Plastic Alaska

Item Type Thesis

Authors Namey, Jason

Download date 30/09/2021 23:46:37

Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/11122/8733 PLASTIC ALASKA

By

Jason Namey, B.A.

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

in

Creative Writing

University of Alaska Fairbanks

May 2018

Gerri Brightwell, Committee Chair Kyle Mellen, Committee Member Rich Carr, Committee Member Rich Carr, Chair English Department Chair Todd Sherman, Dean College o f Liberal Arts Michael Castellini, Dean of Graduate School Abstract:

The stories in Plastic Alaska depict characters losing—often literally—their own identities.

Whether it be a young boy who believes that an Alaskan theme park ride transformed him into a

different person, or a woman who finds herself compulsively imagining murdering her husband

after watching a Terrence Malick film, or a desperate man who assumes the identity of his

former best friend so he can get a job on a reality TV show, these characters find themselves thrown—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes willingly—into situations where they must leave their former selves behind just to survive the unwelcome intrusions of an absurd, demanding

reality. Plastic Alaska shows—in worlds that range from the real to the fantastical—the dread, uneasiness, and occasional joy that accompanies metamorphosis.

i ii Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i

Table of Contents ...... iii

AlaskaLand ...... 1

Pickle D ies ...... 13

He Knows Where Fish Sleep...... 27

The Nature of the Ish...... 41

Badlands ...... 59

Three Studies of a Man Falling ...... 71

Plastic Alaska ...... 87

The Somnambulists...... 105

Maybe It’s Some Things That Do Never Change...... 113

Isn’t There More to Your Life Than That? ...... 121

iii iv AlaskaLand

Bobby had come to AlaskaLand with his dad and Ms. Joy but when he got off the Ferris

Wheel they were where now? Certainly not where they were supposed to be. Bobby wondered if it was only ever himself who was wherever he was supposed to be. Or maybe it was only kids who were ever supposed to be places, and parents and adults were only supposed to be wherever it is they were.

We’ll find you when you get off, just stay close to the exit, his dad had said, one arm around Ms. Joy, rubbing her lower back. Ms. Joy told fortunes for a living. That was all Bobby knew about her; he had only just met her this week. She had long hair that landed near her waist and wore loose, comfortable looking clothes. Green stones were strung across her neck. She smiled at Bobby’s dad, then took Bobby by the shoulder and walked with him up to the entrance, where she knelt and whispered in his ear—the first time all day she had said more to him than,

“Quiet down now.” She told him: “Something here changed you. At first I just tasted it in the breeze, but now, I can tell by looking at you. You’re not Bobby anymore, no. I know that if I know anything at all.”

He asked who he was, but she just squeezed his shoulder and returned to his dad.

Bobby still felt like Bobby, was still shaped like Bobby. He sniffed himself and thought, I still smell like Bobby. But as he got onto the Ferris Wheel and turned back to wave, he saw already their eyes struggle to find him.

Now, he stood at the exit like a polite boy while couples walked by, bodies linked like birdwings. A roller coaster climbed to his right. He glimpsed the shivering passengers, teenaged, shirtless to brag toughness with blue nipples. When it plunged, their screams ripped herky-jerky through chattering teeth.

1 An old man stood hunched over right in front of him, yellow toothed, gripping a cane that came past shoulder high. When the man saw Bobby, he dropped the wrapper he had been sniffing to growl something Bobby couldn’t make out. The man drooped his shoulders to lean in close, and Bobby smelled metal on his breath. Tin foil. When the man extended a hand pawlike in his direction, Bobby shook his head and darted into the crowd of people, all stepping and speaking at odd-tempos.

After checking to make sure the man hadn’t followed, Bobby looked around again for his dad and Ms. Joy. All day they had been sneaking off to cramped rooms: photo booths, phone booths, bathrooms.

Bobby figured if he wasn’t sure where exactly to go, it was best to cover as much ground as possible. Especially if he couldn’t rely on anyone else being able to recognize him. Besides, how close did his dad mean by “close”? A foot, a yard, a mile?

He pulled out his phone to scan the crowd moving around him with his MovieScore App: employees stalking by in polar bear getup, a couple trying excitedly to drag their kid into the

Alaska Oil Pipeline Simulator while she sat crying on the sidewalk. A line stuck into the walkway, coming from a booth called “How Long Could You Last in The Alaska Wilderness?” where a machine shot rapid fire quiz questions about berries, alternative hunting techniques, and counterintuitive sources of warmth. Bobby had scored fifteen minutes after the FaceMonitor saw him gag at skinning a moose.

He inserted earbuds while his phone processed the scene. Tense, instrumental chase music started to flow. Bobby tugged at the seams of his shirt and tried to make-believe a scenario. Maybe something from the spy movie they had watched on the plane, when his dad

2 forgot to warn Bobby before one character got his knuckle stabbed through with a letter-opener, and Bobby cried while everyone looked over like, Aren’t you a little old for that?

How can I be too old for it, if I’m doing it? he had thought.

He pretended he had stolen confidential documents from the Ruskies and needed to find cover before the top trained sniper turncoat lined up his shot. He ran through the crowd, curving between legs before tripping over his own feet and falling into a puddle of spilt warm soda. A swarm of walnut-sized flies scattered. He lay there till the music grew to a beat so fast he felt his heart trying to outdo it and off he was, running again.

He ducked behind trash cans and hugged the walls tight while the MovieScore sharpened, grew loud and urgent. He tried to turn the music down, but hit the wrong button and only made it worse. It gave him a headache, and he ripped his earbuds out, rubbing his eardrums to soothe the pain. Dazed, he looked around. The candy store appeared next to him like a cathedral from the mist. It must have been how many stories high? He allowed himself a moment of awe before running inside.

When Bobby looked back at the door, he saw the old man limp by with his cane, examining crushed soda cans like each was a dropped pair of eyeglasses. How had he caught up, when Bobby had been running so fast? Nobody else even seemed to notice the old man until they near tripped over him. When he squinted over and pointed a finger at Bobby, Bobby spun around.

And when was that but when he saw her.

Bobby couldn’t see her face, but recognized the scar on her calf—the one he heard a different story about each time he asked. He wondered if she would be able to recognize him.

“Mom?” He reached out and pulled the tail of her denim shirt.

3 “Bobby!” she exclaimed, then turned toward him and knelt. “Are you here with your

father?” She glanced around.

“Why aren’t you in Florida?” he said. The strangeness of seeing her here began to taint

his initial relief. Bobby remembered when they told him his mom almost but didn’t quite have a

personality; she borderline had one, which he thought was strange because it seemed to him she

had enough personality for a whole family, which is why his Dad said she was better off by

herself.

“Just because that’s where you saw me last doesn’t mean that’s where I’m supposed to be.” Her eyes darted around the door and windows, picking at the ceiling like they were a toothpick cleaning it. “Are you all by yourself?”

“I’m supposed to find Dad and Ms. Joy after I get off the Ferris Wheel.”

“Oh my,” she said. “You’re lost.”

“Dad and Ms. Joy,” Bobby said. “After I get off the Ferris Wheel, I’m supposed to find them.”

“Well they’re not here.” She held her arms out to the store. “They’re not in these candy jars. They’re not in my pockets.” She bent down. “Come on, let’s get a bite and then I’ll help you

look.”

“I’m supposed to find them after I get off the Ferris Wheel,” Bobby said. He looked at the door. A roller coaster looped over buildings outside.

Her spindly fingers enclosed his thin elbow, bone against bone. “After lasts a long time,”

she said. “Did you try calling them?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “No.”

“Speak with conviction,” she said. “Hand me your phone. I’ll call.”

4 He handed her his phone. She put it in her purse.

“Come on.” She pulled him toward the door. Her grip shuddered like a landing aircraft.

“It’s not polite to starve a woman and here I am, dizzy with hunger.”

***

When they got to the restaurant, Bobby wondered if he would still like the same food he always had. He wanted to chew his fingernails and couldn’t remember had he always done that or was it new?

His mom asked for a booth in the back.

“Right this way,” the host said.

When they sat down, Bobby heard his phone ring in her purse.

“Mom,” he said. “Can I answer my phone?”

“Now, now,” she said. “It’s not polite to telephone at the table.”

Bobby looked down at the menu. The entrees were all named after dinosaurs, but the description of each item was foreign and indecipherable, vowels stacked to form sounds Bobby didn’t think a mouth could make. On screens around the restaurant, simulated footage played of a meteor hitting a prehistoric earth—Bobby recognized the hugged-close continents from school—sonar-ing out extinction-hungry ash-riddled waves. From space it looked like the Earth had a boil needed lancing. A German couple stared with nervous curved eyebrows at the screens as if they thought this was maybe a news channel.

“Mom, after we eat, are we going to find—”

“It’s not polite to ask questions during dinner either.”

Bobby looked back down at his menu. His legs weren’t long enough to touch the floor so he had to lock his elbows on the table to keep the seat cushion from sliding.

5 “Well,” she said, putting the menu down and smiling at Bobby. “I certainly know what

I ’m having.”

A busboy walked over and filled their water glasses, dress shirt floating around him like a

sail. She watched him the entire time, though he kept his eyes down. He bowed slightly and

started to walk to the next table.

“Wait,” she said, and he stopped. “Sit down for a moment.”

“Ma’am, I—”

“Just a moment. Scoot over, Bobby.”

Bobby scooted over. The busboy hesitated, then sat, glancing anxiously at the servers buzzing around.

“Show him how to hold a fork,” she said, then winked at Bobby. “He’s never been in

such a nice restaurant before.”

The busboy looked around again, then unrolled one of the silverware setups.

“Always remember to put the napkin on your lap,” she said to Bobby. “But if you’re wearing dark clothes, ask for a black napkin in case the lint sticks to your slacks.”

The busboy picked up his fork and lifted it high. Bobby nodded shyly.

“Notice how he doesn’t grip it with his whole fist like he’s starting a lawnmower. Now,

how would you cut a piece of steak?”

“Ma’am, I—” He started to stand, but she reached over and pushed him back down. The busboy picked up the knife. Some of the staff passed by and glanced exasperated looks at him.

He sighed. Bobby knew how it felt to not know who you were supposed to listen to.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Act like you want to be here.”

6 The busboy forced a smile, picked up the knife and cut into an imaginary steak then moved the bite to his mouth.

“The most important thing,” she said, “is learning how to eat with your left hand so you aren’t constantly shuffling your fork and knife back and forth. Well done, thank you.”

The busboy stood and bowed. A server came up and led him away by the shoulder, whispering viciously in his ear. Bobby’s mom wet her napkin in her water glass and wiped down her hand. Bobby rubbed his own arm, sticky with dried soda. His phone rang again. He stared at her purse.

“Oh for God’s sake,” she said and pulled his phone out. Bobby reached for it, but she dropped it in her water glass. Ice spilled over the side.

“There,” she said. “Now that’s that.”

“I need to find Dad and Ms. Joy.”

“Is that all you’re going to talk about?” she said. “Dad and Ms. Joy. Dad and Ms. Joy. It’s not polite to mention people who aren’t at the table.”

“I’m sorry,” Bobby mumbled. He looked across the dining room and tried to make eye contact with somebody, anybody, but whenever he did, the other person would just smile and turn away.

And when was that but when he saw them: his dad and Ms. Joy. They came through the restaurant door and frantically held out a photo to the host. Bobby sat up straight. Shocked still.

The host looked at the photo, the tables, back at the photo, then shook his head and showed the busboy, who had been passing by on his way from the kitchen. The busboy shook his head too.

Bobby’s Dad gave the place a once over. Bobby stared straight at him, sitting up as high as he

7 could, face broad and hopeful, but his dad’s glance bounced quickly over him to the surrounding tables. Bobby released a small squeal as his dad and Ms. Joy hurried back outside.

Bobby leapt from his seat and ran through the restaurant, dodging waiters and water pitchers. He shot through the door and down the walkway. “Dad!” he shouted. His dad ceased consulting a you-are-here map to scan the fog of crowd before looking back at what Ms. Joy pointed at. Bobby started to shout again when his legs jumped out and sent him rolling across the concrete.

He popped up quick, feeling road-burn on his forearm, and saw he had stumbled over the old man. The old man didn’t notice at first. He sniffed a bottle on the ground then slid it into the plastic bag below his armpit. Bobby looked back at the map. His dad was gone. He panicked glances in all directions but the crowd was too thick. There were any number of stores and alleys they could have ducked into.

“Boy,” the old man said.

Bobby froze. He wanted to run away again—back to the restaurant—but all the instructions his mom had given him throughout his life clashed inside his head: respect your elders, don’t talk to strangers, respect the less fortunate, respond when an adult speaks to you. Be polite. Above all, be polite.

“Boy,” the old man repeated. “What time is it?”

Bobby shook his head.

“What time is it?” The old man leaned in closer. “I said, what time is it?”

Bobby reached for his phone then remembered he didn’t have it. He didn’t know what time it was and he realized that, for his entire life up till now, he had always known what time it

8 was, give or take. This thought left him short-winded, as though, if he took his eye off time, it might spin somewhere unexpected.

His mouth hung open, too parched to speak.

“Goddamn kid,” the old man said. “I know what time it is.” He caned over to a trashcan.

Bobby stood there, confused, then walked back to the restaurant. His mother still sat at the table.

“I ordered for you,” she said when he sat back down. “But I’m worried you won’t like it.”

She looked deeply upset.

Bobby closed his eyes. I should be glad I’m not Bobby anymore, he thought, maybe my mom isn’t who she used to be either. Maybe that’s why it’s only her who seems to still know me.

She gasped when she saw his arm, then reached out and turned it to examine the spotted blood from where he had braced his fall. She fingered a Band-Aid from her purse and placed it over the scrape even though it was too small to cover but a fraction of it.

***

Right before getting into his mom’s car, Bobby felt equally urged to run away or hold her tight.

“Hop in the front seat,” she said when he tried to climb in the back.

“I’m not allowed to ride in the front seat,” Bobby said.

“Have you ever ridden up front before?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Nothing bad ever happens on your first time. That goes for everything.” She opened the door for him. “No, no,” she said as he reached for the seatbelt. “That will just make it worse.”

“Where are we going?” Bobby asked. He looked at the dashboard clock. It was broken, flashing all nines.

9 “North, sweetie,” she said.

“We’re already pretty far north, aren’t we?”

“Yes, sweetie. Yes, we are.”

The parking lot crowd flooded around their car like a murmur of birds, each person attached to or trying to follow some other. A formation led by none and all. Bobby’s mom honked her horn to push her way through.

They turned north onto a highway that travelled even farther through the park. Bobby saw TeleBillboards displaying his school picture, name, and the last place he had been seen. The picture was a few years old; Bobby barely recognized himself.

His mom reached over to pinch his cheek. “You’re a celebrity. Now you can’t say I never did anything for you.”

The farther north they went, the bigger the rides grew, sprawling like giant spiders. Even though these were all empty, they never stopped running. Employees still stood around, waiting to tear tickets and give safety speeches as the vacant trains raced over tracks arched across the road.

Right after they flew past a sign that said “Last Available Exit,” Bobby saw a police car approaching, red and blue lights winking in the rearview mirror.

His mom pulled over and rolled the window down. It took the cop a few minutes to catch up. He approached the driver’s side and hunched over the window. His sausage-and-onion breath filled the car.

“Ma’am, you can’t drive up here,” he said, then looked at Bobby and leaned in closer, grasping the door. The cop stared. Bobby was afraid to make eye contact with him; he wondered how far back the Telebillboard stood. Bobby’s mom ran a fingernail up and down her leg. The

10 cop kept looking over at her. She reached up and pushed her hair behind her ear then played with

the buttons on her shirt. “Ma’am?” He shifted his focus back to Bobby’s mom. “Did you hear

me? You can’t drive up here.”

“I’ll turn around,” she whispered.

The cop coughed and examined Bobby.

“Was there anything else you needed?” Bobby’s mom whispered, even quieter than before.

The cop started coughing again and could now barely breathe. It looked like he was trying to say something else, but then a voice shot like static through his walkie-talkie. It made

all three of them jump. The cop pulled it to his mouth, caught his breath, and replied in some

alien code. “Just turn around,” he said to Bobby’s mom, stiffly, then jogged back to his car and

sped a U-turn through the grassy median.

“Find a good radio station,” Bobby’s mother said, switching the ignition back on. She waited until the cop was out of sight before accelerating back onto the highway. Bobby reached

over and turned the dial until he heard nothing but white noise. His mother sang along—creating

something like a dry gargle from the back of her throat—as they continued north through parts of

AlaskaLand that didn’t even have employees, much less guests, just bright shining paint. It

looked like a toy village, freshly unwrapped. They could hear the squawk and caw of south-

pointed sandhill cranes, flying like boomerangs above them.

They kept driving until they reached the edge of AlaskaLand. The sky and land stretched

out past it to such flat vast expanses that Bobby could look at it and understand what it meant to

feel emptiness as an object. Bobby’s mom appeared on the verge of tears; he reached over and

grabbed her hand. He had never felt it so relaxed.

11 On both sides of the car, lines of orange-vested workers scraped through permafrost to lay steel and wire. Their machines made awful music. One worker walked over to them.

“You can’t be here, ma’am,” he shouted, barely audible through their closed windows.

Bobby’s mom turned toward him and said gently, “This is what I wanted to show you.”

The construction worker banged a hand against the door. “It’s dangerous, ma’am. Turn on around.”

“How are you going to ask us to leave,” she said, “when this is the first place we’ve ever felt at home?”

12 Pickle Dies

Pickle likes his ex-wife’s house because when he steps out for a night piss the

Tallahassee streetlights light and shape the plants like Greek statues.

He slides the door shut behind him and curls back down on the couch, pulling the sheet up to his wet armpits. It’s patterned Winnie the Pooh; they must have bought it twenty years ago, when his daughter was still a child, but it smells like a dog has been sleeping on it. Fur rubs off when Pickle pinches the sheet between his fingers. Did nobody wash it?

Whenever he’s really working to fall asleep, he’ll smack his lips. Maybe he saw that in a movie once. He sits up then lies back down just to sit up again in a never-ending rotation till the sun starts to rattle against the trees. He wants to watch TV but worries about waking everyone, so he decides to just watch it on mute but can’t crack the remote. The screen won’t flash no matter which button he presses.

He leans back and lets his eyes trace the ceiling as if it were a maze to solve. He tries not to stare at that stain, the one shaped like pimpled lungs. But every stain looks like something when you’ve got everything wrong with you. His lungs are shot; his liver is shot; his skin is shot

(not to mention his eyes and ears). He gives himself a week left to live, tops. And he doesn’t need to see any doctor to know. Doctors only tell you that everything is fine. Doctors say everything is fine and you’ll live forever. Doctors don’t know shit.

He thinks about everything he needs to put in order before he dies. Finances? Check. He doesn’t have any finances. Religion? Check. He doesn’t have any religion. Family? He’ll call that a half-check. That’s why he’s here, after all. That’s why he begged Sand to convince his daughter to come to visit. That and because he wants to feel seen again. He wants to remember

13 how it feels to arouse some reaction in other people, some reaction other than the brief moments of anger he often ignites in strangers.

***

Around 7 a.m., Sand and Bill come down. They make pancakes from a box and top them with blackberry jam and bring a plate over to Pickle, still sprawled out on the couch. He gets nauseous after just a few bites.

“You didn’t cook these long enough,” Pickle says. “The insides are still runny.”

“How did you sleep?” Sand asks.

“Oh, fine.” Pickle rubs his lower back. “I’m a little sore is all.”

“I think there’s a blowup in one of these closets,” Bill says.

“There’s no room for a blowup,” Sand says. “We would be tripping over it all day.”

“I think he might be more comfortable knowing we don’t have to eat breakfast standing in the kitchen,” Bill says.

“Hush,” Sand says. “You can sit at the dinner table.”

“I don’t want to eat breakfast at the dinner table,” Bill says. “The dinner table is for dinner.”

“Why don’t you buy me a dog bed and I can sleep on that?” Pickle coughs into his palm.

Bill and Sand are looking away so he wipes his phlegm on the couch cushion. “Better yet, a coffin. Then when I die you just have to close the lid and bury me out back.”

Bill starts to say something but Sand cuts him off. “Just drop it.”

Pickle—feeling accomplished for getting a rise out of Bill—leans forward and uses the coffee table to push himself up. The empty dishes on top chat against each other. After finding

14 his balance, he goes over to his bag, pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and struggles the sliding glass door open.

He sits on the concrete bench and looks back at his reflection in the door. A collage of waist-high smears—as if rubbed off a dog’s nose—renders his body smudged and amoeba-like.

Pickle looks away.

Tapping his empty breast pocket, he realizes he can’t find his lighter. He scans the patio, cluttered with the same old bullshit: lawn chairs dripping mildewed rags, a shovel rusting against the house. Orange bug spray caps shine among the muck. Mold fills a steel water bowl. A utility lighter hangs off a grill.

“Bingo,” Pickle says, reaching.

Rows of long grass droop back over themselves like barbed wire. Pickle fantasizes about cutting the lawn. He can’t remember when he last sweated. A mound of dirt sits near the back fence. It looks freshly dug. Pickle wonders if it’s a grave, if a p et was recently buried back here.

A squirrel sprints on top of the dirt and jerks its head around.

“Fuck you, squirrel,” Pickle says, then slaps at the mosquitos tickling his neck.

***

When Pickle gets back inside, Sand and Bill are halfway up the stairs, headed off to perform whatever pre-work rituals.

“Try not to sit on the couch when you’ve just finished smoking,” Bill says.

“Don’t listen to him,” Sand says.

“Don’t listen to me,” Bill says.

Pickle decides to respect at least one of the countless petty things they ask of him, but he feels suddenly flint-kneed and lightheaded, so he just nods and by the time he says “Sorry” their

15 door has already shut so instead he says it to himself. He closes his eyes and props his feet against the coffee table and before he knows it Sand and Bill are back downstairs.

“I talked to Cyn yesterday,” Sand says. “She’ll be by around noon. Tell her to call me.”

“Noon.” Pickle says. “We’ll see.”

“It wasn’t easy to convince her to come,” Sand says. “Ask her about school, her major. I think you’ll be proud.”

Bill gives Pickle a look he can’t decipher.

“It’s just...your feet...if you could...,” Bill says.

Pickle rotates his legs onto the couch.

“No, it’s...your shoes.” Bill looks over at Sand as if waiting for her to jump in. “Just...if you could just keep your shoes off the furniture.”

Pickle lets his feet slide onto the floor.

“We just bought new stuff,” Sand says. “That’s why Bill said the thing about smoking.”

Bill motions to the fridge. “There is salami if you get hungry. Help yourself to whatever except—” Sand glares at him. “Whatever.”

“What about water? Can I have that?” Pickle asks. “I’d hate for my kidneys to get shot too.”

“Sure, help yourself.” Bill opens the front door.

Sand watches him from the kitchen. “I’ll meet you in the car.”

“Aye, aye.” Bill goes outside, and they hear the engine start.

Sand walks over and sits next to Pickle. “Hey.”

16 Pickle, forcing a smile, prepares to hear the limits of his welcome. They haven’t yet discussed how long he’ll be staying, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she wanted him gone by tomorrow afternoon.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

“There’s a first time for everything.” He stares at his feet.

“You’re brave.”

“What have I ever done that was so brave?”

She looks away.

“I just wanted to ask,” Pickle says, “if I could stay for a few days, or maybe even—”

Bill honks the car horn twice: a long one followed by a short almost apology. She quickly says goodbye, then walks to the counter to gather her bag. Watching her leave, he wonders how she’ll act when he dies, whether his death will drag up old emotions or just feel like the long - awaited punchline of a wordy, boring joke.

The clock shows only 8:30.

He wishes he had asked her about the remote.

8:31

8:32.

It’s truly amazing, he thinks, how much time there is in a day. If a person only had one or two days to live, that wouldn’t be much less than a lifetime.

Without meaning to, he falls asleep.

***

A knock rings out.

17 “Come in,” Pickle gasps, startled awake. But the knocking continues. His eyes confuse around the room. Having just woken up, he can’t find the front door: everything is a blur.

After surveying what feels like a different room each time his eyes make a pass, he squints the light gold of a door handle. He can’t tell if it’s locked, but Cyn must have a key.

“Come in,” he shouts, robbing breath from his lungs. Door and lock collide then collide again. The knocking resumes.

Dammit, Pickle thinks, pushing off the couch and rocking forward to not so much stand as fall upward. He uses first the countertop then the wall to steady himself as he makes his way.

Now don’t get annoyed already, Pickle tells himself.

He reaches over and unlocks the door.

Instead of his daughter, he opens it to a man his own age, wearing a black shirt with a priest’s collar. The man holds out his arms as if to say: Ta-da. “May I come in?”

“No,” Pickle says, caught off guard.

“Are you Peter?” the man asks.

“Do I know you?”

“Sand and Bill invited me.”

“People call me Pickle.”

“May I come in?” the man says.

“No,” Pickle says.

“Pickle,” he says. “I won’t be long.”

“I’m expecting my daughter,” Pickle says. “Fact, I thought you were her.”

The man peels out a watch. “Not till noon. It’s only ten. May I come in?”

“How many times you gonna ask?”

18 “That was the last time,” the man says.

Pickle steps back. “I’m holding you to the few minutes.” He tries to walk confidently but only makes it a few feet before leaning hard against the counter. “Sorry,” he says. “My knees are shot.”

The man stops behind him.

“Have a seat.” Pickle motions to the couch. The man squeezes by and sits on the nearest cushion but scoots when Pickle almost falls in his lap.

“Do you know why I’m here?”

“No,” Pickle says, then pauses. “Yeah.”

“First, let me say you’re very lucky. You have a beautiful, kind family.”

“You say that like you’re the one who figured it out.”

“No, no,” the man says. “I just think it’s important to remember what all we have. How lucky we are. How lucky we have been.”

“What do you mean 'we’?” Pickle says. “You planning to come with me?”

“In some form. In some fashion.”

“Only one fashion I know of.”

“Would you like to pray with me?”

“No.”

The man nods and looks around the room. “That’s a fine TV. I have the same one, actually. Why don’t we sit and watch something?” He picks up the remote. “Would you like to sit and quietly enjoy some television with me? Yes, then, after a bit, if there is anything you want to talk about, anything you want to confess or ask absolution for, just start. I’ll be listening, even if it doesn’t seem like I am.”

19 “They let you have a TV?”

“College football,” the man says. “I can’t live without it.”

“Do you look away when they show the cheerleaders?”

The man laughs. “Maybe I could hear your confession now?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Pickle says, coughing.

“You know why I’m here?”

“I said I did.”

“Your ex-wife asked me to come.”

Pickle feels his heart acting funny and gives it a minute to calm down. “One time she found my bicycle chained outside a bar and beat it with a hammer.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” the priest says.

“She once threw a pair of scissors at me. And she thinks I ’m the one who needs to see a priest.”

“Sand comes to church every week.”

“Fuck you,” Pickle says and coughs.

“We’ve all done things we need to answer for,” the priest says.

“Done? I’ve done but one, maybe two things in my life,” Pickle says, “the rest is just personality.”

“You need to ask for absolution,” the priest says.

“You need to ask to kiss my ass.” Pickle shifts in his seat. He feels the pinch of a hemorrhoid.

10:01

20 Pickle thinks the priest is about to get angry or snap, but he just sighs and leans forward and says, “I certainly will not.” For a moment, it looks like he might say something else, but instead he stands and sucks in a deep breath. Air expands his stomach into something spacious enough to curl inside. Exhaling, he leaves.

10:02

10:03

I should have asked him about the remote, Pickle thinks. He decides to again try figuring it out himself, but he can’t find the damn thing anywhere. He’s been sitting on the Winnie the

Pooh sheet and dog hair now covers his pants. That is what Sand and Bill want, he thinks: Pickle the dog. Pickle the neutered dog, obeying their orders, “Here boy, sleep on the couch and stay away from the people food.”

He wants to smoke a cigarette inside just to spite them but knows he’s too tired to finish the whole thing and his pack is running low. He kicks the coffee table and listens to the dishes shake.

Pickle closes his eyes and falls back asleep.

***

Near one o’clock his daughter comes but not alone. She knocks on the door as it opens, as if she were a mother who didn’t want to catch her son touching himself. A man trails in behind her, holding her hand.

Pickle snaps awake. He had only been half-asleep: still aware of his body but enjoying pulses of strange imagery.

The first thing he thinks is, Fuck, I want a cigarette.

The second thing he thinks is, Say hello to your daughter.

21 He can’t believe how beautiful she’s become in the last five (six? seven?) years. Short, yes, but too smart to be a model anyway. Not brilliant, perhaps, but possessed of a certain intuitiveness. He wonders how she did in high school. Was she class president? Valedictorian?

Prom Queen? No, likely not. But who decided those things matter?

“Cynthia,” he says and tries to stand, but his body doesn’t do more than resettle on the couch. “Introduce me to your friend.”

“This is Patrick,” she says. “Pat, say hi.”

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Cynthia says.

Pickle tries again but can’t rise past slumped over. He’s suddenly annoyed that Cynthia brought a friend when this may be the last time he ever gets to see her, as if visiting her father were just some errand to run between the real events of her life.

They come a few steps inside, but Pickle still has to look over the back of the couch to see them. Cynthia kicks something small and rubbery down the hall. A dog toy. The way she kicks it—softly, achingly—confirms to Pickle that a dog has recently died. Had a dog lived its entire life since the last time he saw his daughter?

“Pat’s a musician,” Cynthia says.

“Music student,” Pat says, blushing.

“A musician,” Pickle says. “Marvelous.”

“I’m really not that good,” Pat says, blushing even more.

“And what are you studying, dear?” Pickle says.

“I’m studying history,” she beams.

“No,” Pickle says. “No, that’s not right.”

22 “Huh?”

“History,” he says. “No, I don’t like that at all.”

“But you like that he’s studying music?” Cynthia says. “You don’t even care about

music. I know how you talk to people. I know what you do.”

“I love music.” Pickle is surprised by his own defensiveness.

“You studied history. You majored in history.” Cynthia lowers her voice. “Not that I give

a damn.”

“History was different back then,” Pickle says. “More interesting things had happened.

Now there is nothing interesting that has happened.”

Cynthia’s lower jaw slightly opens, then wiggles around, overloaded with half-formed

phrases.

“Now, sir.” Pat steps forward and holds a hand up as if Pickle were some beggar they

saw on the street. “With all due respect, you don’t know a damn thing about your daughter.”

“You’ll never be a musician if you keep defending people,” Pickle says, which makes Pat back up and quiet. Pickle learned long ago that you can get people to do anything if you know

how to put them in competition with who they think they are.

Cynthia turns to Pat, “I told you he would get like this.”

“You did. You told me.”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“You did. I said you did.”

“You’re too good to die in a hospital?” Cynthia says to Pickle. “Or at your apartment?”

“I wanted to die at home.”

“Mom and Bill bought this place two years ago. You’ve never even been here before.”

23 “They owe me for all they’ve put me through.” Pickle himself isn’t sure what he means by this. When he’s around strangers, every conversation feels like a board game—full of conscious, premeditated moves—but, talking to his daughter, he feels out of control.

“Perfect,” Cynthia says. “We’re gone.”

“Call your mother,” Pickle says.

“It was nice meeting you, sir,” Pat says.

“Fuck you, Pat,” Pickle says. He takes out his cigarettes and pulls the utility lighter from his jeans.

Opening the front door, Cynthia turns to say, “Smoke more cigarettes. Never stop smoking,” then slams it shut.

At least he had remembered to tell her to call her mother. You couldn’t take that away from him.

Pickle puts his feet up on the coffee table and lights a cigarette, no longer caring whether

Sand and Bill kick him out. If they did, that would say more about them than him. You can’t kick a dog out for chewing up the carpet. You can’t kick a dog out for acting like a dog.

Maybe he should be relieved that Cynthia will hate him till the end. After all, her and her mother’s hatred kept him company all those years he moved up and down Florida, getting evicted from one studio apartment after another. Their hatred kept him tied to something, and he followed that rope back when he needed someplace to die. He has to admit it had been disappointing to learn, when he showed up at her door, that Sand didn’t hate him anymore—at least not like she used to—that her feelings toward him had cooled into a combination of nothingness and pity. He had hoped for intense anger, or anguish, but had been met with

24 gentleness instead. It’s better to be hated than seen as just rubble from the past. Better to be seen as the devil than a broken down version of yourself.

He sucks a few times on his cigarette and feels his energy coming back. He stands easily and walks outside to piss. Just like a dog, he laughs to himself, then looks at the mound of dirt in the back of the yard. He zips up and returns to the couch.

So what now?

Bored, he taps his palms on his knees like: ho-hum. But then he does it again and again until he finds the beat of some song he invents as he goes along. After he finds a rhythm in his hands, he begins to whistle, only able to scale a few bars before coughing. He keeps tapping until he finds his breath and starts to whistle again, erupting quickly into another coughing fit. But he doesn’t stop tapping his knees. He whistles again: same result.

But, he slowly realizes, the coughs are part of the song, too. So he repeats his low octave hawk until it forms a pattern, until it sounds like some animal language, until, he notices, it echoes like distant barking.

25 26 He Knows Where Fish Sleep

Every Sunday the cashier at the Cheap Butts Filling Station gets shot dead.

An article in the Monday paper talks about a special corner of the graveyard set aside for

these folks at the Reverend’s ask. Every cashier seems to have been the last of their living kin. A

picture depicts the manager hanging a “Now Hiring” sign in the front window. That sorta thing’ll

think a man ideas. For the last year, I’ve been trying to figure out whether Ireally want to die or just think that I want to. That’s the difference between looking at a knife and doing something with it. Last week, after I shaved my head with Rusty’s straight razor, I used it on my neck too, just to know how it feels to hold a blade against my own throat, but I need something more

inevitable, and how could you not learn the truth when you’re just days away from smelling

gunpowder?

Coming off a year’s unemployment, my resume reads spare—I admit it—but I figure beggars and choosers they can’t be. Rusty’ll piss his balls if he sees me with a job, though I sure

as hell ain’t telling him where. Churchfolk only believe in death-at-own-handedness for saints

and martyrs—the article says some have started protesting outside of Cheap Butts, demanding it

close down— and I don’t want to ruin his moment of pride, his first chance to see me as more than toilet spit.

Five years ago, Rusty married my mom and they moved here to Port St. Joe, Florida before those menthols she smoked grew tumors across her lungs like barnacles on an oyster shell. He took me in after my accident last year, planning for just a few months.

So now it’s just me and Rusty, Rusty and me. Rusty and me and Mom’s old ashtray. Rusty

and me and everything that peoples the space between us. Rusty says he’s sick of the humidity,

27 the rain. He wants to attend divinity school then start his own congregation up north but can’t afford to on account of supporting me, his thirty-year old dipshit stepson.

***

The Cheap Butts’ manager says, “You’ve got the job!” all favor-like after we barely interviewed five minutes. The store is a mess: racks knocked over, chip bags spilt. A bullet- ridden fridge drips off-brand orange soda to a fly-stained puddle. The bathroom: out of order. I ask the manager if he minds the protestors outside, but he says he loves them for all the coffee and tobacco they buy.

I can’t help myself for saying, “It seems you’ve got a high employee turnover rate.”

“And how!” the manager says.

He hands me my uniform. There’s a tattered hole through the stomach.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I hosed it off.”

“Mind if I color in a bullseye?”

“A sense of humor!” he says. “Never lose that, Charlie! Never change.”

I don’t know where he found the name Charlie because it sure as hell don’t mean me.

“The most important thing,” he says, “is that you pay for everything you drink from the soda fountain and that includes refills and that includes just ice. You start tomorrow.”

“How many sick days I got?”

“Twelve. I don’t know. Seven.”

“I’m not feeling very well,” I say. “Maybe I’ll just start on Sunday.”

“You’re in what we call a ‘probationary period.’”

“What if I’m sick now?”

“Then you’ll work sick.”

28 ***

On my way home, I drop by the funeral service for the Cheap Butts attendant who preceded me. Protest signs lean against the church exterior, which is greener than I remember, spotted by some mold or fungus. This is the first time I’ve been here since my mom’s funeral service. I’m wearing my Cheap Butts shirt—I had put it on to make sure it fit—which suddenly feels wrong in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. The Reverend doesn’t notice me. He’s too busy shouting how he knows, knows, this is the week God will finally summon him to heaven, but then one woman stands and throws her left shoe at me, then the right. Then her husband takes off his shoes and throws them at me. The Reverend stops speaking and everybody turns around.

Then they all throws their shoes at me. I stand there and let a few bruise up my arms, but most of them miss. A child’s shoe hits my face, and it feels like my nose might start to bleed. Another one nicks my tender scalp. I lift my hands to shield my eyes. Someone strings his shoes together and throws them at my stomach like a Frisbee. I lose my breath and stumble out, looking below my arms to see if Rusty is in the crowd.

“The Devil,” the Reverend shouts, following me to the parking lot. “The Devil he trots before us.” He looks much shorter out here, even though he’s still wearing his heeled shoes. The daylight reveals his youth. He’s no more than a few years older than me, with sharp widowing hair and a face that’s all cheek. Deodorant stains form eyes around the pits of his black robe, which smells like worn socks and cheap cologne.

“Martyr me,” he whispers and sits on the asphalt. He tosses a switchblade onto the ground, lifts his chin and pulls down his collar to expose his throat, closing his eyes.

I walk off, wondering if they’re going to put their shoes back on or finish the ceremony in their socks.

29 ***

I’m asleep on the couch when Rusty comes home. I sit up fast at the doorknob turn, leaving a shadow on the cushions. Looks-wise, Rusty appears a retired boxer, ex-navy seal, or convict.

He has tired blue eyes, buzzed hair, and lean arms that coil like snakes when his elbows move.

He repairs air conditioners and dresses always in full camo.

The story with Rusty is he’s got PTSD from being an extra in war movies. His twenties and thirties were spent dying in the deleted scenes of straight-to-video documentaries and History

Channel dramatizations. He’s fought in every war there was. The good ones, at least.

“What a sight unseen,” he says sarcastically from the doorway, setting a stack of plywood on the floor. “Take a break, flesh-head, You’re working too hard.”

“Stop calling me that,” I say.

“Help me board up these windows,” he says. “Then we’re going to protest.”

“The windows?”

“Look at a newspaper for once in your life,” he says, even though he sees me read the paper every day. “A tropical storm’s headed for the Gulf. They say it could be a hurricane by the time it gets here.”

“You’re talking about that,” I say. “It’s too early to board for that.”

“Nobody’s going to tell me what to do,” he says.

“Well, I’m too wore out to help,” I say. “I nearly drowned, you know.”

“You were underwater thirty seconds,” Rusty says. “Over a year ago.”

“You sound awful sure for someone who never even talked to the doctor.”

“You know I can’t stand hospitals,” he says, then sniffs the air. “Something sour in here?”

He sniffs some more. “When’s the last time you vodka’d the sheets?”

30 “Dad,” I fiddle with mom’s old ashtray. “I got a job.”

He takes a plastic bottle of vodka off the shelf, walks over, and pours some on me. Rusty cleans everything with cheap vodka. It stings the scrapes on my arm. I roll off the couch, still wrapped in my sheets. “That bites.”

“Goddamn your excuses,” he says. “And goddamn your sheets. You sweat and piss in them all day till I can smell it from the goddamn door. The gosh damn door, I mean. The gosh darn door.”

“Did you hear what I said, Dad?”

“Darn Freon killing my nose hairs each by each, and the last smell I’m ever to remember is your sour stench. And call me Rusty, darn it.”

“I got a job, Dad,” I say. “I’m trying.”

“I’ve died over and again for this country, and this is what they do with me. This is where they put me. A tiny apartment with my dipshit stepson who won’t vodka his sheets every few weeks to spare my nose the extra miles. If I’d spent my twenties lying in bed—”

“I’m thirty.”

“Well,” he says and starts to walk in circles. “Well, well, well.”

“Well’s for horses,” I say.

“Give me a cigarette then come on, gosh darn it.” He sits on the floor and hugs his knees.

“Carton’s fresh out.” I shake the hollow thing.

“Let me smell your fingers, flesh-head.” He crawls toward me.

“I didn’t smoke any, Dad. I swear.”

31 “Let me smell.” He grabs my ankle. I kick and taunt, “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.” He pulls at my leg but it slips out of his grip, so the blanket just bunches in his arms, still damp with liquor. He shoves his nose into it and inhales deeply. I hear him shudder with delight.

***

As I walk to work on my first day, I cut through a neighborhood and, moving through the empty streets, see a young girl jumping on a trampoline in her front yard. I stop when I reach her house and watch her jump.

“I’m practicing,” she says. “When the hurricane comes, I’m gonna jump through its eye and punch it in the brain.”

“You’ll get struck by lightning,” I say.

“Hurricanes don’t have lightning,” she says.

“That can’t be true,” I say, but I had never considered it before. There’s always lightning in

Florida.

She sticks her tongue out at me then turns mid-air so she’s facing away. I keep walking, scanning the houses as I do. Nobody else’s windows are boarded up, yet Rusty spent all night hammering away, nearly making me sleep through work because the house was so dark this morning that eight a.m. looked like midnight.

Protestors have completely ringed the gas station when I get there. They see my uniform and grab my elbows and shoulders to try to keep me from going inside. It’s already ninety degrees out and they can barely get a grip for all my sweat.

“I’m late enough as it is,” I say.

“Don’t you know that’s the Devil’s house?” they say. “Don’t you know what happens in there?”

32 “I get a paycheck’s what happens in there,” I respond, whipping my torso around till they let go. Some do the sign of the cross and start to pray. I see Rusty in the back—he must not have slept a minute—sharing another man’s cigarette. When our eyes meet, he spits on the ground and looks away.

***

The story with me is, two years ago I dropped out of Tallahassee Community College to become a door to door cell phone salesman. I would visit this one elderly lady’s house at the end of every month. We would chat while I did her chores then she would buy a phone or two, letting unopened boxes of them pile in her kitchen. Becky did nothing but complain about the grocery store that fired her. “Alcoholism is a disease, right? So how come I can’t use my sick days to get drunk?”

One day I had been cleaning leaves from her pool (“Be careful,” she had called from the back door, “my husband drowned in there”) when I slipped on the corner and hit my head on the way in. I stayed underwater almost ten minutes—Rusty don’t know what he’s talking about. It would’ve been a record if there’d been somebody to time me. Even though every doctor in town said no brain damage had been done, I knew something in me had changed. I could no longer motivate myself to work, for one, and I stopped biting my fingernails. That was also when I started to really think about death—and the difference between thinking-about and wanting.

I tried to visit Becky again when I got out of the hospital, but she wouldn’t open the door, afraid I had come to sue her.

***

Tuesday morning, I place two packs of Kools on Mom’s grave. Mist flickers across her stone like a lake at dawn, and I pretend its cigarette smoke floating up through the roots. Rusty

33 hasn’t said a word to me since he saw me at the gas station. He’s just been silently stacking cans in the pantry, changing the flashlight batteries, buying ammo and duct-taping magazines together— “jungle style.” He paces back and forth all day, wearing a plastic army helmet, mumbling lines from past roles. I ask Mom to help him understand my decision’s got nothing to do with him or God. Then I ask her to help me understand what my decision is.

All around are plots of cousins, aunts, uncles. After visiting them, I move to graves I don’t know, the cliched epitaphs, sticky weeds nobody cares to pull. I see the section for the dead gas station cashiers, cramped together crosses that stitch over scabs of grass. I lose my breath and don’t peek closer.

***

The first full moon of every lunar cycle, the Reverend props open the front door of his house outside the church and ties himself to his bed with piano wire. He lays a scythe by his feet for the devil to come and disembowel him with. He thinks himself a martyr. But the Devil never comes—nobody comes. Nobody except a cloud of mosquitoes and me—the next morning—to untie him, ashamed of his still beating heart. I tell him there’re easier ways to kill yourself. He could set himself on fire like that Tibetan Monk Rusty once played. But the Reverend says that

Saints are slaughtered by the Devil’s hand, not their own, and I nod, even as he looks at his own hands, unsure if he can tell the difference.

The Reverend says, “I’m beginnin’ to believe you’re Godsent to sacrifice me.”

“Which would make me what?” I say.

“Consider it from my perspective,” the Reverend says.

34 Walking to work on Friday, I can smell the sugared air of a coming storm. Stray clouds litter the sky—the outer bands. The wind runs cool over my scalp. I start to worry that the hurricane will hit before Sunday morning. Rusty sees me going into Cheap Butts. It’s early and most of the protestors are toeing around, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, both bought from inside; a few idly toss rocks up and down in a way that comes off as more bored than menacing. Everyone keeps glancing at the sky, pointing at it, wincing. One guy with a white ponytail and a nicotine-yellowed mustache waves his limbs about, telling a story to the interest of two or three. Green paint lays in stripes across Rusty’s face; he stands alone, a few feet away from everyone else. When he sees me, he lets his sign sag and yips. Everyone looks over for a moment then returns to what they were doing, but Rusty keeps yipping. I try to ignore him, but when my hand starts pulling the door he hollers to wait and jogs over.

“Hey flesh-head,” he says. I turn toward him, not sure what I expect, but he just asks, “Do you get a discount on bottled water?”

“Don’t call me flesh-head,” I say.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says.

I pause for a minute so he can say what he meant, but he just stands there quietly, so I open the door and walk inside.

“Where are you going?” he says.

***

On Saturday morning, the Reverend comes in. He’s wearing Bermuda shorts, flip flops, and a baggy fishing shirt, sunglass tan nested between his ears and eyes. The protestors are just beginning to arrive, a late start. Rusty doesn’t seem to be with them today. They look drained, frustrated. They know the storm will chase them off when it makes landfall, and if it causes any

35 damage around town, when would they find the time to come back here? Looking at the sky

through the windows, I think the hurricane will hold off for at least another day, but I wonder

whether it would be worth sticking around just to see how it all ends.

“You look like a cancelled check,” the Reverend says.

I wipe my brow. “What can I do for you?”

“Mint Skoal, please.” He has the tired voice of a man near his end, a man who’s lived a life

longer than his age. I ask for his ID and see that he’s actually younger than me. I place the green tin down. He has the exact cash in his pocket. When he hands it over, I spot thin callouses like bracelets around his wrists.

“Keep the change,” he says, tracing me with his eyes.

I stare dumb.

“A joke.” He rubs the top of his head. “I barely recognize you with the bare scalp.”

“Sure,” I say, not surprised that he doesn’t remember seeing me at the funeral.

“Have you seen your stepdad today?” He leans forward and places his hands on the

counter. I shake my head. He has a desperation in his face that I’ve never seen before. His left

eye squints half shut.

“We were supposed to go fishing.” The Reverend leans in farther. His neck seems to grow toward me like a vine, and I take a step back. “One last time before she hits. You ever go fishing with him?”

I take another step back and bump into the cigarette case. “Just once.”

“But never after that?”

“Never after that.”

The Reverend twists closer. “He knows the good spots. He knows where fish sleep.”

36 I feel pinned, even though he’s few feet away. The glass case creaks as I press against it.

“The only time we fished was years ago. After Hurricane Ivan. Back when Rusty was nothing but our neighbor. The yards had all flooded. We sat on his roof and pulled catfish from the

driveway.”

“I remember that year. More than a few people died.”

A weight compresses my ribs, and I lose my breath. “More than a few catfish too,” I barely

manage to say.

“You think catfish mind dying? Me, I think they see the hook.”

I try to respond but can’t speak. He looks down at the counter and rubs his hand along the

surface, as if admiring it, then leans back. Air returns to my lungs.

“Fresh coffee?” he asks.

“Brewed a pot before you walked in,” I say, catching my breath.

“How is it?” he asks.

“I’m drinking it.”

“Is it strong?”

I nod.

“Bitter?”

I nod.

“Good,” he says. “I like it strong. I like it bitter.”

“Me too.”

“‘But I like it, because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.’ You ever read Stephen

Crane?”

“We have a twelve ounce, a sixteen, and a twenty-four.”

37 “I’ll take the twelve.” He sets a dollar on the counter. I slide a penny back and motion with

my head. “Pot’s over there.”

He stares at me then taps the penny twice and gets his coffee.

On Sunday morning, I wake up early to the sound of wind and rain thrashing the trees. I

go to wake up Rusty and tell him the hurricane hit early, but his bed is empty. In the bathroom, I

see he’s already filled the tub and some buckets with water. His boots, normally by the front

door, are gone. I take a guess at where he is.

As I walk to Cheap Butts, I try not to think about what’s supposed to happen there today,

afraid I might lose my nerve. I cut through the same neighborhood as always and see the trampoline. The girl has been on it every day I’ve walked by and still is, but it’s so weighed

down by water she’s not doing much more than splash around a puddle.

“Get inside!” I scream at her with a voice as loud and mean as I can make it. To my

surprise, she does. The rain grows thicker; it sounds like white noise. I continue on.

When I get to Cheap Butts, I see Rusty whacking away at a tree with his axe, trying to fell

it onto the gas station and figuring, I guess, that everyone would blame the damage on the

hurricane, or at least agree to blame the damage on the hurricane. The tree heels in the wind then

falls backward and knocks out some power lines. They snap like tendons ripping. Sparks jolt the

morning air. Rusty trips as he backpedals, splashing into a puddle then scurrying out on all fours.

Wet leaves stick to his body. I run toward him, my clothes waterlogged and heavy. The gas

station sits between us. Holding his ankle, still crawling backward, he looks over at me and

quickly points to the puddle that I’m moving toward: split wires dangle into it. Wind blows water

from the puddle closer to me, and I dart sideways and pull open the gas station door, surprised to

38 find it unlocked. I back away from the windows, then turn around. The Reverend stands behind the counter—his palms flat on it—staring at me. He’s mocked up a shirt to resemble my uniform.

A pinch of tobacco bulges his bottom lip. His head is shaved just like mine. I stare back and swallow, shivering wet.

“Here we are,” I say.

“Yes,” he says and spits into a cup. “Here we are.”

39 40 The Nature of the Ish

Sasha

They knocked on the door, and I whispered to Mark, “I know you don’t believe me, but

I’m telling you the truth: I never saw any letter from your brother.”

They knocked on the door, and I whispered to Mark, “If they ask about it: deny, deny, deny.”

They knocked on the door, but as I started to whisper something else, Mark opened.

“Mom,” Mark said. “Dad.”

“I’m surprised I didn’t break a knuckle,” his father said, clenching and unclenching his hand. “Hello, son.”

“Hello, dear,” his mother said.

A pause settled in, and his parents kept their eyes squared on Mark. They never acknowledged me until I spoke first, and, whenever I did, would look over as if surprised to find me there, a curio with brown hair and bad posture. I think they liked Mark’s first wife more.

“You two look thin,” I said.

“Sasha,” Mark’s mother said. “How are things?”

“Things are well,” I said, then corrected myself: “good.”

“Well, good,” Mark’s father said, walking past us. “If you kids will excuse us, it’s been a long drive and I think we wouldn’t mind washing up.” He turned to his wife. “You can take the master bathroom and I’ll take the guest. I’m sure there are two bathrooms in this place.” He looked to Mark for confirmation, and Mark nodded.

“Certainly,” Mark said.

“Certainly,” I said.

41 “Are you certain?” Mark’s mother said.

“Things are well,” I said.

Mark’s mother turned to her husband, then looked down at her watch. “Meet in the kitchen at six-fifteen?”

Mark’s father checked his watch. “Do you have six-o-two now?”

“Six on the dot.”

“Hm,” he said. “I’ll fix it in the bathroom.” He held up his wrist to us. “Waterproof.”

We oohed and ahh-ed as though we had never before heard of such pagan witchcraft.

“Second door on the right,” Mark said to his dad.

Mark and I went and sat at the kitchen table. I let my eyes shadow across the room.

“Hey,” I said to Mark. “Hey.”

“Jesus, I get it.” He turned. “You want me to deceive my parents soyou can continue deceiving me.”

“Circles,” I said, making one in the air with my finger. “Remember to talk in circles.”

“Leave it alone.”

“At least play nice until they leave.”

Mark started to say something when his father came in, wet face gleaming. He looked at his wrist, then around, then back at his wrist.

“Your mother come in already?” he said to Mark.

We shook our heads.

“Shit,” he said. “That’s right.” He scurried back into the bathroom and smoothed shut the door. Not even a click. I tried to roll my eyes at Mark, but he wasn’t paying attention. Then,

42 about ninety seconds later, the bedroom door opened and, a half-count behind it, the guest bathroom.

“Perfect timing,” Mark’s mother said.

“You could set a clock by our watches,” Mark’s father said and they both giggled.

“Wine?” I offered, standing.

“Just a nibble,” Mark’s father said.

“Three cubes of ice in mine,” Mark’s mother said.

“We don’t have cubes,” Mark said. “We use crushed.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Mark’s mother said.

“Just a few crumbs,” Mark’s father said. “I drink like a bird.”

“Do birds not drink a lot?” Mark said.

“What they don’t do is eat a lot,” Mark’s father said.

“I heard that wasn’t true,” I said, wrestling the cork out. Some wine dove to the floor. I let my sock absorb it. The bottom of my foot tingled.

“You ever seen a bird eat a ribeye?” Mark’s father said.

“Nope,” Mark’s mother said.

“You ever seen a bird chow down on surf n’ turf?”

“Never in my life,” Mark’s mother said.

I brought them their wine, then some for Mark and I. Mark made a mock-show of comparing how little was in his glass compared to mine.

“So,” Mark’s mother said. “Here we are. Us, and you.”

“You’ve probably been wondering,” Mark’s father said. “What we’re doing here.”

Mark mumbled, “I was under the impression you were just visiting.”

43 “Have you never heard the phrase, ‘Kill two birds with one stone’?” Mark’s father said.

“Visiting being one of the birds.”

“The main duck being Will.”

“What’s wrong with Will?” Mark asked.

“What’s wrong with Will, he asks,” his mother said.

“What’s wrong with your brother,” Mark’s father said. “Is that he is deranged.”

“Deranged-ish.”

“No ish about it.”

“What’s wrong with your brother is that he kills squirrels with a pellet gun.”

“He said he just wanted to shoot cans off the fence.”

“He cleans them and cooks the meat in our own kitchen.”

“When he’s not feeding it to the dog.”

Mark slammed both palms down on the table. I flinched back. His parents quieted and looked at him. “Why are we talking about Will?” Mark said. “Why did you drive out here to talk to me about Will?”

They looked at each other. Mark’s father scratched the back of his head. Mark’s mother bit her upper lip. I thought I heard them whisper. The look on their faces seemed to say that we’d missed something obvious.

“Well, you saw the letter,” Mark’s father said, attention returning to us. “What did it say?”

“What’s wrong with Will, you tell us,” Mark’s mother said.

“He hasn’t spoken since he wrote that thing,” Mark’s father said. “His last form of communication.”

44 “We want to know what it says,” Mark’s mother said.

“It might help us understand the incident, because he’s sure as hell not telling us anything.”

“Understanding is the mother of prevention.”

“The hospital says there are two possibilities. It was an accident or it wasn’t.”

“Which, your guess is as good as ours.”

“So hand it over.”

“We’d like to have an idea what we’re dealing with. Before he’s released, we mean.”

I picked at the scabby, wooden table and considered escaping to the bathroom.

Mark sat quietly, his face resting between upward pointing hands, almost as though he were praying, then he exhaled expansively and leaned back. He paused and curled a smile across his face. “Ask Sasha. She read it.”

His parents both stretched forward. It felt like their necks were lengthening across the table, branching toward me till they would be close enough to lick the sweat off my forehead. I determined to push the silence as long as I could. Anger wetted my armpits.

Will, unbeknownst to Mark and his parents, had sent us not one letter, but fifteen, all in the last month. After reading the first one, I took it out on my afternoon walk and slipped it in a random neighbor’s mailbox, intending just to buy myself time. Will had an untidy, disturbed mind; and I worried that his letter—essay, really—would be too upsetting to Mark. But before

Will’s first letter even came back around, another sat there in our mailbox, and I redirected that one too. After a few days of this, I realized my method was too simple, too traceable, so I started to redistribute some of our other mail, then some of other people’s mail.

45 Mark knew he had caught me doing something, but he wasn’t quite sure what. While doing laundry one day, he found a neighbor’s bank statement, forgotten inside my coat. He turned all my clothes’ pockets inside out, trying to find more evidence, then—panting, wild- eyed—dug through my purse. Stuck to the lining: a rubbed-off cartoon stamp, the exact type his brother had reels of.

“Did you?” Mark’s mother said, looking at me. “Read it?”

“Well?” Mark’s father said.

“Tell them about the letter,” Mark said.

“No,” I mumbled.

“No you didn’t read it?” Mark’s father said. “Or no, you won’t tell us what it said?”

I took a sip of my wine and held it in my mouth. I couldn’t figure out how to swallow. I pretended to take another sip but instead spit back in my glass, wiping a sleeve across my mouth and staining it red. “The letter,” I said. “From Will.”

“Is she okay?” Mark’s mother said. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Don’t you remember where you left it?” Mark rested a hand cruelly across my back.

“It’s in the bedroom,” I lied, then walked back there, where I crouched on the floor, leaving the door cracked so I could eavesdrop on what they were saying.

“What was that about the hospital?” Mark said.

“Either he was just cleaning the knife and it slipped,” Mark’s mother said. “Or, oh god, I can’t even say.”

“Like that time in high school. You remember.”

“With the beer bottle.”

“Look, we know that when a marriage is young—”

46 “And fragile.”

“Yes, when a marriage is young and fragile.”

“Any outside pressure can become, well...”

“That’s all she wrote.”

“Fat lady sung.”

“But, well, here it is: we need you to take in your brother for a little while.”

“A change of scenery would do him good, the doctor said so herself. And we know he would talk to you.”

“It’s a lot to ask, we understand that. That’s why we wanted to do it in person.”

After a moment of silence, Mark said. “What makes you think we’re fragile?”

“Fragile?” Mark’s father said. “Did we say fragile?”

“We said young, I remember we said that when a marriage is young.”

“Yes, when a marriage is young and fragile—”

“Well there you have it.”

“I suppose we did say fragile.”

Mark said, “I forgot about the beer bottle.”

“Where did Sasha go?” His father said. “Should someone check on her?”

“Here.” His mother’s chair squeaked as it slid across the floor.

I heard air drafts shudder through the vents and eyed the shadows around me: they always look so out of place indoors. I thought about how we crave light but really it’s just clawing the edges of our walls, looking for a way out. I wanted to sneak through a window, abandon all this and go walk circles around the neighborhood, forever, until there was nothing left in the house but empty space and echoes. I wanted to take my place in the crowd of misfits,

47 alongside the autistic boy who biked twelve hours a day and the man who lumbered around, staring at porchlights, sometimes past midnight, wearing just his underwear. Yes, the three of us, a new family of movement.

As I listened to Mark’s mother walk closer and closer, then eventually place her hand on the doorknob, a pain stirred inside me, and I realized I had been digging my fingers into my scalp.

*

48 Joanna

I had taken the day off from work.

After Dave had retired from his teaching job at the university, he had been home nonstop

for two months straight—so when he got invited to go cross-country skiing with some former

colleagues, I couldn’t resist the chance to monopolize some alone time.

All morning I had sat at the kitchen table, drinking wine and staring at various web

browsers.

Dave had left notes all over the house telling me not to touch the mail, to just leave it in

the box until he got home. But, it was late afternoon now, and my legs needed stretching, so I

decided to go get it because it’s my mail too. As I approached the end of our driveway, I noticed

Sasha walking down the street and waved, but she ignored me; everyone seemed to be getting a

bit squirrely these days.

Inside our mailbox sat a stuffed manila envelope, folded over itself. Ink pressed so deep I

could feel the indentation of each symbol. Slight tears spotted the zip code.

The stamp, a cartoon Disney character.

As soon as I got inside, I decided to open it, and pulled out over a hundred loose leaf

pages. The document— titledA Taxonomy o f Television and other Government Mind Controls:

Manifesto—was filled with sentences that fired like machine guns, unpunctuated save for dashes.

A few parts were illegible; the rest spoke sprawling paranoia, digressing in frenetic cursive on

invisible cameras and alien frequencies. Televisions whispering code. Maybe it was just the

wine—I was prone to alcohol-induced tunnel vision—or the dread of Dave coming home soon,

but the essay disturbed and possessed me. It felt like an unwelcome guest, an intrusion that

violated my mood of weary calm. After I read halfway through, examining each line closely, I

49 noticed a horrible resemblance, which quickly consumed my attention. I stole into the bedroom and slipped one of Dave’s old notebooks from his nightstand, then brought it into the kitchen and compared the handwriting, side-by-side. There was something unmistakably similar in the L’s and K’s. Both had lines that angled downward as they scrambled across the page. Equally disturbing, though, was that Dave’s notebook seemed to have been written in some sort of code; nonsensical sentences and strange symbols riddled every page. I pulled out my cell phone and tried to take a picture of the both texts, intending to research graphology when there was more time, but I couldn’t get my hand to stop shaking long enough to snap a clear photo. Attempting to calm myself down, I reached for my wine glass but knocked it over instead, soaking both the essay and Dave’s notebook.

I froze, then hurried a glance at the time; he would be due back soon, so I had to act quick and direct. I first took the manifesto into the office and shredded it, along with its envelope.

Then, after carefully unwinding and trashing the notebook’s metal wire, I shredded that too, cardboard and all. Tying up the bag of shreds, I could smell the flatness of paper, which reminded me of snuck cigarettes. I dumped it in the recycling.

It occurred to me—too late—that I should have checked the address on the envelope. If it had been meant for Dave, then who could have sent it? If he had tried to mail it out, but been short on postage, or whatever, then who was it intended for? I tried to exorcise from my brain all thoughts of the Unabomber, that he had also been a former academic

Less than a half-hour later, Dave arrived home and the first thing he asked was: “You didn’t get the mail, did you?”

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact I did.”

He groaned as he walked into the kitchen. “Was there anything unusual?”

50 I shook my head.

“Wine?”

I lifted my freshly refilled glass, but still couldn’t keep my hand steady, so I affected an ironic swirl. I closed my eyes and took a large sip. That helped.

He emptied the bottle into his own glass but barely squeezed half a serving.

“Well,” he said.

“I was hungry,” I said, improving my mood with another large sip.

Dave saw the red stain on the table that I had forgotten to wipe up. “You should really learn how to open a bottle.”

“The same way you get to Carnegie hall,” I said.

He poured his sip into my glass. “Might as well finish what you started.” He went out to the garage, and my insides clinched up. I grew breathless as the bottle rattled into the recycling.

How long had he been out there? Longer than usual? When he re-emerged in the kitchen, I tried to glean information from his face, but he always looked distressed lately, how could I tell if anything had changed?

“You should have rinsed it out,” I said.

“Cockroaches prefer beer.” He shrugged. “Are you sure there was nothing in the mail?”

“Was there something you were expecting?”

He shuffled over to the window and looked out. “There’s an extra car in their driveway.”

“I think Mark’s parents are visiting,” I said.

“Visiting?” he said. “What do you think they want?”

“What does it matter to you?”

“This is my neighborhood,” he said. “Every irregularity is my concern.”

51 “It’s not an irregularity. I just told you what it was.”

“Why,” he motioned to all the clutter around me, “is this place always such a mess?”

“What are you going to do about it?” I said.

“Does the recycling go out today?” he asked.

I eyed him for any insinuation, but the question seemed innocent enough. “No.”

“Didn’t it used to go out on Fridays?”

“When have you ever heard of anything going out on Fridays.”

“I swear it used to go out on Fridays,” he trailed off. “I’m going to go do some work.” He walked off toward the bedroom. I had grown increasingly concerned about what exactly constituted his “work,” but I didn’t get the chance to sit there worrying for too long, because he quickly came back in. “Somebodymust be stealing our mail.”

“What?”

“If there was nothing unusual in our mail today, then that’s the only explanation. You’ve been home all day, right? How often did you look out the front window?”

“Dave.”

“Was there any time when you stepped out? Even if it was short, five or ten minutes, did you leave the house?”

“Dave, sit down. I need to talk to you about something.”

He did so, though barely. His butt might have been just hovering above the chair.

“Relax,” I said. “Jesus, just calm down.”

He slouched back and affected a relaxed posture, but I could see he was nibbling on the inside of his lip. He gave me a look like, “Go on, if it’s so important.”

“This isn’t easy to say,” I said, easily. “But, well, I’ve been unfaithful-ish.”

52 He tempered his chewing, squinting his eyes like he used to when analyzing a

philosophical problem. “What exactly is the nature of the ish?”

I told him this invented story about a woman I had met while picking up Tex-Mex the

other night—a quite average looking woman—and how I staked out the bathroom, waiting for

her to come in, and, when she finally did, we engaged in some non-physical foreplay that

resulted in us both feeling something distinctly, well, tingly.

“This is all highly alarming to me,” he said.

“I can only imagine what you’re going through right now,” I said.

“It’s been a rough day,” he said, “between that and the mail.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” I slammed my palm down. “Is there nothing I could say that would make you stop thinking about the mail for one goddamn second. What is with you and the

fucking mail?”

“It’s mywork!'’ he said. “How could I ever think about anything else?”

“Why don’t you tell me what was in there?” I said.

He leaned forward, examining my face closely. “What are you getting at?”

“Who were you sending that manila envelope too? What kind of crazy shit have you

gotten involved with?”

“Sending a manila...” He grew incredulous. “I’m not involved with anything except

holding the government accountable!”

“The government?”

“The goddamn mailwoman!”

“What about the goddamn mailwoman?”

53 “We’ve been getting other people’s mail lately, not to mention some of our own mail has

gone missing too. God knows how long it’s been going on, but I never noticed until I was home

all the time. I’ve been building a case against her, keeping meticulous records, identifying

patterns. All of my evidence pointed toward there being an irregularity today. Here, I’ll show you.” He scurried off to the bedroom. I already had a sense of what was coming and so wasn’t

surprised when he ran back in and said—panicked, panting—“My notebook!”

“What about your notebook?” I asked, cruelly.

“One of my notebooks is missing!”

“Well, you see,” my hand, steady now, lifted my wine glass, and I enjoyed a sip. “You

see, I shredded your notebook.”

His mouth gaped.

“And we did get something unusual in the mail, and I shredded that too.”

He collapsed onto his knees, then bowed his head to the floor, but after moaning for a

second, he perked up. “So I was right, then?”

I nodded. “You were right.”

He pushed himself up and started pacing in the kitchen. “Maybe this is for the best,

maybe I wanted to play my cards too soon, when, really, I still need more data points, more

evidence of patterns, that’s how you build something irrefutable, yes.”

While he weighed those possibilities, I snuck off into the bedroom, took the rest of his

notebooks into the office, and started to shred them one by one. I didn’t bother to remove the

metal wires this time. The shredder made a sharp, struggling noise each time it reached one but

always handled the situation with surprising grace.

54 He ran into the room—frantic, frazzled—but, seeing he was too late, stood resignedly in the doorway.

“Bring me the mail,” I demanded.

“You know, some of those notebooks had ideas for articles,” he said. “Those were years’ worth of ideas.”

“Bring me the goddamn mail,” I said, and he slunk off, then returned with two labeled boxes, each loaded with envelopes, postcards, advertisements. I shredded everything, taking my time. At one point, I paused and made Dave refill my wine glass. When the bag got too full, I dumped the shreds out onto the floor. After my work was all done, I stood, exhausted.

Dave leaned against the doorframe, his head hung low, a mopey look on his face. A quiet peace resettled inside the house, and he said, “Don’t you think some people deserve better?” For the first time all day, I knew exactly what he meant.

*

55 The Mailwoman

Well, they had tried to can me twice before: once for that incident with the cats, then that

time when my hand sanitizer smelled too much like vodka (they didn’t buy that I had been just

chewing my fingernails), but I got through both of those because I’m nothing if not resilient;

that’s what my mother used to say, when I was down on hard times, she’d say, “Resile, Debbie,

resile!”

Nothing troubles me more than being in trouble, so after suffering through all those

misaccusations, I decided it was nothing but the narrow for me from then on out—no chances taken, nothing that could be misconstrued as a failure on my part. Obvious as it may sound, once

everything seemed to be at risk, I realized how much I appreciated having a salary, health

insurance, a sense of purpose. Not to mention the routine these things afforded me: Chinese food twice a week, every now and then a movie, warm clothes when I needed warm clothes. I finally

saw my life as one worth protecting.

“Resile,” I told myself. “Resile!”

But you know how these things go. You may say, Getting fired for something you never

did, well, there are worse things than that. At least you get to walk out with your pride intact, with your sense of self unscathed.

Me, I say there’s nothing worse in this godforsaken world.

You ask what makes a person, and I’ll tell you that a person is nothing but a creature that

lies. And that is exactly what the people in this here neighborhood did: they lied, claiming I’d been misdelivering too much of their mail. They said it like just any old thing to be fired for, like

it was nothing more than an offense. Didn’t they realize that distributing mail into mailboxes is what I do? Is all that I do? If I were to fail at such a duty, that would not be me failing at my job;

56 it would be me failing at the capacity to even understand what my job is. It would make me no

better than a caterpillar.

Why these folks want to say they never received their mail when I know goddam well I

gave it to them, well, that’s not for me to say. The whole thing feels like a conspiracy, like they

want to gang up on ole Debbie the mailwoman. I don’t know why. I’m good at my job, good-ish

at worst, and I don’t deserve to get run out of town like I’m no better than Son of Sam. So to hell

with them all, I say. Burn for it.

I don’t know what my endgame is, but to hell with that too. Having an endgame (slowly

climb the ranks through punctuality, hard work, and small snacks to keep my energy up) is how I

got here in the first place. Sure, I may not be set to get anything out of all this, but you could say

I’ve learned a lesson or two about get anything. I have to prove—to somebody, anybody—that these folks have received every last bit of the mail thatme and the Lord know was good goddam well put in their mailboxes. Which is why I’ll be out here digging through the whole

neighborhood’s trash until I find every last “unaccounted for” envelope. Well, you say, do the

means justify the.... Do two wrongs make a.... I say, that kind of logic can join in hell every rich,

entitled bastard in this whole neighborhood, everyone who wants to blame me—the

middleman—for every problem: postal, personal, or professional. It takes many hands to make

mail travel across this great earth, and it takes a humble hand to receive it. That, I suppose, it what I’m looking for in these cans: good citizenship.

As of yet, my pilgrimage hasn’t turned up anything of note. So far, my fingers have been

stained by more varieties of moldy fruit than I thought possible. I’ve scraped myself on the sharp

edges of cans; I’ve near vomited from the unearthly reek of week-old diapers; I’ve prayed to

Mary a hundred times that I caught nothing off those used-up bandages. Folks around here may

57 wish I would just turn and go home to enjoy my apartment while I can still afford to keep it, that

I would abandon my quest, that I would accept my punishment, whether it be fa ir or not. That’s just how it goes, people love to say when it’s their going isn’t in question. No, these folks may

wish all that, but tonight, their wish will not be granted. They’ve all received enough of what

they want for one lifetime.

58 Badlands

After we had finished watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands on DVD, and Martin

Sheen’s murders still looped through my head, I turned to my husband and watched him nibble

and suck at the edges of partially-popped kernels, his lips making breathy clicks like a squirrel

chewing acorns, and started to think about repeatedly stabbing him in the face. I considered using unrolled paperclips, the sharp end of a nail file, the corner of an open drawer. I could shove

a fork through his eye, push a steak knife through his cheek, then cut off his nose.

These were not thoughts I expected after three years of married life. While my husband

stared at the DVD extras—his favorite part—and tried to remember which special feature I hated

least, I slipped off to the bathroom.

I crouched on the mat, but the more I tried to stop thinking about stabbing my husband, the more I thought about stabbing my husband, and the more I thought about stabbing my

husband, the more I tried to stop thinking about stabbing my husband. I curled down and pressed

my hands against my head to try and suffocate the thoughts, but this did nothing, so I wrapped

my head in toilet paper.

I must have lain on that bathroom mat for fifteen minutes before my husband realized I

wasn’t returning to suffer through some making-of doc and decided to come check on me.

“I’m okay,” I called but since toilet paper smothered my face it came out as all vowels. I

heard him slide the key off the door frame and fiddle it into the lock. I ripped the paper off my

head and tossed it at the bathroom wastebasket just in time for him to enter and spot me sitting

on the floor, all knees and arms, spooked and breathless. He stood there like he wanted me to

speak first. I could take the key from his hand and jam it into his eye. I could whittle my

59 toothbrush into a shiv and stab his Achilles. I could spray bleach in his face. I could smash his forehead against the sink.

He stood just outside the bathroom, eyes begging me to say something, but I could barely glance up at him before the images grew so strong my stomach hardened to cement.

“I’m pregnant,” I lied, and his relieved smile told me there could be no taking it back.

The next morning, my husband came into the kitchen while I poured my first cup of coffee and wrapped his arms around me. He had been a runner in college but now possessed the skinny-fat physique inevitable after a lifetime of eating pasta. When I looked at him, I saw a fragility I otherwise associated with small birds. His wet nipple hair pressed into my uncovered back, and I shivered with disgust. I smelled my coconut body wash on him; he always bought the cheap stuff then used mine instead. His palms met on my stomach. His nose rubbed against my neck. I thought about throwing hot coffee across his face then smashing the pot on his ribs and spreading the glass along his skin like a blackjack dealer shuffling cards.

I didn’t want to think these things. I didn’t want to do these things—at least, I didn’t think that I wanted to do these things. But if I couldn’t stop thinking about killing him, how would I know that I didn’t want to? How could I deny what so obsessed me? I turned to face him. He got on his knees and kissed my stomach, then lifted the bottom of my tank top and put his ear against my bellybutton.

“I hear something,” he said.

His freshly shaven face felt stuck to my skin. I fingered his wet hair and tried to ignore the impulse to crash my knee into his chin or dig through his ear until my finger reached his brain. “It’s a little early for that,” I said.

60 “With anyone else you would be right,” he said. “But I have exceptionally good hearing.

They used to call me ‘The Ear’ in High School.”

“They didn’t,” I said.

He stood and sipped from my coffee cup. “I might buy an empathy belly. It’s this

weighted garment that would let me experience the physical symptoms of pregnancy. Then it

would be like we’re going through this together.”

“No it would not be like that,” I said. “Because you could always take yours off. Maybe

if you got it sewn into your own skin, that would be a start.”

“Hm,” he rubbed the sides of his stomach, as if imagining this. “Let’s meet for lunch today. We need to start talking about doctors.”

I shook my head. I knew how bad he wanted to steal control, as if I needed him at every

appointment just so he could prove how easily he could bear each inconvenience and, therefore, who was I to complain about how long we had been stuck in some waiting room?

“Oh.”

“I have a job interview,” I lied.

“Where?” he said, then looked at the clock. “Shit. I need to get dressed.” He hurried back to the bedroom. I stood at the kitchen counter until I heard him shout an affection through the

closing front door. I took my coffee over to the kitchen table, rubbing the cup’s rim until it no

longer tasted like his toothpaste.

I turned on my laptop, determined to find some job I could interview for that day, even if

it was a job I would never take. Especially if it was a job I would never take. At least then I could

erase one lie.

61 I went to the usual sites. The local college’s post sat only a few items from the top. They

needed an administrative assistant for their Film Studies Department who could start the next week. The job had only been posted the day before. I called, saying I was interested but could

only interview that afternoon. I told them my credentials: five years’ work experience, a master’s

degree in marketing, reading comprehension in German. I asked if noon worked and they said,

Bring three copies of your resume.

Badlands was far from the most violent movie I had ever seen, but something in me had

clicked on and now I had no idea how to switch it off. I wanted badly to talk to somebody, or

even look up my symptoms on the internet but—and the presence of this thought most terrified

me—if, God forbid, I ever did kill my husband, then evidence like that could remove all

plausible deniability.

What did it mean that I had begun to think in this way? Was this what they called

premeditation? Did this mean, somewhere in my subconscious, murdering my husband had

become a foregone conclusion? I had never considered myself capable of such a thing.

Murderers were people on TV. Murderers had abusive stepfathers and alcoholic mothers and

strangled cats in their basement. Or maybe such modifiers only attached retroactively. Maybe,

pre-murder, the stepfathers were stern, the mothers tipsy. Only later did accidents turn into

warning signs, did alone time become an antisocial tendency. How strange to think that a single

act could change the tenor of my entire childhood, certainly my marriage.

I arrived a little early for my interview. The building looked like a church: a tall arched

entry, crosses over each window, a spire jutting into the sky. I double-checked the building’s

62 address with the one I had written down, then walked inside. Stained glass windows seared color into the wooded interior. Gothic pendant lights hung from the ceiling. Through an open door off to the side sat an altar. A small gathering of people concentrated near the front of the pews. A daily service, I thought, until I noticed that everyone had out laptops and iPads and that a woman up front was gesturing toward a projected PowerPoint. I stared in until somebody hurried past me and shut the door behind them. Startled, I looked around until I found a hallway and went down it.

I didn’t know where to go, so I took turns at random, many of which led to dead ends. In a few instances, a half-flight of stairs terminated at a wall. Unlike the well-lit entryway, there seemed to only be a handful of lightbulbs back in this labyrinth. In some sections, I couldn’t see anything and walked with both palms pressed out. I passed the occasional door with the occasional name written on it: always a closed door.

Eventually, while moving down a hallway that narrowed to barely fit my shoulders, I bumped into a small, skittish girl. “Film department!” I blurted out, and she told me to follow her. She brought me around a corner, past a large expanse of cubicles, and over to a desk where a woman sat at a computer, browsing through pictures of dead movie stars. I told the woman I was there for the interview, but she didn’t respond, so I started to repeat myself before she finally said, “Give me a minute, honey. I just ate a big lunch.”

I took the few steps toward a couch and sank into its belly. I looked back at the cubicles.

They hummed with people—young and tired-looking. Their rapid movement reminded me of a hive, and I paused to make sense of it, letting my eyes follow one person for a little while, then another. They seemed to have a language of cigarettes: everyone kept one behind their ear; they traded them in passing and stole them off each other’s desks. They moved in time-lapse: their

63 bodies always in between motion and stillness. If I stood here long enough, would I be able to

discern meaning from this pattern? Or did this system exist just to perpetuate its own existence?

On the coffee table in front of me sat a flyer: a casting for a student’s thesis film. A short,

domestic thriller. They would be auditioning this Saturday.

A tall, sagging man emerged from an office and spoke to the admin. I thought, this is

what my husband will look like in thirty years. The admin nodded toward me. The man walked

over and extended a hand. “A pleasure,” he said. I followed him to his office, but he stopped just

inside the door and turned, startled to see me there. He motioned back to the couch. “Have a seat,

have a seat. Sophie will start the interview shortly. Right now, she’sdigesting .”

“Me?” Sophie said. “This isn’t even my department.”

“Yes, right,” the man said, pausing, “but that’s what we need! An objective eye.” Before

she could respond, he slammed shut his door. It stopped so close to my nose that I took a few

quick steps backward.

“He’ll be with you soon,” Sophie said to me.

I stood there, staring at his door. I wanted to bang on it, drag him out and make him

conduct the interview, whimpering while I dug my nails into his shoulder, but instead I returned to my seat and examined the flyer. I turned on speakerphone, then called the number. The person who answered sounded like she had just woken up. I told her I was interested in auditioning,

projecting my voice directly at Sophie, nearly shouting every over-enunciated syllable. When I

looked up, she was staring at me.

“Take it outside,” Sophie said. I ignored her, but she persisted. “Outside.”

I held up a one-second finger to Sophie, then spelled out my email address into the

phone.

64 “People are trying to work,” Sophie said. “No personal calls.”

“This,” I held up my pointer finger again, “means ‘I’m almost done.’”

“Outside.” Sophie walked closer to me and crossed her arms, trying, I supposed, to

appear intimidating. “Take it outside,” When the woman finished reciting my email address back

to me, I hung up, then stood and pointed the phone toward the roof the way a bank robber would

hold his gun when cornered by police. Sophie panted from the excitement. I jab-stepped toward

her just to watch her scurry back behind her desk.

“I had assumed you meant a job in marketing,” my husband said, using his pinky finger

to pick taco shell from his teeth, the same finger I had just seen him scratch his ear with. “Not

amateur cinema.”

“One thing led to another.” I stared at his face and wondered if it had always been so

strange: his eyes appeared uneven; his mouth, crooked; his nose, bent to the side.

“Hm.” He nodded, then took a sip of his water and looked disgusted by it. I could tell he wanted a beer; he always wanted a beer when he had Mexican food. But I knew he wasn’t

drinking because I couldn’t, and that he would gradually stop doing everything that a pregnant woman couldn’t do, and he would think that this would comfort me, this act of solidarity, but

really—like the empathy belly, like him accompanying me to each doctor’s appointment—this

“sacrifice” would just be an attempt to smother any right I had to complain.

“Have a beer,” I said. “I saw some in the fridge.”

He took another bite and shook his head. “I’m trying to get in shape.”

“In shape?” I said. “What do you mean you’re trying to get in shape?”

“You know,” he said and flexed his skinny arms.

65 “One beer won’t hurt.” I walked to the fridge and grabbed him one, savoring the bottle,

the way it can be both blunt object and broken glass.

He set the bottle on the table, unopened. “It’s gotta be a black-and-white thing.”

I had snuck wine into my Fresca. I took a sip and looked down at my food.

He stood and folded his plate in half and tossed it in the garbage. “The paper plates were

a good idea,” he said. “No dishes.”

I nodded and broke my taco shell into sharp triangles.

“Alright,” he said. “I’m going to the gym.”

“The gym?” I said. “You haven’t been to the gym in years. Besides, you just ate.”

“Workout fuel.” He patted his stomach.

I wondered which possibility would annoy me more: either he actually was going to the

gym, which would mean he hadn’t canceled his membership two or three years ago, instead

letting it quietly siphon a monthly sum from us; or he was lying, which meant...what? I took a sip

from my drink and made a mental note to mix the wine with something less sweet next time.

My husband came home two hours later and went straight to the shower. When he

crawled into bed, still wet, I told him to go dry off, but he ignored me.

As I lay awake that night, my thoughts about murdering him transformed into the concern

that, sometime in my past, Ihad already murdered someone. Obviously I couldn’t remember

every second of my entire life—there were gaps. Things that happened when I was very young, things I had forgotten, drunken nights. What if I was such a psychopath that I had murdered

somebody—or even multiple people—but it had been such a small deal to me that I couldn’t

remember? Or somehow blanked it out of my mind? But thoughts were meaningless, I told

66 myself. They emerged, premade, out of nowhere, out of nothing, like tiny universes randomly sparked into existence. Thoughts lived only to be thought. They were the product of some mental architecture that just existed for its own sake, but this sort of reasoning offered little comfort against the image of a door opening to reveal police bearing handcuffs. Or a vengeful relative staring me down with a pocket pistol. My skin grew hot and damp. My heart beat like a shadow.

I tore the sheets off my legs.

My husband’s breathing changed. He lifted his head and saw me. Light from the digital clock painted his cheek red. He reached over and placed a hand on my stomach. “Do you want me to make you some chamomile tea?”

I shook my head. He put his arms back underneath his pillow. I ran my hand along the scapula that poked through his bare back and thought about how easily he could be identified by his mole patterns.

An hour later, still wide awake, I walked into the kitchen and over to the wooden knife block, pulling each one out until I found the meanest. I stared at the blade, rubbing my fingers along the cool metal, then put the it back—top left corner, I noted—and walked over to my laptop, opened up my email, and printed off a copy of the script. My husband, I guess he heard the noise because he came walking out of the bedroom, dragging his feet because he was too lazy to lift them properly. They made a scraping sound I only noticed at night, when the house was quiet: it reminded me of a wounded dog. He didn’t even look at me as he went and sat at the kitchen table, rubbing his forehead with his palms. The way he angled his head, I could see spots where his hair had already thinned.

“What do you do all day?” he said. “Since you stopped working, what do you do all day?”

67 “I make plans.”

“Take up jogging,” he said. “Join a book club. Do something, something so that you can sleep at night, so that I don’t have to get woken up every fifteen minutes as you get in and out of bed, as you watch TV or print out God knows what.”

“I am doing something.” I held up the script. “I’m auditioning for a film, and I need to rehearse.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Rehearse tomorrow.”

“I’m not tired,” I said. “I’ll either be in here, reading out lines to myself, or you can stay awake and help me.”

“God,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

“There’s a lot of shouting,” I said. “Fair warning.”

He groaned and rubbed his forehead again.

“Here.” I walked over to my laptop and stroked CTRL-P. “I just printed you off a copy.”

“It’s short?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I’ll give you ten minutes.” He heaved himself up and retrieved his script.

“I’ll play the wife, you’ll be the—”

“Husband. Yeah, I figured.”

I leaned back and tried to give him a look, but he wasn’t paying attention.

“From the top?” he said.

“Look at you,” I said, “using the lingo.”

“What are we doing here?” he said.

68 I almost replied before I realized that was the first line. “What are we doing here?” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Cut,” I said. “What’s your motivation?”

“Huh?”

“What does your character want?”

“Jesus, I—”

“From the top,” I said, and we repeated the first few lines, him going through the

motions—tired, unengaged—while my attention drifted over again to the kitchen knives.

“Again,” I said. “Again.”

We read through the beginning over and over, faster each time, until we were both bent

over breathless. I had just begun to enjoy myself when he tossed his script down and said, “I think that’s enough for tonight.” He started off toward the bedroom, then turned and motioned toward my stomach. “You should think about getting some sleep, too.”

I rubbed hand-sweat off onto my legs, then picked up his script. “Get back in here.”

He stopped just long enough to shake his head. I heard the bedroom door open. I felt an unexpected desperation.

“I’m not actually pregnant. I’ve been lying this whole time.”

Now he changed direction altogether, returning back to the kitchen. “What did you just

say?”

I went over to the wood block, threw the scripts down and pulled out my new favorite

knife, waving it at him. “I only married you because I looked at you and saw somebody I wouldn’t mind dragging down with me.”

69 I took a few steps toward him and pointed the tip near his face. He swiftly ducked around the blade and over to the other side of me, backing toward the kitchen counter. Then he did something surprising. He reached into the wood block and pulled out a knife and put his hand on his waist like a fencer and tapped my knife away. I almost dropped it but adjusted my grip and held it back up. He tapped it away again. Now I dropped my script and mimicked his posture. I side-stepped one of his slow, half-hearted stabs and took a wider stance. We danced in circles until I grew dizzy. The world spun around and around, then seemed to flatten, then lost all dimension save the two of us, standing there, holding up both our blades. It was my turn to thrust.

70 Three Studies of a Man Falling

The night he arrived in Los Angeles, Ben found a marble-sized growth on his inner thigh.

An inflamed follicle, he assumed—he knew the leg was a common place to get them but maybe

that was just if you shaved. By midafternoon the next day, it had swelled to the size of a button

and fingered out red tracks. An infection. Everything he knew pointed toward it being a boil, but

Ben worried that it might have pitted into an abscess by now, or be the product of some sexually

transmitted virus (sometimes these things keep dormant for years). Because he felt both

embarrassed about its location and ashamed at what it might be, he refused to go see a doctor.

When he heard Joe turn off the shower, Ben tugged down his shorts until their hem

covered his growth, then pressed his legs together. He didn’t want Joe to see it; Joe was the kind

of guy who washed his hands both before and after he used the bathroom. Ben looked over at the

door and imagined Joe drying off the tub so mold wouldn’t grow. The knob spun and he

emerged, toweled at the waist, backed by steam. He grabbed two beers from the fridge then joined Ben on the couch. “All the bars are walking distance.”

“Get that away from me,” Ben said.

“Come on,” Joe said. “Quit tomorrow.”

“Stop being a shit friend,” Ben said. “And beach rats don’t bathe three times a day.”

“You waddle like a beach penguin,” Joe said. “You waddle like a beach Robert Ford.”

“I’m a Nothing-Nothing,” Ben said.

“Boy you nailed it there.” Joe tightened the towel around his waist. “Spot on.”

“Smoke a cigarette with me.”

Joe swallowed whole the beer he had offered Ben. He set the empty bottle down on a

cardboard box that rested next to the couch. “You ever seen an old smoker’s toes?”

71 “What’s in all these?” Ben motioned to the boxes that also lined the living room and

kitchen. They even half-filled Joe’s bedroom. Everywhere, these cardboard boxes.

“I’m watching a friend’s stuff.”

“Hm.” Ben struggled to stand off the couch, careful to keep his body rotated away from

Joe. He flinched as his thighs rubbed together (if he could lose some weight, he thought, his thighs wouldn’t rub together so often and he wouldn’t have this problem), then limped out the

sliding glass door and kicked aside some leaves. He both hated and loved smoking in Los

Angeles: all the runners, their skin-tight bodies, they made him feel guilty, sure, but they also

gave him hope for a healthy future he could quit his way into, maybe once he turned thirty.

Attractive people make everyone more forgiving of their vices; Ben supposed that was why

movies could be so dangerous.

“I’ve got some friends headed to a margarita bar,” Joe said through the still open sliding

glass door. He went into his bedroom, then returned wearing jeans and a polo shirt. “Thirty-six

ouncers, four shots per.”

“You’re overcompensating with alcohol,” Ben said.

“Oh boy,” Joe said. “If people could hear you preaching to me.”

“I’m tired is all,” Ben said.

“Robert Ford, preaching about alcohol. You need an espresso. I’ll make you an

espresso.”

“Don’t make me an espresso.”

“I saw you get so drunk one night, you lost a shoelace. And you preach to me.”

72 It had been a long summer of drink for Ben, of waking up and not remembering driving

home, not knowing if he’d hit anybody on the way back, if he’d run over a child, somebody’s

pet, somebody’s childhood pet. Not knowing if he’d made awkward, insulting advances on a

friend’s date. If he’d shoved anybody, broke anything. This only drove him to drink more, his

shame, his shame at what he might have done. The more he considered his own personality to be

a performance, the more anxiety he felt at botching the act, at losing focus and letting some

murky, oft-hidden “him-ness” slip through. He spent afternoons, hungover, texting friends so he

could try to read anger into anything they said. This inevitably led to invitations for drinks, and

Ben would go just to make sure everyone still liked him. But then he would relax and drink until

he could barely stand and then the next day repeat the whole thing.

He developed a few techniques, though, to remind himself when nothing bad had

happened. He would write notes in his phone before he went to sleep, something like, the date

followed by a check mark. As he drove home, he would chant: “Safe driving, safe driving, safe

driving,” just to make it stick. Sometimes, when he needed to sober himself up, he would put a

finger down his own throat.

Then, one day, Ben realized he wouldn’t waste too much time worrying about anything if

he just started drinking as soon as he woke up, which was how he ended up slurred out on who-

knows-whose balcony, making eye contact with a man standing on the building next door. Vents

grew from nearby roofs like mushrooms; mushrooms grew from the ground like tiny hands. The

evening sky leaked a stretch of orange. The sun can’t wait until the day it gets to kill us all, Ben

remembered thinking. The man shuffled his feet to keep his balance. What do you think? he

asked. Should I jump? Ben stared, considered, blinked. He tried to flick his cigarette off the balcony, but the wind caught and held it in the air. Do whatever you want, Ben said. It’s your

73 life. Then he walked back inside, grabbed some beer from the fridge, and left while the man still

stood there, considering his options.

A month after that, Joe called to offer Ben a place to stay, if he felt like coming out to LA

for a while, if he felt like manifesting any personal destiny. Joe wanted to move from his one-

bedroom place into something more affordable, and he needed someone to live with. You should

come stay with me for a few weeks, a month, Joe told him, and if you like it out here, then I’ve

got a 2/2 already lined up. Ben, after all the constant unease, knew that an old friend like Joe was

exactly what he needed: somebody who wouldn’t hate him no matter what he said or did. What

Ben needed, after this long summer, was some unconditionality.

The next morning, as the marine layer simmered over the streets, Ben reexamined his leg.

The growth had blackened. It had branded the surrounding area into a broad red circumference, a

near perfect circle. He limped into the bathroom and pulled on a second pair of boxer-briefs, but

the painful area extended so low it still rubbed against the seam of whatever pants he wore to

hide it.

Joe had asked Ben the night before—after coming home green mouthed and seeing him

still lying there on the couch—if he had a lady back in Florida. Ben didn’t explain how he had

finally reached a place, his diseased leg being the final step, where the whole notion of sex

repulsed him. Or maybe it wasn’t sex specifically, but mere physical contact. He recoiled whenever anybody even placed a hand on his shoulder.

Joe emerged from his bedroom and jogged in place, shirtless, wearing above-the-finger

athletic shorts—his body pale but lean. “Do you want to go see the apartment later?”

“Since the fuck when do you run?” Ben said.

74 “You should try it. Get that blood flowing.”

“It’s not for me.”

“Don’t lock the door. I’m not bringing a key,” Joe said, tugging at the sides of his shorts

to show they didn’t have pockets.

“Watch out for ne’er-do-wells,” Ben said.

“I’m serious,” Joe said. “You lock the door, I’m kicking it down, and you’re paying for

it.”

“I have no reason to lock the door,” Ben said.

Joe’s voice grew quiet. His shoulders slumped. “Okay, just don’t lock it.” He resumed jogging-in-place and went out. Ben sat silent on the couch. Life felt lately like an accumulation

of all the melancholy and shame he’d ignored since puberty, feelings which, like antibiotic-

resistant bacteria, never died and constantly grew stronger.

He eyed the boxes around him. The way they seemed flung about, hastily stacked, made

him uncomfortable. Messiness didn’t bother him per se, but this messiness felt too out of place in

Joe’s otherwise neurotic apartment. He walked over to one box and stacked it atop another. The

box was heavy. He wondered if it contained fragilities but chose to ignore this thought because it

felt so good to be doing something, so he continued lifting and stacking and arranging until he

reached a box that felt soft, like it contained clothes, and he slowly peeled off the duct tape,

wanting to just look inside.

Later, smoking a cigarette on the balcony, Ben stared up at the sky, which, because of the

shorter buildings, could be seen better in Venice than most other parts of LA. He saw something

dark and circular up there, past the layer of fog. It looked like a hole in the atmosphere. He

couldn’t tell if it was moving or not, and it was so small, it hurt his eyes to focus on it. Stubbing

75 his cigarette out on a leaf, he pulled out his phone and Googled “Dark circle, Los Angeles,” then

“Falling black thing, California,” but nothing close to relevant came up. It moved too slow to be a meteor, or whatever, falling from space; this thing descended with control. He leaned against the sliding glass door and watched it, using one hand to block the sun.

“Do whatever you want,” he mumbled. “Do whatever you want.”

After Joe returned from his run, he spent the rest of his day coming in and out of the living room: he showered, watched a few game shows with Ben, bought groceries, visited his girlfriend on set, made egg-salad sandwiches, which Ben didn’t eat because of the mayonnaise

(“Vegenaise,” Joe corrected him). While grabbing Ben another pack of cigarettes, he found some medical gauze for him too, hoping that would help with whatever Ben kept calling “Just an ingrown hair.”

In and out. In and out.

Joe drove to a local bar, sat outside, and ordered a Guinness on draft. When it came, he accidently fingered part of the rim and made a mental note to drink from the other side, sanitizing his hands in case he slipped up again. The man at the next table over smoked a cigarette and enjoyed some foreign, canned beer. Unlike Ben, with his pained expressions, skinny-fat body, and shaggy hair, this man affected cigarettes as a desirable, sophisticated thing.

He wore a white V-neck shirt, had slicked-back grey hair and a trim beard. He looked like the kind of person to be.

Joe startled when the smoker’s phone vibrated and rattled the metal table. Lately, he flinched every time he heard a phone ring, always worried that Charlie was calling. Charlie had been Joe’s closest friend out here, and they had originally planned to move in together, before

76 Charlie had fallen—or jumped—off a fourth-floor balcony, survived, and moved down to

Orange County to recover from his injuries at his parents’ house. Ever since it had happened,

Charlie had been calling to ask Joe to come visit. Joe kept saying he would come down soon

until eventually he just stopped answering.

He ordered another Guinness. The smoker ordered another drink, too. Joe admired the

way he finished a beer without making a show of it. No, he took his last sip with the same grace

that he took all his other sips. Maybe this left slightly more camel-piss at the bottom than most

drinkers could tolerate; maybe this man didn’t sweat such things as a warm, final sip; Ben, on the

other hand, used to go around closing bars, or dried-up parties, and swallow the leftovers from

every scattered can he could find. Or was it Charlie who used to do that?

After college, Ben had disappeared for three or four years, his longest stint. Joe suspected

he had either been in prison or a mental institution. Ben’s problem, if you asked Joe, had never been his drinking, but that he spent too much time alone. By Joe’s estimate, Ben hadn’t seen

(socially, that is) another person for almost three weeks before coming out here. Ben acted like

he had a drinking problem, but what he really had was an isolation problem, something Charlie

struggled with too.

Joe ordered another Guinness. His last one, he swore.

He needed to get Ben up and about tonight, for both of their sakes. Having Ben loiter

around the apartment with Charlie’s things all day, Joe knew it wouldn’t take long for his two

friends to completely conflate in his mind. But Ben never wanted to leave because of that damn

leg (which Joe prayed wasn’t doing any sort of oozing), and now he didn’t even drink. The

promise of drinks had always been a surefire way to get Charlie—Ben—anywhere. And here Joe

had taken time off—unpaid time off—to try and sell Ben on living in LA.

77 Joe swatted at what he mistook for a fly buzzing around his face, but when he looked closer, he saw the object was actually much farther off in the distance, up in the sky, even. Small and black, circular. It crawled closer to earth, so slow that he could barely tell it was moving when he stared directly at it, having to look away and look back—or measure it against the tip of some building—to even gauge its progress. Nobody else seemed to notice it.

Now, Joe’s own phone rang. He squirmed for a few moments, letting it emanate dread from his pocket, then forced himself to check the screen. It was his neighbor, which offered both relief and a new sense of disappointment. Was he fetishizing his own importance to Charlie?

Maybe, at this point, Charlie only cared about getting his things back.

“Yeah,” Joe said into his phone.

“I heard a disturbance,” his neighbor said. “Somebody screaming. I couldn’t make out what.”

Joe rushed in and saw Ben standing on the balcony, leaning against the edge. He seemed focused. Joe grabbed the medical gauze off the kitchen counter, where it sat, still bagged. He noticed that Ben had rearranged some of the cardboard boxes, stacked them into various shapes: a triangle formation in the living room, a pentagon in the kitchen. Some boxes had been opened and tape dangled off like thin strips of flesh. Joe looked back out at Ben and saw that he was wearing one of Charlie’s shirts. Had Charlie worn that very shirt on the day of his incident, or did they all just look that way now?

Joe couldn’t bear seeing Ben out on the balcony, wearing that shirt, but he forced himself to walk over, slowly, carefully. He was afraid of startling Ben, so he tapped his knuckles against the glass, inaudibly at first, gradually adding volume until Ben looked, almost suspiciously, over

78 his shoulder. Joe held up the gauze with one hand and pointed at it with another. Ben looked at him, confused, and, for a terrifying moment, Joe thought he recognized something desperate in that look, but then Ben nodded and held up a one-second finger. Joe took a few steps back and sunk into the couch.

The muted TV montaged images that felt strange with no narrative to unite them. In this way, the banal became avant-garde. A street, a coffee cup, people walking, trash cans. Zoom in, zoom out.

Cut to close-up.

Cut to credits.

Cut to commercial.

After Ben took a shower, he examined his leg with, he had to admit, a certain pride. This growth, it was something he had made. It was a part of him, and he was a part of it. Even though it hurt and crippled him, he had a thought like, he would miss it when it was gone. It had a magnificence to it. Even the smell it now emitted didn’t bother him. He understood the cancer patient, reluctant to get chemo; the acne-sod teen who doesn’t want to pick. He stared at the medical gauze sitting on the sink and knew he couldn’t deny Joe, who had done so much for him.

So he unwrapped the gauze and coiled his upper thigh, moving as fast as he could, anxious to get back out on the balcony.

“Look at this smiling face,” Joe said when Ben emerged from the bathroom, walking normally. “Now you’ve got some fresh tires on you.”

79 “I hope you don’t mind,” Ben said, pulling on another one of Charlie’s button-downs. “A

bottle of soap must have burst in my luggage because all my clean shirts are sticky.” He patted

the front and back pockets of his pants.

“They’re on the coffee table.” Joe pointed to the pack. “Wait, hold on, I’ll smoke one

with you.” Joe pulled out two cigarettes, and they walked outside. “You got to have a drink with

me, though.”

“I don’t—”

“You don’t drink, I know. Nobody drinks. Alright. You can watch me drink.”

They lit their cigarettes.

“In fact, I’m getting a beer right now, hold this.” Joe walked inside the sliding glass door.

He almost tripped over a cardboard box on his way to the fridge and returned holding two bottles. “Don’t worry, Robert Ford, they’re both for me,” he said, when he got back outside.

Ben ignored him and looked around the sky. “Shit, I can’t find it anymore.”

“What?”

“The...that...”

“That black thing?”

Ben turned toward Joe, face perked up. “Whatwas that?”

Joe shrugged. “I don’t know.” Now he looked around the sky. “But it’s gone.”

Ben chewed his lower lip.

"Come on, let’s get out for a bit.”

“There’s nothing to do out there except drink.”

“Nothing to do except—” Joe stopped talking when he saw he had lost Ben’s attention.

“It was probably just something for a movie.”

80 “It looked like it would have landed a little north of here,” Ben said, absently.

“Or an advertisement,” Joe said.

Ben finished his cigarette and examined Joe. “We should try to find it.”

“Find it? Do you know how big Los Angeles is?”

“Then let’s go to high ground. Somewhere we can look down from.”

Joe ran his hands through his hair. “Alright,” he mumbled, happy, he supposed, to at least be doing something. “We could check out the Griffith Observatory. You can almost see the whole city from up there.”

Joe stopped at a gas station near the park and filled a fountain drink halfway with rum. “I am still on vacation,” he said to Ben as he stirred the liquor into his diet coke. Ben lit a cigarette.

“Not in the car,” Joe said, and Ben dropped it out the window.

“Who keeps calling you?” Ben asked.

Joe pulled into an empty lot. “There’s about a half-mile walk from here.”

“I can make it,” Ben said. “Just let me use the bathroom first.”

They walked over to the lone building. Ben went in, then immediately came back out.

“Can you keep watch? There aren’t any doors on the stalls. Why aren’t there doors on the stalls?”

“It’s a public place,” Joe said. “They don’t want people to shoot heroin.”

The sun hadn’t fully set yet, but Joe could see the moon. His mom used to say they were lovers, the sun and the moon, and when you see them both at the same time, it’s because the moon suspects something.

81 Joe watched the bathroom door for a few minutes, but then got distracted by the bushes, the way they scarred the landscape. In fact, the whole ground had the uneven, ridged look of surgically incised skin.

“Thanks, asshole,” Ben whispered, walking out of the bathroom. “Some junky almost sat in my lap.”

Joe offered hand sanitizer. Ben stuck a cigarette between his lips.

“You can’t smoke here,” Joe said, leading the way up. “Park rules.”

Ben slipped the cigarette behind his ear. After they had walked barely a quarter-mile,

Ben’s face betrayed complete exhaustion.

“Over there,” Joe pointed, “they found a human skull a few years ago.”

Ben heard somebody whispering. “What?” he asked.

“I said over there they found—”

“No, after that.”

Joe shrugged.

Ben took a few steps off the path and leaned against a tree, sliding down it till he sat on the ground. Joe hurried over to him.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Ben said, rubbing his temples. “Just give me a minute.”

Joe kneeled next to him. “Is it your leg?”

Ben shook his head.

“Is it your heart?” Joe stood and looked around. “Should I find help?”

“I said just give me a minute,” Ben said.

82 “Here,” Joe patted down Ben until he found his cigarettes. He took one out, lit it in his own mouth, and handed it to Ben. “If they catch us, we can split the fine.”

Ben inhaled deeply on the cigarette and closed his eyes. Joe heard voices coming in low, but when he looked around he didn’t see anything. He tried to listen closer but couldn’t make out a distinct word. Ben stood and brushed himself off. “Let’s keep moving.”

“Make sure you stomp that out when you’re done,” Joe said. “It’s wildfire season.”

“These trees are full of despair,” Ben said. “I think they want to be burned down.”

They could see, out in the city below, cars gradually flick on their headlights as the sun slipped deeper into her grave.

Joe stopped and let Ben catch up.

“Down there,” Joe motioned, “they found a convicted pedophile hanging from a tree.”

Ben nodded.

“Gimme a cigarette,” Joe whispered.

Ben snuck a cigarette to Joe then took out another for himself. Joe handed Ben his cup while he lit his cigarette, and Ben took a sip. It tasted sweet and watered down. He took a second, longer sip.

Joe noticed and let him keep the cup.

Ben stopped again and put his hands on his knees.

“Let’s just head back,” Joe said.

“No,” Ben said. “I’m okay.”

“We can come another time.”

“No,” Ben said. “I have to find that thing.”

“You were the one who stopped moving.”

83 Ben didn’t reply.

Joe’s phone started to ring. He silenced it in his pocket, not even checking the screen. He

knew it could have been any number of people calling, but he couldn’t bear to look.

“My neighbor said he heard screaming this afternoon,” Joe said.

“Turn your phone off,” Ben said when it began to ring again. “I can’t stand that noise.”

Joe shook his head. He knew that, eventually, Charlie would move back to LA and they would see each other again, an incident made more uncomfortable by all the times he hadn’t

answered, but that didn’t matter right now. That friendship felt like nothing more than rotted fruit

he couldn’t touch long enough to throw away. “Let’s sneak down here for a bit,” Joe said. “To

recover our strength.” He angled off the path a short way and lay down. After a few seconds, he

heard Ben join him. They lit fresh cigarettes and passed the plastic cup back and forth until it was empty. Ben pressed a hand against the inside of his thigh and winced.

“Is that it?” Joe said, sitting up.

“Where?”

“There.”

Ben followed Joe’s finger. About a hundred feet away sat a large, black rock. It appeared to be a perfect circle—a sphere, technically, and balanced, somehow, without rolling down the

hill. They could tell it wasn’t natural, that it didn’t belong there. It looked darker, blacker, than

even the night sky and seemed to suck in all the surrounding light and energy. The object did, in

fact, look like a circle, because it was too dark for their eyes to perceive its depth. Joe stood and

moved toward it. Ben hesitated, then followed. As they got closer, the whispers returned, not

only louder now, but also less distinct. The object smelled like burnt hair. Joe moved around to

its side, admiring it while he finished his cigarette. He squatted to look closer and saw bushes

84 crushed beneath it; bushes it had clearly landed on. Its diameter appeared to be about fifteen feet, but because of the angle of the ground, Ben was able to hop on and squirm his way to the top. It had a texture like Styrofoam but easily supported his weight. He noticed that his leg had gone numb. “I think I wrapped the gauze too tight,” he shouted to Joe, then caught his balance and watched the city: lights turning on and off as people abandoned some buildings and crowded into others; the Morse code of traffic: long, fast movements here, short, staccato ones there.

“Do you hear that?” Ben asked.

Joe nodded. “But I can’t make anything out.”

“It’s a lot clearer up here.”

“What’s it saying?” Joe asked.

Ben’s face grew discomfited, then despondent. “I’ve wasted my life,” Ben said. “It’s saying that I’ve wasted my life.” He leapt off the rock. The fall wasn’t far, but the angle was awkward and the ground uneven. His numb leg buckled beneath him, and he rolled a dozen yards until he stopped against a tree. Joe ran over to him, slowing as he neared, cautious in his approach, hearing, unexpectedly, laughter.

85 86 Plastic Alaska

Waiting an hour-thirty for a bus in zero weather can make you hate a cop for dying.

Airport Rd. is still shut down for the funeral procession. Impatient others around me list in the

shallow wind, anxious to rejoin their lives. Me, I just like to ride. A few anarchist-types hold

signs along the street next to others come to pay their respects. One of them says, “I hope they

serve doughnuts in hell.” Another says, “Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you.” A third woman makes obscene sexual gestures at the cars driving by—she’s the only

person who appears to be having any fun.

Esau, the cashier, slumps into his Mitsubishi. He just bought the car last week, he had told me.

That car has a mythology. It carries within itself a history of our city.

The grocery store parking lot is too congested for him to back out, but, after the truck behind him moves, he creates some space with a few herky-jerk motions, then immediately gets

stuck again. I step off the curb and walk toward him, squeezing between bumpers. When I get

close, he looks up and recognizes me.

The first person who owned the Mitsubishi was named Stephen. Stephen worked at a

Michigan factory called Plastic Alaska, where he mass-produced Alaskan themed board games,

Alaskan themed action figures, Alaskan themed toy trucks, Alaskan themed sandboxes. He

stared daily at these toys and dreamed of himself being toy sized or the toys world sized, him

moving amongst them like a man made like men used to be made: hard and bitter handed. His

coworkers often found him in the break, molded plastic scattered in front of him as he play-acted

87 various scenarios of adventure, and the only thing they could summon themselves to say would

be, “Did you pay for those?”

It’s when a man most realizes that change must be made that the very possibility seems to

stagger away. He would take home board games and, late into the night, as the house chimed all

sounds of sleep, glue atop pieces like three-dimensional photographs of a life he hadn’t yet lived.

Then he would take the boards out back and bury them into the earth.

Stephen’s boss was hot on his wife so he kept him on longer than he should have, hoping

for something like a complete cerebral shutdown. Parasitic in origin, perhaps. A life among

institutions. But no sooner did Stephen start showing up for work in parkas and flannel-lined jeans than he passed out from heat exhaustion. His file entered internal review.

Not to be retained, the stamp wrote.

Which is how a man finds himself walking the streets in pray of a crossroads. He called

for the devil, but he ended up with me. I said, “I bet you need a car that can really roar,” and he

said, "You don’t know the half of it.” He asked what his leaving would cost his wife and kids,

and I said just subtract what you’re taking away and there you have it. We drove north to

Fairbanks, Alaska. I didn’t so much ride along as bear witness, whispering in his ear, "It’s

snowing there already. Can you smell it?”

After Stephen disappeared, Mike saw the car being prepared for police auction. Its

pristine condition—unexpected, given the context—impressed him. An officer himself, he bribed the auctioneer to slander the vehicle in whatever ways needed to ensure he achieved the top bid,

a task the auctioneer did with flourish, and Mike bought the Mitsubishi for his soon-to-be-sixteen

daughter. Wanting to make sure it still ran okay, he drove it here, to his twenty-year high school

88 reunion, where he ended up talking to an ex-girlfriend who had married the owner of the

Fairbanks cemetery.

“All he talks about is permafrost,” Allison told Mike. Her eyes avoided his.

“I’m sorry he couldn’t make it tonight,” Mike said, now a police officer, following a

training regimen that, he noticed, kept him in far better shape than any of his classmates—even

Allison had gained a few, but what would you do if you married a grave digger? All night Mike

left-handed his drink so she and everyone else could see no ring. He wished he hadn’t worn a

button down shirt. So scrawny in high school, he wanted to flex his swollen arms, wiggle his

Navy tattoos.

A long pause.

“This is still the only thing I drink.” She took a sip of her champagne. “Pretty lame,

huh?”

By the bar, someone vomited into a trash can while the former Offensive Line cheered

and ordered more shots, pointing fingers, guessing at the next man down.

Mike had an impulse and decided to go for it.

“Come with me,” he said and reached for her arm, but she pulled it away. He reached

again. She took a few steps back and made a sound like “No.”

“What’s wrong?” Mike said.

“I know what you did,” she said, glaring at him now.

“What I did?”

“I get the newspaper.” She finished her drink. “Look, I have to go.”

“Wait,” Mike said.

89 He watched her make an elaborate loop around the auditorium to avoid walking directly by him. She poked into another circle of conversation. Someone handed her a drink. She whispered something, and a few of them looked over at Mike, then at the floor. He set down his club soda and walked into the hallway of the school where he had spent what suddenly felt like such a small part of his life. He glanced at the stickered lockers, stacked like bodies in a morgue, only distinguished by half-leaked sheets of paper. So strange to think these bits of hollow serve as locus points for so many lives. When he reached the weight room, the door opened right up.

He draped his shirt over a bench and started doing curls; squats tested the stretch of his slacks.

He snatched, pulled deads. He inked salt from his skin—lost track of time. When he stopped, panting, and put his shirt back on, sweat shadowed the chest and pits.

The auditorium had been left empty and messed. Had they forgotten to hire a cleaning crew? Did some shift duck their job? Mike stacked chairs and wiped tables, pillowed trash in the dumpster. He stole supplies from the janitor’s closet and swept the floors, mopped them. He couldn’t stop. He cleaned the entire school: classrooms, toilets, the principal’s office. It seemed nobody locked doors. He polished administrative nameplates. At four AM, he found the

Mitsubishi to be the last car left.

He fingered the wedding ring from his pocket and slipped it back on, wondering how much trouble coming home this late would cause. As he unlocked the car door, he heard someone run up on his blindside. Mike lifted his hands in surrender.

The boning knife squirmed beneath his ribs.

Mike would feel stuck to that spot forever, cemented to the parking lot. After the ambulance had retrieved his draining body, but before the snow fell, before they closed down a road in his honor, he saw the Mitsubishi roar by. Mike didn’t wonder how the car had so soon

90 found another owner. He didn’t wonder at the logistics of this—no, he just laughed in spite of

himself because, even though he had been reduced to another dripping soul, he missed nothing

more than flashing that red and blue smile to pause a driver’s heart.

***

And blood stains are hard to prevent, Irene would learn, because, in the moment, keeping

your child’s blood from settling in the fabric isn’t exactly a top priority. Things you find yourself

far more concerned with: your son, his gushing nose, whether his older brother, who jabbed him

with a pen, needs to see a therapist and if that therapist would do more harm than good.

It’s not like the pen went all the way up his nostril, it just glanced the inside. And when

noses bleed, they bleed aggressively. She had never heard of anyonedying from a nosebleed.

Her son pinched his nostrils but that didn’t do much good, so she had him take off his

shirt and wrap it around his face like a bandit from some old movie. When they got to the

grocery store, she told him to wait in the car, then brought her oldest son in and handed him the

list.

“I’ll be waiting right here,” she said, and the kid slumped off, thumbing blood from the

sides of his fingers.

Irene paced by the checkout lines, wondering if she had done the right thing by not taking

her son to the emergency room, wondering whether she had written down everything they

needed from the store, realizing, looking outside now, that that man was standing by her car,

staring into her car’s window where her son sat half-naked. She blinked to confirm her sight, then ran outside, through the parking lot, wincing at horns and squealed brakes. She could hear the man speaking, but couldn’t make out what he said. He turned and held up his hands before

scampering off. She didn’t even think to chase him because she was too concerned with her son

91 sitting there inside the car, shaking, his shirt still wrapped around his face, goosepimples

sprouted across his bare chest. She unlocked and opened the door. He startled, near jumping into

the driver’s seat.

She wanted to ask what the man had said, but couldn’t bring herself to, because what if

her son hadn’t even noticed him standing there? What if he hadn’t heard anything? She couldn’t

bear to make him feel shame, repulsion at his own body for the damage it could tempt others to

inflict upon him. A shame she thought to have avoided by birthing sons.

A week later, she was back in the grocery store parking lot, walking to her car with an

armful of groceries. An older gentleman stood fiddling at the driver’s side door. Calmer this time, she wondered what about the Mitsubishi attracted such strange beings. The folding knife

from her purse fit naturally in her hand. She approached slowly, keeping the blade concealed,

having always regretted not getting a good look at the man from before: a preference for the evil

she can recognize. You can’t fight the devil if he’s just a blur.

She was excited about the prospect of trouble and, as she got closer, even hoped for it,

feeling suddenly a desire to act in some violent way. Did this reaction prove she had evil in her?

An evil her oldest son had inherited? Was this how his mind worked right before he picked up a

sharpened pencil and aimed for his brother’s face? She walked close enough to smell a cheap,

chemical fragrance emitted by the man’s clothes. “Can I help you?” she asked, careful to keep

her voice free of accusatory tones.

“Hm?” he said, not looking back at her. “No.”

“Sir...” She fingered her knife’s release button and wished the stakes were higher, wished

she could perform some justifiable aggression. The man tried fiddling something small and

92 metallic into the lock, and she pulled his arm away. He swung around, and the look in his face reminded her of dementia.

“I can’t fit the key is all,” he said, defensively.

“I’m sorry?”

“The key,” he held it up, barely able to keep it steady. “I can’t fit it in the door.”

She slipped the knife into her pocket and walked closer. The key was rusted, chipped. It looked like something he had found in the trash. "That’s a Toyota key,” she said, barely making out the logo.

He looked at her defiantly. “This is my car. I own it.” She pulled the knife back out, trying to keep it concealed, but he quickly retreated to the center of the parking lot, scrambled around, then tried the door on the nearest car, looked around again, then finally walked across the lot to another car, opened the door, and climbed in.

***

Sam sat back and stared at the Mitsubishi in the rear view. Even though he couldn’t get inside of it, he wanted to just stand next to it again. That car felt like a phantom limb. He remembered its wheels beneath him, gripping the ice during winter, sprinting through the all-day nights. Cranked. Grinding his teeth for the music of it, thrumming his tongue around the corners of his mouth, not realizing he had been talking to himself till he gasped for breath. The world vibrated around the innermost speck of his vision. Eating every other day, he drank coffee and drove circles around town, looping the bus stops to find her but barely able to focus on anyone’s face long enough to identify it. After sitting stopped for even just a minute, two, he would feel it had been hours—except for those times when hours felt like minutes. Clogging up the parking lot, he felt so conspicuous that scores of police had no doubt been summoned. Make haste!

93 He saw her outside the grocery store, gripping the slings of her backpack, staring at the bus schedule like it was a map to the human soul.

“Get in,” he said, brakes whining as the car stopped.

“No,” she said.

“Get in, you bitch.” And she did. He couldn’t believe it. So surprised to have even found her, if she had again said no, he might have just driven off. He reached over and locked the passenger side door, careful not to let his arm rub against her breasts.

“Where are we going?”

“You know where.”

He checked his rearview to make sure nobody stood jotting his license plate or placing a call. You can’t just go around bus stops yelling at seventeen-year old girls anymore, not these days. Even when the seventeen-year old girl is your niece and does nothing all day but occasion every drugstore in town with a pocket full of fake IDs and a backpack full of Nyquil.

As they pulled onto the highway, she unlocked the car door. He reached over and locked it again, goddamning the broken button, wishing he’d had the foresight to put her in the backseat with the childproof door, but then he couldn’t have kept an eye on her, and it was too late now anyway. He put a cigarette in his mouth. She asked for one, and he told her she was too young.

She laughed a throaty, mocking laugh that told him he hadn’t the slightest idea what she was too young for.

“Shit,” he said, patting his pockets. “Do you have a lighter?”

“Give me a cigarette.”

“No.”

“Then too bad,” she said, looking out the window.

94 He handed her the pack. She took one and put it behind her ear. “For later,” she said, dropping the pack in the cup holder. She unpocketed a butane lighter and reached over and lit his cigarette for him. The sharp blue flame scorched half the paper, some of his nose hairs too.

She fiddled with the lighter in her lap, lighting it, putting the flame out, lighting it again.

Every time it clicked, he looked over.

“I’m trying to drive,” he said.

“I’ll give you a blowjob if you drop me at the next bus stop,” she said.

The cigarette almost fell from his lips. What causes somebody to say something like that?

Especially this girl, who Sam used to heat up bottles for, who Sam used to feed cereal to, who he had watched for a week the first time his brother disappeared, and all day they drank soda pop and rode the bus around town. Could that have been it? Could one of those carbonated bubbles have slipped up her tiny throat and into her tiny brain and haywired her neurons so that fifteen years later she would offer to blow her uncle to keep from having to face her dad?

He realized he had been quiet so long she might think he was considering it. “We’re going to pretend you never said that,” he said, and she nodded.

They pulled off the interstate, past signs that said, “State maintenance ends here.” He slowed the car as it entered the uneven, unplowed road; it had been snowing for two weeks straight. She unlocked her door again and when he reached over she grabbed his arm and held the blue flame of her butane lighter against it as he screamed and slammed on the brakes. That time, the cigarette did fall from his lips. She threw the door and scrambled off into the woods.

Sam cradled his scorched arm and looked at the flesh, a black mark shaped like a knife. She would have liked to do a lot more, he thought. She would have liked to have killed him.

95 The surrounding woods went back farther than even God could trace. He didn’t know the first thing about tracking and hell-sure wasn’t going to get lost and die out there looking for some bitch who just seared his arm. He took a minute to catch his breath, then drove back to the cabin. His brother wasn’t even there. Sam ran cold water over his arm, then looked at himself in the small mirror by the sink and saw the fading yellow of his teeth, the reflection smeared by greedy fingerprints. He went upstairs and rambled through his stuff till he found his toothbrush, bristles spotted black with mold. He rinsed it off, then covered it with toothpaste and attacked his fuzzy teeth. He brushed till he felt drowned, then spit and rinsed and reloaded and brushed again.

He must have gone at it for over an hour. He used half a tube. The toothbrush hairs were flayed and split like bodies in a battlefield. He walked outside and tossed the wasted thing into the snow, wondering why the porch looked so strange before realizing it looked strange on account of his car was no longer parked right outside. He sat down, and regretted his pack of cigarettes in the cup holder. He would have to walk three miles to the nearest store. Shit, he thought, and knew he wouldn’t call the cops on Cynthia, and Cynthia knew he wouldn’t call the cops on her, so he had nothing to do but sit on the front porch and stare out at the pale world around him.

And over time, Sam lost his need for food, of water, of anything except walking up and down the streets, trying to find the Mitsubishi and whatever he lost in there. The car was everywhere until it was nowhere, and he grew invincible to the cold, and mosquitos no longer noticed him, and he lived to such an old age that he bore witness to a world none of us could ever have anticipated, and when he tried to tell children of the things he had seen, they spat at him and played tricks on his long-extinct eyesight.

96 Never had Cynthia felt worse about stealing her uncle’s car than when she saw him

standing at a bus station a few years after. She had run inside the grocery store to buy formula

and now stood paused in the entryway, watching him. The same place she had stood when he

picked her up. She felt a tinge of guilt when she wondered if his forearm had scarred. But screw

him. She had run off into the woods, and he hadn’t even given chase. He had gone home to snort

or shoot up while his niece could have tripped over a log and broke an ankle and starved to

death.

One bus came and went, and he made no move toward it. She didn’t understand why he

stood in the cold instead of the warm entryway. It hadn’t yet snowed, but it was near-zero and he

didn’t even have gloves on.

A man walked over to her uncle and gave him something and walked off. An exchange.

She couldn’t believe she had pitied him when here he was, still using. He probably would have

sold the car for a handful of cash. It was good that she had stolen it. Her action forced him to

have served some decent purpose at least once in his life. She, a mom and wife, was using it to

raise a family in the shining light of God. Her phone rang in her pocket; she let it go to voicemail. People walked around her and turned to look at her face, making sure she was alright.

Another bus came and went, and he made no move toward it. Another person walked

over and handed something to him. She realized then that he wasn’t waiting on the bus, he wasn’t even buying drugs, he was begging. She fingered through her purse: no cash. She and her

husband both worked for hourly wages. But they had food, and a car, and a daughter, and such a

richness to their lives that sometimes she couldn’t sleep for thankfulness. But now she stood

here, watching her uncle beg in the cold, and couldn’t think any thought other than that her life,

her rich beautiful life, had all been built on an evil, shameful act against someone trying to help

97 her in what ways he knew how. And she could never have gotten the job she had now without a car. She worked nights sometimes, long after the busses had ceased to run. She worked Sundays.

What would she have done without the Mitsubishi? Bike ten miles to work and ten miles back in the middle of the night in sub-zero temperatures, not to mention pregnant?

She had a thought to go outside and place the keys in his hand and walk off. Maybe he wouldn’t even recognize her, think her just an angel sent by God. But the person who stole that car had been a different person than she was now. That person had not had a daughter, a husband, a family. She had not had a job. Sure, she had sinned, but that sinner was a different person than her today, and should she have to suffer for that other woman’s sins? Should her daughter have to suffer for that other woman’s sins?

She didn’t turn her head as she walked past him, but, in the car, driving from the parking lot, she couldn’t help but look back and see him see the car, staring at it like what still meant something to him.

When she got back to her cabin, the baby was crying. Her husband was listening to the radio too loud. She set the grocery bag on the table and gave him a look like, take care of this and you know what. She walked back outside. The Mitsubishi sat like a spoken tongue. She smeared a handful of dirt across the door. Then another, then another. But that made her feel nothing, for the car was just a car and she was a child of God. The reincarnation of a sinner. So she smeared a handful of dirt across her shirt, but that just felt like changing clean laundry to dirty. So she stripped, out in the cold, shivering and goosepimpled, and packed handfuls of icy dirt across her own flesh, her face and body, her arms and back. She rolled in the dirt till it covered her entirely, then she walked to the front door and opened it and her husband still stood listening to his music, and the formula still sat unopened on the counter, and the baby still cried,

98 but after she crossed the threshold, all noise stopped, and her family stared at her as she held her

arms out as if to say, “See me for what I am.”

After selling the Mitsubishi, she felt spared from something she could not name, almost

like she had gotten away with something, which she had, she supposed, having never been the

car’s rightful owner. And when she saw the Mitsubishi fly past her one day, running a red light at

a clip near eighty, she watched it shrink away and thought, “The lord may have spared me, but

someone soon will find their death in that car.”

Jimmy had been out of high school for two years and walked always with one hand

around his side that gave the impression he had either been stabbed or was two ticks from pulling

out a semi-automatic. After selling pot all afternoon, he went to his job at Blockbuster. Funny to think it was one of the last three or four in the country. Jimmy wondered, was it even a real

Blockbuster? Did they just keep using the name Blockbuster, even though the company had

ceased to exist? Was there, somewhere, a man who was the CEO of four Blockbusters. The

world, he thought, is full of so much shit that doesn’t make sense, it’s a wonder we can do

anything but smoke pot and watch movies and wonder if it’s time to jerk off again.

The other clerk scheduled wasn’t there. Jimmy thought about calling her, as king where

the fuck she was. But the store was quiet and he liked it quiet, and he doubted it would get too

busy to handle, and this way he could go out to his car and mix a rum and coke without having to

worry.

Some chick he had known in high school walked in, wearing a Washington University

sweatshirt like some snotnose who thought she was too good for all the colleges up here. Jimmy

99 was too good for them too, but he didn’t flaunt his Blockbuster uniform around everywhere he

went. She brought a New Release up to him and set it down.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s reserved.”

She scrunched her eyes at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “A real bummer.”

“There are like thirty of these on the shelf,” she said.

“It’s kind of crazy if you ask me,” he said.

“Are you being serious right now?” she said.

He pointed to the manager tag on his chest. “There is nothing I take more seriously than the temporary rental of video entertainment.”

“I can’t believe you’re still such an asshole,” she said.

“Ma’am, you’re talking with a familiarity I’m not sure you’ve earned,” he said.

She turned to walk out the door.

“How about a fuck for old time’s sake?” he called to her, then saw there were a few

people in the store he hadn’t noticed. He laughed to himself when he imagined the owner’s

reaction if they complained.

One lady came up and rented what must have been the only DVD in the store older than

she was.

“A new release,” he said, slipping the DVD out and hiding it silver-side up below the

counter. “This will be due back in seven hours,”

“Huh?”

“It’s a seven-hour rental,” he said, looking at an imaginary watch on his wrist. “I would

get hurrying if I were you.”

100 “Oh my,” she said, and rushed out with her empty case.

He picked the DVD back up and polished off his fingerprints with a pinch of his uniform.

It felt satisfying to clean something so small and fragile. He had a thought to walk around the store with a rag and wipe down every disc in the whole place. He noticed, for the first time, how dirty the floor was and decided he would actually clean it tonight and not just say that he had.

Did he feel guilty, in that moment, for playing tricks on the old woman? He didn’t have time to feel guilty, because as soon as he looked up, there stood before him a man, short and wobbly. A weather-aged neck. Slick white hair. Tattoos peeked around the edges of his denim shirt. He didn’t have a DVD in his hand.

“Is that your car outside?” the man said.

“You’re going to need to be more specific than that,” Jimmy said.

“Do I?” The man motioned to the window. Jimmy didn’t want to look but did and saw that his was the only car out there. The man grinned. Jimmy spotted the shadows of missing teeth and tried to figure out if he had sold to this man before, if this man was among the—not countless, but substantial—number of people he had ripped off in greedier times.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “That’s my car.”

“Guess again,” the man said.

“Guessing’s got nothing to do with it,” Jimmy said.

“Is that your car outside?” the man said.

“Yes,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t think so, cowboy,” the man said.

“Sir, you’re holding up the line,” Jimmy said.

“Ain’t no line,” the man said without turning around, and he was right.

101 “I don’t know what your game is,” Jimmy said. “But that’s my car.”

“Give me the keys,” the man said. His knuckles pressed into the counter as he leaned forward far enough for Jimmy to smell the deep residue of tobacco that lined his clothes.

“There’s nothing in it,” Jimmy lied, backing up, lightheaded. “No drugs, no money, nothing.”

“On the counter.” The man flipped one of his fists over and opened a dry, crusty palm.

“That car’s worth nothing. You’re going to commit a felony for a car that’s not worth the tires it rides on?” Jimmy wished that old woman would come back in, or the girl. Anybody. He reminded himself to stand confidently, to always be the intimidator, not the intimidated. He had dealt with people far worse than this man, hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if his weed suppliers had killed before, and who the fuck was this guy?

“Come on,” the man said. “We’re going for a drive.”

“No,” Jimmy said, taking a step toward the counter, starting to feel in the groove, ready to see where this went, confident he could talk this guy right out of the store.

“That must be your word of the day,” the man said.

“Five counts before I put a bullet in your forehead.”

“I’ll spare you the wait,” the man said. “Do it now.”

“I will.”

“Do it.”

Jimmy reached in the back of his pants for the gun that wasn’t there, and the man reached in the back of his pants for the gun that was.

But he didn’t shoot Jimmy, not then. He pointed it at him and said, “Come on, now.” And

Jimmy did, because what other choice did he have? The man had a singularity of focus. He didn’t

102 mind pulling his gun out in a store where there were (likely) still functioning security cameras and, even outside, the man didn’t bother to conceal the weapon. “Shouldn’t you lock up?”

“Huh?” Jimmy said.

“Lock up,” the man said. “You can’t just leave a fine business such as this one unlocked all night for whoever to come in and do what they please. ”

They got in Jimmy’s car, and Jimmy drove, gun pointed at him the whole time.

"Turn here,” the man said, and led Jimmy down a road he had never seen before. Then another, then another. Hours passed, and Jimmy had no idea if they were hundreds of miles away, or whether they had somehow snaked deeper into the city itself. The man grabbed Jimmy by the upper arm and pointed out the window with the gun. Jimmy’s eyes took a moment to adjust, but then they described a large, concrete structure, barely a silhouette against the night sky. A parking garage—abandoned, most likely. Jimmy pulled inside, and, as the car glided forward, rows of lights turned on. Each row, as it did, revealed a line of old, red Mitsubishis, the same make and model as his. Dents littered the doors of some; others had their front smashed in.

A few looked pristine. In almost every car, a person sat behind the wheel—often injured in obvious ways—staring out with the look of the barely alive. But some cars were empty, and they stuck out more for all their emptiness. Jimmy drove to the next floor up and saw more of the same and kept driving until he found an open parking spot. He instinctively pulled in.

"What do we do now?” Jimmy asked, feeling, as he did, his consciousness flicker. He felt suddenly like the man holding the gun, saw the world through his perspective, then he was back to being himself, then he was some other person in some other Mitsubishi, sitting, remembering, thinking about her life, then he was me, staring out a bus window, riding circles around town.

103 Me, him, us, Jimmy was everybody, but then he was himself again, aware now how temporary that could be.

104 The Somnambulists

Every morning, until the day the Conjurer unexpectedly disappeared, we feigned sleep for as long as we could, pretending to still be under the previous night’s trance as he poured his morning coffee. Dark liquid brimmed his cup like captured shadow, but he never carried it steadily enough to his crooked table, always spilling and burning his hand, then flinching and burning his hand again. In those moments, we had to hold our breath to keep from laughing at him as we stood still along the walls of his cabin, our arms chained to thighs, necks shackled. His cabin appeared to have been built by someone with no understanding of right angles: each wall screamed upward at a degree either acute or obtuse. The corners resembled collapsing tents; the floor was a jagged mess of boards. Nothing filled the main room save his table, a phone, a few kitchen supplies, his conjuring books. Dead squirrels hung from a string like laundry. We whispered the word "coffee” to ourselves and tried to remember how it tasted. If we were back in our own homes (such peaceful homes, we imagine we must have had), if we were permitted to walk of our own volition, we would pour our coffee one drop at a time just to tongue out a sip so small it was scarcely more than heat. We would spend entire mornings, whole days even, walking back and forth across our kitchen without once thinking time had been wasted...

Who would we be but the somnambulists; he, our conjurer? We did not know what use he had in mind for us, no, but we suspected it had to do with his ex-wife’s new husband, whom the

Conjurer parroted in a nasally voice every morning as he stirred schnapps into his mug. Were we to kill him? Frighten him off? What all did the Conjurer make us do after he hypnotized us each night and released us onto the world? What were we capable of, we wondered, what had we already done?

105 ***

Every afternoon, while the Conjurer chopped wood or ran errands in town, we spoke to

ourselves. We exercised language. Its nods toward discrete images were the only memory we

had of a previous life. The Conjurer had filled us with amnesia—he had stolen our histories and

left us with nothing but sentences themselves. Or maybe we were his own creation; no extant

evidence proved anything about us save that we were alive... Each word felt invented by our

uttering of it but offered us nothing more than a picture, disconnected from space and time, yet,

in our spare moments, we still cataloged these images, hoping that they might eventually compile

some trace of a past. Words dripped constantly from us. We spoke half-phrases and finished each

other’s thoughts. Sometimes, we alternated saying single words, forming ideas often nonsensical

and, when coherent, both ours and not, agreed upon by all and none. Whistle ragged box music.

Sever something heart. The language became its own thing; it cut every tie from us. Even when

it was your own mouth moving, you seemed not more than a wake, a mere remnant of something

now passed. Language, to us, in these lives so empty of conscious experience, served as more

companion than tool. A living object, an end in itself, not some pragmatic means...

***

Every night, we watchedThe Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari...

***

Every night, we watchedThe Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari, and those moments of staring at dusty

light traced whining from projector to wall showed just how much empty space hid down the

room, stretched like a hangman’s rope. We saw dread in every frame because we knew that once the film completed, we would be at the Conjurer’s mercy. He, on the other hand, considered each viewing a treat, drawing clear pleasure in the angular, labyrinthine sets—the sets that make each

106 character seem to be walking through the corridors of a wooden brain. The dark cinematic eye, closing and opening. The stuttering, unreal movements and over-white faces...

***

Every night, we watchedThe Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari and dreamt only of falling...

***

Every day, we hurried glances across his cabin for bloodstains, a body, a dirty shovel, any sign that we had killed. But so far, it did not seem he had had us do worse than hunt squirrels. Our evidence: the new batch of corpses he strung up every day; the occasional leaf gripping our pants; boots muddy after a day of rain. He must have still been honing his powers, testing our capabilities, we thought. Sometimes he cooked the squirrels into a stew, but more often he let them go to seed. What fate would await us that morning we had completed our violent teleology?

Would he still have any use for us? We, ourselves? Whispers of a suicide pact. Of inevitability and free will. Of moral obligation. Of how could we live with bodies twisting slowly toward such transgression. It would be simple, in theory. One of those mornings he spent shivering off the previous night’s drink, too ashamed to cast us mind, we could shove our necks forward against the shackles and collapse our windpipes. But then what lives would we have led? No memories of childhood, of mothers, husbands, wives, children—if such things existed. There must be more for us, yes, how could we let this be all we knew...

***

We lived for Tuesdays, when he called his daughter on speakerphone. We loved the squeak of her voice. The way she lengthened vowels and got so frustrated when she accidently uttered the interjection she had given up for Lent, an act she worried would send her to hell. How beautiful, to be so deprived of evil, to not realize the true length of sin. Even the Conjurer seemed gentle in

107 these moments, talking two octaves higher and smiling to himself as he admonished her for speaking ill of her mother’s new husband. But, of course, once the call ended and the Conjurer retreated sniffling to his quarters, we were struck with the gravity of our task. What if the

Conjurer had more in mind for us than just harming his ex-wife’s new husband? What if he wanted to kill his ex-wife too? We were haunted by what such a thing would do to his daughter, that we might be used to rob this perfect child of her right to a mother. Rob her of moments like: dressed in a wedding gown, mother’s hands resting on her shoulders as they exchange mirrored glances and see the beautiful compression of time; hospital visits, grasping and thumbing her mother’s spotted, wrinkled hand while the years stacked festering inside prepare their final bow...

Then, one morning, as we shackled sleepwalkers stood, eyes squinted to appear closed, the

Conjurer did not enter the kitchen, the living room. Our stomachs cried for the oatmeal he fed us daily while stroking our hair and humming German lullabies, his breath smelling of Schnapps and pipe tobacco. Through the windows, we stared at the woods, trees splayed like cracked glass.

We stared, bitter at the squirrels for their wasted freedom, jealous of their lives rich with movement. Urine tickled wet our legs as it trickled down throughout the day to dampen our boots. Our straight knees calcified. Night fell and offered no sleep. The Conjurer had disappeared. For a brief moment, we fantasized that he had gotten arrested, but then realized if such a thing happened, no one would ever find us here...

We had not realized the extent of our reliance on his tricks. We had grown addicted, been transformed into insomniacs. To pass the time, we recited lines from The Cabinet o f Dr.

108 Caligari, going through the film over and over while the sun forgot about us. We decided to shed

our anonymity, to name ourselves. We ached and thought and threw voices into silence, voices

so separable from their source, as if names were a prerequisite for history. Whatever we had

previously been called, if we had ever led lives outside this captivity, was as gone as the rest of

our memories. We needed to start afresh—had no choice but to. Our first impulse was to resist

this tongue that denied access to our previous lives, that refused to contort and form what phrases

we needed. So we decided to name ourselves with knocking sounds, with gentle raps of skull

against wall. But that did not last. Dizziness soon set in. We tried grunts, but our throats, so dry,

collapsed into coughing fits. Then it became hard to remember any names, once we relented. We

tried to use other words we knew, normal words, but each sound, once picked, lodged in

everyone’s minds and prevented us from thinking of anything else. Strangled, strangle,

strangler, strung. So we decided to pull names from the one place we knew... Caligari spoke,

then Cesare spoke, then Jane spoke, then Francis spoke. Thrilled by fresh distinction, we talked

ourselves hoarse. But with not much to talk of, we reverted to recitingThe Cabinet o f Dr.

Caligari: Spirits surround us on every side—they have driven me from hearth and home, from wife and child... Satisfied, we attempted rest as the sun remembered us, shining brighter in

celebration of our newfound identities. The room was a glow of rising dust, air specked like

spinning mites. We shifted from heel to toe and back again, trying to wake our numbed feet, but

no comfort was to be found. Our spines felt as though they were curling back into themselves.

We knew there would be no sleep that day. We wondered what we would be willing to sacrifice

for some. We knew the answer...

109 At noontime, Caligari spoke. We listened, tried to ignore him, listened some more. Jane cried

out, and Caligari responded. But our throats were too dry, our lungs felt shrunken, struggling to

even keep up breath, though something about our newfound names added authority to our

straining voices. Outside, the squirrels appeared suddenly ill-fit beneath their skin. They shifted

in stop-start rhythm, as if wound-up children’s toys. They looked tumorous, sickly; their fur

sagged like grey canvas. They seemed to move backward but somehow grew closer. Their eyes

gazed lustily through the window. One of them creaked over to the glass and started to scratch

and paw at it, scraping a nail-to-chalkboard sound... The Conjurer’s phone rang—the dark red

phone perched on the floor—so we assumed it must have been Tuesday. The ring made each

silence more acute. It made us perceive the depth of emptiness around us. But he would never

miss his phone call, we thought, and grew excited at his possible return. Even Jane, for all her

previous talk, was relieved at this prospect. Flies tickled our faces as they landed on and hovered

around our sullied pants. We did not dare breathe, afraid even the slightest mumble could chase

him away, as though it was us who had the power over him, as though it was our job to lure him

back with gentleness. Maybe, in our previous lives, the Conjurer had known and feared us and

that was why he chose us to capture, constrain, hypnotize. And maybe that fear explained why he

had disappeared, and now we needed to mollify his fear so he could he return. But, try as we did to exude tenderness, he never emerged, and the phone rang and rang. The answering machine

picked up, and we heard his daughter’s beautiful sigh into it. Wait. Not a sigh, but panting.

Breathlessness. We realized Tuesday had only been three days prior. There were a few moments

of silence, then quick breathing and a fluttering of footsteps barely audible through the machine.

Her whispers made us wish for the strength to tear through the shackles and travel until we found

110 her and could bundle her between us, cage her with our bones and keep her safe forever. The line went dead. Another night without sleep...

Squirrels nibbled through a suffering in the wall. They creaked and smelled of rotting logs. They spilled across the floor, the most tumorous curling while infants inched from their dusty fur like worms. Some hitched over to our legs and chewed. It felt pleasant at first, our legs so itchy and out of reach, but led to a new kind of torture as we longed to bandage and compress our wounds.

There was a jarring thump. The squirrels dissipated. A whine. The last gasps of Cesare ending his only life. We tasted the dampness of his choking breaths. Caligari screamed out...

Cesare’s corpse hung limped forward, still held up by his shackles. Blood and drool combined to form a viscosity that leaked through his lips and settled on the floor. His lifeless body angled in such a way that revealed new aspects. The back of his head had rubbed clean of hair, leaving a pale, moon-like circle. Scarred flesh peeked around his shackles. His limbs were made mostly of bone. Wrinkles wormed across his face; gray colored his stubble. We looked at his aged corpse, then at our own hands—seeing them, for the first time, as ancient things—and realized just how long we had been in captivity. We watched Cesare’s body twitch with a new sympathy, knowing how soon we would join him. His twitching grew livelier and livelier, until it resembled dancing; but then he stopped and never moved again, save for his tongue, which slipped from his mouth and dangled like a hanged man’s foot.

In the middle of the night, the Conjurer returned. His new, slight limp made him move as if in old, grainy home videos: the limp-step occurred at twice the speed of everything else he did. Dirt

111 flavored his arms and undershirt. He tried to lean a shovel against the wall but it slid and fell,

chattering with the floor. He did not look over as he kicked shut the door and struggled to his

film projector, putting in a reel we had never seen before. It started with the last frame of Dr.

Caligari and began to run backwards. The Conjurer then collapsed, lying in the middle of his

cabin like a corpse in an oversized coffin. The squirrels, back outside, flattened their gunpowder

flesh against the windows, tonguing and toothing the glass. We had no choice but to watch the

screen, our eyes felt stuck to it, while everything around us grew darker, then silent. The phone vibrated but made no ring. Lightning flashed though no thunder could be heard. We blinked and

realized, suddenly, it was us lying on the floor and the Conjurer shackled to the wall. Our arms

and legs moved like freshly greased hinges, almost as if they had never been constrained at all.

But even in this physical freedom, we lacked a certain control. Our heads turned toward the door;

it was open. We stumbled out. The trees formed a flatscape around us. The squirrels were frozen two-dimensional images in varied states of decay. There was but one path and we followed it.

Jane and Francis spoke but made no sound. We kept on. Our walking turned into stumbling. The

path expanded and compressed like an accordion, and we began to fall through it, filled only with the grim knowledge that we would never stop.

112 Maybe It’s Some Things That Do Never Change

I can forever recall like tomorrow the time I arranged for Lucy’s married lover to trade souls with the meanderer.

I knew the meanderer from my military days, and when I brought the idea up to Lucy, she agreed immediately. She said it would be a lot easier for her and Bill to run away to Arizona if he could abandon his body onto someone else.

So I put her in contact with the meanderer, and she first met the stubby man during her rounds around the casino floor. He had approached her to ask about the bathroom, clothes wafting of Pimento cheese soured by sweat. Acne scars nibbled across his cheek. His sudden presence caught her off guard, so she only motioned vaguely and nearly spilled her tray of drinks. She found him moments later, watching slot machines and holding his crotch like a child waiting to pee. More composed now, she leaned over and whispered in his ear.

Across the patterned rug, Bill spilled the ball along the roulette wheel and ignored shouts from those who kept up bets on red and didn’t embarrass the players who tipped him by returning more than a nod and when asked what brought him to Vegas he said, “I hate to water front lawns.”

Since the start of his shift, Bill hadn’t rolled a single red and people had begun to notice.

The most superstitious gamblers kept a wide berth. The regulars mimed religious iconography up their bodies if they so much as accidentally glanced at him. Only tourists dared venture near.

"Fifteen black,” he announced.

“You worthless fuck,” the last remaining guy at Bill’s table said, sunburned inside a fishing shirt, his face adorned with the scabby lips of one not used to desert air. He swallowed

113 the dregs of a Red Bull & vodka then billowed off like a sail, throwing, as he did, his arms up in resignation.

Looking at the long string of black numbers projecting from Bill’s screen made Lucy feel unbalanced, like something sat on her left shoulder or she had one hand made of stone.

Her eyes scanned the scattered crowd. A quadriplegic child sat bored by an elderly woman pulling slots; she had him set facing away from the reels to watch her back. Some college boys kept patting the pockets of their basketball shorts. A small party squinted at craps, as if doubting that rules for such a game could even exist. A few spots down the bar, the fishing shirt licked liquor residue from his shot glass like a drunken cat. He turned to Lucy and tried to complain about his roulette dealer while she made tiny, retreating steps, pulling against the empty space between them. She didn’t say a word in response—the kind of reckless customer service her managers held meetings about— and continued her rounds and said to herself, "No, I will not glance at Bill as I pass his now empty table.” Per casino policy, Bill kept loping the ball, kept repeating the ghost motions of a game without players. Other waitresses shouldered unordered drinks just to look busy—rounding out ten minute circles, then dumping the thin soda in rotation at the bar. One long assembly line. Lucy tried to imagine how the place would look vacant, doors locked and chained, but her mind could never complete such an image, always leaving a few tourists, or weekenders, as if the pour of feet and heads composed the building’s, not furniture, but structure. What does that make me? Lucy thought. I, it?

Enter, again, the meanderer. Stubby and knuckled with dark hair, he curved the space a few steps off Bill’s table and watched. Impatient wet handprints haloed his pockets. The two men exchanged nods.

114 On the walkway, just above the casino floor, marched an army of sick children, crooked over, bald and spittly. They glanced everywhere their guide pointed, coughing out oohs and ahs.

Reflected light illuminated their eyes.

The meanderer meandered closer to Bill’s table, then all the way up to it. He tried to hand over a hundred-dollar bill, but Bill tapped the table. The man kept holding the bill out, poking the air between them, as if testing an unfamiliar gesture.

“Set it on the table,” Bill said, tapping again.

When the man did, Bill asked, “Inside or outside?”

No response.

“Do you want chips to bet the inside of the table,” Bill pointed to the numbers, “or the outside?”

“Where does the smart money play?” the man asked.

“Back in your billfold,” Bill said. “Ever hear of mutual funds?”

“Er. Outside, inside—no.” The man paused, then said with a satisfied air. "Outside.” He sat back, and his fingers made cobwebs across his chips. He haunted Bill’s table till shift’s end without placing a single bet and when he got up to leave, he forgot his money.

Lucy watched Bill sit on her bed and pluck stray hairs off his arm—dropping them on the floor like he didn’t care whose feet they would get stuck to—his back turned to her as she sat catlike on the bathroom sink, brushing her teeth and watching him through the door-absent doorway. Each time he pulled off a long, black one he would examine it, as if wondering how such a thing could grow from his body.

115 When they first started seeing each other, she was self-conscious about how much her apartment resembled a motel: blank, stained, with nothing on the walls but photographs of famous clocks from around the world. But now she liked what it seemed to say, that any moment she could be gone, and remember that.

At the door, a knock.

"I think it’s for you,” Lucy said through gargles of spent toothpaste.

Bill answered the door. Outside stood the meanderer, stubby as ever, perhaps more so.

Lucy spat in the sink. “Come in,” she called.

The man bumped into Bill as he tried to enter. Bill backed up to let him pass.

Lucy emerged from the bathroom, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

“Should I be nervous?” Bill asked.

“Think of it like changing a battery,” the meanderer said

"Are you sure you won’t mind me looking like him?” Bill asked.

“Don’t be rude. He’s not bad. All things considered and such,” Lucy said.

“I do all right,” he said. He mimed the act of spinning a roulette ball. “And I always wanted to be a casino dealer.”

“And then I would become...”

“A traveling salesman,” he said. “Because that’s what I am, a traveling salesman.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to see the world?” Lucy said. “I’m tired of watching grown men drink tear-salty vodka tonics.”

“Well, I really just work the southern Nevada area,” he said. “I’m more of a meanderer.

That’s it: a meandering salesman.”

“I’m sort of having second thoughts,” Bill said. “What exactly is in this for you?”

116 “My feet hurt and my car ran out of gas,” the meanderer said.

Lucy watched Bill contort his new body and wasn’t sure if it had taken.

“Are we going to fool around or what?” she asked.

“You know, there were probably easier ways,” Bill said. “For me to leave my wife, I mean.”

“Name one,” Lucy said.

“I can name five,” Bill said. “Just let me think for a minute.”

Lucy had known the meanderer a day and now he was sleeping on top of her.

Well, him, or he was Bill. Same old Bill. Bill-ness as usual. Which—she had told herself beforehand that what she really cared about was Bill himself and whatever body he wore was yesterday’s news, but if this man was Bill, it was a Bill of the worst degree. Like, for instance, he no longer just bit his nails, now he sucked on them. He shaved too roughly and left his neck a swath of red. He picked at his feet then ate with his hands, made too much eye contact and tried to kiss her when she needed to breathe for God’s sake.

Here’s the part where it all starts to get fuzzy.

The next day. One of the them had been out all morning on his sales route though he didn’t know what to sell, so he had mostly just knuckled doors and asked the answering folks if they knew the good word and if so, could they point it out in his pocket dictionary? When he returned to where he thought he was supposed to return, he found Lucy entangled naked with the

Bill-looking one. His belly swinging like a hair-spotted hammock below eyes popping from a red, sweaty face.

117 “Next time knock,” the Bill-looking one said.

“He left his wife,” Lucy said. “Your wife. It obfuscates grammar, this situation.”

“So there’s an option for you,” the same one said.

This left the other guy with nothing to do but walk through the dark-bright Las Vegas

streets and think about trying to get his wife back, or someone else’s wife, or to just keep

walking.

***

At her shift the next day, gliding through pockets of casino chatter, Lucy thought: What’s

that old saying, the more things change the more they stay the same?

She wondered now whether there had never been a switch in the first place, if Bill had just faked along, trying to put one past her. This seemed the patent Bill way of getting out of

situations he no longer desired finding himself within the confines of. But the whole act must

have caused some change of heart, because now the Bill-looking one claimed to want her full

stop.

She paused by the bar to watch Bill’s distracted throws. Whether he was him or the other

guy, it had been how long since he pitched a red? His face grew more nervous, chuckling after

each toss. Men in cheap collared shirts, their skin a carpet of wrinkles, drifted to and from his

table. Gone before she could collect their drink orders. The more times in a row he rolled black,

the more people wanted to bet red. What’s that old saying?

At the stools to her left, the sunburned man, still wearing the same fishing shirt, chatted

with a blond woman. They were the only people at the bar. He phrased himself cautiously and

seemed to focus on her features for some tell he’d learned from TV. These days, Lucy thought,

men assumed every woman in Vegas was a prostitute, which made Lucy feel sorry for both those

118 who were and those who weren’t. How much do we have to question whether things are as they seem before they no longer seem like anything?

Lucy placed a hand on his shoulder. It felt harder, less doughy than she anticipated. The man looked at her, the woman looked away. “She’s not what you think she is,” Lucy said.

“Then what does that make me?” the man said.

Lucy could recall forever the time her mother told her—at the age of eight, no less—that every person offered an opportunity, even though, so far, Lucy hadn’t quite been what she’d had in mind.

An assortment of sick, despondent children, aged kindergarten to high school, walked above the crowd, sticking together as they toddled to the exit, bags packed and homeopathic last ditch efforts waiting. Strangers offered a wide berth. “I didn’t expect it to remind me so much of a hospital,” one of the children said. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”

Lucy looked up and saw both of the Bills walking toward her, then she closed her eyes and saw the same. They walked toward her from the front, from the back, from every possible angle at every possible speed. She rubbed her eyes and rubbed them again until everything was a blur of hair and skin, then moved behind the bar and poured herself a drink, not caring if her managers saw, not caring what would happen after she drank it to the bottom, not caring how many other drinks, in the long straight-line of her life, had come before it or how many would come after.

For Lucy and the Bills, things ended as inauspiciously as they began, as inauspiciously as everything that occurs in a universe birthed by explosion. Or maybe they’re happier than I give them credit, although typically it’s the other way around, and sure as hell not with each other.

119 Lucy gathered every piece of cash she could muster and donned a pink wig to come bet it all on black, intending, I suppose, to double her worth and take off for the next nearest desert. But, and

I swear it’s true, the whole casino went mouse-quiet when he rolled the first red he’d rolled in near a week and Lucy slapped him right on the neck and I believe ran off or something with the owner of a Southeastern seafood chain who had been hounding her since he got in town—big sunburned guy in a fishing shirt. Why did I introduce her to the meanderer in the first place? I typically stay off my coworker’s lives—who would want to create problems he’ll then have to hear about all day? Or worse, solutions. But we all do favors and we all take them, though I can’t remember who asked for it, and nobody ever orders drinks in here that take more than two ingredients—three if we count chunks of fruit—so my hands get restless. I swear I saw the meanderer just this afternoon on my bus ride here, door-to-dooring with his suitcase full of whatever it is nobody needs. I guess maybe it’s some things that do never change.

120 Isn’t There More to Your Life Than That?

Anytime I do anything with my girlfriend’s kids, somebody ends up bleeding.

“Let’s get you some ice,” I say to Scott, peeling him off the grass like a band aid.

“Look at me,” Scott’s older brother, also named Scott, says. “Come on, I want to see.”

Younger Scott looks over at him. The side of his head, right alongside the eye, bubbles

out liquid like a backed up drain. It mixes with his tears and snot to form something thick and

repulsive by the time it reaches his chin.

“Gross,” older Scott shouts, turning away, then back. “Again.”

“Here.” I skin off my sock to wrap around his forehead. “Give the swinger some room

next time.”

The swinger had been me. Older Scott had been pitching and younger Scott was the

catcher. I wanted to impress them by hitting it over the fence, but the pitch sailed wide so I

popped younger Scott on the follow through. Back in my schooldays, I played ball with their

daddy, who couldn’t hit piss if it was him leaking it, so I figured this could be something to teach them when Melissa sent us to TurtleFuck Park because it’s September and soon everything will be covered in snow and midnight.

She calls it TurtleTurtle Park.

So now I’ve got a bleeding, shrieking preteen and dozens of strangers staring over while

I’m tugging on the Scotts like, maybe let’s walk a little faster before we see someone I know.

Is it everyone who lets me down every day?

“Next time. I doubt it,” younger Scott says. It’s a relief just hearing him speak. For a few

minutes he hadn’t done anything but scream and pat his forehead and glance at his bloody hand

and scream louder as if seeing it for the first time.

121 I drive slow to the Fred Meyer, betting he has a headache—I sure as shit do. The whole

drive, older Scott sits turned toward him on the bench seat asking again and again to see it.

“No,” I say. “He’s got to keep it compressed. Or maybe it’s elevated?”

“There’s an acronym they taught us in school,” older Scott says. “It’s called Rice. It

stands for Rest and Ice.”

“You resting okay over there?” I say.

He takes the sock off—looks at it—and starts screaming again.

“That red stain was there when I gave it to you,” I lie.

We park in a fire lane. I loosen a bag of ice from the outdoor freezer and walk in to pay

for it. Everyone stares at young Scott. Older Scott walks next to him, smiling. I lead a bit so

maybe no one will think I’m with them.

Before they even finish ringing me up, I fill a grocery bag and push it against Scott’s

head. I trash the bloody sock, and the cashier gives me a look. What I want to know is, what else

am I supposed to do with it?

“Maybe throw it in your own damn garbage can?” she says. “Do you have a Fred

Meyer’s rewards card?”

I take out my keys and scan it.

After we get back into the car, the bleeding seems to have stilled.

“Let me see,” the older one says, and the younger lifts the ice, his skin briefly sticking to

it. He blinks dried blood from his eyes. “Gross,” the older one says. He looks away and squirms, then turns back. “Let me see it again.”

“Shit,” I say. “I left my keys at the register.”

122 As I’m walking back in, I try calling the kids’ dad but no answer. Dialing him, getting his

voicemail, this is cigarettes to me: something to structure the day around. My endorphins simmer

each time.

Their daddy is named Scott too. He’s a man of some description. I feel bad about myself

to think of him as Scott Sr.— what has he done that I couldn’t? I’m the one raising his damn

kids. Instead I think of him as Senior Scott so he sounds like a high schooler and in a grade he

never even reached.

Overhead, a sedge of sandhill cranes squawk by on their way out of dodge.

I think of finding what to make these people see me how I deserve to be seen: the kids,

Senior Scott, Melissa, everyone. Here I am, always giving them what-all, and it only leaves

somebody bleeding or with their feelings hurt, or both.

The cashier holds my keys out as I walk up, her hand guarded by a grocery bag. A copy

of the Daily News Miner sits upside down by the register. I glance over and immediately

recognize the name on the back page.

Percy John Percy may be a celebrity here in Fairbanks, Alaska, but I always have and still

know him as Nippleshit. Me and him had rubber banded around each other through what school we both finished, and it’s not that I never expected him to grow up to nothing, it’s more that he was the kind of guy who would cheat on the pretty girl with the ugly one, leaving Pretty and

Ugly—my sisters both—to fight and scream all night during the good TV. That’s the kind of not-

never-nothing type person I mean.

Well, fast forward past one moderately viewed reality TV show about balancing love­

sick gold-panning with some pandering to Alaska fetishism and I’ll leave you to guess whose

123 girlfriend’s kids have been bugging him to go to Nippleshit’s book signing. I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

Me and Melissa are sitting at the kitchen table. She’s on the phone; I’m trying to get her attention.

The hospital bill lies between us like a commercial break.

The Scotts claw at the front door like dogs.

Neither of us can afford to pay it, and she’s maxed out on student loans, which is why I didn’t want to take him to the hospital in the first place. Why don’t we fake our deaths, make new identities? I had said to Melissa. Why don’t you die and I pay off the bill with your life insurance money, she had said, though she knows I don’t have any insurance.

“Where are my keys?” I ask Melissa for the fifth time, and she finally looks at me—I used to could tell how much she wished I were different, but now all I see is how much she wishes I were nobody she knew. Sometimes two people just do something, and then they’ve done something; that’s sort of how we got together. But, hell, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be here anymore. Having a family is sort of like being a celebrity. It fits my temperament. “I asked you to leave them in the coffee tin.”

She covers the mouth of her phone and deepens her glare. She’s always on the phone with professors and classmates. She’s getting a master’s online. Something about petroleum, making it or getting rid of it.

“They’re in your hand, smartsmart,” she says. Since she stopped cussing, she’ll just repeat the non-cuss word in a pair, like “Godgod,” “Holehole,” or “Mothermother.” It helps her feel like a good mom, which does kind of turn me on.

I look in my hand. She got lucky that time.

124 “When I finally kick you out,” she says, “it’s nice to know I won’t have to change the

locks.”

“Don’t do me any favors.”

Me and the kids stack in the truck cab like Pringles and off we go to Walmart.

The kids hate their namesake, which makes things easier when I need them to do stuff

and harder when I need to watch TV. But the truth is, he’s pretty good fun, their daddy—the kind

of guy you want to grab a beer with, even after he almost cut off your nose. Me and him used to be friends before one of us started sleeping with the other’s wife. Who can remember who that was. The past is a gooey-eyed thing.

The line for Nippleshit’s book signing is longer than he deserves it to be, by which I

mean, is there.

Standing in line, I try calling Senior Scott, but no answer. I always wonder what he’s

thinking, never answering. What if I was calling about his kids?

I glance at the shit stacked shelves. Strange to think it will all one day be scattered across

thousands of folks’ homes, that or mailed to Africa or whatever they do with what won’t sell. My

thoughts are: other people have plenty of shit, just use theirs.

The man in front of me in line is about my age. Hell, maybe he even went to high school

with me and Nippleshit twenty years ago. But, if he had, he’s since bloated to a state of

unrecognizability, because I don’t remember an inch on him. He’s got a kid with him too, and

he’s gushing about how much he loves Nippleshit’s show (“Why no second season?”) and that

column he briefly had in the paper (“Bastards stopped printing it just when it started to get

125 good”) and his blog and those YouTube videos he’s been posting lately (“They definitely deserve more than a few thousand views”) and all that bullshit and more bullshit. The whole time he’s talking, Nippleshit just stares, gripping his pen like the plug of some life-support machine he can’t wait to yank from the wall, until eventually he tears the book from the little kid’s ha nds and signs it with what’s barely more than a straight line and gives it back in a motion that also serves to sort of sweep them aside, and the kid looks up at his dad with eyes that emit both betrayal and shame, as if the kid is just realizing for the first time how many situations his dad doesn’t know how to handle properly. After watching all that, I start to dread what Nippleshit’s going to say to me and all the ways he might embarrass me in front of the Scotts.

“Hey Percy,” I mumble as we step forward, already starting to guide the Scotts toward the door, halfway expecting to be dismissed with a single flick of Nippleshit’s wrist.

He pauses for a moment, and I’m waiting for him to bring up something from high school, but instead he stands and grapples me into a hug. “Just the man I wanted to see!”

“These are my kids,” I lie. “Scott Jr. and Scott II.”

He laughs. “You haven’t changed a shrug.” I laugh too, though I don’t get what he means. He shakes both their hands then slides over the book they pooled their allowance for. I don’t know why he seems so damn happy to see me.

“You’ve got quite the shiner there,” he says, motioning to younger Scott’s stitches.

“Should I make it out to ‘Scott and Scott’?”

The boys stare up at me, scared to talk to a local celebrity or just anyone who doesn’t live in their own house.

“They share too much as it is,” I say.

126 He signs a page from the front and one from the back then doodles somebody gold panning getting snuck up on by a bear. They fight over the book after he hands it back, so I snatch it from them. “Papercut,” younger Scott says and puts his finger in his mouth. We turn to leave.

“Hey Scott,” Percy says. We all three turn back, but he’s looking at me. “Why don’t you give me your number. I’ll be around town a few days. We should grab a beer tonight.” I pause, unsure whether to correct him or walk off. But then I decide Fuck It and give him my number because I can’t even remember the last time I hung out with a guy m y own age.

I wish I could tell Senior Scott not only did I see ole Nippleshit today, not only did he get us confused with each other, but we’re going to grab a beer no less. In the good days, Scott would have said something like, “A beer? Are you sure you want to go back down that road?” but the last time I talked to him he was all, “You calling to say you’re done with my wife?” and when I said, “No, but...” he hung up.

“Which of you little shits has my keys?” I say as we walk past the registers. I’ve tur ned both my pockets inside out.

“You left them in the pickup,” the older one says.

“Why did he call you Scott?” the younger one says.

When we get outside, I take the book from them. It’s a flimsy thing. The cover feels like cardboard, and just flipping through causes the binding to loosen up. I tear out the signed pages, then trash the rest.

“Hey, we paid for that,” the older one says.

“Why don’t you ask it for a ride home then?” I say as we pile into the truck. I see my keys turned in the ignition, engine still running. “Lucky guess,” I say.

127 ***

And wouldn’t it be just like Nippleshit to want to grab drinks at the hotel bar? I’m surprised he didn’t ask me to grab them at the airport. As I walk through the lobby, I keep checking behind me before remembering the kids are at home watching mommy do calculus.

“He’s going to take a tequila shot from my bellybutton,” I tell the bartender when he walks over. I’m starting to think I might stick to water but when Nippleshit orders us two Bud

Lights I find the only thing I can do is pat my gut and say, “Make mine a heavy.”

“You know what they say about cameras and ten pounds,” Percy says when the bartender sets down his beer.

“I thought that was just movie cameras,” I say. “You know, Oscars, Hollywood. The big screen.”

“Big screen,” he laughs. “You should see my TV.”

“Hell, I built my own TV,” I say. Which, of course, I didn’t.

“These beers are on me,” he says. “Self-publishing, I keep like eighty-percent of the profits.”

I take a sip. The air bubbles tickle as they leak from my mouth, and I wonder if it’s not a lie about beer being brewed but instead it’s created by witches and alchemists in some untouched

German forest. “I’m not supposed to be doing this,” I say. “Drinking beer, I mean.”

“We all do stuff we’re not supposed to, now and then.” He winks and takes a pull. “Nice kids, by the way.”

“I’ll tell the wife you said so.”

“Elizabeth?” he says.

“No,” I say. “Melissa.”

128 “Do you still talk to what’s-his-name?”

“Who?”

“You know, that guy obsessed with you in high school. I’ve been trying to get in touch with him too.”

“I heard he killed himself with a weed-wacker.”

He takes a sip. “Isn’t that something? Everyone always thought he was in love with you.”

“Maybe it was that or he wanted to be me.”

“Hm,” he says. “Your kids must have gotten a kick from meeting a TV star this afternoon.”

“TV star? Tell somebody else,” I say. “TV personality, may be a better way of putting it.”

Nippleshit quiets for a minute. I think I pissed him off. Then he takes a deep swallow and sets his empty bottle down. “Finish your beer,” he says. “I need to show you something up in my room.” I catch myself looking around for the kids again, knowing all the trouble they could cause in a place like this.

About seven or eight months ago, when I had just started living with his wife, I came home to Senior Scott sitting on the front porch crying, hunched in the corner with his back faced out.

“Hey Scott,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. “You want to go fishing tomorrow?”

He didn’t respond. When I got closer he whipped his elbow back, and I smelled a spurt of gas. He swung at me with a weed-wacker but barely missed my face, string blown wind hitting my eyebrows and lashes. I stumbled a bit then centered my weight and faced him up, not sure

129 whether to try and neutralize him or take off. The story I tell is, I didn’t run because my family lived here and he bore a weapon with questionable intent.

He took another jab at my face but I sidestepped. He moved clumsily, awkwardly, and I thought he was fixed to trip and fall.

“Scott what the hell are you doing?” I said.

When he righted himself, he pumped the weed-wacker twice, strings dancing sinister, then dropped it and sprinted down the street.

Honestly, I never would’ve stolen his family if I knew he was going to take it so personally. The funny thing is, the first time he found his wife flaying Saran wrap from my naked body, I swear I saw a hint of pride in him. Which maybe is what I really wanted. To show how much he had always underestimated me.

***

After we walk into his room, Percy pours two whiskeys. He sits on one bed. I sit on the other.

The TV in his room plays mute this show about Alaskan cops who also sing a cappella.

It’s one of my favorites. Way deeper than Nippleshit’s. Melissa calls his show “the lowest common denominator.” Which means 0, I think. Or maybe it’s 1.

It’s funny how at home he looks in the blandness of a hotel room. I bet he’s never said

“paint swatch” in his life. I find myself admiring this about him.

“The worst thing about filming,” he says, “is you can’t listen to any of your favorite songs because of copyright fees.”

“Hm,” I say. “I can’t even like a song until I’ve heard it on a TV show.”

“Drink?” he says, lifting his glass.

130 What I want to know is, why did we come up here to have a drink when we were doing that downstairs? I smell the whiskey and imagine whisking it in a bowl like eggs and dumping it on a hot skillet. Feeding it to the family. Back when I was a drinker, people called me a drunk.

When you’re a drunk, you’re a joke. When you’re an alcoholic, then people take you seriously.

I want to take a sip, but I set the glass down and stand.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say. He starts to motion but I quickly add, “I’ll use the one in the lobby” and hurry out to the hall. I ride the elevator down and beeline outside. “Have a good evening, sir,” I hear someone say through the shutting hotel door.

But when I climb into my truck, I realize I can’t start the engine, on account of where the fuck are my keys.

Goddammit. I check my hands and pockets twice. I could call Melissa, ask her to borrow the neighbor’s car. But I never told her where I was going tonight and having her come pick me up outside a hotel might not look so good. Especially with no gum to trick my breath. Especially a hotel as nice as this. “And yet we stay in a motel when we go on vacation,” I can hear her saying. Then I would have to drag her upstairs to show her that Nippleshit is here, and it was his room and then where would I be? Back where I started plus Melissa. Plus questions. And if I was going to do that I might as well go back up there now and get the keys myself.

In front of my truck, ravens hover above a half-open dumpster, plucking meat off fast food wrappers. One of them tries to land on the shut half but can’t grip the plastic so she scrambles and slides before finding her wings and flying off to the still-lit sky.

I walk into the hotel and up to the front desk. The scab-cheeked teen is helping somebody, apologizing profusely for some minor inconvenience involving the ice machine. Why does it feel like I’m always standing in some line or another? Always just in front of or just

131 behind somebody I hope to bear no resemblance to. As the clerk and the inconvenienced woman repeat the same remarks over and over, the woman’s stern expression gradually melts, until the clerk’s sincerity seems to have made her feel guilty about making such a big deal about whate ver

(“I can’t even remember why I needed so much ice!”), and now she’s the one apologizing to him

(“You’ve been so patient when I know it’s not even your fault”), and they go on like this, apologizing to each other, until eventually she accepts his offer of a free whatever and walks off.

“Welcome back, sir,” the clerk says, redirecting toward me an intensity of focus that almost knocks me back a pace.

“Did anybody by any chance find some keys down here?” I ask. “Maybe by the bar?”

“No, sir,” he says, using the same sincere tone with me that he used with the woman, only now, being its recipient, I’m able to sense something sinister in it, something almost evil, the way I imagine Charles Manson might have talked if he had worked at the DMV.

“You didn’t even check,” I say.

“Sir, my entire job is checking. If you see me standing here, I’m never not checking.” He maintains his smile and eye contact, but I get the impression that he wants nothing less than to slit my throat and dance in my blood.

“You have to do what I say. I’m the customer.”

“Yeah, well, what have you ever done that was so great?”

His eyes, his tone, it all becomes so unbearable I double-time over to the elevator, scanning the floor on my way. A few times I think I see the keys, but it always turns out to be a coin catching the light just so.

132 I ride the elevator to the top floor, and return to Percy’s room, which I only could

recognize because the door had been left wide open, I guess by me. He’s watching the TV and taking notes on a legal pad. He sees me and stands.

“I think I dropped my keys in here,” I say.

“Your keys? What are you talking about?” He hands me my glass of whiskey. “I thought we were going to have a drink?”

There is something so pure about how whiskey can sit out forever without going bad.

Like how you think, if I could only drink that blue Kool-Aid looking Windex, I might feel clean

and reborn.

The glass just fits so perfectly into my hand, I end up drinking it and two more.

“Alright,” he says as I sit back down with my fourth. “You want a job?”

“I got a job,” I say. “I’m a dad.”

“What I mean is on my new YouTube show,” he says. “You’d be in an episode. We film tomorrow so I need your answer five minutes ago.”

“YouTube show?” I say.

“We ain’t gold panning anymore,” he says and laughs. “I need to prove to the networks that I still got it. This is gonna be my way back in.”

“Is this for those same videos you’ve already been making?”

Nippleshit shakes his head. “Those were just practice. This is the real deal. I’ve got

funding and everything.”

“What would I do?”

He glances at the clock on the nightstand. “I need you to act like I slept with your wife.”

133 “Now listen here,” I say, then think about that hospital bill sitting on our table back

home. “How much does it pay?”

“You probably won’t have to get naked,” he says, “but maybe be open to it.”

Just then two short men with intricate muscles enter wearing all black. They have briefcases full of contracts and waivers and so much stuff to sign, but Nippleshit keeps pouring

me whiskey so that helps. What I want to know is, why me?

“You just look like the kind of guy whose wife would cheat on him,” Nippleshit says.

***

Me and Melissa drink coffee the next morning and I tell her what I did.

“You son of a son,” Melissa says. “You dipdip.”

“The kids can’t hear you.” I shuffle a hand through my hair. “They’re passed out.” I like

to say “passed out” because it drives her crazy. She says it makes them sound like sailors.

“People around here watch his stupid videos. People I see every day.”

“If it makes you feel better,” I say, “he says these videos will get him a deal with truTV.

Maybe he’ll bring me along with him.”

The look on her face says, “That does not make me feel better,” but her mouth says,

“Where the heck is your truck?”

“Percy called me a cab.” I rub the sleep-grease from my hair. “I couldn’t find my keys”

“I needed it to get to work today.”

“Hey you can’t lordthat over me anymore,” I say. “I’m a working boy myself.”

“Some job.”

“I know you’re impressed,” I say. “Even if you won’t act like it.”

I catch her looking over at the hospital bill pinned to the fridge.

134 “My check should be enough to pay that off,” I say.

She starts dialing on her phone and shuffles back to the bedroom, slamming the door.

I decide to walk to the hotel and find my keys.

I walk to the hotel, but I don’t find my keys. I never realized how out of breath you could

get just from walking. That’s one of those things that, if you walked enough to figure out, then you wouldn’t get out of breath just from walking.

Well, walking plus kicking over stranger’s trash cans. Something about the way they sit

perched at the edge of everyone’s driveway, signs of lives that create and dispose of waste at

scheduled intervals, feels like a taunt about even the least of things I’ve always failed to do. The

dumbest pig never forgets to eat its own shit, but I can’t even remember when garbage day is.

When I get to the hotel, I see everyone standing in the parking lot. The last of the

seasonals. A mix of stiff-necked folk and old people whose muscles drip like animals without bones. They try rubbing themselves warm, wearing different levels of dress: bathrobes, pajamas,

gym clothes, business casual. My truck looks so flaccid sitting there. It’s funny how anyone else would see it and think it belongs here much as anything, not realizing that it looks like a piece of

shit. It prefers being seen in the snow, green paint flexing through the crumbled sky.

I shuffle through the crowd and to the door, but somebody grabs my shoulder and turns

me around. It’s the same teen from last night. Outside and up close, his face seems both young

and old at the same time. I wonder if he had been a sickly child or drug addict.

“Can’t go in,” he says. “Fire drill.”

“Did anyone find my keys?”

“Jesus, man,” he says. “Isn’t there more to your life than that?”

135 I turn and walk through the crowd till I find Nippleshit.

“Oh good,” he says. “Now we don’t have to go out of our way to pick you up.”

“Did you find any keys in your room?” I ask.

Nippleshit looks up at the sky, shading his eyes with a palm. “Everywhere I go now, I

think about lighting. Too much, too little. Harsh, soft.” He looks directly at me. “Everything

exists in order to end up in a reality TV show.”

“They were on a ring,” I say. “Chevy.”

His phone goes off, and he unpockets and answers it in one motion, then covers the

mouth and says, “Wait for us in the lobby, if they ever let us back in,” and walks away.

I pick up my own phone and type in Scott’s number.

“Who is this?” somebody says through the line, not Scott.

“Is Scott there?”

“No. Not Scott. No Scott here. Who are you? Why do you call this number, four, five,

six times a day, huh? I never pick up, you keep trying. Ring, ring, ring, that’s what my phone

does all day. Ring, ring, ring. My wife thinks I’m having an affair. My mistress thinks I have

another mistress. You’re ruining my life. Big problems you cause for me. Big problems. What

you say now, huh? What you got to say?”

Shit. I hang up. I guess that’s my fault for never saving anyone’s number. I watch

Nippleshit in the distance, pacing across the parking lot. The front desk teen walks up next to me.

“Did you ever start to think you made the wrong choice?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

***

When I see Senior Scott in the van I know I’ve made the wrong choice.

136 “Look who’s still alive,” Nippleshit says.

With Scott now sat smooshed next to me, everything about him and how he reacted starts

to piss me off afresh. The weed-wacker thing, sure. The time he mailed me fake anthrax. The

time he tried to slash my tires, and might have succeeded if I hadn’t been in the truck and

driving. But especially that spell right at the beginning when he stalked us some, approached us

at the Fred Meyer and tried to kiss Melissa, and she shoved him off and the Scotts stepped up

like to protect her and he told them they were dumbshit kids who would grow up to be dumbshit

adults. I guess he never figured where they would have got that from.

The van’s driving around town, windows rolled up tinted, the radio playing apparently

Percy rapping over the sound of dishwashers.

“This song is called ‘Rinse Cycle,’” he says from the front seat. A handheld camcorder

duct taped to the dash faces back. I notice it’s the front desk teen driving.

“I’m trying to save up for videogame school,” he says. “It’s expensive because it’s a for-

profit.”

“You look like crap,” Senior Scott says to me. We’re crammed because there is, for whatever reason, a large bucket in the seat behind Nippleshit. Scott smells like lint and earwax,

and I feel a bony thigh through his Carhartts.

“Yeah well you look like shit,” I say.

“Good but let’s try to be a little more descriptive,” Percy says from the front seat. “How

are things with Melissa?”

“You know,” I say.

“Be descriptive.”

“We fall asleep each night wrapped in the warmth of each other’s breath.”

137 “Jesus. What? Are you a poet? Is this Shakespeare in the park? Too descriptive.”

“We fall asleep each night in vaguely sexual positions.”

Scott makes a face like, I’ll show you a vaguely sexual position, motherfucker.

“Now I ’m falling asleep,” Nippleshit says. “Who wants the rest of this?” He pulls out an

enormous bottle of whiskey, barely a sip off the top. “My eyes were bigger than my liver. Here,

you look thirsty.” He practically throws the bottle at me, so I have no choice but to grab it. It’s

the shame that always makes me start drinking again—the general, directionless shame that’s

followed me my entire life. I know it will only be worse when I wake up tomorrow—sober,

hungover—which will make it that much harder not to immediately start drinking again, but

right now, even knowing all this, I still tilt the bottle back and take a gulp then offer it to Scott.

“I’ll have some in a bit,” he says.

I hold it out to Nippleshit.

“Not in the shot!” he screams, holding his hands up like I’m robbing him. “I’m not in the

shot!”

“That’s called the fourth wall,” Scott says.

“Maybe it’s you should be in video game school.” I take another sip.

“Speak up,” Nippleshit says.

We drive around drinking for what feels like two hours or a minute then show up at my

house. The rest is a cross-eyed montage of screaming and cursing and apologizing for the

screaming and cursing and getting drug back into the van and falling asleep to the sound of

Nippleshit freestyling.

138 I wake up in a trashed hotel room with chapped lips and a tongue made of Velcro. I can’t

recall if it was I messed up the room or it came this way. There are clothes scattered that I don’t

even own, and I have a vague recollection of two goons arguing whether to smash the TV with a baseball bat or bare fist.

I have a less vague recollection of someone screaming and running out with a bloody

hand. I can even see the drops breadcrumbing their way out the door. Or are they mine and

coming in? I scan and pat myself down for flesh wounds.

Jesus, is my truck still here? Did I find the keys? I trim back the sheets and look under them, then sit up and try to really think about what happened but find it hard to think about

anything except get me a fucking Gatorade. Blue.

Maybe a little vodka squeezed in.

No.

It’s then I notice the slavering glass sitting on the night stand, ice still fresh. I sip slow then finish the whole thing. Wouldn’t you know it’s a Gatorade and vodka. Did I mention

something before I fell asleep or is this just what they call turn down service?

Feeling better, I decide to investigate, try and find Nippleshit’s room. In the hall, the two

short, muscular men grab me by each elbow and start hurrying me toward the elevator.

“Go, go, go,” they say. I can’t tell if they’re with me or against me.

“I thought you guys were lawyers,” I say.

We go all the way down and out till we’re back at the van by valet. Dried and chunky

puke forms a trout stream across the door. I’ll give you three guesses as to who did that.

Nippleshit steps out.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he says. “Man am I burned up.”

139 “Burned up,” the goon on my right elbow say.

“Burned up,” Nippleshit says. “Scott was supposed to come back to the hotel and you were supposed to stay at your own house but, well, things got inverted up somehow.”

“On account of that woman wanted nothing to do with you,” the same goon said.

“Wait,” I say, “so you know I’m not Scott?”

Nippleshit nods. “Yeah I figured that one out as soon as I saw him.”

I sigh. “I think I’m done.”

“Just give me one more day.”

“I’m serious. I’m out.”

Now Nippleshit sighs. “How about this. You give me one more day, or I sue you. You lied on your paperwork, after all.”

“We call that breach of contract,” the goon says.

“Marcus thank you so much take a bow you’re out of here.”

“I was just trying to...,” Marcus says.

“Thank you, Marcus, wonderful job, round of applause for Marcus, everybody.”

The goon on my left elbow starts clapping. I notice the bandaged hand. Marcus turns to him and lunges. “I got you this job, you bastard.” Nippleshit snakes forward and grabs me from between them.

“You’re with me, hotshot.” He pushes me into the backseat. “Let’s get you home.”

***

On the drive there, I lean against the window and stare at the leafless trees, widowmakers some. Nothing but something to fall on your head. The liquor starts wearing off. Every time it surprises me. That it doesn’t last forever, I mean. Back when I worked from nine-to-five, I

140 remember so many Sundays spent wondering why it all had to end. Nothing to show for it but

another forty hours in front of you. I always reckoned that’s what it felt like to spell your death

rattles, to lie there, wondering what’s the point if I’m just gonna end up with nothing but the

chore of dying?

When we get to my house, Scott is edging the yard, but the grass is brown and he’s just

kicking up dirt across the driveway. His shirt’s off even though it’s fifty degrees, showing a torso

messy with stray black hairs.

“Howdy.” He flips off the machine when we walk up. Everything I own is piled in the

driveway. By which I mean, my clothes.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Hey now I would watch that language. This here’s a family home.”

“So, what, you slept with Melissa?” I say.

“She technically wouldn’t let me inside,” he says. “But through the wall, I felt something

deeply spiritual. One might call it the first whispers of reconciliation.”

“Whispers? Save it for your diary,” Nippleshit says. “Give me something raw.”

The front door opens and the Scotts run outside.

“Scott,” Melissa says, walking out behind them. “Did you sleep in my freaking driveway

last night like a freaking homeless?” She turns to me and holds out an unwavering finger. “You.

What’s-your-name. Come here.”

The kids start running after each other in circles, yelling, “Your dad’s homeless.” “No your dad’s homeless.”

“Melissa,” I say. “My stuff will get rained on if we don’t move it back inside.”

141 “Come here,” she repeats. I walk up, head hung. “Get inside,” she calls to the kids but they ignore her.

“Keep rolling, no matter what happens,” I hear Nippleshit say behind me.

“Putting it in the driveway was a favor,” Melissa says to me. “If it’s still here tonight, it’s the road.”

“Come on,” I say. “Can’t you at least—”

“I told you I didn’t want to be implicated. Now I’m in the darn thing,” she motions to the hotel clerk at the end of the driveway, pointing the camera directly at us.

“Can you two speak up?” he says.

I say to her, “I think you technically have to sign—”

“Sh,” she says, sharply. “Do not talk. Have you never considered my position? Have you never considered how much crap I have to balance? Work, school, the kids. Is it so awful to expect some person to try and make some things easier now and then?”

“How could I consider what it’s like to be you, when I’m not you?” I say.

“Shut the fuck up,” she says. “Do not say another fucking thing.” She closes her mouth quickly and looks to see if the kids heard her, but they’re still chasing each other in circles. “I said get inside,” she yells at them, then to me, “if you all aren’t gone in five minutes, I’m calling the cops.”

“Your dad has bedbugs.” “N oyour dad has bedbugs.”

“Maybe once I finish up the yard, I can come take a look at that table leg,” Scott calls, pretending to wipe sweat off his brow even though he’s clearly shivering.

“Nothing’s wrong with the table leg,” Melissa says.

“Your dad has scabies.” “N oyour dad has scabies.”

142 I walk back down the driveway, waving my arms at the camera. “Shut it down,” I say.

“You don’t say that,” Nippleshit says. “I say that.”

“You two have a nice reunion?” Senior Scott says to me from the side of his mouth. I turn and run up and tackle him, wrestling the edger from his shocked hands. I try to swing it at him but miss and lose my balance. The blade nicks older Scott on the calf as he’s reaching forward to shove his younger brother. Was he shoving him out of the way? He takes two more steps then realizes what happened and throws both hands quick and tight over the wound and rolls across the lawn.

I pause, shocked, and drop the edger.

“Fuck,” Melissa screams and pushes past me to mother him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Nippleshit runs over to put his arm around the crouched Melissa as she tries to pick up her son and dial her cell phone at the same time. He looks over and says, “I’m sorry you had to find out this way.” She shoulders him off. I look back at Senior Scott, who stares lustily at her, not much concerned about his son at all. I run toward the kid, taking my shirt off to wrap around his leg, but Nippleshit meets me halfway and delivers a hard line of knuckles to my face. I fall on the driveway and he starts kicking me in the stomach.

“That day was myStarry Night” Nippleshit would say to me later, after his show failed to generate any interest, and I learned that the only funding he had was his own checking account, which he drained without paying a single person. “When I’m dead, and they’re writing books about me, they’ll discover these episodes and realize how brilliant I truly was.”

Perhaps, but, in this lifetime, he wasted all his money on videos nobody wanted and moved back to Fairbanks and now shares an apartment with Senior Scott, motherfuckers both.

143 The truth is, that day was myStarry Night too. As Nippleshit kept kicking me and the

pain got worse and worse—and my ribs broke and my brain got concussed and a few teeth

chipped off and rolled down my throat—I started to enter altered states of consciousness. As if

every drink and drug I ever took had been stored in a tiny pod that just burst into my bloodstream. I felt my mind pool out and get sucked into other people’s brains the way a furnace

pulls carbon monoxide from parked trucks. I finally saw everyone how they were instead of just

how they related to me. I hated that part.

I felt Nippleshit’s mind reduced to ratings porn like a politician whose opinions change with every new poll. Maybe his show would have worked if he hadn’t skimped so hard on the

focus groups. I felt Melissa cursing with great pleasure at the fucking dumbasses in her life, and

her own dumbness at letting us come around in the first place. I saw Scott, a man no better than

me, but maybe no worse either.

I remember being wheeled out of the ambulance, through the bright fluorescent hospital

corridors, past all the people in the waiting room, the suckers with broken arms and allergic

reactions, the ignored, the frustrated, the people I typically find myself alongside, but I wasn’t waiting in line with them that day, because that day—covered in my own blood, and vomit, and was that piss now too?—I skipped them all. I lay there full of joy at being, even briefly, the star

of the show, the one everyone was looking at, because that, that is what it’s all about! Attention.

Respect. Admiration. All the things withheld from me my entire life. All the things I’d always

deserved.

144