, I must feel the apologies inwardly. That is the hard part, the inward contrition. With respect to inward contrition, the Jesuits are no help.”

“Why here? Why in Minneapolis?”

“The Girl was born here,” the old man said, “and one’s spirit always naturally returns to the place where one was born. For years I sat by the Thames in London. Now I’m here. I’m not always alone. Benny Herrmann sometimes comes down here to keep me company. We are reconciled, he and I. He wrote music for me. Did you know that he once lived in Minneapolis at the Nicollet Hotel, a few blocks away from here? He composed his opera, Wuthering Heights, a pastiche of Delius, in this city. I never liked it. Don’t tell him. However, most nights I have no company. So I make pictures in my head, as I used to do. And, now, you must leave me, Doctor. You cannot stay.”

“Mr. Hitchcock,” he asked, “will my patient die? The little one?”

“No, not this time,” the director informed him. “There will be a miraculous recovery. In fact, it has already occurred. Her heart has somehow repaired itself, no one knows how, though perhaps your initial diagnosis of damage to the valves was mistaken. Why should anyone question such a recovery, such a miracle? No one ever does. They will not. Music up. We dissolve to happy, smiling faces. Joy abounds. The end, and the final credits,” he said sourly. “Not like many of my pictures, but there you are. So for once, my dear doctor, you will have a happy ending. The scene in the hospital will be directed not by me but by Frank Capra. This case will bring you great renown. You will be cheered. A box-office smash hit, one might say if one were inclined to use such phrases. Henceforth you will be known as a healer with uncanny resources, like a shaman. Well, I must bid you a good night.”

At that moment, the director himself dissolved, leaving behind the odor of cigar smoke and burnt coal. What was brimstone, actually? Just another name for sulfur, with a smell to wake you up, to make your eyes open in astonishment.

—

Dr. Jones rose from the bench and jammed his hat down on his head, lowering himself against the wind as he made his way to his car. Driving home, he saw the souls of the dead wandering about the city. They seemed not to see each other. No one smiled. The dead seemed puzzled by their condition, distracted, preoccupied. They appeared to be dressed in nondescript clothes from Goodwill, although some were naked. Among them ran a few children. None of the women were pretty, or the men handsome. They were beyond all that. Some sat on park benches or stood in bus shelters next to actual living people. The dead were identifiable not because they were semitransparent but because they walked several inches above the ground, and they did not reflect light but radiated it, like fireflies.

If I am going mad, Dr. Jones thought, remembering Herzog, it’s all right with me.

Once in the house, he touched the play button on the kitchen’s message machine. A nurse from the hospital had called to say that Dr. Jones should phone the unit as soon as possible. Something strange and quite wonderful had happened. He trudged up the stairs feeling as if he had shed some weight.

On an impulse, instinctively negotiating his way through the nearly perfect dark, he knocked softly on his son’s door before entering. Wearing his boxer shorts, Raphael lay sprawled not under the covers but on top of them, his seventeen-year-old body giving off a sweetly rank boy’s smell, leathery and acidic like that of a horse’s stable. The clock radio blinked on the bedside table, illuminating the poster over the bed of a superhero cheesecake girl who was apparently from another planet. She aimed a weapon-thing at the viewer. Her confrontational breasts pushed aggressively at her vinyl uniform. She had powerful thighs and the scowling face of an angel. Raphael’s tae kwon do awards and cups gleamed and glowed from two shelves across from the window. Dr. Jones gazed at his boy for a minute in the near dark. He could not look at his son in daylight without Raphael saying, “What?” So he watched him now. Minutes passed.

After leaving his son’s room, he knocked softly on his daughter’s bedroom door before entering. Theresa had always been a light sleeper, and, when Dr. Jones entered her room, she awoke and blinked.

“Daddy,” she yawned. She was still usually happy to see him, and she smiled absentmindedly now. “What are you doing in here?”

“Late night,” he said. “I just got home.”

“I was having a dream,” she told him. “I was having it when you came in.”

“A dream? About what?”

“It’s private,” she said. She was fourteen.

“Okay.” He approached her, kissed her on her forehead, and turned around to leave. “Sleep well. Have more dreams, sweetie.”

“Where have you been?” she asked. “There’s that smell.” She wrinkled her nose. She had a disobliging side. “You smell like…” But she appeared to have fallen asleep again before she finished the thought.

After leaving her room, Dr. Jones stood out on the second-floor landing waiting to go into his own bedroom, where he himself would soon be sleeping and where Susan was certainly sleeping now; he could hear her soft reassuring snores. His patient, the one who might actually be in recovery, having suffered a minor miracle, was named Da’neesha, and her mother had said that her daughter loved to dance and wanted to grow up to help people. He bowed his head. He tried to bless his family, his patients, all the afflicted everywhere in the world, but the blessing, being too large and weighing too much, and improbable besides, stayed with him and would not travel.

In the bedroom, he took off his clothes and got into bed next to his wife. Snuggling up behind her, he put his arm around her. When she made a noise, he whispered to her, “There’s something I want you to do.”

She made another noise.

“I want you to pray for me.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

“I don’t understand anything,” he whispered to her, “and I need to understand what’s happening to me.” The words would have sounded agitated if he had spoken them during the day, but it was nighttime, so what he said had no force, since the souls of the dead were still moving here and there outside his house on their endless pilgrimages, and they had made Dr. Jones sound nonsensical. Meanwhile, the doctor felt sleep overtaking himself so rapidly that he quickly forgot his request, and as he crossed the river and lost consciousness that night, he felt his own ghost arriving to embrace his body.

Avarice

My former daughter-in-law is sitting in the next room eating cookies off a plate. Poor thing, she’s a freeloader and can’t manage her own life anywhere in the world. Therefore she’s here. She’s hiding out in this house, for now, believing that she’s a victim. Her name’s Corinne, and she could have been given any sort of name by her parents, but Corinne happens to be the name she got. It’s from the Greek, kore. It means “maiden.” When I was a girl, no one ever called me that — a maiden. The word is obsolete.

Everyone else under this roof — my son and his second wife (my current daughter-in-law, Astrid), and my two grandchildren — probably wonders what Corinne is doing here. I suppose they’d like her to evaporate into what people call “thin” air. Corinne’s bipolar and a middle-aged ruin: when she looks at you, her vision goes right through your skin and internal organs and comes out on the other side. She mutters to herself, and she gives off a smell of rancid cooking oil. She’s unpresentable. If she tried to go shopping alone at the supermarket, the security people would escort her right back out, that’s how alarming she is.

The simple explanation for her having taken up residence here is that she appeared at the downtown Minneapolis bus depot last week, having come from Tulsa, where she lived in destitution. She barely had money for bus fare. My son, Wesley, her ex-husband, had to take her in. We all did. However, the more honest explanation for her arrival is that Jesus sent her to me.

Two weeks ago I was in the shower and felt a lump in my breast. I actually cried out in a moment of fear and panic. Then my Christian faith returned to me, and I understood that I would be all right even though I would die. Jesus would send someone to help me get across into the next world. The person He sent to me was Corinne. I know that this is an unpopular view among young people, but there is a divinity that shapes our ends, and at the root of every explanation is God, and at the root of God is love.

I go into the room where Corinne resides, knitting a baby thing. I pick up the cookie plate. “Thank you, Dolores,” she says. She gazes at me with her mad-face expression. “Those were delicious. I’ve always loved ginger cookies. Is there anything I can do for you?” she asks. She’s merely being polite.

“Soon,” I tell her. “Soon there will be.”

—

You get old, you think about the past, both the bad and the good. You have time to consider it all. You try to turn even the worst that has happened into a gift.

For example, my late husband, Mike, Wesley’s father, was killed by the side of the road as he was changing a tire. This was decades ago. He was the only man I ever married. I never had another one, before or after. A rich drunk socialite, a former beauty queen fresh from a night of multiple martinis with her girlfriends, her former sorority sisters, plowed right into him. Then she went on her merry way. Well, no, that’s not quite right. After she hit Mike, my husband’s body was thrown forward into the air, and then she ran over him, both the car’s front and rear tires. Somehow she made her way home with her dented and blood-spattered car, which she parked in the three-car garage before she tiptoed upstairs and undressed and got into bed next to her businessman husband. She clothed herself in her nightgown. She curled up next to him like a good pretty wife. The sleepy husband asked her — this is in the transcripts — how the evening had gone with her girlfriends, if they had had a good time. Why was she shivering? She said the girls had been just fine but she was cold now. She didn’t know that someone had gotten her license plate number, but somebody had, as her dark blue Mercedes-Benz sped away. A man out walking his dog on a nearby sidewalk wrote it down. God put him there — the dog, too.

Meanwhile, right after that, the police arrived at our house. I remember first the phone call and then the doorbell that woke my son, Wesley, in the crib that he was beginning to outgrow. He could climb right out of it but rarely did. Wesley began crying upstairs, while in the living room the police, who would not sit down on the sofa, gave me the bad news. My husband, Mike, they told me, was laid out in the morgue, alone, and I would have to identify him the next day. They were quite courteous, those two men, bearing their news. They spoke in low tones, hushed, which is hard for men. One of them wore old-fashioned tortoiseshell glasses. They warned me that I might not recognize my husband right away. But the next morning I did recognize him because of what he was wearing, a blue patterned sport shirt I had bought at Dayton’s on sale and had wrapped up for him at Christmas. He had thanked me with a kiss on the lips Christmas morning after he opened it. “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” was playing on the radio when he did that. So of course I remembered the shirt.

The socialite testified that she didn’t know she had hit anything or anybody. Or that she didn’t remember hitting anything or anybody. There was some question — I heard about this — whether she had asked her stepson to take the rap for her. She wanted him to go straight to police headquarters and to say he had been driving his stepmother’s car, drunk, at the age of seventeen, and therefore he would be tried as a minor and let off scot-free. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t lie. The socialite’s out of prison now, but my husband is still under the ground in Lakewood Cemetery.

I await the resurrection of the dead the way other people await weekend football. I’m old now, and the glory will all be revealed to me soon enough. I can feel it coming. Glory will rain down, soaking me to the skin.

If the socialite hadn’t gone to prison, I imagined buying a handgun and going over there to her mansion and shooting her in cold blood if she answered the door. But, no, that’s wrong: I had Wesley to raise, so I don’t suppose I would have actually committed murder, though to kill her was extremely tempting, and the temptation did not come from Satan but from somewhere else inside me. It was mine. I dreamed of murder like a teenager dreaming of love. Peaceful and calm though I usually am, my husband’s death and my wish for revenge changed me. Murder dwelt in my heart. Imagine that! It came as a surprise to me as I did the laundry or cooked dinner or washed dishes. Sometimes I wish I were more Christian: even now, at my age, with knees that hurt from arthritis and a memory that sometimes fails me, I still think certain people should be wiped off the face of the Earth, which is counter to the teachings of Jesus.

But what I’m saying is that Jesus intervened with me. He came to me one night and said, in that loving way He has, “Dolores, what good would it do if you murdered that foolish woman? It would do you and the world no good at all. It wouldn’t bring Mike back. Turn that cheek,” He said to me as I was praying, and of course I could see He was right. So I forgave that woman, or tried to. On my knees, I turned the other cheek as I wept. I turned it back and forth.

I believe that humanity is divided into two camps: those who have killed others, or can imagine themselves doing so; and those for whom the act and the thought are inconceivable. Looking at me, you would probably not think me capable of murder, but I found that black coal in my soul, and it burned fiercely. I loved having it there.

All my life, I worked as a librarian in the uptown branch. A librarian with the heart of a murderer! No one guessed.

—

Months after Mike’s death, I’d go into Wesley’s room to tuck him in at night. By then he was talking. “Where’s Daddy?” he would ask me. Gone to heaven, I’d tell him, and he’d ask, “Where’s that?” and I wanted to say, “Right here,” but such an answer would be confusing to a child, so I just hummed a little tune, a lullaby to calm him. But my son knew there was something wrong with my face in those days, because of the hard labor of my grief. I didn’t smile when I put my son to bed, and probably I didn’t smile in the morning, either. I couldn’t smile on my own. So there, at night, in his bed, he would get out from under the sheet, stand up in his rocket-ship-pattern pajamas, and he would raise his hand with his two fingers, the index finger and the middle finger outstretched in a V-for-victory sign. He would raise those fingers to the sides of my mouth, lifting them up, trying to get me to smile. He held his fingers there until I agreed to look cheerful for his sake. He was only a little boy, after all.

—

Time passes. The socialite, as I said, is out of jail, and Wesley has grown up and has two children of his own, my dear grandchildren, Jeremy and Lucy. Corinne gave birth to Jeremy before she fled the marriage, and Astrid, Wesley’s second wife, gave birth to Lucy. But I still think of that woman, that socialite, driving away from my dying husband, and of what was going through her head, and what I’ve decided is that (1) she couldn’t take responsibility for her actions, and (2) if she did, she would lose the blue Mercedes, and the big house in the suburbs, and the Royal Copenhagen china, and the Waterford crystal, and the swimming pool in back, and the health club membership, and the closet full of Manolo Blahnik shoes. All the money in the bank, boiling with possibility, she’d lose all that, and the equities upping and downing on the stock exchange. How she was invested! How she must have loved her things, as we all do. God has a name for this love: avarice. We Americans are running a laboratory for it, and we are the mice and rats, being tested, to see how much of it we can stand.

God’s son despised riches. His contempt for riches sprouts everywhere in the Gospels. He believed that riches were distractions. Listen to Jesus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If that isn’t wisdom, I don’t know what is. And remember this, about those who are cursed? “For I was hungry, and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me.”

Anyway, that’s why Corinne is here. We have to feed and clothe her. Jesus doesn’t believe in those glittering objects that hypnotize you. Hypnotized, you drive away from a dying man stretched out bleeding on the pavement.

—

I go into Corinne’s room. She sits near the window with sunlight streaming in on her hair, which looks greasy, and she’s talking before she even sees me. Apparently she’s psychic and knows I’m coming. Since I’m not about to waste a beautiful morning like this one by brooding about breast cancer, I ask her, “Do you want to take a walk?” The question interrupts her monologue. “I’ve got to exercise these old bones,” I tell her. Actually, I’m not that old. I’m in my seventies. It’s just an expression.

She’s gesticulating and carrying on a private conversation and seems to be very busy. Finally she says, “No, I don’t think so.”

“My joints hurt,” I tell her. “I need some fresh air. And I need company.” Craftily, I say to her, “Without a companion, I might fall down. I might not get back up. You never know.”

“Oh, all right,” she says, her nursing instinct rising to one of her many surfaces. Even crazy people want to help out. “Oh all right all right all right.” She puts on a pair of tennis shoes that Wesley bought for her yesterday, and we set out into the residential Minneapolis autumn, with me slightly ahead of her so that I don’t have to smell her. Has she forgotten how to bathe? She’s had opportunities here, bathtubs, showers, and soap — running water, both hot and cold. We amble down toward Lake Calhoun. Out on the blue waters of the lake, some brave fellow has one of those sailboard things and is streaking across the surface like a human water bug. Here onshore, the wind agitates the fallen leaves, whipping them around. It’s October. My hips are giving me trouble today, and of course the lump in my right breast still remains there, patiently hatching.

“Do you think of the past?” she asks me. “I do. I wanted to call you on the telephone, you know,” Corinne tells me, suddenly lucid, “once I moved away, after Jeremy was born. All those years ago. But I couldn’t. I was a mess. I was ashamed of myself. I’m a heap of sorry.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind,” I say, before I realize that she might misunderstand me. “We thought you were in a state.” Then she tells me that she suffered panic attacks as a young mom — did I remember this? Of course I did — and that all she could do was escape from here, from the marriage and the child and the house. It’s her old story. She repeats it all the time. Contrition is a habit with her now.

“Nature tricked me,” she says. “I gave birth to a baby boy, and I didn’t love him, and I was so ashamed of myself that I left town. I went to work in Tulsa in an emergency room,” she says, knowing I know all this, “and I worked there for years, and the people came in night after night, and, Dolores, you can’t imagine these poor people, knifed and shot and slashed and choked. Their hands were broken and their mouths were bloody and bullet holes pierced them, and some of them had been poisoned, and the rest of them were bent over and groaning, and you know what happened then?”

“You forgave yourself?” I ask. I wish she would change the topic. I wish she wouldn’t dwell on any of this. She doesn’t know I’m capable of murder.

“No. I lived with it. I saw things. I heard things. I got bloodied with the blood of strangers all over me. People screamed right into my face from pain and confusion. I saw a woman whose boyfriend had forced her mouth open and made her swallow poison. A person shouldn’t see such terribleness. Her stomach had started to burn away before we got to her. When the police questioned the boyfriend, he said that she had told him to go fuck himself and that no woman was going to speak to him that way without consequences. So he did what he did. A manly thing to do. He had her name tattooed on his arm. With a heart! She survived that time, somehow. Two months later he killed her with a knife while she was sleeping. At least he was done away with in prison, later on, stabbed in turn. I think they call that karma. Thank goodness!”

By now we have made our way to Thirty-Sixth and to the fence surrounding the cemetery, whereupon Corinne loses her train of thought, as she does in all the subsequent walks we take together. When she collects her thoughts, she says, out of nowhere, “I hate them.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Capitalists,” she says, and suddenly I’m not following her. “They’ve made my life miserable. They’ve made me a crazy person. You can talk about the victims of Communism all you want, but as a woman I’m a victim of Capitalism, because did I tell you how they took away my pension? I had a pension, and they gave it to investors and the investors invested the money in bogus real estate and bundled something-or-others, and so I ended up with nothing, bereft, broke, a ruined person, no pension, plus I was crazy and alone, and meanwhile the capitalists were accumulating everything and coming after me in their suits. Have you ever seen how they live? It’s comical.”

“I agree with you, Corinne,” I tell her, because I do. By now we are inside the cemetery, and we stop, because overhead in the sunlight a bird is singing, a song sparrow. We walk on quietly until we come to my husband, Mike’s resting place.

Michael Erickson

1937–1967

Next to him is the space in the sacred ground where I’ll be casketed in a couple of years. I love this cemetery. I do. I come here often. It’s so quiet here under the balding blue sky with its wisps of white hair, and as we’re looking down at the grass and the leaves, serenaded by the song sparrows, Corinne falls to her knees, smelly as she still is, a human wreck. She mumbles a prayer. “Wesley’s daddy,” my former daughter-in-law cries out, “God bless him, rest in peace, forever and ever and ever.” She’s so vehement, she sounds Irish.

This is how I know she’ll take care of me once I’m incapacitated. Slowly, on my bad knees, I get down too. How lovely is her madness to me now.

—

We get back to the house, and that night the capitalism theme starts up again at the dinner table. We seem to be a household of revolutionaries. This time it comes from Jeremy, who before dinner walks into the kitchen barefoot, holding his iPhone. I am sitting, drinking tea. He’s sixteen or seventeen, I can’t remember which. Usually he and I talk about space aliens, and I pretend they exist to humor him and bring him around eventually to Jesus, but tonight he’s looking at something else. He’s wearing his Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, and I notice that he’s growing a mustache and succeeding with it this time.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” he says to me. I don’t mind his use of obscenity. Really, I don’t. It tickles me, I can’t say why. “Grandma Dee, do you like elephants?”

“I like them very much,” I say. “Though I’ve never known any one of them personally.” We’re seated at the kitchen table. Astrid is making dinner, Wesley is in the garage doing something-or-other, and Corinne is upstairs cooing in front of the TV set. I don’t know where Lucy is — reading somewhere in the house, I expect. “They are among the greatest of God’s creatures,” I say. “I understand that they mourn their dead.”

“So look at this fucking thing,” he says, pointing at the little phone screen.

“It’s too small. I can’t see it.”

“Want me to read it?” he asks. What a handsome young man he is. I enjoy his company. It’s so easy to love a grandchild, there’s no effort to it at all. Besides, his face reminds me of my late husband’s face just a little.

“Sure,” I say.

“Well, see the thing is, it’s about elephants being killed and like that.”

“What about them?” Astrid asks, from over by the stove. “Killed how?”

“Okay, so in Zimbabwe, which I know where it is because we’ve studied it in geography, anyway what this says, this article, is, they’ve been, these people, these Zimbabweans, putting cyanide into the water holes in this, like, huge park, to kill the elephants. And these fuckers have access, I guess, to industrial cyanide that they use in gold mining—”

“Jeremy, please watch your language,” Astrid says demurely. She’s dicing tomatoes now.

“And they’ve been, I mean the poisoned water hole has been, like, killing the little animals, the cheetahs, and then the vultures, that eat the cheetahs once they’re dead, so it’s, like, this total outdoor death palace eatery, but mostly the cyanide in the water holes has been killing the elephants.” He gazes at me as if I’m to blame. I’m old. I understand: old people are responsible for everything. “Which are harmless?”

“Why’ve they been doing that?” I ask.

“Killing elephants? For the ivory. They have, like, tusks.”

“How many elephants,” I ask, “did they do this to?”

“It says here eighty,” Jeremy tells me. “Eighty dead elephants poisoned by cyanide lying in dead elephant — piles. Jesus, I hate people sometimes.”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s fair.”

“What do you suppose they do with all that ivory?” Astrid asks, stirring a sauce.

“For carvings,” I say. “They carve little Buddhas. They kill the elephants and carve the happy Buddha. Then they sell the happy Buddha to Americans. The little ivory Buddha goes in the lighted display case.”

“That is so wrong,” Jeremy says. “People are fucking sick. These elephants are more human, for fuck’s sake, than the humans.”

“It’s the avarice,” I say.

“It’s the what?” he asks.

“Another word for greed. Go ask Corinne,” I tell him. “She’s upstairs, watching TV. She doesn’t like it, either. She sounds like you.”

“I still hate her,” he says. “I can’t talk to her yet. It’s my policy. She just wasn’t—”

“I know, I know,” I say. “The policy is understandable. You’ll just have to give it up eventually, sweetie.”

“You can’t tell me that it’s no biggie because it was a biggie. If that wasn’t a biggie, leaving my dad and you to take care of me, then nothing is big, you know?”

“Yes,” I say. “I understand. For now.”

“Jeremy,” Astrid pipes up from the stove, “where’s your father?”

“Him? He’s out in the garage. He’s working on the truck or something. I heard him drop his wrench and swear a minute ago. There are too many of them in the house. That’s what he said before he went out there. He’s been saying it.”

“Too many what?” Astrid asks.

“Women,” I say, because I know Wesley and how he thinks. “We confuse him.”

—

I can see it all, and I know exactly what will happen. I have second-sight, which I got from my own father, who foresaw his death. He saw an albino deer cross the road in front of his car while he was on vacation, and he turned to my mother and said, “Something will happen to me,” and something did. A stroke took him a week later, and no one was surprised.

They’ll do surgery on me and give me the usual chemo and radiation. I’ll be okay for a while, but then it will come back in other locations in my body. I won’t have too much time then. The point is not to be morbid but to meet the end of life with celebration. This is what I want to say: the thought of dying is a liberation for me. It frees us from the accumulations.

This is where Corinne comes in. I have it all planned out. I will say to her, “There’s something I want you to do. I want you to accompany me on this journey as far as you can. You can’t go all the way, but you can keep me company part of the way.” She’ll agree to this. As long as I can walk, Corinne will take me around to the parks and the lakes. We’ll go to the Lake Harriet rose garden, and together we’ll identify those roses — floribunda! hybrid tea! — and then we’ll stroll into the Roberts Bird Sanctuary nearby. I know most of the birds over there: there’s a nest of great horned owls, with a couple of owlets growing up and eating whatever the mama owl brings to them, including, I once saw, a crow. I’ve seen warblers and egrets and herons, very dignified creatures, though comical. We’ll see the standard-issue birds, the robins, chickadees, blue jays, and cardinals, birds of that ilk.

She’ll take me over to the Lake Harriet Band Shell, where on warm summer nights the Lake Harriet Orchestra (there is one) will play show tunes, and I’ll sit there in my wheelchair tapping along with “On the Street Where You Live.”

We’ll go down to the Mississippi, and we’ll walk, or I’ll be wheeled, along the pathways near the falls where the mills once were. I’ll hear the guides saying that Minneapolis has a thriving industry in prosthetic medicine because so many industrial accidents occurred here years ago thanks to the machinery built for grinding, lost arms and so on, chewed up in the manufacturing process.

We’ll be out on the Stone Arch Bridge, and Corinne will be absented in her usual way, ideas batting around her head, all the bowling pins up there scattered and in a mess. “I just don’t have any filters,” she’ll say. “Any thought seems to be welcome in my brain at any time, day or night.”

“Yes,” I’ll agree. I’ll see the Pillsbury A Mill from here. What a comfort these old structures will be to us, still standing, their bright gray brick almost indestructible. Spray from the Falls of St. Anthony, named by Father Hennepin himself, will lightly touch my face, and I’ll feel a sudden stab of pain in my body, but it won’t matter anymore. Pain is the price of admission to the next world. Here will come a boy on a skateboard talking on his cell phone, and behind him, his girlfriend, also on a skateboard (pink, this time), texting as she goes. They’ll look just born, those two, out of the eggshell yesterday.

“Jeremy has one of those,” Corinne will say, meaning the skateboard.

“He’s quite the expert.”

A fat man in flip-flops will pass by us. He’ll be carrying several helium balloons, though I don’t think they’ll be for sale. On the other side of the bridge in Father Hennepin park, we’ll rest under a maple tree. A single leaf will fall into my lap.

Here. I place it before you.

Glory, gloriousness. During my life, I never had the time to look closely at anything except Wes, when he was a baby, and my husband’s headstone after he was gone. Now I’ll have all the time in the world. Nothing will bore me now. My obliviousness will sink into my past history. Henceforth my patience will be endless, thanks to the brevity of time. Stillness will steal over me as I study the world within. When I look down into my lap, I’ll see in this delicate object the three major parts, with their branching veins, and the ten points of the leaf, and the particular bright red-rust-gold color, but it’s the veins I’ll return to, so like our own, our capillaries. I’ll finger the maple leaf tenderly and wonder why we find it beautiful and will answer the question by saying that it’s God-given.

“There’s that nice Dr. Jones, way over there,” Corinne will say. “Lucy’s doctor, out on a stroll.” She’ll pause, then say, “He could lose some weight.”

“They’re doing a Katharine Hepburn revival at the St. Anthony Main movie theater,” I’ll say, gazing at the marquee listing Bringing Up Baby.

“I always found her rather virile,” Corinne will reply.

Thus will our days pass. You need a companion for what I’m about to do, and she’ll be mine. Once I’m in bed, and then in the hospice, she’ll read to me: Pride and Prejudice, my favorite book after the Bible, and she’ll read from the Bible too, in her haphazard way, wandering from verse to verse. I wonder if she’ll read from the Book of Esther, which never mentions God. Slowly I’ll depart from this Earth, medicated on morphine as I will be, mulling and stirring the fog descending over me, over Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, over daytime and its dark twin, night, while in the background someone will be playing Mozart on a radio. What is that piece? I think I’ll know it. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, is it…? Then I’ll know more pain, and darkness. And then the light won’t go on ever again, here.

—

On the other side I’ll float for a while, between worlds. The pain will be gone, the pleasure, too, those categories neutralized. On all sides the boundary markers will have softened. Instead of coming from a single source, sound — music — will come from everywhere, and I’ll hear it with more than my ears. I’ll see with more than my eyes. Faces, I think, will pass me in corridors that are not corridors. The old vocabularies will be useless. They will name nothing anymore. This is the afterlife: we will be headed everywhere and nowhere, and we will drink in light, swallow it, swim in it. We’ll hear laughter. And then — but “then” has no meaning — my dear Michael will find me, without his former shape but still recognizable, and he’ll take my hand and lead me toward two rooms, and he’ll say to me, “Oh, my dearest, my life, there is only one question, but you must answer it.” And I’ll ask him, “What is that question? Tell me. Because I love you…” I’ll want to answer it correctly. What has this to do with the two rooms? But for that moment, after he puts his finger to his lips, he dissolves into air, he becomes pollen, and is scattered.

Somehow I am led into the first room. I’ll be in a chamber of perpetual twilight. No one predicted this twilight, or the shabbiness, the feeling of a beggar. How richly plain this all is! Something wants something from me here. My attention. My love.

Now I’ll enter the second room. And all at once I’ll be dazzled: because here on the richest of thrones, gold beyond gold, sits this beautiful man, the most beautiful man I have ever seen, smiling at me with an expression of infinite compassion. His hair will be curling into tendrils of vibrating color. He will be holding up his palm, facing toward me, and in that hand I will see the world, the solar system, and the universe, rotating slowly. Behind him somehow are the animals, the great trees, everything.

It will be a test, the last one I will ever have. Which room do I choose?

The beautiful man clothed in light will ask me, “Do you admire me? Care for me?”

And I will say, “No, because you are Lucifer.” And I will return to the room where it is always twilight, where all that is asked of me is love.

Gluttony

Immediately after the accident, the doctor thought: Stupid pain. Stupidity itself. Below the knee, thanks to a fractured tibia, pain sent its dull, insistent neurological message upstairs. Pleasure never works that way. Pleasure’s vague fog spreads underneath the skin in a warm narcotic glow — a fog that lights up the soul. Then it fades. You try to locate its source, and when you do, you crave more of it. The bottle. The drug. The woman. The meal. Especially the meal.

—

He found himself in the car eating beef jerky and the contents of a jumbo bag of potato chips. He didn’t remember buying either one, but he must have purchased them when he stopped at the gas station. There, under the buzzing fluorescent lights, everyone had the doughy complexion of figures in a Hopper painting. Now, lying voluptuously on the front seat next to him, the bag of potato chips had been slit open in a kind of physical invitation into which he inserted his hand and withdrew food. Who had opened these packages? Someone had. He had, the doctor, Elijah. Who else? He didn’t remember opening them; they had commanded him to make the first move, like the cake in Alice in Wonderland with the note attached: “Eat me.” The food carried some responsibility for his excesses. It had desires, especially the desire to be consumed.

As he chewed and swallowed, he piloted the little car homeward through the dark. The steering wheel, however, was greasy with salt and cooking oils and saturated fats transferred from his palm, and although he wiped his fingers on his trouser leg, he couldn’t get the grease off his skin. He felt drowsy. A literate man who entertained himself by reading Shakespeare, the doctor thought of Lady Macbeth: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” No, not these hands.

Against his own obesity, he had concocted his own diet plan, the Jones Plan. It was simplicity itself: every time you go into a restaurant, you order an entrée you do not want to eat. You don’t like the taste of pork? You order pork. If the very sight of lobster disgusts you, you order lobster. You search the menu for an unpalatable culinary miscalculation, and then you request it. You ask your wife to prepare distasteful meals. The whole point is to be presented, day after day, with the unwanted. Naturally your wife is horrified and insulted by these ideas, when she does not regard them as comical. So far, however, no weight has been lost by anyone, thanks to the plan.

He pulled up into the driveway and wiped his hands again but this time on the car’s dashboard. The lights were blazing inside the house, so Susan would still be up, vigilant about his arrival. When he stepped out of the car, he stood for a moment underneath the linden in the front yard and thoughtfully noted its seeds scattered on the lawn, pale green against the darker green of the grass illuminated by the streetlight. He felt a pain in his chest, and its attendant breathlessness. Ah, he thought, it’s that again.

Inside the house, dressed in her blue bathrobe, Susan put down her book, a history of the Armory Show, and rose to greet him. Her perfume preceded her. She kissed him, her eyes still on the door through which he had entered, a kiss both perfunctory and ironic, gestural in its well-meaning sweetness. “Your lips taste of salt,” she said.

“Snack food,” the doctor said. “I didn’t really have dinner.”

“Well, I could always heat up something for you. Are you still hungry? There’s some leftover roast in the icebox.” She enjoyed using antiquated words. “Or I could throw together a salad for you.” She refused to follow the Jones Diet Plan and had said so. He shook his head. “Hey, guess what’s going on here?” She gave him a brief and almost unreadable smile.

“I have no idea.”

“We need to go to the basement.” She waited. “We have to go down there if I’m going to tell you what’s going on here.” She cocked her head at the ceiling. “He might be listening.”

“Rafe?”

“Who else?”

The doctor smelled a trace of gin on his wife’s breath. She gave off an air of late-night melancholy elegance, an effect always intensified by alcohol, both the melancholy and the elegance. As she made her way toward the basement door entrance, her slippers shuffled on the linoleum, and her hips under the bathrobe swayed a little, a touch of womanly swagger intensified by the gin. Her expensively cut hair was streaked with gray, and her hair swayed with the same rhythm as her hips. He didn’t want the younger version of Susan back — he did not desire younger women and despised men of his age who did — because a younger woman would leave him alone and untended in middle age, and he wanted to share the process of aging with someone, and not just anybody, but with her.

He felt his love flaring up for her: he remembered exactly how beautiful she looked when they first met years ago in San Francisco and saw how she appeared to the world now, the result of what their lives together had done to her, and the two versions of her, the young and the…well, she wasn’t old, exactly, weathered was maybe a better word, touched him with an electric intensity that made it hard for him to breathe. How he loved her! He even loved her sadness. But loving your wife’s sadness was a soul-error. Everyone said so.

She flipped on the light for the basement stairs and descended slowly, turning her feet at an angle so that she wouldn’t slip on the narrow steps. At the bottom she flicked on another light. He followed her, trying to see the stairs over the mound of his belly. Her canned preserves lined the shelves behind her, fresh this past summer from the cauldron of the pressure cooker, including the stewed tomatoes in mason jars that sometimes started to ferment and caused the jars to explode. He remembered reading the paper one evening and hearing a canned-tomato bomb go off underneath him. When he had gone downstairs to inspect the damage, shards of glass and stewed tomatoes were strewn all over the basement floor. It looked like a crime scene.

“How was your day?” she asked without interest. “Any hallucinations?”

“No. Just the usual can of worms.” He was puffing from the exertion. At last he shrugged. “No. A little better than the usual worms.”

“Remind me,” she said, “to have someone come down here and inspect this place for mold. I smell mold.”

“Okay.” He noticed that she faced slightly away from him, though her right hand played with the fingers of his left hand, an old habit. She toyed with his wedding ring. He often felt that she was inspecting him.

“What’s this about?” he asked, as the furnace rumbled to life. “How come we’re down here?”

“What’s what about?”

“Why we’re down here.”

“Oh. Down here?” She had grown terribly absentminded. Maybe it was the gin. “Oh, yes, of course.” She nodded, a bit too forcefully, though she was still facing away from him. “Okay, so brace yourself. It seems that we were grandparents for, I don’t know, about four weeks. Well, I mean, virtual grandparents, because, well, you get the picture.”

“I do? No, I think I don’t get the picture. What picture is this? Does this have to do with Jupie?”

“Bingo.” She nodded and then wiped her eyes on her bathrobe sleeve. Jupie was their son, Rafe’s girlfriend—though Jupie was Eli and Susan’s private name for this girlfriend whose actual name was Donna. A serious martial artist in tae kwon do, Rafe also considered himself a Marxist and had met this girl at a downtown political rally for voting rights or whatever. She was a freshman at Macalester, and although she was a year older than he was, her political activism matched his. They had hooked up soon after they met, and she had attended his matches and cheered him on. An attractive young woman with long brown hair, big brown eyeglasses to match, and a habit of chewing on her lip after she said anything, she nevertheless had an essential blurriness to her, which had provoked the doctor, after one of her visits to the house when she and their son had engaged him in conversation about gender identity, to call her Jupiter, not because she was godlike but because she resembled a gas planet. You’d go down through the layers of gas with her, and you never got to anything solid.

Her well-meaning earnestness had a certain charm. All it lacked was specific content.

By contrast, Rafe was all specific content. His body had a wiry density: when he moved, he seemed not to walk but to float, his movements all perfectly coordinated. When sparring, he showed absolutely no mercy, and his face showed an utter lack of expression. Watching him, his father felt pride and wonder. Well, he himself had been a fighter once.

Of course teens were hazy because life was still hazy to them, but this Donna, this Jupiter, was a mistress of the unspecific. Political platitudes and unsubstantiated generalizations just came leaking out of her. Besides, their son was still in high school, a senior. Big political rhetoric turned him on.

“Actually,” Susan said, “we’ve got to stop calling her that. Her name’s Donna. If Rafe ever catches us calling her Jupie again, he’ll pitch a fit.”

“So…”

“So I guess he forgot about condoms one time, or they got careless, but anyway he got her knocked up, unbeknownst to us, and also, equally unbeknownst to us, they went off to Planned Parenthood last week.” This sentence came out of Susan in pieces, severed into parts. Elijah took his wife into his arms and felt his old damaged heart breaking again, momentarily. “After all,” his wife said into his shirt, “she’s eighteen. Or nineteen. Old enough anyway to get an abortion.”

“When did he tell you?”

“This evening. And here’s the thing. He’s been crying all afternoon. The poor kid. His crying is contagious. And…I don’t know. You don’t expect a tough young man to be torn up about it. You don’t expect the fathers to cry.”

“You don’t?” He waited. “I do.”

She just looked at him, through the tears.

“But anyway Rafe’s not generic,” he said. “He’s not one of ‘the men.’ He’s not one of ‘the fathers.’ Rafe is himself. Of course he’d cry. Jesus, the poor kid.”

“I’d rather,” she said, stiffening, “I’d rather you didn’t lecture me about him. I believe that I know him as well as you do.” She paused for effect. “If not better.”

The doctor still held on to her. “Let’s not fight,” he said. “What should I do? Should I go talk to him?”

“Yes, but don’t lecture him, okay?”

“I don’t lecture.”

“Of course you do. You hold forth. You get started, and once you get going, you’re like an oscillating fan. Wisdom spews out of you in all directions.”

Sorrow had made her cruel this evening. The doctor felt hungry again, terribly hungry, mealless, and he removed his bulky arms from where they had been encircling his wife and dropped them to his sides.

He trudged upstairs to sit with his son. At the top, he stopped for breath. He would sit down on Rafe’s unmade bed, where conception had recently taken place. On the walls and shelves above them, the trophies and medals for his tae kwon do competitions would be on display. The smell of teenage boy would pervade the room: sweat, pizza, musk, and drugstore aftershave would be mixed together in there. Somewhat uninvited and slightly unwelcome, the doctor would just go on sitting there until something happened or nothing did. With another man in the room, Rafe would stop crying and collect himself. Rafe was devoted to benign authority: when sparring, he always bowed deeply and crisply and always walked away from his instructor backward. He had never gone through a rebellious, obnoxious phase and wouldn’t start now.

The doctor would wait patiently with the young man, his son, who had fathered a child, “sired” one, that old strange verb that people now applied only to pedigreed dogs. Anyway, patience being one of his gifts, maybe the best of them, he would listen as his son lectured him on progressive politics and tae kwon do and werewolf fiction, his three great passions, as he recovered his composure. Donna, the boy’s girlfriend, was in fourth place when it came to the passions, although the boy did not yet realize where she stood in his hierarchies. Only his father did. Poor thing, she would disappear eventually. They would all get over this.

—

Elijah’s wife had written a story with Jupie in it. She had always had ambitions as a writer and had joined a downtown writers’ organization called Scriveners’ Ink, where she attended a workshop once a week led by a young woman, a recent MFA graduate.

Susan had shyly shown the story, entitled “Like Father Unlike Son,” to her husband. In the story she had written, there is a young woman whose boyfriend is a sweet-tempered but infatuated adolescent male dupe. The girlfriend leads him around from one political meeting to another. The story is narrated by the boy’s mother, who is not afraid to label her athlete son (a football player) to his face as “pussy-whipped”—the accusation is meant in good fun. The boy’s father, a balding and overweight criminal lawyer given to pronouncements, provides comic relief and a regular income but somehow is not sufficiently supportive of his wife emotionally. He’s too wrapped up in his work, it seems. Near the end of the story, as he crosses the street near his office, he is struck down by a Prius driven by an angry former client named Nancy, seeking revenge. This melodramatic touch at the story’s climax leaves the boy’s mother and the boy alone together, with the girlfriend, named Venus, now out of the picture, or forgotten, following the lawyer’s painful death from internal bleeding. Together, in the story’s last paragraph, the boy and his mother engage in troubled speculation about their future.

Elijah had rather liked the story. He didn’t mind being killed off in it. He had complimented Susan on the narrative momentum, and he felt flattered that she would think of putting him into a piece of writing. In the story, the lawyer’s name was Gerald, and Elijah had started to think of himself that way from time to time, not as himself but as Gerald, a disputatious character who turned up in his consciousness and his voice whenever he, Elijah, was driving, or arguing with insurance companies over billing practices.

—

One night two weeks later, with snack-food salt and cooking grease once more on his lips and fingers, the Jones Diet Plan having failed him again, the doctor arrived home to find Susan and Rafe sitting in the living room, waiting for him. They were both on the sofa, and because they weren’t reading or watching TV or listening to music, he knew something was up.

“So?” he asked, as soon as he’d hung up his overcoat.

“Hey, Dad,” Rafe said. His tousled curly brown hair framed his face, under the standing lamp, and his broad shoulders cast a shadow across the upholstery. He was barefoot. He didn’t like to wear shoes or socks indoors and said that Asians had it right. With studied politeness, he said, “How was your day?”

How to describe a day that included a parade of sick kids and their parents, diagnoses, written prescriptions, and a trip to the hospital? “Oh, fine,” he said. “Yours?”

“There’s a thing,” Susan said. “There’s a thing that’s come up, Eli.”

“Yes? What thing would this be?” He waited. “Where’s Theresa?” This was Rafe’s sister.

“Upstairs.” At that, both Rafe and his mother started speaking at once. They didn’t seem to notice that they were talking simultaneously, or if they did notice, neither could stop to let the other one explain. They continued to talk over each other, although both of them were making the same point.

This simultaneous duo-outburst bothered the doctor even as he was listening to it. He knew his wife had a streak of self-absorption, a very little one, though still within normal range. Sometimes when other people were talking, she would excitedly interrupt as if no one else were in the room, as if no one else had ever existed. But to see Rafe talking over his mother — not even trying to outspeak her competitively, which would suggest that he knew she was there in the room with him, but calmly conversing with his father, as if the two of them were alone together — made Elijah feel a little sliver of despair.

The gist of their talk was that Donna’s parents wanted to meet with Elijah — just with him, and no one else. They had made this request to their daughter, and she had passed it on to Rafe, who had passed it on to his mother. Now, here it was. Why hadn’t they called him? At the office? He would have returned their call! Well, they just hadn’t. Nor had they explained their rationale, or what the conversation would be about.

They wanted him to visit them late Sunday afternoon. This Sunday. In three days. Around five p.m. Given the Minnesota late autumn, the skies would be darkening by then. They lived in Delano, a semirural town west of Minneapolis. They were looking forward to talking to him, Susan said. They also planned, she told him, to give him some Christmas cookies, though it was still November.

When the doctor agreed, Rafe said he would text Donna, who would then tell her parents that his father would be coming. The most simple encounters could be made complicated with just a bit of effort. Rafe gave his father the address of Donna’s parents, out in Delano.

—

That Sunday, the doctor pulled into their driveway with the aid of his car’s GPS system. The family name, Lundgren, was attached with red metal letters to the driveway’s mailbox. From the outside, the house itself projected an eerie normality, a rigidly resolute cheerfulness. A two-story colonial, it seemed to be projecting tremendous quantities of light from each window, as if every lamp and overhead fixture had been turned on to counter some terrible visitation, which was himself. The light was not just incandescent but somehow inflammatory, as if the walls and knickknacks were giving off a fiery plume that extended out onto the lawn, with its flecks of snow. The doctor shook his head to free himself from drowsiness and then groaned as he turned off the car’s engine, opened the door, and heaved himself out, shaking off potato chip particles from his overcoat.

When he pressed the doorbell, he heard from inside the house a chime that sounded like the first few notes of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” When the door opened, he saw Donna’s parents, both approximately his own age, somberly smiling in greeting as they ushered him in. Donna’s mother held a plate of cookies, which she transferred to one hand as she waved him inside and shouted her greetings. Elijah was used to talking to parents about their children in his medical practice. He knew all the parental styles. Although he felt he was ready for any variety of family drama, he had forgotten how country people like the Lundgrens hooted in loud welcome for social occasions even when they weren’t glad to see you. Noisy hospitality of this kind could be cold and heartless. The whole point was to avoid any trace of intimacy. In the Midwest, you just had to get used to it.

Mrs. Lundgren, neither pretty nor beautiful but solid, wore her brown hair in a moderately ostentatious beehive. Her eyes looked out from behind glasses attached to a tiny chain around her neck. Her shapeless skirt, a dull gray, gave the impression of formality heightened by the cameo brooch she wore on her blouse. She reminded the doctor of a loan officer he had once known at a bank, a no-nonsense woman whose face, after much experience of the world and probably much practice, radiated aggressive neutrality, seasoned with a bit of distaste for humanity.

Mr. Lundgren wore jeans and a sweater. His eyes were the impossibly deep blue that had so frightened the Native Americans when they gazed for the first time at the conquistadors. He shook hands with the doctor with a machinelike pneumatic grip, which out here signified masculine force and solidarity. “Hello,” the host said, showing his teeth briefly, in what might have been a smile.

Donna’s mother grinned at the doctor and directed him toward a living room chair planted in front of an audio speaker. Nearby was a side table with Ritz crackers topped with whipped cheese-colored goo. Each cracker had been placed carefully on a tiny paper napkin on which were printed minuscule blue flowers. A giant flat-screen TV, as large and solemn as an altar, held pride of place in front of the window, blocking the view. The TV’s screen was dark, but music from The Nutcracker suite poured out from the speakers, making it hard to hear anything else over the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The doctor thought he heard Mrs. Lundgren shout out her own name, Eleanor, over the music, and she gestured at her husband and instructed the doctor to call him Herb. “We’re Eleanor and Herb!” she said brightly, with an icy hostile smile. “Nice to meet you! Thanks for coming!” Without a rising inflection, she asked, “Can we get you a glass of water!” The doctor shook his head. He wanted whiskey and crusty bread, but you wouldn’t get that in this household even if you begged for it on your knees.

He felt another moment of sleepiness.

Across the room, Herb Lundgren, slumped majestically in his La-Z-Boy chair, stared at the doctor impolitely. There was a clear division of labor in this marriage: talking would be Mrs. Lundgren’s job, while her husband examined the guest for visual clues.

“I wonder,” Elijah said, “if you could turn the music down? I can’t quite hear you.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Lundgren said, advancing toward the audio system and fiddling with the dial. The sound dropped to a nearly inaudible hush, like an orchestra of mice playing inside the walls.

Mrs. Lundgren remarked on the weather, how cold it was getting. Her church, she said, worried about the homeless at this time of year. While she talked, the doctor surveyed the opposite wall above the sofa, where the Lundgrens had hung a cross-stitched Last Supper. Looking closer, the doctor suspected that the piece had been made from a mail-order hobby kit. Hours had been spent putting it together, in mad devotion. The mouse orchestra inside the walls continued to play Tchaikovsky while the doctor nodded in agreement to something Mrs. Lundgren had said that he actually hadn’t quite heard. Over in the corner, on a bookshelf, was the Oxford English Dictionary. What was that doing here? Talk about clues: you must never underestimate your opponent. Someone here did a lot of reading.

Now Mrs. Lundgren was talking about Somali refugees, and the terrible conditions in the Sudan, and the shocking treatment of women in sub-Saharan Africa, clitoridectomies and the like. “And that’s not the half of it,” she said. The doctor nodded. “It makes you wonder sometimes about those people, how they think,” she continued, as the doctor squirmed and closed his mouth, through which, he realized with embarrassment, he had been breathing. “We’ve been there, after all,” she said. “We saw it with our very own eyes. We worked in a refugee camp. We know what we’re talking about, so.”

“Where was this?”

“The Kiziba refugee camp in Rwanda! Very inspiring!”

Mr. Lundgren glumly shook his head while he studied his hands. “But very hard work,” he muttered.

Very hard, his wife repeated, but God expects us, she said, to help take care of the less fortunate, didn’t the doctor agree? He did. Time passed. Global troubles were mentioned and disappeared into the conversational haze as if they were items of gossip. Suddenly the doctor remembered something his son had told him: Donna’s mother worked as a middle school world history teacher. As teachers do, she continued to drone on: they, the Lundgrens, had tried to give all their extra money away to the poor for the sake of justice, and they had assembled a little scrapbook with photographs of children whom they had sponsored. “It’s over there. We could show it to you. You can’t go into heaven carrying bags of money!” Mrs. Lundgren said, shaking her head and laughing mirthlessly over the comic irony of it all. Every life was sacred, she said, didn’t he agree? You could walk into heaven accompanied by the souls to whom you had lent a helping hand. That was possible. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty, she said, confabulating.

No wonder Jupie had turned out the way she had.

The doctor rose to his feet and approached the plate of cookies, taking three for himself. Rarely in his life had he felt so hungry or so sleepy. He was starving in every possible way. He needed a nap, right now, and his hunger felt like an embrace of emptiness hugging him pitilessly, stifling him. His hunger, he suddenly thought, was empirical. In his mind arose an image of a man drinking a six-pack of air, one empty bottle after another. In rapid succession he ate the cookies and took three more, while Mrs. Lundgren lectured him on the holiness of all human existence and how existence was not a choice but a gift. Well, at least he knew where this was going. The lowest and highest hold the same rank in God’s eyes, she was saying, tapping her finger on her knee. Of all the democrats, God was the greatest democrat. Status meant nothing to Him. He cared nothing for trinkets or the glittering machines of success. Before Him, we are all the same. The doctor felt himself growing impatient at all this moralizing and its transparent intentions. Everything she said sounded like a practiced speech, prepared and canned, like tomatoes in the basement. What did he, the doctor, think would save him?

“Excuse me?”

“Well, we were wondering, what will you do to be saved?” She leaned back and smiled. “We were wondering about that.” She reached over for a Ritz cracker and popped it into her mouth. The doctor watched her chew. She ate like a peasant.

“Isn’t that a very private matter?”

“Yes, it is,” Mrs. Lundgren said, keeping her gaze on him, and suddenly he knew whom she resembled in both appearance and manner: Margaret Thatcher. “But you are the father of the young man who caused our daughter to become pregnant, aren’t you? We wondered what values you had instilled in him. It may be a private matter, but it’s ours now. Our matter.”

“It’s a father’s job to instill values,” Mr. Lundgren said, from his corner. “That’s what a man does, so.”

“I have tried to teach him to love the world,” Elijah said. “And to treat everyone with respect. And to fight for what is right.”

“Well, that’s not enough,” Mrs. Lundgren said, and the doctor intuited that she was a skilled tactician in argumentation and probably coached the high school debate squad. “If the world were enough, being worldly would be a virtue, wouldn’t it? But it isn’t. Does the world include our grandchild, yours and ours, the one who died?”

“You should take this up with your daughter,” the doctor said.

“But we have,” she told him. “And she seems to have been converted by your son. Converted to oblivion.”

“Don’t lecture me.” The doctor spoke, but it was Gerald who had spoken up. Elijah seemed to be turning into his wife’s fictional creation. Okay, fine.

“I’m not lecturing you. We’re just asking questions and offering an opinion. We want to know what sort of man you are. As if we were all family here. Which we sort of are. Whatever did you teach Raphael? If I may ask?”

“Well,” the doctor said, “first of all, we’re not a family. What I taught Raphael, that’s my business. And as for what I am, I’m a pediatrician.”

“Yes, we know that. That’s what you do. You care for children, which is quite admirable. But I asked you what you are.”

“By what right do you ask me such a question?”

A rather long air pocket of dead silence followed, accompanied by the music. The doctor had never heard such a silence, with music in it.

Finally Mrs. Lundgren said, “The right of one parent to another. We have blood on our hands. All of us. And our children have blood on their hands. They have snuffed out a life, those two. They have caused suffering.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Gerald blurted out. “A woman has a right to choose. We all know that.” Neither Lundgren flinched, as he had hoped they would. “I have to leave now.”

“I don’t think so,” Mr. Lundgren said, and the doctor felt a chill.

“Do you think the happy choices of our children should depend on the suffering of fetuses? Is that the ticket? Is that the ticket to the universe? To its meaning? You should read your Dostoyevsky,” Mrs. Lundgren said, a mild frenzy in her voice. “Don’t you think a father should protect his infants and not kill them?”

“That’s enough,” the doctor said, standing up, although all he did was to reach for more cookies. Dostoyevsky in Delano! Of all things.

“You opened a jar,” Mrs. Lundgren said. “The jar was full of pain. It was your jar.”

He felt the room constricting and growing hot, warmed up from its already overheated condition. He felt Gerald overtaking him. It was Gerald who blurted out, “With all due respect, fuck you, ma’am, and you, sir, and good night.”

She laughed, and for a moment the doctor felt himself admiring her. “What a silly person you are,” she said. “Obscenity is not an argument. It is weak-minded. I had thought you would be more thoughtful. After all, you have a medical degree. You have not thought any of this through, not any of it, I can see that now. How shallow is the pool in which you swim. You are therefore self-deluded, cruel, and mean-spirited. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but we are in pain. Isn’t it ironic? Your name being Elijah? And you, a doctor?”

“Now you’re name-calling. I’m not a monster, and neither is my son. Perhaps you are the monster. It’s time for me to leave now. Time to go.”

“Is it time?” She glanced theatrically at her watch. “Perhaps I am a monster. But if I am, I’m a monster in the right army, and you’re in the wrong one.” She was still smiling eerily at him. The smile, fixed and meaningless, appeared to be surgically applied. Inside the walls of the house, the mice, perhaps on a salary, continued to play The Nutcracker. “The doctor is too busy to give us more than a few minutes of his precious time. So we must bid him farewell, Herb.” She turned toward her husband, who seemed to have been mummified in his La-Z-Boy chair.

Who was Herb? It was only at this moment that Elijah realized he had already forgotten the first names of the Lundgrens. They had introduced themselves, what seemed like years ago, but their first names had not stuck. He put on his hat and coat, which had been draped over the newel post, and without another word, walked out to his cold car, thinking that never in his entire life had he had a social encounter like this one, nor would he ever again.

—

The stars had a spectral clarity in the moonless sky; no wonder people thought of them as the lights emanating from the dead. Shaken, hungry, and sleepy, the doctor took several random right turns until he finally found himself where he wanted to be: on a dirt road between fallow fields with hardly a house in sight. He wanted to be lost, and he was. He turned on the car’s radio and turned it off again after hearing a few bars of atonal orchestral music. On the passenger seat rested a bag of Oreos, a box of Goldfish crackers, Cheetos, and Funyuns.

Rafe had trained in tae kwon do from the time he was a child. He had begged for lessons starting in second grade. The last time the doctor had seen Rafe sparring, the boy jumped so high that his father was startled; Rafe’s moves were perfectly coordinated, and his flexibility seemed impossible. When he did a front rising kick, his extended foot was higher than his face. And fast. He dominated his opponent with a complicated series of kicks, and then he leaped out of range before his opponent could land anything on him. He never retreated. Why was the doctor thinking of that particular match, now? The blank merciless expression on Mrs. Lundgren’s face had reminded the doctor of his son’s face in combat.

In the distance the doctor saw the blinking red light of a radio transmission tower.

When you got down to the heart of things, you found desolation. Even in the midst of joy, you would find it. But you would find joy everywhere too. His son took joy in combat and sometimes laughed in practice sessions. So complicated, the mixture of the two. The doctor reached for the Oreos and ate several. He had attained a new low, or was it a new high, in sleepiness. He felt like fighting the drowsiness, but the drowsiness welcomed him, as any narcotic does, taking him up and away.

Christmas is coming, the doctor thought, the geese are getting fat. A child’s rhyme from elementary school. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. Why are the geese fat? Who feeds the geese? If you haven’t got a penny…what will do…the doctor heard a sound, without definition, and the road tilted a bit…

—

Then things were flying around him — the cell phone had escaped from his coat pocket and was airborne in front of him, as were various other items, including the bags of snack food and a clipboard from the front seat — and he heard the sound of crunching or of some huge animal chewing up the car as it rotated and fell down into a ditch, and Elijah, now thoroughly awake, felt his driver’s-side door open (how had that happened?), and he was ejected sideways, having forgotten to buckle his seat belt. Narcolepsy, he thought, with an odd diagnostic lucidity even as he came to rest on a little hill at the side of a field with, he instantly knew from the pain, a broken leg, a fractured tibia. He had always been a crack diagnostician, and even now on his back in the dirt, staring up at the night sky, cookie crumbs on his lips, his skills had not deserted him. How stupid pain is. From below the knee, thanks to the fracture, pain sent its dull, insistent message upstairs to the brain. Pain was like a siren. Pleasure never worked that way. The air had turned very cold.

Now he felt himself shivering rather violently from the cold and shock amid the field’s dirt and snow. He saw the constellations above him wheeling in their eternal rounds, and a great peacefulness took hold of him, like the slow spreading of pleasure under the skin in a vague fog diffusing itself in a warm glow — a fog that lit up the soul. Underneath the peacefulness dwelt the pain. They could coexist.

He sniffed. The temperature was below freezing. He would die of hypothermia out here. No one would see him. He had landed in the middle of nowhere. His right hand was lacerated and was bleeding steadily. But it was perfectly all right, all of it, especially the bleeding.

The image of his son sparring intervened, and he realized that he didn’t want the last faces he ever saw on Earth to be the faces of Herb and Eleanor Lundgren. Yes! He had remembered their names! He tried to sit up, and he looked around: in the distance, across the field directly behind him, stood a farmhouse with a single light at the top of a pole illuminating its driveway. He would have to be Gerald, it seemed, to get over there, and he could do it, and he thanked his wife for imagining Gerald, a combative man, into existence. He began crawling, using his elbows and dragging the rest of his incapacitated body, and he distracted himself from his own loud cries by admiring the sky full of stars indifferent to his situation, and also admiring the plainspoken stupidity of pain burning a hole in his leg. He crawled a certain distance, he didn’t know how far, trying to reduce his cries to groans. What was the point in groaning? No one would hear.

He was in terrible pain but a rather good mood.

Ahead of him, in the field, to the right, out of the cold, out of the dark, out of the emptiness, a bell rang: his cell phone.

He crawled toward it. He dragged along the ground every cell of his corpulent body. By the time he reached the phone, the screen read, “Missed Call.” The phone had been flung, as he himself had been, from the car, and now here it was, a gift from the gods who perhaps did not want him dead after all or had changed their minds, and after grasping the phone and reading the missed-call message — it had been from Democratic Party headquarters, no doubt soliciting a donation — he called home and told Susan what had happened to him and that he loved her, as she cried and shouted and then at last calmed down and told him how much she loved him and always had. Where was he? she demanded. He said he didn’t know and would call the police. He promised to call her back, and then, peering down at the numbers, he called 911. He tried to describe his location to the dispatcher, but he didn’t know the name of the road he had been on, so, between the bursts of imbecilic pain, he did his best to inform her about everything he saw, the blank landscape, the nondescript trees, the constellations above him (he was in shock, he knew), and again luck was with him: he said he thought he could maybe spot a tattered sign in the distance advertising a U-pick apple orchard, and the dispatcher said, oh, all right, yes, she knew where he was, and besides, they could find him using his phone and a GPS track. Stay calm, she told him. Don’t move.

—

He disobeyed her. When the EMT guys arrived, their incandescent spotlight found his face, and he waved his arm at them and shouted for his life.

In memory of THB

and for Chris

Vanity

He had stuffed his suitcase into the empty overhead bin, having purchased early-boarding rights from the airline, and had settled into his nonreclining seat, 32-B, when he had to stand up again to let the passenger in 32-A get past him. 32-A accompanied almost every move — taking off his raincoat, placing his crossword-puzzle book on the seat — with an unpleasant, guttural grunt. 32-A was a short man, of a certain age, stooped but solid, with hair dyed inky black. Apparently indifferent to mere appearances, he displayed traces of dandruff on his rumpled suit. Dandruff had also made its way onto his soiled and unpressed lime-green necktie. Harry Albert, who, by contrast, dressed rather elegantly and could still turn heads for his handsomeness, gave the man a nod, but 32-A did not nod in return. When 32-A finally sat down, he said, “Whoof.”

Harry nodded and, between staged laughs, said, “That’s right!” trying to be friendly. However, 32-A did not seem interested in Harry’s amiable agreement and pulled out a battered copy of that day’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. He turned to the business page and commenced to read. From time to time he uttered subvocalizations. Grim-faced, the flight attendants announced that they had “a very full flight.” They proceeded to help passengers force their luggage into the already crammed overhead spaces. They gave instructions in the use of seat belts and oxygen masks, and eventually the plane was airborne.

Going through the cloud cover, the plane bounced and rattled. A few passengers laughed nervously. One overhead compartment popped open. A little girl screamed. The captain announced that there would be no beverage service, for now: too much turbulence.

“Bumpy flight,” Harry Albert said.

“Unhrh,” 32-A replied.

Well, he wouldn’t bother to introduce himself to a man whose only conversational gambit consisted of nonverbal animal-like rumbling. Trying to doze, Harry heard 32-A making more peculiar sounds, like a dog having a nightmare. It would be impossible to doze off with this guy growling next to him. Feeling despondent, Harry reached for his paperback copy of Schindler’s List, which someone had recommended.

32-A glanced over and grunted again. Finally he spoke up. “I was one of those.” He had traces of a middle European accent, nearly gone, mostly dead but still living, a ghoul-accent.

“One of what?” Harry asked.

“I was a Schindler Jew,” 32-A said.

Harry Albert felt a slight electrical shock. “I’m honored to meet you, sir,” he said. He held out his hand and introduced himself to the man, who replied with his own name, “David Lowie.” Or at least it sounded like Lowie. Harry didn’t think it would be polite to ask 32-A (or, no: a person shouldn’t think of a Holocaust survivor as 32-A) to repeat his name, so he refrained. Nor could he address his seatmate as David, presuming on an intimacy that did not exist. Mr. Lowie? Well, for the duration of an airplane flight, who needs names? Anonymity was the rule.

Apparently his seatmate didn’t think so. “Harry Albert?” the man asked. “What’s your last name?”

“It’s Albert.”

“Rrrgggr,” the man replied dismissively. “That’s an English name. But it sounds like a first name. Ha ha ha rrrgh.” He coughed into a stickily soiled handkerchief, crusted with dried extrusions.

“Yes,” Harry said, as the plane bounced around. A woman one row in front of him, on the other side of the aisle, was anxiously reading while holding her husband’s hand. Okay: it was a turbulent flight but not life-threatening. “Could I ask you,” Harry said, turning to his seatmate, “what Schindler was like? Did you ever talk to him?”

“Talk to him? What a question. No! Never. Don’t be nuts. You didn’t even look at him.”

“You didn’t look at him?”

“Of course not. I kept my head down. I could hardly tell you what he looked like. You didn’t look at any of the Germans. If you were smart.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? I see you don’t— Well, because. It’s, um. Because obviously. Because you didn’t look at them, Schindler included. Not any of them. You know, I was going to be in that movie. Spielberg, that fellow, not a tall man, flew me to the grave site. In Jerusalem! With the camera set up, shooting, take one take two, I put a stone on the grave, me. Filmed. Lights, camera, action.”

“Were you—?”

“I got a good dry-cleaning business in Milwaukee,” the man said. “Several stores. Successful! A new one out in Brookfield, maybe one in Waukesha. We’re looking into it. My life doesn’t depend on being in a Hollywood film. I got left on the floor.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I got left on the floor. What’s the matter? This phrase, you never heard it? When they cut you out?”

“Oh,” Harry said, “the cutting-room floor. You got left on the cutting-room floor.”

“This is what I said.”

“No, you said you got left on the floor. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what floor you were talking about.”

“What’d you think I was talking about? The second floor, lingerie, where you buy ladies’ undergarments? This is— Well, you’re a kid, no wonder you don’t know anything. So. I went over there, a nice hotel, free food, the Holy Land, Jerusalem, he shoots me, I am directed, but where am I in the film? Nowhere. Not that I mind.”

“I’m sorry. You should have been in it.”

“You’re telling me. They flew me to Jerusalem. Coddled, there and back. A seat in first class both ways. So tell me. They don’t want me in their film. What’s wrong with me? My appearance? Anything? No. I don’t think so.”

Harry looked more carefully at his seatmate’s face, which was of a formidable ugliness. Of course, ugliness was no one’s fault despite what Oscar Wilde had said about the matter. Lowie’s elderly expression was one of sour, downturned-mouth disgust mixed with a very precise rudeness. However, he was a survivor, so hats off.

“You see anything wrong with my face?” The man was persistent.

“Not a thing,” Harry Albert said. “Clearly they made a mistake, leaving me on the floor. I mean you. Not me. You. Slip of the tongue.”

“You, they didn’t leave on the floor. With your looks, a handsome English prince like yourself, they never leave you down there. Guys like you? Always in the movie, upstairs, presidential suite, the best treatment, silk sheets. Palace guard out in front, beefeaters, room service. You, they put in the golden carriage. Horses pull you. People waving, want your autograph. Guys like me, never, unless we fight for it, compete, in a free market. How come therefore they fly me to Jerusalem if they’re only going to waste my time? This remains a puzzle. Even my wife can’t solve it. So why are you flying to Vegas?”

“A business conference,” Harry Albert said.

“What do you do?”

“Manufacturer’s rep. Medical devices.”

“Well, good. That’s a good business. The economy can never hurt you if you sell to sick people. The sick are always with us, I assure you, Harry Albert. Always will be. A full supply of the sick. Hoards of sick. More of them always, too, including the old, like, what do the kids call them, zombies.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“What’re you going to be doing in Vegas?”

“Oh. Me? I’m meeting my wife. She got there yesterday, a cheaper flight, one night on her own, and she’s been playing the slots. I had work I had to do, talk to a banker here in Minneapolis, therefore I’m leaving today. She’s been playing the slots, did I mention that? And tonight and tomorrow and the next day, we’re going to the shows. The shows in Las Vegas are the best in the world! The nightlife. It’s— Am I explaining? Even a child knows. Do you like nightlife?”

Harry Albert liked nightlife very much but suddenly felt that a certain tact might be necessary. “Yes,” he said.

“And the showgirls?”

“Showgirls? Meh,” Harry Albert said.

“Meh?”

“Yeah, meh. I like the costumes sometimes,” Harry Albert said.

“Costumes, yes, sequins and glitter, but they’re not the point. What’s with the ‘meh,’ if I may ask?”

“I can explain.”

“This explanation I would like to hear. Every year, my wife and I go to Vegas. We have fun. We gamble a little, we go to the shows. Performances, by the very best: Wayne Newton, Olivia Newton-John, Sammy Davis Jr. Have you seen him? What a voice! Versatility! Perhaps he has no appeal to English royalty like Prince Albert, but what’s the harm? Okay, so he’s been dead for a while, but my point is: greatness. Also, and I don’t think I mentioned this, the sun. The sun is a prizewinner. Have you ever seen rain in Las Vegas?”

“No. Never.”

“Exactly. They’re smart. They have the sun under contract.”

“And rain?”

“Rain they don’t employ.”

“Well, it’s a desert out there,” Harry Albert said.

“Yes, but nightlife blooms where no rain falls. You’ve heard that expression? What time is it at the blackjack table? Who cares? Shoot out the clocks! The showgirls, tanned and healthy, where do these girls come from? They pop up out of the cactus plants, could be. Do they have mothers? Are they desert creatures like armadillos? I don’t bother to ask. Even my wife enjoys the showgirls, as long as they’re dancing. I like to sit close, so you can see the sweat. Sweat drips down their long legs. I like that. Criticize me if you want to.”

“Ah.”

“You don’t like them? Prince Albert, I believe you said you were indifferent to showgirls.”

“Well, I’m gay.”

“So are the girls. Everyone smiles in Vegas. Everyone is happy and carefree, except for the losers of life savings. You have to know when to stop. Common sense. I don’t see the problem.”

“You don’t get it,” Harry Albert said. “I’m queer.”

The plane bounced, and 32-A sat back. “You’re a queer?”

“Yup.”

“You don’t look like it. What’s the point in that? Please explain.”

“Excuse me?”

“Why would anyone want such a thing? No showgirls for you? Just showboys? With nice hair? Tap dancers? Playing the gold piano?”

“Could be.”

The old man leaned back and puffed out his cheeks. “I’ve known people like you. And, let me say, I am open-minded. Every hedgehog has a law for itself, hedgehog law. For me, however, queer has no appeal. Your particular kingdom is closed to me. So, you get to Vegas, no showgirls, no pretty waitresses, what have you got?”

“Plenty,” Harry Albert said.

“Please don’t describe. A cute smile I suppose can be anywhere. But okay. Prince, listen to me. Like I said, open-minded is my motto. You got your book there, you’re reading about Schindler, but this is America now, different hedgehog laws. So, okay, what am I—? I’m saying, and this is very simple, so listen. These other people on the plane, screaming now, turbulence, they would say it too if they only stopped screaming. Which is: enjoy life. In your hedgehog royalty way.”

“Thank you,” Harry Albert said. “Trust me. I do enjoy it.”

“You’re kind of solid-looking. You don’t look delicate, if I may say. Or sensitive, even, which, I might as well tell you, I despise. Feelings? No, not for me.”

“I work out.”

“You work out what?”

“In the gym. Circuit training. Also, I box. I’m a fighter.” Harry Albert made a fist, and the old man nodded. “I have a good punch.”

“That’s right. You must. That’s right.” The old man had become quite vehement. “So there’s something I want you to do, Prince.” The old man reached into his pocket and drew out a business card. On it had been printed his name, the name of his business, Go-Clean, with its website, and an e-mail address. He handed it to Harry Albert. “First we shake hands. Not every day do I meet a member of the English royal family trained in pugilism.”

“But I’m not—”

The old man held up his hand. “Don’t deny. You’re thinking: this old man, he’s crazy, a Schindler Jew, suffering has made him insane, and I’m telling you, no, it didn’t. Maybe a joker.” He held out his hand, and Harry Albert shook it. “A joker is what it made me. A joker vacationer. An American going on vacation to Las Vegas, where my wife already is, that’s what I am. An American like you. So what you do is, you go to your business conference and then night falls, and you enjoy the nightlife in your hedgehog way with your hedgehog friends, and you write to me, you send me a note telling me you’re okay. Because now we are friends. You said you are honored to meet me.”

“Yes, I am.”

“And I am likewise honored to meet you, English royalty. Freed at last from the palace, like Roman Holiday. Even though you don’t look like Audrey Hepburn. Maybe more Oscar De La Hoya. Are you vain, like him?”

“Yes. But I’m not—”

“Like I said: don’t bother to deny.” The old man turned to gaze out the window. “We’ll be landing soon. Where are the free peanuts? The free beverage?” He turned back to Harry Albert, and all at once a smile broke out on his profoundly ugly face, a transfixing smile. “This is a very annoying flight. Except for you. Prince, you’re good company,” he said. “You keep a person interested. Send me a letter. Tell me what it’s like.”

—

Sitting in his hotel room, satiated with pleasure, the other young man still in bed, prettily sleeping, Harry Albert opened his laptop and began to write.

Dear David, he wrote, I promised that I would write to you and now I’m doing just that. I’ve had some lucky streaks in Las Vegas since I got here. The conference went well, I made some contacts, I met some people. He glanced at the bed before turning back to the computer screen and the keyboard. You could say I won.

Business in my field is good. I don’t have to worry about money.

For a moment he gazed out the open window at the lights of the city. He liked to keep the windows open with the curtains drawn back in case other visitors, in other hotels, happened to glance out, Rear Window style, in his direction. They would see him disporting himself in the company of others. Let them envy him. Let them envy his good looks, his luck.

You asked me if I’m vain. And I sure am. I don’t think about my looks too much, anyhow not much more than most people do, but it gets me results. When I get older, I’ll have to drop it. My appearance will start to fail. But by then I’ll be in love. I’m too busy for love right now. But by then, in the future, I won’t care how pretty anybody is, and they won’t care about my looks either, and we’ll be fine.

The point is, I love my life. So do you. I was pleased and honored to meet you.

Thanks for the conversation.

He signed the e-mail “Prince Albert.”

A week later, back in Minneapolis, he received a reply, three words. Don’t kid yourself.

The e-mail note was unsigned.