LOVERS IN VAGUE STATES OF MILD DISTRESS

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Fine Arts

by

Ryan D. Lind

April 2017

© Copyright

All rights reserved

Except for previously published materials

Thesis written by

Ryan Lind

B.A., Kent State University, 2014

M.F.A., Kent State University, 2017

Approved by

______, Advisor Varley O'Connor

______, Interim Chair, Department of English Dr. Patricia Dunmire

______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Dr. James L. Blank TABLE OF CONTENTS iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

STORIES

FOUR FOX ACHE...... 1

APPROXIMATING ODDS...... 6

IN CASE OF FISH WASH GLASS...... 38

BIRD BONES...... 45

CICADA...... 55

LOVERS SEATED QUIETLY ON A BENCH...... 64

VAGUE STATES OF NEAR-UNDERSTANDING...... 94

MILD DISTRESS...... 115

I-35 SOUTH...... 130

JOY IS A LIQUID...... 145

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My gratitude to the fine instructors in the NEOMFA program, especially Professors Wasserman,

Wing, and O'Connor: Wass for reading with tremendous scrutiny and a zen-like commitment to positivity, C-Dub for being my second-favorite (but best) teacher of all time, and Varley for providing tireless critique, a reading list par excellence, and facilitating craft discussions that have left me both exhausted and eager.

iv Four Fox Ache

Sister used to come slowly down the stairs in stocking feet, usually she was singing.

Pulling on the banister, hanging from the handrail. Letting her heels slide over the nose of each step, landing flat-footed on the next tread: Bang.

A pause as she slid her heels into position, a couple nasal bars of Madonna with vibrato,

“it's like a little prayer.” Bang. “Down on my knees.” Bang.

That was her way. She tumbled down the stairs what seemed like once a week. Our father would tell her, “That's what you get for coming down them steps that way. There is no good- goddam reason to come down stairs like that. Why do you continue to walk down the stairs like that?”

Sis would bawl, but the man refused to pick her up. He conversed with her, reasoning and explaining until her sobs became sniffles, and then he muttered a phrase under his breath.

“Oh Four fox ache.”

I'd spill a glass of soda on the counter top, dribbling down the face of the cabinetry onto the floor. He would deliver a demonstration: this is how you pour yourself a glass of soda. This is where you put your glass in relation to your plate. Then, after his reasoning, his demonstrations, and his lessons, he reminded us that life is hard. He'd turn his head and whisper the same phrase,

“Four Fox Ache,” indicating to Sis and me that he had been conducting serious business.

It didn't make sense to me as a child, the pain of the four foxes. I pictured them in their

1 hole, in their den, dug out below the bedrock in the wooded land behind our house. The entrance to the den below some great root excavated from the clay by diligent animals who had been evicted by the foxes. I didn't really know where or how foxes lived, but you used to be able to pick things up from cartoons. Adult things and sometimes fox things, too.

These four agonizing foxes were hunkered down in their lamp-lit den. The first had a bandaged tail, an unspecified injury. Another had a blackberry bramble stuck in her paw. The third fox had one of those cartoon headscarves worn to ease tooth pain, or to stop the character experiencing tooth pain from verbalizing their tooth pain. The fourth was the most morbid of the foxes; his hind leg had been caught in a trap. What's a fox to do? In order to survive he had chewed his leg clean off above his tiny fox kneecap.

This fourth fox was the most self-absorbed, and why not? Licking and whining, and "Oh, my aching leg."

The first fox, Bandaged Tail, would ask, "What leg?"

And the fox with the mouth tied shut to cope with tooth decay would try to laugh but would reconsider because in the wisdom of old cartoons: it only hurts when a character laughs.

Meanwhile, the poor female fox with the thorn whimpers. None of the foxes come to her aid, their paws just as useless to remove a thorn as her own. So, the foxes commiserate in the darkness of their den.

Sometimes my father's words would crawl out through the crack under their bedroom door. "Oh, four fox ache, Jennifer." These were lesser pains, I presumed. They happened in the dark and were not accompanied by rectifying instructions. No soda to sop from the table and floor; no child in need of a lesson in logic. A spoken expression while Sis slept and I tried to

2 sleep. If my bedroom door was cracked I could see him pass in the hallway.

On these trips to the living room, I remember how his face looked less like leather and more like cloth, hair piled on top of his head. His feet would plod from their shared bedroom, and in the morning a retired comforter laid on the couch in a wad next to his pillow.

I lay in bed and imagined the foxes in their convalescent den. The nighttime entrance was spookier—greens became gray, black, impossibly black and endless. I assigned the four foxes new roles. The candlelight cast longer shadows. The foxes spoke in whispers like my parents did, heaping up the day's sadnesses.

One got a "C" on a spelling test. Another had divorcing parents. The third still had a toothache. The image of a fox in a headscarf is difficult to replace with mere melodrama. The fourth fox was odd to me. She was sad for no good reason. Tears in her eyes. In this second scenario, she had things far better than the other three foxes.

His red eyes woke me in the morning. He poured my cereal and milk. My father's voice crackled in the early hours, and he lilted the ends of his sentences in the morning like everything was a question. “I have to run out and bring in more firewood?” Or “The geese are heading

South?” as if perhaps they were going elsewhere for the cold season this year. Maybe this was his attempt at creating a tolerable day: to speak like happiness was spreading from his throat, clearing like a fog. Maybe I am giving the man too much credit. Maybe not enough.

Sis and I were older when they divorced. I was a Junior in college, she was a Freshman half a state away. Our mother delivered the news to us separately, over the phone. Mother didn't share details. Sis and I went home over the same weekend a couple weeks later, after an early snowfall. Our mother looked at us and smiled through tears. She said that it was nice to have us

3 all together. All together she said, and I don't think she meant our father any ill by saying that we were all together without him. In the silly math of adulthood, four minus one can equal all together.

Our father drifted away. He neither defended himself, nor belittled our mother. He and I speak on the phone occasionally, now, but I make my own breakfast, and I've earned my own pair of red eyes in the mornings. We don't have much to say when we do speak. I ask about his cholesterol and he in turn asks about mine, says that these things are genetic, and that I should watch my diet. “Don't eat too much fruit either. That's my problem, I like fruit too much; all that fructose isn't good for the heart,” he says.

Usually I say, “Really. Huh?” like I'm hearing his dietary advice for the first time. He asks about work. Fine, I tell him, because he wouldn't understand and probably doesn't want details beyond the continuation of my breath. This, I think, is underrated.

Sis, I'll bet, doesn't slide her heels off the nose of stair steps any more. I don't know this with certainty. We also rarely speak, but I am trying to do a better job of phoning her. And she is obviously much older, now. And she has a nice practice. People ask her how they should live.

How they should cope. She tells them, I suppose. Yet, we could never figure out how to talk about that odd thing that happened while we were away learning our trades. Time passed and we forgot to try.

She didn't come home for Christmas last year. She told my mother she was setting some boundaries for her family. It was nice, for a change, to spend Christmas without having to hear our mother pining about how we were all together. My sister's absence made it feel like we almost like we included the old man again.

4 I sit on the bed in my old room, now my mother's guestroom. My sister and her family will arrive sometime this evening, and I am trying to stay awake for their arrival. My wife sleeps in a ball around her swollen belly. A light in the bathroom brightens the hallway where I used to catch a glimpse of my father retreating to the living room.

You understand someone best in absentia, maybe. I look out the crack in the door for a few minutes, remembering his disheveled hair and the slump of his shoulders passing by. I should call him, four fox ache. I wonder why it is so strange to make a phone call. But I should call to tell him that mother is well, and to confess that I have eaten too much ham, to breathe into the receiver.

5 Approximating Odds: A System for Limit Hold Em

“Come to the table with enough time to stay and play awhile. While sitting down and

trying to destroy a game by firing from the start is my favorite strategy, it doesn't

always work. There are games that demand staying power.”—Doyle “Texas Dolly”

Brunson, Super System

The first thing you've got to understand when you sit down at a card game is that you, yourself, are unknowable. This is life's and poker's most important fact. Proceeding from one's own ineffability, the object of poker is to isolate an opponent, putting them on a specific hand, and folding or betting accordingly. Your opponent and his cards are unknowable. All you really know is what you hold. (Currently, I am holding the 10-J of hearts.) Remember this: you are different than you were last night, and tomorrow night you'll be a different player, too. Poker players, like every other human being you'll meet, are ever-changing. The solvent player gathers information. The winning player applies collected information to his dynamic situation.

What follows is a night of careful internal and external observation at a $5-10 Limit

Hold-Em table, probably the easiest place to make a modest living in any casino. I've had better nights and a few worse nights. But the night I will detail for you was a long night, and long nights allow the player to observe himself making choices. As important as correctly performing a handful of mathematical formulae, a consistent strategy of applying self-knowledge will minimize the player's losses and maximize profits.

6 One best learns truths about himself while examining his relationship to other people, for the purposes of poker: other players. By showing you examples of how I gather and apply knowledge, I hope you can devise your own system for managing your table emotions while influencing those of your opponents.

*

Lisa has a law degree from Ohio State which she uses to import and wholesale yoga mats.

She is showing me her small feet. Rather than shaking hands, she said to me, “My name is Lisa.

My feet hurt.” As she said this she positioned her legs in the direction of my chair, and propped her feet up near my left hip. Under different circumstances, Law Degree Lisa may be my idyllic woman—these small feet, well-kempt, and a taxed cashmere sweater. I am focused on my game tonight, not only because I have been commissioned to write this article for Pure Player

Magazine, but primarily because the job of the limit player is to avoid losing. The most important part of winning is not losing.

I've known hands-full of Lisas; she is a type, both as a player and businessperson. Lisa plays everything to win. She is a serious player, but she has come to the casino to blow off steam.

She probably loses in the cardroom only slightly more often than she wins. She knows the game, but she is casual in her approach to the table.

She tells me about herself and her law degree and her yoga mats in quick succession while she is unstrapping her strappy heels. She wants to see—she wants someone, at the moment it's me, to see—just how purple her instep has become from the devouring vamp. She flexes her toes, curling and straightening. “Just look at those lines,” she says massaging her talus.

So I do. I just look at those lines. Her toenails are professionally painted a mauvish color,

7 matching the tone of her bony skin where it has been gouged by fashion. Law Degree Lisa is an extrovert, and because her personality is large, Lisa and people like Lisa can appear false. Do your best to take Lisa and the rest of your table-mates at face value. Sure, poker is a disingenuous activity. But your job is to judge action not actors. The reader should note that I have already distanced myself from desiring Lisa in the usual way a player like myself might want Lisa.

No, I am not immune to Lisas, the brain's flooding wash of oxytocin, but I must focus on her chips. Before you sit down at your table, you must assess your weaknesses, and unfortunately many human frailties are evolutionary. There is nothing you can do about them; you can only know them. Most professionals have built a levy of discipline and self-control well before they pursue poker as a career.

Lisa is engaging me because she has watched me engaging a younger girl who is leaning on the rail near me, humoring me with conversation. Lisa wants me to herself. Not just me. As soon as she can spot someone who is both handsome and wealthy, she will forget me. I possess one of the two qualities Yoga Mat Lisa looks for in a man. She has no interest in a man's personality. Her own concerns for companionship are purely Darwinian: “Can this male protect and support his inevitably attractive offspring?” I compliment Lisa's toenail polish and her

Michael Kors heels.

“How do you know Michael Kors?” she asks. “Your girlfriend must be a shopper.”

The game has begun. By offering a specific, name-brand compliment, I have engaged

Lisa on a personal level, and I can now collect information about Lisa. But I have, perhaps, made a minor mistake. Time alone will tell. Now, I must provide Lisa with details of my own life. If I

8 confirm her statement, Law Degree Lisa will assume that I can afford a girlfriend with refined tastes. She may pursue me. If I lie, if I say that my girlfriend sells shoes, she will assume I am unestablished and rootless. If I tell her I am married to a woman who buys Michael Kors' shoes for a large retail chain, one of two things will happen: she will remove her small feet from my chair and insert them back into the Michael Kors shoes she has just removed, or she will coyly unbutton the top button of her sweater to more freely release pheromones and otherwise cause my mind to wander. At the table one must weigh his options quickly. Remain ambiguous when possible. I tell her that Michael Kors is pretty famous. He's on TV. Everyone knows Michael

Kors. Lisa accepts this answer.

*

Limit Hold-Em (a form of the popular Texas Hold-Em where the minimum and maximum bets are predetermined) is the purest of all poker games. You see all the cards nearly every hand. Karma—the cyclical nature of existence, the percentage points of sowing and reaping—not luck or a fat bankroll, is the bedrock of limit games. No-limit games (those with no ceiling on the amount a player can bet) favor the wealthiest players and reward bullies. As such, no-limit games lack nuance. Karma, when a long series of hands are played to their conclusions, is certain. Luck, both good and bad, flattens into probabilities. Though luck, I contend, is also real.

To be a TV poker star, you need a handle on simple mathematics, the skill to divine your opponents' hands and predict their tendencies, and luck. To be a professional limit player—that is: to make a reasonable portion of one's living in a cardroom—one needs only to habitually of put one's self in karma's favor. Of course, one still has to master ratios and execute bets

9 accordingly.

I make a third of my income and spend nearly half of my working hours playing cards. I have no desire to be on TV. I am not chasing wealth. I needed a part-time job, and the poker player's schedule is flexible.

*

To get to Mountaineer Racetrack and Casino from my house, you have to cross the

Newell Bridge, a privately-owned suspension bridge that hangs over the Ohio River. Toll is seventy-five cents to cross, or a dollar for a round trip fare. Always buy the two way ticket if you're gambling in West Virginia. The bridge was built in 1905. The deck is steel grate; you can see the river through the grate as you drive across the bridge. The Newell Bridge is white. Or it is blue-gray depending on the sunlight and colors of the surrounding foliage. A sign posted on the

Ohio side of the bridge charges pedestrians five cents to walk across the bridge. Every so often someone will jump. Sometimes they live. Usually the jumpers die.

The East Liverpool Hospital sits two blocks from the bridge on the Ohio side. If you get bad news at the hospital—if the cancer is back, if the Parkinson's is advancing quickly—you can take the sidewalk downhill to the bridge and for a nickel you can have eight-six feet of ease in the free fall.

A woman jumped a couple weeks ago, and she made it. Or she lived, anyways. I guess

“making it” depends upon perspective. Authorities fished her safely from the Ohio River. The local paper did not report the extent of her injuries. The headline read: “Woman Who Jumped off

Bridge is Critical.” Maybe this is the reason people jump from the Newell Bridge in the first place—they are critical.

10 I usually give the Newell Bridge jumpers cancer, or a combination of cancer and marital infidelity. But maybe it's just gravity. I confess: all I can think about when I'm driving across the bridge is jumping. I don't obsess about jumping, but leaping from the bridge occurs to me as a possibility, and I think about it. I don't think about jumping, but I think about the act of jumping.

When I am not driving across a bridge, I do not think about jumping from a bridge.

According to my research, suicidal women jump to their deaths more frequently than men

—nearly 2:1. A harsh fact. I suppose a jump is like falling in love. No real control. You light a cigarette and throw your hips over the rail. And that is love. Generally, I assume that women are better at love than men, but I doubt, for example, Lisa's acumen at love.

I owe the development of my poker strategy to the bridge and to the local papers that alert residents of recent jumpers. The papers never list a reason for the jump. Reasons are tricky, perhaps. Readers must speculate and invent reasons to make sense of jumping. Freud maintained that all human beings contend with an impulse for self-destruction and death. This impulse was later named thanatos, and I've named the game plan I am presenting here Thanatos Poker. While thanatos as a psychological reality remains unproven, assuming a bit of thanatos in one's self and one's opponents grants the observant player an advantage at the table.

Thanatos theory at the table contends that the nine people seated with you have a buried impulse to lose their money to you, and unawares, you want them to have your money, too (but only when seated at the poker table). What I mean is: these people also think about jumping from bridges when they drive over them, though they may be perfectly happy and well-adjusted in their day-to-day lives. Think about it for a second: if you didn't want to risk handing your cash over to strangers, you'd find a high yield money market account or a mutual fund and watch your

11 money accrue interest.

*

The fellow to Lisa's left is a real swinging dick. He offers to buy her a drink, and she accepts. People in the yoga industry say yes to everything; it's part of their religious practice— acceptance. Then he looks to me and asks, “How bout you, sir?” in a power-move to attract

Lisa's quaint shoeless feet to his right hip, away from my left hip. I tell him no thanks. I cock my head at him in disbelief. Dick is here to get laid. Good for me. I am here to make money.

But I have learned something about Dick. Dick desires to be desirable or at least respected. Knowing this, I have made a mistake. I should have granted him the power he was seeking and accepted the drink, made him feel alpha and invincible. Working against one's machismo is a strict discipline. Even an experienced player can fail to recognize opportunities for meekness, the best kind of power. Meekness is a manageable absolute. When luck arrives

(good or bad) and temporarily trumps karma, the meek player will be seated at the table with chips. Of course, had I taken the free drink, I may have upset karma. One cannot take drinks and poker chips, maybe.

Dick is thin. There is nothing to him. His arms extend from his neck, he has no noticeable shoulders. He is well-dressed and clean shaven. The seams of his shirt sleeves are resting on his biceps. Zero shoulders. Dick is making big small talk. He says, “I manage thirty-some employees who manage other companies' accounts.” He says some other boring things. Lisa's head is turned in his direction while her feet remain on my chair. She is flexible. She is nearly twisted. She strains to crack her spine. If Dick weren't so physically undesirable, Yoga Mat Lisa would swivel her hips and her law degree and forget about me.

12 Lisa thinks Dick's work is impressive. “Wow,” she says. She says this often. While they exchange accomplishments, I scrape at the felt near my chip stack. The felt is worn thin and matted to a sheen by the oil and skin cells and general filth left by thousands of sweaty, covetous hands who've played and misplayed hundreds of thousands of hands before I arrived. I can almost see my reflection in the felt.

The cardroom in this casino is an afterthought, tacked on behind the racetrack's grandstand. The tables fill a cavernous room, and the rail separates pedestrians from card players.

There is a no-limit tournament going on in one corner of the room. The horses are running tonight in their final weekend before they are shipped off to wherever it is racehorses migrate for the winter. Old men bundled to sit in the outdoors stand sweating at betting windows, waiting. It is a Friday night, so the locals are packed into their usual places. The room is wall to wall. I mean things are blurring and beautiful and noisy. Scumbags with freshly exchanged paychecks are smiling. Italians with hair slicked. Brigades of drunken women. Blue collar workers dressed as bankers. Bankers wearing Buckeyes caps and matching sweatshirts. Everyone momentarily childless. Laughter covers the sound of defeat like a jet engine.

A woman's voice over the PA directs names to numbered tables, speaking in a language of muffled consonants only pit bosses can interpret. The pit bosses wave, scowling and impatient, to incoming players and seat them. The line in front of the cage is eight, now nine people deep, waiting to turn cash into clay. They've been waiting all week for this one night, to get into a game. “Reds and greens,” they say to the man in the cage. The cage man's body language and facial gestures say: I don't give a shit, while dutifully wishing good luck on behalf of the casino upon the exchangee.

13 The ATM line is a mixture of boredom and anxiety and bliss. There is hope shooting from the machine. Lighting up when someone wins for merely remembering their PIN. The ATM is running slow. The connection is tired, and a line forms for it as well. People study their bankcards, fingering the braille of the raised numbers and the letters that spell their full names, including the middle initial. Perhaps folks in the ATM line wonder: who is this person belonging to this name? Or perhaps they do not wonder this, never have stopped to wonder who they are for one blessed second. And because they have never bothered to wonder about their being, you, the reader, will have a distinct advantage over them at the table.

The girl on the pedestrian side of the rail is waiting for her boyfriend to lose the rest of his chip stack so she can finally go back to their hotel room and rest her legs. Right now, I am describing a particular girl—the one over my shoulder. I was talking to her when Lisa wrapped her polished toes around the seat of my chair, but when she heads off for bed another girl will replace her. There is always a young woman standing at the rail, waiting for luck, receiving karma. Like watching a tree through the seasons. “One more hand,” the boyfriends all say.

Tonight's girl was reading information on her phone before I interrupted her. Blank face, smile, blank face, quizzical look, fingers moving across the screen, scan the room, smile.

She is from out of town. I know this because she is wearing a skirt. Locals wear jeans, sometimes sweatpants. If you're playing to win, you want to avoid the locals. Locals have more than luck or karma, they have teammates in a mano-y-mano. Steer clear of people in sweatpants.

She is rubbing her hand on her thigh. She is clicking her flats on then off. Chomping on gum. Bored as hell. Oblivious to the noise. “Who you waiting on?” I call over my shoulder, toward the rail. She looks up, disoriented. I look at her while she tries to identify if the voice she

14 heard was talking to her. I am smiling towards her. She sees me and looks bored with me already.

“My boyfriend,” she says.

“He any good?”

She looks at me in semi-shock. I make a gesture toward the card table, understanding, only now that she has falsely interpreted my questions as sexual. Now she looks embarrassed, realizing I was obviously inquiring of his skill in the cardroom.

“He thinks he is,” she says. “He does win.”

“How often? Not all the time, right?”

“Pretty often. Who knows, though. Can't trust him about money.”

“No?”

“Nope.” She looks back at her phone.

I ask the girl on the rail what her name is. She tells me her name is Shiloh. Here there is a lull in our conversation.

Talking at the table encourages more talking, and talk becomes information. I am not interested in learning much about Shiloh; Shiloh is reading in the casino, and she is my junior by more than a decade. But talking to Shiloh has induced Lisa to put her tiny feet on my chair and to tell me about her yoga mats, how she imports them from China, but doesn't really feel bad about it because “yoga is pretty, you know, Oriental and they probably know how to make better yoga mats than we do in the States.” A yoga woman cannot afford to have a demi-desirable man spreading his attention elsewhere. Chatting with disinterested Shiloh has broken my table open before me. The information begins to come.

“Look at my feet,” Lisa says.

15 *

I am down some, a couple hundred. Posturing to affect karma, nothing I cannot rebound from. I employ karma by sowing into the game in order to reap later rewards, while projecting my own false self-destruction—my own thanatos. My thanatos strategy has the appearance of recklessness and loosens up all players at the table, especially those who are inexperienced or over-confident. Tonight, there are three young bucks who will pay me all night on the other side of Dick, practically salivating whenever I play a hand. I will take all their chips before I leave.

I've folded on the flop to each of them already.

My thanatos theory is not a game theory in the mathematical sense. Thanatos Theory is a player-based theory. For math theories on limit poker, I'd suggest Earl Craven's short book,

StackRatios. Craven keeps the division simple. Thanatos theory is a cyclical mindfulness plan that concentrates on managing the emotional circumstances of the table and one's own constitution.

Here's the gist: once you establish a low turn-over rate at your table, you start to slough off your chips. Allow yourself to “lose” pretty big, but don't think of it as losing. This is investing. You put karma on your side by creating absence and lack. You keep on casting your bread upon these waters, knowing that you sow, so also shall you reap. Over a career, and even over the course of a long evening, the cards will break even. It's statistics. If you catch a big hand while splashing around early, tighten up immediately and let your night's work begin. Otherwise, be patient. Lose a little.

You drink one glass of whiskey on the rocks, and you let the rocks melt. Manage your image. You drink your whiskey so painfully slow. You hold that glass forever. Casinos give you

16 tons of ice. You'd complain in a bar. Here, it's a prop. Let it melt and drink the water like it's still whiskey. You want people to believe you're mildly drunk and completely fun. I force people to enjoy my company. I offer myself and my chips as gifts to them. I pay them to like me. I congratulate them. I shake their hands when they beat me. Real genial, but this is all by design.

In order to make your living playing limit poker you have to trust the free-market. Often you have to suffer a blood bath in order to keep people playing with you late into the night. Once you've established yourself as a deep-pocketed clown, a friend of the table, you tighten up. You must trust in capitalism and its twin offspring: Greed and Altruism. Either will carry you to payday if you're patient.

There are people who feel genuinely bad about beating a nice guy. The Altruist is not used to taking money from his fellow man. He or she will feel sorry for your losses, uncomfortable with seeing your diminishment. They see you losing for a while and they began to feel a genuine empathy for your condition. They tell themselves stories about you: you are an addict; you are a drunk; you are on a streak of bad luck, likely because of a divorce or a tenuous childhood. Who knows what they may think, but they will think something, the Altruist. You are at the forefront of his mind. He tracks your beats, your folds, the faces you've made. The Altruist will follow you with a dead hand into a big pot, subconsciously willing you his chips. They see your thanatos and they empathize.

Although most people have benevolent tendencies, the true Altruist is rare in the cardroom. The fellow to my right is the lone Altruist at my table. But they do exist, so they are worth mentioning, and when you find them, study them and allow them to slide their chip stack to your seat.

17 Most players have sharpened their game on avarice—one of the deadly sins. Acting kind and jovial while losing exposes the kill-or-be-killed in other players. Once you've seen the greed in a man, he cannot hide it again unless he has wracked up thousands of hours in sales or some other branch of human psychology. You play like a wounded antelope seeking one last drink from the river, and Greed will stalk behind you. Give the greedy player some free chips. Fold at the turn. Or call the turn and fold on the river. You feed his greed.

All you need is one good hand—and believe me, a hand will eventually come. Once your cards come, Greed cannot stop losing his chips to you. The greedy player will chase you until exhaustion, until he's digging into his pockets for more cash because he believes he is better than you. He watched you slough off all those chips earlier. And now, prey has become predator.

I have bet/folded twice to Dick on the turn. I've folded twice on the river to two of the idiots seated left of Dick. All of these players are greedy. My cards will come soon.

The thanatos player will determine early on, by careful observation, which opponents are the givers and which are the takers. He will trap the takers and free the givers. Trap and set free.

You'll still have to catch a few hands at a limit table; and you'll want to avoid bluffs.

Bluffing at a limit table rarely works, especially against inexperienced players. The bluff pays off less than you'd hope. Better to have the cards than to have hope. Bluffing is, however, an effective way to rid yourself of chips and establish the flow of karma.

*

The room goes quiet for a second. People start pointing. The whole room has gone to question marks, now. “Is that . . . him?” I hear, over and over. “That has to be him!” A shameless man with an unusually small head poking out of a Penguins throwback hockey jersey stands up,

18 leans over his table, the laces of his neckhole are dangling. He announces: “It's Gene Simmons from KISS!” Everyone is looking. People are laughing at the spectacle the small-headed man has made of himself and wondering if the man really is Gene Simmons.

Suppositions and assumptions are death in the cardroom. You have to boil suspicions down to a knowable fact: that man looks similar to Gene Simmons. There you have something to work with—something that is absolute. You can build patterns on true things, on certainties, and thereby systematize your game. Systems help you avoid losing, and not losing saves you from becoming a degenerate.

I did think Mr. Simmons was taller. The man who may be Gene Simmons looks so dirty. I think that he might not have a bathtub. In his most recent, brief iteration as a reality TV star,

Gene Simmons appeared neat and orderly. Tonight, this Gene Simmons looks like you might have imagined he'd look when he was falling out the door of a tour bus in the seventies. He is wearing an oxford shirt underneath a jean jacket and a leather vest over the denim. It's the oxford shirt—a white that must be brand new—that makes me think he may be the actual Gene

Simmons. Gene Simmons, or whoever this is, is smiling and laughing with the rest of the room's inhabitants. Everyone is thinking the same thing: I thought he would be taller?

The man next to me—I'm warming up to him, the lone Altruist, a real kind man—asks,

“Do you think that is him?” My neighbor will be leaving shortly; he is nearly down to the felt.

He looks dejected, so I tell him that I'm pretty sure this man is Gene Simmons. I have enjoyed my neighbor's company except for his tendency to speak at an inaudible volume with his face tucked down his breast pocket, and then, when his utterances had been completed, he would look up at me and smile. I have no idea what he has said to me all evening. I may have agreed to start

19 working for him on Monday; I don't know. I kept nodding my head as he spoke, trying to lean in.

The closer I got to him the further he pursed his lips down into his pocket and the softer he spoke.

“It sure looks like him,” I say.

“It could be an impersonator,” he says.

“Yeah, I don't know. It would be weird for Gene Simmons to walk through a shitty West

Virginia casino.”

He mumbles something.

“Huh?” I ask.

“It's not that bad,” he says, plainly.

“What's not that bad?”

“The casino,” he says. It's not that shitty.”

I think that my neighbor is drunk, admitting his sympathies. He's been drinking cheap twenty ounce beers from their tall cans all evening. I don't point out that decent casinos don't serve twenty ounce beers in cans, that seems too personal. He has a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, too. He is down to the felt because I have recently inherited his chip stack. He (an Altruist) and one other player (one of the three bucks on the other side of Dick) followed me to the end of a hand, allowing me to pump the bet, my opponents getting better odds on their very dead hands.

My neighbor had a flush. The buck hit a full house.

It sounds fantastic: I flopped quad kings. The third time I've hit quads on the flop at

Mountaineer in my career. I am tempted to assume the four kings are a sign of good luck, but my system depends on karma, not luck. Furthermore, the big hand means I am back near stasis, not

20 yet winning. My neighbor and I are becoming old friends before he will call it quits for the evening. Before we will never see each other again.

“There must be half a gallon of piss on the men's room floor and not a mop in sight,” I tell him. “It's pretty shitty. But I guess I've been in worse.”

He laughs. “You should go talk to him,” my new friend says to me, staring down trying to examine his nipple. My ear is less than a foot away from his face so I can hear him speak.

“You should. I'm in this hand.” I point to his chip stack which visibly depresses him.

“I don't have anything to say to him.”

“Ask him to stick his tongue out,” I say.

The kind man laughs like a mule. “Yeah! I'll do that!” he says, but then he just sits there watching Gene Simmons' smiling look-alike face get closer to us.

With major stars, you see them ducking the paparazzi, but you can imagine how someone who had once commanded the spotlight may want to be noticed again. When the man smiles he looks even more like Gene Simmons.

Law Degree Lisa is the right age to be thrilled to see Gene Simmons. Two or three weeks short of an early menopause. Nature is dragging her to quickly explore her mating options. She tells me she thinks the man is a look-alike, but a really good one.

Lisa's hand is on my back.

Shiloh, on the rail, notices that everyone is looking in her direction. She blushes and checks her accoutrements, but then she realizes the people are looking past her. She turns and looks Gene Simmons right in his face. She does not recognize him so she resumes browsing whatever is on her phone, barefooted with her shoes beside her. Gene Simmons walks past

21 shoeless Shiloh. I think that Shiloh would be his type, his preferred age, if the man is indeed

Gene Simmons.

People walk with him, not bodyguards, a small disorganized entourage of misfits. I can see his backside now. The whole poker room is watching him walk by. Dealers have paused.

Players are standing. Gene Simmons is walking by the waiting list. One guy calls out, “I love you, Gene Fucking Simmons.” Everyone is laughing. I can see Gene Simmons's shoulders shaking—he is laughing too. I remember a story about Moses, standing in the cleft of a rock after he had negotiated to catch a glimpse of God's backside as God departed. I wonder where God was headed. The icon turns a corner, and he is gone, invisible. The room is happy. Everyone will have a story to tell.

*

I have only witnessed the search firsthand once. When someone jumps from the Newell

Brigde, the river fills up with boats. The papers take pictures from the shore of the volunteer firemen and fishermen with dock access dragging the Ohio River, performing their humanitarian duty, trying to recover a body. The Newell Bridge was built so Ohio residents could reasonably work across the river in West Virginia. The bridge is still privately owned by The Homer

Laughlin China Company, makers of the once sought-after Fiestaware. They still make versions of the old favorites. And they have new designs, too, for a changing marketplace. Old ladies still shop at their factory store.

Outside the store there is a pile of broken pottery, like a bright Gehenna. The pile is so much bigger than you imagine. When you look at the Newell Bridge over the pile of pottery chips from the Homer Laughlin employee parking lot, the bridge looks vibrant white. You cannot

22 get near the pile of broken china. There are “Keep Out—Private” signs everywhere. Makes you wonder what could possibly be of value behind the chain-link fence. Men stand around watching over the private parking lot, while skid-loaders push the debris around in piles that are heaped taller by a front-end loader. The job of piling shards looks endless, pointless. A Sisyphus operation.

Personally, I'd love a box full of all that broken pottery. I don't know what I'd do with it, but the “Keep Out” sign increases my desire. I'd keep it around in the attic maybe. And I'd hang my own “Keep Out” sign on the attic access to make guests wonder what I could possibly be storing in my attic. I'd shove the box from one corner of my storage space to the other to make room for other things I've deemed as useless as a box of pottery shards. Maybe pass down the box of broken table services to someone after I die, so they could have a heap of sharp colors to push around, too.

The Homer Laughlin security team is not specifically assigned to the bridge, but they do take a certain amount of responsibility for finding jumpers—living or dead. There is a boat in the water that clearly belongs to Homer Laughlin, the color makes it obvious. It is bright blue like early Fiestaware. You might call it cerulean, the color of my mother's eyes, and Lisa's eyes, which are probably tinted contacts. Men on the Homer Laughlin boat search as diligently as the team of first responders, volunteer firemen, and locals. The color of the boat evokes happiness; it is difficult to imagine the Homer Laughlin employees dragging a bloated corpse aboard the bright boat.

*

Shiloh does not care one wit about Gene-Whoever. She is glowering across the poker

23 room in the direction of her boyfriend. “Which one is he?” I ask Shiloh, who must feel self- conscious about her feet as she re-shoes them. I know the answer to my question because I see this hairy manchild in a Red Sox cap boring a hole in my life with his close-set eyes, barely visible under the cap's shadow and his excessive brow. Red Sox is seated at a $5/10 No-Limit game. There is well over ten grand, closer to twenty on his table.

He is filled with hatred. Chest hair is sprouting from his t-shirt. When she points him out,

I deliberately look past him and to either side of him to mess with his fragile ego.

“Red Sox?” I ask.

“That's him. Tom.” She seems to be comfortable again. She removes her shoes.

“Are your shoes uncomfortable?” I ask.

She laughs. “Yes, they are. Why do you ask?”

“Every time I look your direction, you're taking them off or putting them on.”

“They're new.”

“Red Sox buy them for you?”

“He paid for them. I picked them out.”

“They look great with your outfit,” I say. “Did Red Sox mention that?”

“Thanks. Yes, he likes them.” She must think I am drunk. I am trying to not look embarrassed after being so uncharacteristically forward. I feel real stupid. And I feel like something is coming loose in my brain or in my heart. I cannot pinpoint what is becoming disconnected.

“That's good. I'm glad to hear that he's the kind of guy who mentions that kind of stuff.”

“What difference does it make to you?” she asks.

24 “Really, none. No-Limit guys are usually pretty self-involved. All ego. I just figured there was a good chance that Red Sox had forgotten to mention it. He looks pretty jealous. He looks angry that you're talking to me.” I keep talking to Shiloh because I know it's burning up Red Sox.

I enjoy watching him boil. I am a sadist. Or is it masochist? I can never keep those labels straight.

“Yeah, he gets pretty jealous.”

“I can tell; first sign of selfishness,” I offer.

“You a shrink or something?”

“God, no. Machinist and limit player.”

“This is your job?”

“Only in the evenings.”

“You make your living here?”

“Some of it, yes.”

I worry I have blown my cover, but my table is busy paying attention to the commanding

Yoga Mat Lisa, even the other woman seated at our table. Lisa has that effervescent quality that makes even her banalities seem temporarily interesting. Lisa has no less than four players engaged in a conversation about her hair color: “buttered toast with golden wheat highlights,” she says. Besides, my conversation with Shiloh has been awkward enough that even if someone overheard me, they'd assume I was bluffing about my table career to impress her. I hope someone has overheard me, now that I think of it.

*

I like Lisa's hand on my back.

25 I realize I am losing my cool, revealing too much of my actual self at the table. At this rate, I'll be massaging Law Degree Lisa's feet and tracing the muscles of her calves in an hour.

I'll be confessing my desires to her. I'll be holding her chin in my fingers, forgetting about chips.

“Here are a list of my failures,” I will tell Lisa, while we lie on her hotel bed, and I know—I know—she won't care to hear them because she only believes in success. I'd try to tell her something she could not hear. I would tell her where I am weak, but Lisa would think I was lying. Playing the game. I need to gain my composure. One needs to remember the game he is playing and forget the fruitless side action.

*

Red Sox is scratching himself. I have done someone at his table a favor. He is imploding.

I don't play at Mountaineer frequently because the bouncers drag fights outdoors and let the fighters knock on each other's heads until someone loses. The barbarism is refreshing. At least until both parties are arrested—the winner and the loser go down together. I am certain I could take Red Sox in a fair, necessary fight. I have not made a fight necessary, nor am I interested in going to jail with Red Sox. “He really doesn't like that I am talking to you, does he?”

Shiloh giggles and twirls her hair. I wonder how Lisa would describe its color? Chocolate copper?

“I bet you one dollar that Red Sox loses all his chips in less than ten minutes.”

“No he won't. Tom's better than that,” she says.

Next thing you know, Tom Red Sox is making hissing noises and his chair falls over behind him. “See,” I said, “I learned to play limit because I cannot handle the dramatic no-limit shift of emotions either. Red Sox and I have that in common, except I have learned to understand

26 my weaknesses,” I opine to the girl who has stopped listening while Tom Red Sox floats across the floor on a cloud of disgust. He positions himself between me and Shiloh. They are discussing money.

“No, Tom,” she insists. They are moving away from me, one on either side of the rail.

“Goodnight, Shiloh,” I call out. “You owe me a buck.” She giggles at me again before resuming her argument. Red Sox glares at me one final time. I wink at him.

There are many ways to win in a poker room.

*

I'll tell you one quick thanatos story from the Newell Bridge. This one comes from the

Salem Area Times, a periodical consisting mostly of pictures of used cars and garage door repair ads. The writer of the article, Raymond Reilly, humanized the following incident:

A middle-aged couple kissed before jumping in tandem, holding hands, from the

Newell Bridge on Thursday evening, according to witness, Kari Larkin. Larkin

said she was monkeying with her radio when she looked up and saw the pair. “I

saw them kissing,” she said, “and then they just leaped. I dialed 911, but I could

barely talk. I was freaking.”

I think about the lovers jumping in tandem after a kiss. I wonder if the witness was more freaked out than the couple. If the couple was waiting for a pair of headlights to approach in order to be seen. Cool as cucumbers, waiting. Only the witness would freak out. The couple remaining confident, exhaling their last drag of a final cigarette. They have found or they have created synchronicity.

Both jumpers wore black, cutoff tee shirts, both had visible tattoos according to Larkin.

27 The man was wearing ripped jeans; the woman was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans. They both wore their hair in ponytails. They nearly share a description. Lacking control, lacking identity, making up for deficiencies by matching. Matching despair. Or maybe the couple had recently reached a milestone, a pinnacle, and couldn't bear the coming trough of lows. Karma moves both ways.

*

Thanatos poker can push you into a deep depression. When your starting objective is make your situation as bad as it can be, you're going to experience tremendous lows. You have to keep some cash in a safe, accessible spot to remind yourself that you are playing a role. I keep a grand or two in my buttoned breast pocket at all times.

You cannot play yourself out of money, but you have to put yourself in a deep, deep hole.

You have to hate how it feels to be that far down. You have to feel the weight of losing, and you have to learn to be okay with the pressures of failure. You have to want to feel the silty river bottom, and you have to hate that you want to feel it. You're doing this to yourself, manipulating karma to come around and shine its promised face upon you. Tap your breast pocket. Remind yourself: the night will end favorably despite your feelings.

Poker is like any other job. No one likes to go to work, but once you're there, it isn't so bad. Kind of defining even. And for an hour or two every night your job is to lose your shirt in order to find it. To get slaughtered in order to be resurrected. To slip money into other people's bankrolls so that eventually they will push their whole stacks back to you.

Chips are time, not money. Chips represent exchanged money, but what does money represent? Money is not real; money lacks inherent value. You get money in exchange for time

28 spent toiling. For you and for me, chips are time. Chips are only time and toil. Somewhere between three and four red chips equals one hour of work done by regular people—the median wage. I spend an hour or two sloughing off representative hours. A lot of them. I don't count the hours as I push them to my opponents. That would be torture. Hours are real and valuable.

Don't think I don't feel the hurt when I am bleeding time as clay chips; it hurts bad. You will hurt. You will become aware of certain realities you've not yet imagined. All the chips you have to waste in order to get more chips. Waste. The recognition of waste can paralyze you. You will hurt. This awareness can transcend the poker table—the money and waste needed to keep our fucking society afloat, you'll think—it all becomes clearer and more severe when you're throwing your hours across the table to a man wearing a T-shirt promoting the superiority of Ford trucks over Chevy trucks. To Dick and three young asswipes to his left. All the bullshit. You can get so depressed. But keep playing. All this loss is a necessary part of the theory.

This is thanatos poker. Losing is baiting. Baiting is catching. Catching is pumping the pot on a sure thing because your table mates have concluded that you are insane, friendly, and unable to deduce simple percentages in your head.

You've set karma in your favor by negating your toiling, untabulated hours—your chips.

Now, you wait for the coming upswing of karma. Nothing is more predictable.

*

The action at the table continues. I am only mildly interested. I make a long series of folds; I can't catch anything. 9-3 off-suit, 9-2 off, 8-2 off. In this situation, a lesser player would start splashing around, trying to make something happen. Avoid this temptation. Focus and commit to your game. Or admit your boredom and pack it in. There is no shame in calling it a

29 night at the right time.

Uncharacteristically, I am struggling for my own focus. I have no doubt that Red Sox and

Shiloh will marry. Maybe once he mellows and she learns independence—middle-age—they will find some fortitude. The courage to metaphorically leap from hypothetical bridges imitating the figurative couple from the newspaper. Babies are bridges, in a sense, through despair and toward commitment. Who knows? I'd bet my chip stack that they will have a handful of children in the next decade. Perhaps they'll be okay.

“I had a massage at the casino spa this morning,” Lisa interrupts my boredom and my run of folds. “It was heaven. Have you been to the spa, here?” Lisa again demands my full attention.

“I could use another already.” She laments that the spa is now closed. I wonder if this is an opening for me? “My girlfriend and I come here all the time,” she says. Her friend is playing craps in a nearby room.

I tell her I have never been to this or any other spa. She tells me that her partner doesn't like to gamble. That he is all work work work. That he is no fun. I am not sure if this complaint is a cue. I must take it at face value. Her statement means her partner works too hard. Here I am, in a place of adult recreation, working. I want to ask her, “Who among us is having any fun?” I look around. Almost everyone appears to be having a fine time.

“How long have you been together?” I resign to ask, dully. I don't really want to imagine

Lisa's partner.

“Almost eighteen years.”

“Wow. A long time. Kids?”

Law Degree Lisa tells me she has spent almost two decades fully aware of how babies

30 turn lovers into liars. She has worked against this phenomenon. Still, her long, open-eyed partnership doesn't appear to have satisfied her as she may have once expected.

“And you haven't married him.”

“He hasn't asked.”

“Huh,” I say, in a breath, “that seems strange. Subject's never come up?”

Lisa laughs. God, I am flirting with a beautiful woman at a poker table. “Right. We've never even mentioned the idea.”

“So if he asked, you'd say yes?”

“Who knows?” she says.

I know two things: Yoga Mat Lisa has eyes the color of my mother's eyes. Hers are probably tinted contacts, as I've mentioned, but they look like fake water, aqua blue. The color that impressionists use to paint seascapes. The color of early Fiestaware. So bright it is hard to imagine that this could be an eye color. The second thing I know is that Lisa and her equally non- committal partner do not have the fortitude to jump from the Newell Bridge. A stunt like bridge- jumping requires great commitment.

Mr. and Mrs. Visible-Tattoos were probably celebrating their anniversary.

The friendly man to my right is finally knocked out of the game by someone seated across the table. He glances at me sheepishly, then speaks into his shirt pocket. He holds out his hand to me and wishes me luck. We shake and I tell him to drive safely. He will, he says. He always does, he says.

*

The middle-aged couple, they have not been found dead or alive. Nor have they been

31 identified. A second witness—an ear witness interviewed a few days after the story ran in the paper—said he heard a woman scream and then he thought maybe he heard a splash. Maybe the scream was the eyewitness with her window rolled down. I believe the man believes he heard a scream and splash on the night in question.

Sheriff Wahlquist said in a statement: "I suspect we'll find them. The Ohio River almost always gives up what it takes in. Almost always.” I think that is most often true of rivers. They are very karmic natural elements, rivers.

*

I should mention luck. Don't count on it. Most luck is misinterpreted karma. But luck is real. Most people have no use for luck. Hard work is a fine and common substitute. People say that luck is a result of preparation. Sometimes this proves out. But enormously successful people acknowledge that simple good fortune is responsible for their ascendancy. Take Gene Simmons.

Sure, KISS worked hard and rode mediocre songs as far as they could take them. But the makeup and the bloodspitting and accusations of devil worship were a matter of timing—simple luck.

The seventies demanded odd icons, and lucky for KISS. Perhaps the members of the band studied their culture and made a conscious decision that the world was waiting for leg-splitting sex demons from outer-space, but probably not. Luck.

Luck is outside of your control. If you stumble into luck, you can, like Gene Simmons and KISS, parlay that into a lucrative career at the table. Gene Simmons is an above-average bass player with an extraordinary tongue who got lucky, so lucky that even a man who looks like

Gene Simmons could get free drinks at West Virginia casino all night long. If you're lucky, ignore all my poker advice. Ignore all advice. Just be lucky.

32 *

This couple that jumped from the Newell Bridge, they must have swum to the scrub oak on the West Virginia bank and walked away. Maybe they are accomplished jumpers, adrenaline junkies, retired Olympians—no luck in that—that's training; except I suppose it is more difficult to execute a jump under starlight. They entered the water, toes pointed, and at just the right moment—once their backs were being swallowed by the waters of the Ohio River—they lifted their heels and laid their bodies flat under the surface of the moving water. Now, nobody knows their names. Mr. and Ms. Visible-Tattoos. A pair of matching cutoff T-shirts. A little kiss, a scream, and a splash and somehow they managed to find the safety of the banks of the Ohio

River and anonymity.

*

Law Degree Lisa is attracting attention, now. Lisa rivered a gut-shot straight draw and took down a big pot. I was not in the hand but several people were. Lisa played the hand wrong, against pot-odds and she won anyway. She is squealing just loud enough to get people to look in her direction. As if she needed volume. The whole room has noticed her, her beaming smile. I wonder if she is becoming louder because I have failed to give her the attention she sought.

Because I have made the mistake of asking about her personal life, and because she made the mistake of answering my questions. We have nearly shared something. Yoga Mat Lisa must feel self-conscious, talking about her long-term boyfriend she calls her “partner.” I have misplayed this hand all night, and I doubt I could, even if I tried, work my way back into her sights. It is too late to admit to her what I want, and I am not certain I want her anyhow. Mistakes have been made.

33 She may take someone back to her room. But if she does, I think she will devour them. I console myself. The give and take of sex. Beautiful women like Lisa are used to taking when they think they are giving. Used to winning. Used to importing and wholesaling and profiting.

And who am I to suggest an alternate theory to replace the genetic luck of beauty?

Lisa moves to a different table, higher stakes, better odds. She is the lone female. Lisa's voice is happy. She puts her hand on my shoulder and squeezes as she departs, tells me good luck. I don't bother to explain, of course, that I don't need it—luck is not part of my strategy.

It's all thanatos and patience.

*

Over the long haul, playing thanatos poker is an airtight method. Once in a while I still lose. You will too. Your opponents will opt for the buffet when you finally catch that crushing hand. That happens. Or people just don't have a hand worth the gamble, a ditch in their own karmic cycle, and you gain from them only a minimal amount of chips. And it's true, some nights the cards do not come.

Tonight is a loss. I flopped the quad-kings. I saw Gene Simmons or a version of him. I did not get invited back to the lucky and lovely wholesaler's hotel room for an unfair sexual exchange. I am up only thirty bucks—six red chips, less than two units of time. Subtract gas and the dollar it cost me to get across the Newell Bridge both ways, and I'm in the red for the evening. And I have lost time or spent time or wasted it.

*

It is 4:30 in the morning. The roads are quiet except for the real bad drunks.

I am crossing the Newell Bridge. I hand the woman in the tollbooth my return ticket. I've

34 read about her in the local papers. She works the toll booth six nights a week. The septuagenarian’s name is Imogene Simmons. I am not kidding. Imogene says that I should drive safely now. I tell the woman who has seen and commented on so many bridge jumpers for the local press, that I intend to drive safely.

I want to bounce a theory off her that goes like this: the most recent jumpers, Mr. and

Mrs. Visible-Tattoos, had been circus performers. They lacked a venue due to the decline in circuses, so they decided to travel the country and jump from bridges at night when only one vehicle could see them standing in the headlights. They did this to shock the driver and whatever passengers were in the car. A kind of graffiti performance. The retired performers craved an audience, so they crafted an intimate audience from a passerby. I have a number of other theories. I decide not to bother Imogene Simmons.

Instead, I park my truck in the hospital lot next to a sign that reads: Patients and Visitors only. I walk down the hill. If the bridge looks white over the pile of bright pottery, I wonder what the heap of ceramics looks like from the bridge. I wonder if I'll be able to see the heap at all, or if it is hidden from view by treetops. I walk up to the tollbooth holding out my nickel to cross the bridge on foot.

“We don't collect the nickel anymore,” Imogene says. “It ain't worth slowing down traffic. We kept the sign, though. Everyone likes it.”

“Good to know. It's a great old sign.”

“People like it,” she reassures me.

“I'll bet.”

“Why you walking so late at night?” she asks.

35 “I was driving,” I say. “Just came through here in the white pickup.”

“And now you're walking back?”

“Halfway.”

“You're not going to do anything stupid are you?” she asks.

“No. I'm just going to stand there in the wind and watch the colors as the sun comes up.”

“And then turn right around?” she asks.

“Yeah. After sunrise, I'll walk right back. Promise.”

“You better. I've seen some things out here, by God.”

“I bet,” I say. I do not bother to say that I've read her observations in the paper. I am not looking for conversation. “I'll be back. I'll wave when I pass your booth.”

“I'll wave back at you,” Imogene says.

The river is still black. The horizon is beginning to glow white. The wind is relentless, screeching in protest as the cold air is forcing itself through the steel grate. I am concentrating on breathing slowly and deeply against the wind. No way anyone could hear a scream from either bank. The testimony of the ear witness is phony.

I realize, as I pass the steel suspension buttress, I have committed to catching the sunrise too early. I should have napped for a while in my truck. Now, I am already nearing the middle of the bridge. I realize that I will have to analyze another night at the table to satisfy the requirements of Pure Player Magazine. That's fine, I think. I wonder who I will be tomorrow night, which is technically tonight. For a second I toy with the idea of sprinting back to my truck and hightailing it back to the casino. Spending another dollar to cross the bridge and look for

Lisa. I committed to rejecting Lisa too early, maybe. I assumed information about her, about

36 myself.

I know this: I got most lost on the very night I was paying the most attention, trying to figure out how to explain who I am to a bunch of strangers on the pages of a free magazine. I commit to capturing all the picky details again tomorrow night.

The sun crests the trees and hills. Traffic is picking up on the Newell Bridge. And I can see the Homer Laughlin China Factory on the high ground looking over a bend in the Ohio

River, to the south and east of the bridge. I can see the pile of what I know to be brightly colored pieces of pottery. From here it looks gray, almost white.

37 In Case of Fish Wash Glass

You are driving past LaDue Reservoir, through the mist; sunroof open, and you smell the heavy outdoors, feel the chill and let the heater blow on your feet—warm and cold air swirling.

Morning deejays are performing their rites. You think you can hear the fatigue, the lack of interest in their voices this morning. Maybe it's you. Jimmy Chunga introduces this week's number four: “Don't Dare Stop the Music,” a self-referential number by ShaiBeats. You obey; you let the song continue “because you know you want to / know you want to / dance dance dance / you don't dare stop the, stop the, stop the music / No-ooo.”

You look at your speedometer. You slow down. You think to yourself about how you will slow down, but you dare not stop.

You think about Selah, the new woman at the office. How dark she is. How her name is really Ashley, but when you interviewed her she explained: “There are too many Ashlies.” Her nametag and business cards read Selah. There are no other Ashlies in the office, but you didn't argue. Her resume, application, and paychecks insist on her given name. She seems to be a Selah.

She has successfully inhabited the name she created for herself. In fact, you agree with her. There are too many Ashlies.

“Besides,” she said, “Selah is an anagram for Ashley kind of, if you jumble the letters and drop the Y. Do you know what it means?”

“The word Selah?” you asked. “Of course,” you said.

38 You remember wondering if she has a background in etymology that was not listed on her resume. You decided to hire her.

“Selah means to pause and think, like meditation or something,” you told her. “It's

Hebrew.”

She wants to know how you knew this, how your knowledge was made. You think she is attractive for a junior epistemologist, but you would not tell her so. So dark. Black eyes and that jaw like an ice skate blade.

You sit, now, in your car, driving; selah-ing about Selah. Replaying scenes.

You hear a thump. It is not the bass line of “Lemme Bounce On It,” this week's number eleven (and rising!) song, by the New New Magnets—a Swedish girl group who is invading

American airwaves.

You immediately know how the fish lands on your windshield. You are startled that you are not startled. Amazed at your ability to be rational. You suspect no heavenly pestilence, accuse no nefarious Poseidon. You see the talon marks. The Northern Pike is small, about the size of a hammer handle.

You decide not to flick your windshield wipers to remove the fish. All the slime would spread across the driver's line of sight. A good call. Straight thinking, you tell yourself.

“A slough-shark!” your father used to say, when you, as a boy, had landed a Northern.

The slimiest, stickiest species of fish in the lake is gumming up your commute. Selah, you meditate, and you smile while you think about how strange it is to have a fish pressed against your windshield.

Funny how quiet things can get.

39 You watch his mouth. You think of the fish as a he. He is not a she. Females get bigger, you remind yourself. The have less color. Could be a girl fish, but you're somehow sure it's a very boy fish.

So still. He is gaping, the fish; his jaw is opening and closing. Ruminatio. To chew. The

Lectio Divina. What comes next? Meditatio or contemplatio?

“I don't knowio,” you say out loud. You are embarrassed to hear yourself speak. Ask

Father what's-his-name. The young guy with the goatee and the frail voice made for singing from your confirmation days.

What was his name?

Teach a man to fish.

If a falconer teaches his bird to fish he'll never have to fish again.

A falconer like that could take leisure even from his leisure.

He is suffocating from too much oxygen. Sixty miles per hour is far too fast for a fish out of water. His gills are pumping. You wish he were at a better angle so you could see the bright red interior gills.

Selah's too-bright red lipstick.

You wonder if the fish is confused. You anthropomorphize, lending him your thoughts.

Your fish thinks, “I was just trying to have a peaceful breakfast. . . .”

His mouth finally takes one last gulp, and his skull makes a tap on the glass. His gills stop. His pectoral fin, the one not trapped between his lifeless body and your windshield begins to vibrate on the wind. The fish is drying. You can almost see him shrivel into his sad skin.

You wonder if the last thing the fish heard was this great line penned by the New New

40 Magnets: “Cuz outside the club we go all night long, all night long.” Maybe the fish was out too late, going all night long. A ripe meal for the early bird, you think. That's how these things happen.

You learn to ignore the dead fish. You have sales to make today. Well, you have no sales to make; your team has sales to make, and you, as Senior Sales Coordinator, must facilitate your team's movements. You sell insurance, but not important insurance—a kind of gap insurance—

Insurance Insurance, you call it.

This hot new product protects the policy's holder from being under-insured in nearly all possible insurance-mandatory or insurance-recommended situations. The product sells itself, you tell your team, your friends, the people you converse with casually in bars. Gaps in Home, Life,

Dental, even Flood coverage (which is generally sold as a separate policy) are covered by

Insurance Insurance. “It's a miracle product!” you tell people in bars and coffee shops and parking lots. “Let me set an appointment for you!” you say.

Your job is stupid. Meaningless, except for Selah.

You remember the fish on your windshield. The slime dries to paste and then to dried paste.

“Top of the hour throwback! How bout some Oingo Boingo, Akron?” Jimmy Chunga announces. You hum the staccato intro. You bellow with Danny Elfman, “I was hit by something last night in my sleep / It's a dead man's party / Who could ask for more?” You think Danny

Elfman is a genius.

You can see that the fish will be with you for the remainder of your drive, for sure.

Selah's black hair gets caught in her bright red lipstick.

41 You are the first one to arrive at the office. You look for a napkin with which to grasp the errant fish, but you remember that you dribbled a fastfood burrito onto your tie yesterday and you used the last of your napkin stash to blot the refried beans into an acceptable match of your tie's fleur-de-lis pattern. You look for a fastfood bag. Nothing. You look through your shoulder bag. Only necessary files.

You remind yourself that none of your files are actually necessary. You say this out loud.

You accentuate “actually.”

You resort to removing the small Northern Pike with your bare hands. You are out of options. You try to do the job using only your left hand, but the fish is on there pretty good.

You mumble this to the corpse: “You're on there pretty good, arntcha?” The fish does not reply, obviously. You use both hands and discard the carcass in a trash bin.

You wipe your hands in the landscaping mulch. This was not smart.

You mutter, “That was not smart.”

You have black bark granules and debris all over your fish-smelling hands. You notice a bright white glob of dried bird shit, too. “Not my day,” and so on, you say. You wipe your hands in the grass. Most of the bark and all of the bird shit comes off. There are thin blades of fescue sticking to your hands. The mowers where here yesterday. You work and get your hands mostly grass-free.

You unlock the door to the office complex. You wash your hands, then you wash the door knobs you've touched and scrub the light switches you turned on. You spray the door handles with a cleaning product that smells like, supposedly, mountain air, if it were mixed with ammonia. The bits of grass that have fallen from your hands will be vacuumed up by the

42 custodian tonight, you think. Your hands stink so badly.

Justin, Selah, and Vaughn walk through the door. Vaughn asks what smells.

Justin apologizes. “My wife has me taking these fish oil tablets so I'll live forever. Fatty omega acids can keep your heart going for centuries, if you haven't heard. Anyhow, they make me burp up a terrible fish smell. Sorry.”

“She wants to keep you around?” Vaughn says.

“Seems that way,” Justin replies.

“I could write up a policy on you for about the price of those fish oil tablets. She could win even if you drop dead,” Vaughn says. Everyone laughs.

“Store them in the freezer,” you tell Justin.

“Huh?” Justin asks.

“The fish oil pills,” you say. “Put them in the freezer. Helps reduce the smell, but not the burping. You're gonna burp when you take those things.”

“Is that right?” Justin asks.

“That's what I hear,” you say. That is what you've heard.

Selah makes coffee. Her coffee is about the color of her hair which sometimes sticks to her red lipstick. Everyone is choking on Selah's strong coffee. All of the office cups wear Selah's lipstick marks. That new product that lasts half a day and promises it won't kiss off. Who tested that hypothesis, you wonder. That sounds like a meaningful job. The rest of your team shuffles in. Someone, probably Candice, probably out of spite rather than taste, dumps what is left of

Selah's pot of coffee down the sink, and brews something a little more comfortable. The way women hate other women sometimes.

43 You begin typing documents and emails. You almost forget about the slim Northern Pike who expired on your windshield. By now you've washed your hands with every soap in the office and doused them with antibacterial liquids. You've even taken a couple pumps from the community hand lotion. Funny how the smell re-emerges in waves.

44 Bird Bones

“Do you have any tattoos you regret?” Angie asked me. We knew each other well enough, but only just well enough, to ask this kind of question. Angie had been responsible for my hair for a little over a year, maybe a year and a half. As such, she managed my presentation to the world, which coincided with a personal resurrection, of sorts. I spent two years or so as a recluse.

I lost a job, a defining kind of job. Fired. If I explain the details, I may hang myself in them; things are going well, so trust me when I say that I felt the whole ordeal was unjust. I bought a clippers with my severance package and tightened the old belt. For two years or thereabouts I shaved my head with that electric clipper.

And then one day I decided to go out into the world again. It was just like that. Like a light switch. I was ready to see people, be seen by people on a regular basis and to get real haircuts again. I outlasted a horrible depression.

“I do,” I said.

“What is it? Can you show me,” she said. Angie was smiling with her scissors at rest above my head.

I stood up with my front-cape on and lifted my shirt to my ribcage. Angie laughed. She snorted. Cried out, “Oh God! That's the greatest.” That is the greatest tattoo I've ever seen. What on earth compelled you to get that?” She kept snorting, but she did not cut me with her scissors.

Angie was Italian with yellow colored hair, black eyes, soot eyebrows, a translucent, bleached

45 mustache over pearl—no, alabaster—no, even whiter than alabaster teeth, made straight, straighter, straightest, the geometry of orthodontics.

“I thought it was funny,” I said.

“It is hilarious.”

“Used to be funnier,” I said. The tattoo is of a post-it note in my handwriting that says:

Get: Milk (2% and soy)

Repair: lawn mower

This post-it note is my only tattoo. “I regret it,” I said, “because I bought a new lawn mower instead of having the old one fixed. So, it's kind of a lie. On top of that, it is a stupid idea for a tattoo. I'm not a skull or dragon kind of guy, I guess. I wanted a tattoo that represented me.”

“Have you thought about having it removed?” Angie asked.

“Not really. I don't mind it. When I say 'regret' I guess I mean, I should have thought about it longer. You shouldn't rush into tattoos. I learned that.”

"Laser removal is pretty cheap," she said. "Seventy-five a session, and it'll take around six sessions for mine. That's what they tell me. Even after the first sitting, it's gotten a lot lighter."

All of these questions because she wanted to tell me about her tattoo removal.

We know each other well enough to build subplots into our conversations. Like when she asks me about my kids, she might be telling me—in the manner of our brand of disclosure—that her period is running a few days late, and she is beginning to worry a little. But that is a different story. Our conversations are circuitous, and we use each other as therapists or as substitutions for real friends.

And Angie knows that I write stories. She suggests that I write about things we discuss.

46 Her drunkenness while lounging at her parents' pool, for example. “That'd make a great story,” she said. She explained how the UPS man and the meter reader showed up while she was fielding a great number of phone calls while drunk, wearing a bathing suit appropriate only for backyard tanning, and looking after the family dog who had recently undergone a minor surgery to remove a precancerous dog-mole. I laughed politely.

At my last sitting, I tried to explain to her how I had been in a real rut. “I'm writing facsimiles of versions of stories, now,” I explained. She asked about writer's block, because the general public believes that writer's are condemned to the ailment. “No, I don't believe in that. I am just too busy to daydream. That's all you need, really: observation skills and daydreaming hours.”

"What is it you're having removed?" This might have been too intimate a question without the prelude. I'm still not sure it was appropriate, but the boundaries had been carefully broken down, and I was playing my part in the conversation.

She pushed her smock off her shoulder. Angie was wearing a white, white tank top that looked brand-new and matched her teeth. All the other women cutting and styling hair were wearing black. She slid the fabric from her shoulder. Then she moved her bra strap from her shoulder. I always get insane when I see a girl pulling on her undergarments, repositioning them.

There is something verboten about these displays that makes me into a wild kind of boy, but I had my own smock over my shoulders, and Angie had a pair of scissors at rest, now, in her folded hand tugging on her strap. She was also telling me about this straight blade she'd just purchased at a hair-stylist's convention, which, she told me, she was intending to use to scrape the hairs off the back of my neck. So, I controlled myself while she worked that thin shoulder

47 free from its confinement.

Anyhow, Angie didn't think of me "like that," and I'd given her no reason to begin thinking of me like that other than exposing her to my ribcage at her request. The tattoo right below her clavicle read, "Everything Leaves a Mark" drawn on in script. Her clavicle was tiny, like a bird bone. This surprised me as Angie is a normal sized Italian woman, not particularly small. But this bone, Jesus, it was so thin. Like a pencil mark. I bet Angie looks in the mirror at her small clavicles (I am assuming her right clavicle matches her left; I've never seen it—it has always been under a black smock when I see her), and thinks: No matter what, I have these small bones underneath my neck. No matter if I get chunky, I'll have these elegant, tiny bones that look like they're drawn on with a makeup pencil. I bet that's what she thinks when she looks at herself in the mirror when she is not wearing a tank top or blouse or smock, just her perpetually bronze

Italian skin.

I laughed when I read her tattoo, and she pulled back from me, offended. I could see her get smaller in the mirror. I couldn't smell her salon products, and I knew that my laughter had hurt her, somehow, even though neither of us thought of the other in that way. Even though she had just finished snorting about my own unfortunate tattoo. I looked at her getting smaller in the mirror, backing up to the wall. "No, no, Angie. I'm sorry," I said, still laughing. I looked at her small shoulder, backed up to the wall, leaning against it. I don't know, anatomically speaking, where the human breast begins and the pectoral muscle ends. To some degree they function as a unit. Angie is at the age where breasts begin to move lower on the ribcage, and as she repositioned her bra strap and her white tank top, her left breast heaved. I am at the age where I am not supposed to be surprised when a human breast gathers at the top of a human bra. This

48 sight still surprises me, causes me to say a word of grace, but to whom—the Lord or the devil?

Artemis, she of thirty-one breasts (but only two clavicles). I do not know where to direct my praise, but I am grateful.

"What?" she said. "Why are you laughing at me?"

I kicked myself around in her chair. I looked at her without the reflection. I didn't say anything for a minute because she was, for that moment, a delicate being with tendrils where clavicles should be.

"I'm not laughing at you." Did she think I was laughing at her because her clavicle looked like a the end of a tiny, useless recursive bow? Did she think I was laughing at her because the skin of her breast is starting to age? Because her chest has seen too much sun? I looked at her face. Her lips were not quivering. Her make-upped brow was pointed up to heaven, searching for the meaning of my laughter.

I said, "This is the greatest. Do you not see it? 'Everything Leaves a Mark,' a statement of permanence, and you're going to pay three to four hundred bucks to have the statement about eternity removed."

"I know," she said.

"It's great. Total cliché.”

"It's the worst, I know. You should write a story about it."

"The absolute worst. In a story, as soon as the character enters the tattoo parlor for her

Everything Leaves a Mark tattoo, the reader knows the ink has to come off. The story is only a matter of how the thing is removed—in this case a laser beam—the least interesting way. Have you considered carving it off with a filet knife? Or better, having someone else carve it off with a

49 filet knife? I mean, for the purposes of writing a better story.”

“Write it,” she said.

“Never. You'd think that I sat around thinking about your skin and your smell and your dramatic thoughts about how easy it is to have permanent marks scrubbed off in our modern age."

"I'm serious. You should use it.”

"Then you'd think I thought of you like that, and all the lines would be crossed."

"I would not. We can keep the lines."

"Oh you would. You would. And you'd get me all wrong. I'd have to put some sexual tension in there for the thing to be even a little interesting because the idea is so small and inverted and so absurd."

"I'd understand."

"You wouldn't. Worse. Your boyfriend wouldn't understand. He would think that I think of you like that, and that you think of me like that. All interested parties would be confused. My wife wouldn't understand. She never understands—wishes I'd gouge out my eyeballs. She has a no looking policy. No looking at you, the woman in the stall next to us in those black jeans. Hell, she doesn't even want me looking at her. No looking at all. Nobody would understand that I would be writing about this cliché above your breast below your tiny, birdlike clavicle. And that you're having the cliché removed, which is another kind of cliché. You do know that I'd have to reference your breasts in this non-story that I will not write, and that would make me so uncomfortable. And you too. You'd be squeamish about me writing about your breasts.”

“I would get over it.”

50 "No, forget it. It won't happen." I said.

"You should risk it."

"I don't take those kinds of risks, Angie. I don't like playing around with the idea of real people having bodies and thoughts about bodies. I can be prudish."

"Maybe that's why nobody has heard of your writing."

"Yes, please keep reminding me of my failure."

"Long as you keep reminding me that I am a cliché, I will."

"We have a deal," I said. I reached out from under my black smock and I stretched my hand toward hers. We shook. She spun my chair around so that I could see myself in her mirror.

She rested her hand on my shoulder.

"Will you let me read it?"

“I'm not going to write it."

"Bullshit. When you write it I want to read it."

"Do you read?"

"Sure."

"Do you read a lot?"

"Not really."

"Then I could never let you read it even if I did write the story."

"Now you think I'm stupid?"

"Of course not. I just think you'd read skin as skin as skin. Like skin has no more purpose than to be sought after. That's the way non-readers read about skin."

“How do readers think about skin?”

51 “Differently.”

“Good answer,” she mocked. "I promise I'd try to read it without thinking. . . .”

"Besides, you'd hate how you have to treat a character. You'd think I thought you were shallow,” I interrupted.

"Let me read it. How long will it take you to write it?"

"Forever. I could never finish a draft before Armageddon."

I sat there in her chair. She pulled bits of hair from my head with a razor and tossed them on the floor. Angie said that my hair was really thinning. She said that I was really getting a lot of gray hairs. I told her I may go back to shaving my own head if she didn't watch herself.

"Wouldn't it be great if part of the tattoo wouldn't come off? The ink ran too deep, or something?" I said. "Like, the lower-case r would just sit there in the space of your shoulder.

What would you do?"

"I'd probably get, maybe a bird tattooed over it, and have the r turned into a feather."

"You've already thought of this?"

"No," she said. "It just seems like an obvious cliché kind of thing to do." She stuck her tongue out at my reflection in the mirror.

I thought that it did seem pretty obvious, now that she said it. She showed me the back of my head, in a handheld mirror. I thought in my heart that I am not as old as I am beginning to look. I thought about the hundreds of clavicles I have refrained from writing about, from tracing under my fingertips and the moral superiority I have earned by my goodness. About all the clavicles that, at least temporarily wished I was not so damn righteous. All of this adds up to nothing.

52 *

So I gave this story to Angie with the following note attached at the end:

Angie,

While I was writing this story, my wife walked into my office to tell me that someone she knew had just died, unexpectedly, and could I please stop and listen to her for one minute? The woman had started bleeding from her nose, vomiting blood and then she was gone—aneurysm. I bet that woman wants to be looked at, now. Seen and admired. So, despite my wife's wishes, I will look at you again, in a respectful manner. Not like that. I'll look at you. Even though I should not have showed you this stupid story, about your stupid tattoo. I will know what I think in my heart. And we will continue to not think about one another in the manner that some people think about some other people. This is no fiction—you have those delicate bones, and bones last for a long time. Longer than hair and longer than skin. I hope you admire those bones—the one I've seen and the one that, I believe in my heart, mirrors it.

*

I gave Angie this story and the note. She told me that she loved the story, but wished I hadn't mentioned her mustache. We didn't talk much when she cut my hair after reading the story.

Mid-cut she says, “I'm sorry. We both knew this day would come. You told me, and I didn't believe you at first. I'm moving in with my boyfriend in Cincinnati.”

Indeed, I had predicted her impending romance in one of our mock therapy sessions while we were both wearing smocks. “Who will cut my hair?” I asked. She pointed to another stylist and told me her name. Said she'd introduce us. I declined the meeting. “I'll figure it out,” I said.

53 I showed her this stupid story. That stupid tattoo. And I thought it was obvious, the meaning: things do actually leave marks, Angie.

But now I am starting to think that she was right and that laser beams are the truest kinds of light.

54 Cicada

I did not know what I should wear, so I bought one of those women's fashion magazines that feature photographs of stars wearing trendy clothes, walking around in Hollywood or

Manhattan with their current husbands or boyfriends. This was a mistake. I should look like one of those guys, a husband or a boyfriend, I thought. I flipped through the pages, but I couldn't see myself wearing pants that came above the ankle and showed off my socks—what an impractical idea, short pants. And saddle shoes, men were wearing saddle shoes, nubuck with bands of color.

In the back corner of my closet, I had a brown corduroy blazer that fit nicely, so I settled on it and a white shirt. I bought new slacks. The hems extended neatly to my heel, as hems should.

And I bought new shoes, not saddle shoes, but shoes similar to shoes of the stars. Before the event, I put everything on and looked at myself in the mirror and decided I would not feel self- consciousness wearing these clothes.

I walked around the house in them and rehearsed. I laughed. I spoke clearly. I pulled at my lapels and spoke very, very clearly. I picked a few phrases that I could turn into lighthearted conversation, tag ends of jokes, and snickered mostly through my nose. “What do you do for a living?” I asked the people I had once known. Then I cocked my head to one side and listened to the response. Focus, I reminded myself while I was practicing. Listen to their words.

I invented words for the Johnsons and Petersons and Dickersons, all these middle-aged

Nordic people, to say back to me. Nod. Smile. A better smile, not that forced one. There.

55 “Um hmm, very impressive. And your family? Oh, they're lovely. You must be very proud.” Then I stood quietly imagining them detail their pride. “Well, it's great to see you,” I'd say, and then I'd move on to the next imaginary body and shake its hand with both of my hands, including my left hand in order to project warmth, rather than timidity. If I asked questions quickly enough, and if I listened intently enough, and if I moved on to the next person with smooth grace, I could avoid having my questions turned against me.

“What about you, Ferg? What have you been up to?” Someone would try to hug me, so I practiced thrusting out my hand, taking the lead in conversations to avoid bathing in the perfumes and colognes, foundations and lipsticks of near-strangers.

After I had practiced for several hours, I walked down to the dock and sat on the bench there in my carefully selected clothes, satisfied with my progress. I looked down at myself, and I was proud of my “look.” I had this girl back in high school and I wondered if she'd be at the reunion.

Not a girlfriend. She had me and I had her. Neither of us were social outcasts; she was slightly different and gregarious, and I was slightly different and kept to myself. We were not unlikeable. People liked me, and people liked her. We both had friends, even mutual friends, but we never formed a convincing social circle. We weren't jocks. I played baseball and Rene played tennis. We drank a little, but not nearly enough to join the party crowd. She smoked, but not enough to be a smoker. We were average kids. There was nothing fancy about our relationship.

We just made each other comfortable.

We hung out frequently. She'd help me with math. I'd help her with English. A few of us gathered for evening fires on my shoreline. One night at a fire, I was telling a story, and she said

56 to me, “You remember everything. You are so deliberate. That's what I like about you.” I told her that I thought that was my most boring quality. “It is,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I'm trying to shake it. Be more impulsive or whatever, you know.”

“I don't think you should. I think you should do the opposite. Go with it. Be even more deliberate. Girls like mysterious boys.”

“That hasn't been my experience.”

“Maybe not girls. Women. Women like mysterious men.”

“Are you a woman or a girl?” I asked. She said that she was both.

Everything physical that happened between us happened right in this location. I had found a sloughed off cicada shell hanging in a spiderweb under our dock. I am intrigued, even to this day, by cicadas. How do those bugs crawl out of their ghosts? I don't know. And where do they go when they've freed themselves?

Anyhow, the two of us were standing on the shoreline, and I said to her, “Rene, let's go into the lake. I've got something I want to show you.” Rene was saved from North Korea by

Lorraine and Gary Hardwick. She was the only Asian in our school; Korean in appearance only, thoroughly American otherwise. Her parents Catholicized her, and she wore the Christ around her neck on his totem.

“It's dark,” she said, but her protest did not convince me.

And I said that I knew that it was dark, but what I wanted to show her was very important to me. I think we were both about sixteen. She had driven to my house, so that seems about right.

Sixteen.

“I don't know. It seems weird to go into the lake after dark,” she said.

57 “That's because you haven't done it yet. Anyways, I have an idea. You wait here. I'm going to run up to the house.”

“Okay. Run, though.”

“Yes, I'll run.” And I ran at least part of the way to the house. I stopped and turned back.

Looked at her standing there looking at the lake. Wondering if she should go into the lake with me after dark. And I think she was looking at the moon too. Or I was looking at the moon which was looking at the lake and the lake looked at Rene. All refractions. She was swatting mosquitoes and looking at the moon or the lake. Either way, she was not looking at me looking at her.

I didn't know how to take that. Should I want her to look at me, or was the lake and the moon enough? I did not know. I've never been sure of these things. Then I turned and finished my run up to the house.

I walked back to where she was swatting mosquitoes and looking. I said, “Hey, look at this, Rene. It won't be dark now.” I dropped a small flashlight into a Ziplock bag. I sealed the bag and pushed the button to turn the light on. “Besides we need this to see what I have to show you,” I said, “it's under the dock.” I took my shirt off and my shoes and socks.

“Under the dock?”

“Yeah, that's where it is.” I pushed my pants down and yanked them off my feet, the way you can when you're young—balanced and flexible so that you can turn the bottom of your foot right up at your face for an inspection, if necessary.

“I don't know if I want to go in the lake. Under the dock,” she said.

“Well, how about this: if you don't like it, we can get right back out. We can come right

58 back to the shore. She and I swatted our own mosquitoes. She told me that she was going to keep her shirt on, but she slid her shorts off her hips, and I didn't say anything about the shirt or the shorts. Nothing. I just looked at her shining tanned legs, the way legs look when you're young and before your eyesight goes just a bit dull.

Rene and I walked into the lake. We kept some distance between us. Maybe because I kept some space between us, she decided that she should take off her shirt and leave it on the dock so that it would be dry when she got done seeing what I wanted to show her, the cicada shell in a spiderweb; but, of course, she didn't know what I wanted to show her, yet.

Our beach was sandy and what rocks there had been, my father, over the course of his life, had removed and piled up along the shoreline. My father and I worked that beach to perfection. I raked out the seaweed several times a week and piled it on the beach. It smelled sweet like just-spoiled fruit. When a pile dried out, we burned it, and that smelled like a piece of burnt pie after a fish dinner.

The sand gave way under our feet. The lake bottom receded pretty quickly on our beach so that the water was up to my ribcage at the end of the dock, higher on her, almost to her arm pits. Her bra was white, and the tips of her hair dragged through the water and sent the moon rounding where her hair floated on the lake. I shined the flashlight up through the water. The light made a green glow and you could see specks swimming and floating on the beam. I stood there dumbly and looked at the specks for a while, and Rene looked at the light, too. She said that the water felt warm.

“Yeah, it always feels warmer at night. I think because you expect it to feel colder.” Then

I moved slowly under the dock to a corner of the framing. I took her hand and pulled her behind

59 me. I raised the flashlight out of the water and shined it up into the spiderweb. “Look,” I said.

“You brought me into the lake to show me that? Gross. What even is it?”

“It's a cicada shell,” I said.

She drew herself up close behind me and peered at the exoskeleton over my shoulder. “I can't believe you took me here to show me this,” she said, but she didn't sound angry. Her voice sounded as if she really could not believe that I had walked her out here, out of our clothes except our underwear and her bright white bra. And I think she really couldn't believe it, too. I believed her disbelief, in the unalloyed way you believe things when you are young. Before you learn to add anger or resentment or dogma to belief or even disbelief.

“I wanted you to see it,” immediately I felt as odd and self-conscious as I have ever felt in my life. Just expressing a stupid desire about a stupid fascination in such a bold manner. Why did

I want her to see this? But I continued, “Look at it; you can see where the eyes were.”

“I'm looking at it. I know,” she said.

“Isn't it cool?”

“It's okay.” She put her hand on my shoulder and stared at the bug shell a little closer. I don't know if she was trying to humor me. I looked at her looking at the suspended carapace, and she cocked her head away from my shoulder. She moved around me, to the front of me. Staying very close, using her hand the way a blind person might, reaching behind herself and hooking her arm around my waist. “It is cool,” she said.

“I knew you would like it, too.” I don't think she was humoring me.

“Why did you think I'd like to look at a bug's shell?” she asked.

“I just did. I just know these things because I am deliberate.” I looked down over her

60 shoulder as she leaned back into me. I saw Jesus resting just below her clavicle, looking sideways, trying to see into the small cup of her white bra before he announces “It is finished.”

We stood there for awhile, me looking at Jesus who was looking at her while she stood in front of me, looking at the dried cicada leather. Her breathing in the foul air I had just exhaled, with her arm hooked behind her and around my waist. A breeze across the waters turned our skin to gooseflesh even though the water was warm.

*

The reunion was going as practiced. I was gladhanding around the bar, looking for Rene.

She saw me. She put her arms around me, said that oh it had been so long. I asked her all of my rehearsed questions: Rene had become an attorney, later a realtor, and she lived downtown

Chicago. She dealt in whole floors of skyscrapers.

“Wow, that's really impressive,” I said.

She said it was interesting work. She liked all the activity and making demands on behalf of another party. “Makes you feel powerful,” she said. She offered that she was twice divorced, newly single. No kids. “You know how it goes,” she said. She smiled and she kept smiling, genuine happiness, I think. She seemed to be a little drunk. She was twirling a straw in her gin and tonic. I said that I did know how it goes, but I am not certain that I know how very many things do go.

“And you? What about you? What do you do?” I told her what I did for a living, and she said that that seemed about right. She laughed. I told her that I still lived on the lake, that I go out and fish almost every night. I said that my parents were gone. We talked about how they both died. I probably gave her too many details, but she nodded and looked empathetic. She asked if

61 my wife was here. I told her that I never married. She said that was crazy. Asked me how that could be. Did I live with a woman? I said that I did not. “You're still good-looking. You still have all your hair. How could that be?” I shrugged, said that I did not know. “You know how it goes,”

I parroted.

“No, I'm shocked,” she said.

Rene's hair was still so black. All around the room, most of us had turned some shade of gray. She kept twirling the ends in her slender fingers, and she looked like a child, still.

“Well, it's really great to see you, Ferg. I'm in town for a few days. We should get together.”

“That'd be okay,” I said.

“I'd like to come out to the beach house and see it. See what you've done with the place.”

I never know if people are being sincere when they say these kinds of things. I thought, maybe,

Rene was just being polite.

“You should,” I said. “I've kept the beach nice and sandy, even though I rarely swim.”

“Tomorrow after I've slept off this booze, you and I can go for a swim. Late morning, once it's warm.” She grabbed me by the lapel and pulled me closer to her. “Remember that night when you got me naked and we made out underneath your dock? God, that was a romantic night.

That dead bug you just had to show me. I'm really surprised you didn't use that tactic on more women.” She giggled and she looked so youthful.

That was how she remembered it, but it was nothing like that. “Yes,” I said, “I remember it very well.”

“Me too. Like it was yesterday.”

62 “Mm Hmm,” I said, and I was smiling with her. “Well, you can come over to the house.

I'm free anytime, tomorrow.” We talked some more, then we parted and spoke to the other people who looked like kids we used to know.

Sometimes, in a small town, you'll see a child in a store or at a gas station, and you can ask him, “I bet you're a Torgeson?” And the kid will say he is, and then you and the child will sort out his lineage. “Do you belong to Al or Steve?” you ask, and kid answers. Reunions are like these dialogues in reverse. Rene and I both worked the big room, me as rehearsed. She flitted, as easy as she did when she was a girl. I think we orbited around each other that night. We were never very far apart and found ourselves in the same circles of conversation.

I went home late with my head half-full of beer. Most words I had spoken in forever, mostly asking questions. I wondered if Rene would come over the following day, and if she did, I wondered what I should wear. I slipped into a pair of shorts, then I ironed the new slacks and the white shirt and returned them to hangers in my closet. I got a glass of water and sat at the kitchen table, the same kitchen table I had sat at my whole life. For the first time in thirty-eight years, I noticed that the table doesn't match anything in the house. It probably needed to be updated a year after it was purchased. Ugly gray stripe-patterned Formica. Something you'd see in a hunting shack.

I mentally cataloged my clothes, trying to figure out the social obligations of tomorrow's clothing choice. A ball cap and a t-shirt and shorts. No socks. A beachy look. I went to bed and laid there, waiting for the sun to warm the surface of the lake.

63 Lovers Seated Quietly on a Bench

When the pair had stripped off the top sheet, Peter laid Adrienne down slowly on the fitted sheet, bearing the weight of her angled body. Adrienne smiled and said, “We need to get to the laundromat.”

“I know all about the laundromat. We've got plenty of time. I promise I won't waste your whole afternoon.”

“Promise?” she insisted.

Peter pulled at the hem of her jeans, and Adrienne lifted her rear from the bed to assist with her own undressing, pushing the waistbands of her jeans and underwear down past her hips.

He took off his clothes, and threw the clothes they had been wearing, item by item, into the sorted baskets. He shook the comforter from the floor, draped it over his shoulders and lay down in near equal parts next to and on top of Adrienne. She pulled the comforter over their heads.

They laid there roasting in the created darkness, while the bedroom was being lit and warmed by the slow winter sun.

“Ahh,” Adrienne sighed, a full sigh, with the satisfaction of a cartoon. He held her delighted face in his hand, fingers on her temple, the curve of his hand matching her cheekbone.

“But we will get to the laundromat this morning, right? We have things to do. We have to clean this dump before my parents arrive, and I want to spend tomorrow cooking.”

“I swear, it's hearing your voice that makes me want to waste so much time,” Peter said.

64 “You'd think it'd be your body. Your body. But no, I can feel your voice in my bones, in my intestines.”

“Tell me.”

“It's like milk. Your voice is like thick milk. I was hearing your voice before I even knew you. Relax now and talk to me. It only takes an hour to clean up this little place, the two of us.

We've got all the time in the world. Talk to me.”

Adrienne couldn't think of anything to say, amorous or otherwise, beyond the division of chores she had prepared for them. She kept the list to herself. She was smoothing his hair.

Everything romantic she thought to say sounded either too aggressive or competitive. She could pay him a compliment, but then Peter might feel compelled to re-compliment her voice in a more detailed manner. She had so many things to say; chiefly, she wanted to tell Peter how love was far lonelier than she had imagined, and while this did not seem to be an inappropriate thing to say into Peter's ear, she wanted to say something into his ear. More than this, she wanted Peter to continue his steady course of action without the distraction of maintaining dialogue. So she said simply, “You're right, we've got time.”

“Say that first part again.”

“Ha,” she laughed from her belly. “I will never tell you you're right twice in a row.”

“What if I'm right twice in a row?”

“Doubtful.”

She kicked at the comforter to free their heads from the dark. The sun shone in Peter's eyes. He winced. He pulled the blanket back over them. Adrienne protested. Peter climbed on top of her, pinning her face down. She laughed and thrashed her head, but as Peter's face drew near

65 her ear, she lay still and let him kiss her.

The darkness of the comforter muted her sight. She listened and she smelled. Adrienne observed all she could, including her own joy, something she was getting used to, but the appearance of joy still managed to surprise her. Joy seemed to crash upon her like the loneliness.

Peter's underarms were ripe; she thought of them as spicy. Her own, she knew, had three days' stubble. His breath smelled of cigarettes and coffee mixed with toothpaste. Her mouth tasted like the pillow case; she was sure it was foul. When Peter had covered up their naked bodies, she caught the smell of turning wine, maybe a dribble of urine. She had always been hyper-aware of smells, especially her own.

While Peter's mouth was on her neck, she remembered those hormonal days when she was sitting in a classroom and thought she caught the odor of her vagina while daydreaming about a version of Brady Dillard. It was Brady Dillard's hair, specifically, that made out with her in daydreams and released the smell of moisture she thought she could smell. She didn't need

Brady to have a face; his unseen mouth and the image of his tousled hair were plenty.

She massaged her fingers into Peter's hair, unwashed and greasy, dust collected by sweat, smelling somehow of leaves and rust. Under the covers, she could smell herself. Both she and

Peter had relieved themselves that morning. She didn't bring up the mixture of odors, their breath, how half-heartedly they had cleansed themselves, believing that the trip to the laundromat and showers would precede any romantic opportunities. Cleanliness is wonderful, she thought, but need is better by far.

Whole industries exist because humans have decided to rid themselves of stink, cover the decay, the sloughing of cellular decomposition, ignore these daily microscopic miracles of the

66 body's built-in maintenance systems. Advertisers remind audiences how badly the smells of human beings need to be erased. But does the human animal want to lose its scent? Not at all.

Temper the smell with water, and augment it with perfumes. The sting of baby puke carries a cloying sweet. The salted sweat of sun baked hair. Of sunburned skin or skin baked to bronze and slathered in lotion, or better—oil. It is the stink that makes mixture of soft spices and flowers more impressive.

Adrienne, with her face pressed into the fitted sheet, discovered the lingering fragrance of frankincense and myrrh from an over-priced bottle of massage oil Peter had brought home to rub her sore neck. The pair of smells presented at birth to represent the short life of Christ and to imply his soon-coming burial. Upon bounding from the grave, he couldn't shake the rich aromas and spent his final forty days leaving a gloried trail of scent upon his friends and followers. “Our bedroom as resurrection motif,” Peter had once joked.

Peter dragged his fingertips up and down Adrienne's legs, worshiping her bones, her musculature, reaching his hand down her body. She felt his eyes on the small of her back. He squeezed her feet, kissed her toes, pressed her arches. Adrienne smiled and issued involuntary, dramatic humming sounds that originated in her throat and rested on her lips. She knew what to expect next and moved her body to accommodate Peter's patterns. She rolled over. Adrienne wondered if Peter was experiencing relief from his worries, too. If touching her was as merciful as being touched by him. They locked eyes and unlocked them to stare at moving body parts.

“Do you like to watch my tits?” Adrienne asked, as they established a rhythm.

“Yes,” he said, locking eyes again. “Is that okay?”

“Yes,” Adrienne said, followed with a laugh.

67 “I'm greedy,” Peter said.

“I'm glad. I am too,” she said.

Adrienne stared at his shoulders which were unusually large for his build. Peter was active and thin as a result. She watched the tendons in Peter's neck appear and disappear as he began to move in rhythm above her. He paused to adjust the comforter, which annoyed Adrienne.

Perhaps we can fight about the comforter, she thought, but she decided against interrupting the morning's events. Comforters make for dumb arguments. She heard herself make a whimper.

They were trying to have their first real fight, something unfair and illogical, so they could get on with the business of togetherness. They'd been seeing each other for over a year.

When Adrienne moved in to Peter's apartment, they agreed the move was more than cohabitation; they were building something together. “Together” was the word they were trying to define—a frightening concept to her. Adrienne wondered if she must empty herself into Peter, or vice versa, or if there was an unseeable container into which they must both pour their beings.

Or if togetherness meant that she would merely craft her schedule around his and he around hers.

What must be put down? What must one take up? To be thirty and not know how this shit is supposed to work is embarrassing, Adrienne thought.

Peter was much easier about togetherness, as if he had been expecting Adrienne to rearrange his days. Adrienne had spent a long string of years building disbelief, having her physical needs met occasionally with cool dispassion. Nondescript relationships without punctuation. A series of pretend Brady Dillards, the hormonal hunger augmented by nonspecific, easily satisfied daydreams—nice heads of hair, varying fashions, pressing into her lap—but these daydreams lacked the intensity of concentration and time. Brady Dillard, for the handful of high

68 school weeks she won him, certainly failed to deliver. She thought her expectations must have been too high. Men became placeholders.

She wanted more, and she condemned herself for wanting. Shamed herself for wanting.

Ridiculed the fabulist nature of romantic comedies. Endless parody of the happily-ever-after dreams groomed into girls. She kept her distance from a short series of men, walk-ons, capable of brief scenes. Some pretended to be suitors, some were, others admitted they were just visitors.

By these false Brady Dillards, she weaned herself from expectation and learned to have a fairly fine time.

But now, Peter was on top of her, and she felt like she needed Peter on top of her. And she was not ashamed of her new need; she was surprised by it. She examined this need constantly, on a loop, with overwhelming suspicion. Peter was restraining Adrienne by her wrists, pressing her arms to the bed, and she was angling her pelvis toward his, digging her heels into the mattress, flexing to increase the intensity of every boorish, confident thrust. She was coming again. The quieting of her thoughts. Peter let the weight of his whole body rest on hers. His movements slowed. His breaths became small growls and grunts. She felt Peter finishing and she tightened around him, satisfied.

Peter twisted himself over the side of the bed to fish for the towel they kept handy. The towel had been sorted, his search fruitless. Peter's back cramped from the long stretch and he made a noise of complaint. Adrienne watched his body contort. Peter—his twisting body—made her believe in some antiquated ideal borne fresh.

She lifted herself and the comforter from the bed, releasing the effluvium, the caustic collection of smells, proof of physical entropy into the air of their bedroom. With a tissue, she

69 dabbed at the semen that had dripped onto their mattress. Everything was good, she thought, but they could not fight.

They had disagreed about things. Sometimes they bored each other. Peter took too long to tell stories and Adrienne liked to tell Peter about her dreams first thing in the morning. A boredom spread on his face that could turn to abject fatigue. “In my dream, you left me to be chewed on by a rat. A rat, Peter! You said, 'These things happen.'”

And Peter would offer the most boring analyses: “Your subconscious fears abandonment.”

“Okay, Freud. I'm trying to tell you about my dream.”

“I heard you.” Peter did not seem to care about dreams. He didn't have many of his own.

He said that his primary action in his dreams was forgetting things, and when he woke from a dream he was often confused.

After she moved in with Peter, Adrienne had a host of terrifying dreams, lasting for a month: she was alone in a bombed city, she was being chased by a group of men, she was accused of theft, she was having teeth pulled. She woke up scared and angry because Peter was useless to her in her dreams, unable to protect her. She'd punish him in real life for his inactivity or non-presence in her dreams. He wouldn't accept her accusations, and when she pulled away from him, he did not chase her, as she wanted. Peter let her have the space she was creating, which angered her.

“Teeth represent money,” he once said, while Adrienne was trying to tell him about one of her nightmares.

“I know that.”

70 During that month of subconscious terrors, Adrienne broke down, bawled, and yelled at

Peter. He said calmly, “You're trying to fight with me about a dream. I'm sorry. I refuse to participate.” She yelled at him some more. Peter went into the kitchen and refilled his coffee. He went to the porch to smoke a cigarette.

“Listen to me,” she insisted.

“How could I do anything other than listen to you?” he asked. “You're screaming at me about a dream.”

“I'm trying to tell you my emotional needs.”

“No, you're telling me what your brain thinks about when you're not actively using it.”

“But I was alone.”

“Yes, in non-reality, you were alone and vulnerable. The person who abandons you in your dreams is you. Your brain doesn't trust you,” he said. The tone of Peter's speech was angling toward a fight, but Adrienne was feeling less defensive. Her nightmares became infrequent.

The morning was passing. Adrienne loaded the laundry in Peter's trunk. The sun was drying moisture from the driveway. She sorted a host of thoughts, most of them pleasant. Peter was counting quarters at the kitchen table, sitting by the laundry soap.

She first met Peter when he came into the bank. He was depositing checks into a business account. He smiled at her. They had many short pleasant conversations for several months. Once he admitted as a joke that he came to the bank more often than necessary to talk to Adrienne.

One night she dreamed that they were singing karaoke together after work. She told him the benign part of the dream before they were lovers, while she was passing him a deposit receipt.

Later, she admitted that after they had finished dream singing, he had taken her into a dark room

71 and lifted her skirt, and the person who was Peter became a head of hair between her legs. And then the head of hair whom she knew to be Peter bent her over and fucked her, forming himself to the contours of her body; hard, the way one fucks when language fails to describe the act of fucking, the partners so love sick and spent that they lose all control and a great depression weighs against their temples. The dream sex was beyond good sex. It was demanding. When she awoke in a sweat, she recalled her feelings, a fulfilled tristitia that Hollywood directors, in their most earnest moments, attempt to capture on film, not one Adrienne had experienced firsthand.

Her dream became a lingering daydream. Imagining Peter coming, while she made herself orgasm one more time.

By this dream and her willingness to participate in lucid variations of the dream when she was awake, Adrienne knew that she wanted to take something from Peter. She imagined the throbbing confirmation of exchange. She didn't know what it was that she wanted from Peter, but for some reason she imagined the thing she wanted to steal was the size and shape of a pear.

Pears come in so many colors and textures. It was difficult to name what she wanted to take from

Peter, but she knew that he had in his possession a pear-shaped thing that she might cherish if she could manage to take it from him. In her waking life, she sought to discover what Peter had that she wanted.

Her pursuit of Peter was limited by the polity of her profession, rendered more laissez- faire than she would have preferred. As his bankteller, she knew things about Peter. He had a tidy, interesting signature. He never asked for a balance. He was pleasant to her, polite to other customers. She had more than once peeked at his linked account balances. Though she knew his address, from the information on her computer screen, she couldn't show up at his apartment.

72 Why did he live in an apartment? He could own several homes. Aha, she remembered solving her own riddle: Peter was a landlord. He lived in one of his own buildings.

When Adrienne studied how badly she had begun wanting Peter, she realized she had, for many years, been engaging in a kind of fatalism—avoiding initimacy by the safe carapace of imagined rotten endings. Reasoning away from moments of present goodness to reconstruct a series of past events and wrong turns or fade into nebulous future possibilities as mere fantasy.

Peter was real and present.

Early in their relationship, she took him to a wedding officiated not by a judge or priest, but by a friend of the bride. Adrienne said that she liked the ceremony; Peter said the transaction was meaningless. It lacked heroicism, Peter said. “Listen to one another. Dream alongside each other. Understand each other's bullshit as being bullshit, a pure load of fresh bullshit,” Peter said, mocking. “That's what love has become: a checklist of boxes meant to satisfy standard requirements. A union of this pointless thought to this other pointless thought. Do you,

Understanding, take Listening to be you awfully wedded life? I do. I so do.

“Understanding? Please. Christ almighty,” Peter cursed, gathered his breath. “Who gives a shit; let's see if this listening bullshit works until you're both dead. Deal? Deal!” he mimicked people shaking hands. “You're married. Go in peace, or whatever.”

Peter was happily drunk. He was showing off for Adrienne and her mother, who was laughing at Peter's mock vitriol. Adrienne was concerned someone from the wedding party might hear Peter ridiculing the ceremony. She shushed him. He shushed her back. Adrienne's mother shushed them both, and Peter delivered a long apology until both women laughed at him, and when he made them laugh, he added, “You just gotta have some fearlessness in a ceremony or

73 why even bother, you know?”

It was true, Adrienne thought, nothing the bride's friend said indicated fearlessness. The false homily imitating a sign hung by housewives over mantles—you live, you laugh, you, what?

Languish?

Peter said, “I miss the pomp of the ceremony, the promises of protection and care and suffering, as long as you both shall live. People staving off death, the only thing capable of severing the pair. You know? No one can fully keep these vows, and everyone, the whole crowd, even the bride and groom know it. But the words are at least brave. That's why anybody can fall in love at these things.”

“I guess a wedding date is a pretty serious date, then?” Adrienne said.

“I'm your wedding date,” Peter said, smiling.

He was being introduced to Adrienne's extended family for the first time. He managed some candor. She dragged him onto the dance floor to make a kind, humorous spectacle of him.

While dancing, she looked for things to say to Peter, but found herself almost laughing at her examination of Peter's critique of the ceremony. Dancing, he looked like a big untrained, brave boy.

But Peter was right, Adrienne thought. Verbs like rescue, heal, and suffer have been downgraded. Couples are offered pathology at the formal outset of relationships—a detailed explanation of synapses and receptors—observable, requiring no lovers, certainly no heroes. To participate in modern love is to partner in understanding. In modern parlance, these romantic partnerships are opportunities for growth. And growth is fine; growth is expected. But growth is not difficult. Living is growth followed by atrophy. Atrophy demands bravery. So this simple

74 partnership, Adrienne thought, isn't love; partnership is business. Partners don't save one another; they bail each other out, at best. Even this gesture of goodwill is hardly more than a bet against future need. If I bail him out now, he'll owe me one later, she thought. The modern agreement works against every coupling instinct developed in cold dark caves—the old fight or flight response, for example—and how naturally a body prepares to fight when the corporeal object of love is threatened.

*

Doing the laundry requires no bravery, and there would be no fights between them today.

Adrienne would have to wait.

“You ready?”

“Sure,” he said, tapping on his jean's pocket full of quarters.

In the car, Peter's radio was tuned to a public radio station that played hits from the

American songbook. Eartha Kitt was percolating through the speakers:

“C'est si bon,

De guetter dans ses yeux.

Un espoir merveilleux.

Qui donne le frisson.

C'est si bon.”

“Maybe we were born in the wrong era.”

“For sure.”

“There is nothing skeptical about these songs. One war, another in the air, the market collapse, years of failed crops, and these jokers are singing about love. Everyone believes.

75 Should have been born then.”

“But if we lived then we might not feel so unique,” she said.

“You're right,”he said. “Pop stars now, you know their lyrics are lying because you know so much about their personal lives. I don't for one minute believe Justin Beiber has ever actually been in love.”

“Sinatra was no saint, and he still seems believable,” Adrienne said.

“Maybe musicians are bad points of reference.”

“That's probably true,” she said. They rode listening to the music of yesteryear. She traced his fingers with hers. When they got to the laundromat, they each grabbed a basket and unloaded it into a machine. Peter inserted the quarters. Adrienne dolled out detergent.

While the machines were working they walked outside and sat on a bench by the entrance. Peter lit a cigarette. Adrienne nuzzled the crown of her head against his neck. The laundromat was situated in a strip mall. There was an obscene amount of parking, half the town could park in the lot, which had been recently sealed and striped. It was mostly empty, quiet. The lovers sat on the bench, looking out over the lot. The slats of the bench were beginning to sag, some cheap unidentifiable wood imported from Asia, covered in a thin coat of lacquer to ensure its peeling and the mystery wood's rot; later the bench would be be replaced by one just like it for only eighty-nine bucks. A two year bench. It was a warm day for November. Snowless. The sun dragged its low fall arc.

A blue Chrysler LeBaron pulled into the parking lot and cut through the vacant parking spaces. Peter was suddenly uncomfortable by the speed of the car. He tensed and squeezed

Adrienne's knee roughly to alert her to danger, preparing to make a last second leap out of harm's

76 way. A puff of gray hair and a smile commandeered the Chrysler. “Jesus, little old lady coming in hot,” Peter said not as a joke, but nervously. Adrienne was nonplussed. She laughed at the driver's obvious happiness. The driver looked carefree. Peter was half-standing, readying to leap and drag Adrienne behind him. The LeBaron jerked to a stop. Peter exhaled. The old lady sprung from the driver's door.

“That's the best way to keep warm,” the driver said. “Looks like you guys have it figured out.”

“We do,” said Adrienne.

“Not that it's cold today, but when it gets cold, you'll be fine.” The old lady walked with a cane in her hand; she did not use the cane for balance. She hobbled, but she moved swiftly. “Isn't it a beautiful afternoon? Who can believe this weather?”

“It sure is,” Peter said. “Global warming.”

“Probably, but what do I care?” she said. “I'm an old lady. Glad you two are enjoying the weather,” she offered as though she had known the pair for their entire courtship.

“Thank you, we are,” Adrienne said.

The woman walked into the drugstore next to the laundromat. Adrienne and Peter laughed when the door had closed behind her. “Why did she have a cane?” Peter asked.

“Maybe it's a prop.”

“Yeah, she has a flair for the dramatic. That's just who she is.”

“She's extending a scene.”

“God bless her. Weird old lady,” Peter said. “I met her doppelganger once, so I got a little nervous when she came barreling toward us.”

77 “What do you mean?” Adrienne asked.

“So, it was September eighteenth, 2001, a week after September eleventh. I was on a lake fishing in Canada on September eleventh with my friends from high school, good friends. We used to go every year. You'll meet them one day.”

“Wait, you didn't know about September eleventh?”

“Nope. No idea about anything. No way of knowing. Nothing about the twin towers.

Nothing. Before cell phones. I mean, not before phones, but before cell phones were useful.

Certainly no connection up there in the wilderness.

“I caught the biggest that year, too. First and last time I caught the biggest fish. I have a picture of it. We get home and no one gave a shit who caught the biggest fish. No one even asked. Our wives and girlfriends, Sam had little kids, Joey had a baby by then too, I think . . . they all just wanted to see us.”

Adrienne pushed herself away from Peter to watch him talk. “How did I not know this about you?”

“I dunno. We learned about everything after we crossed the border; we inherited all the tragedy. We got up early on the twelfth and portaged the lake and hiked out of the wilderness.

Drove down to the border. We waited forever. Never seen anything like it; long line in the early morning. We figured they were training new officers or something. We almost ran out of gas idling in line. We stopped at a Hardee's to eat breakfast. We ordered. And we were tired, because it's hard work getting loaded out. So we're sitting down eating and Joey says, 'Holy crap, look at that.' We look up at the TV. He says, maybe they'll show it again. And they did.

“We all saw for the first time what everyone else had seen ten thousand times the day

78 before. Every time I've seen the footage, it's always looked like a movie. I think we even laughed when we saw it, because the scene looked so ridiculous. So, Sammy bought a newspaper and read us the articles, and we took turns using the one cell phone that still had a charge.”

“You were dating Cecilia, at the time?” Adrienne asked. She tried to collect information about Peter's romantic life indirectly, waiting for pauses in conversation where questions seemed most natural. When Peter mentioned Cecilia, Adrienne wondered if she might learn more about their relationship. She wanted to know about Peter's past and how close he had been to settling down. He was not a typical bachelor, and his unmarried and otherwise unclaimed status mystified her.

“Yeah, we were living together in Colorado, at the time. Our first and last vacation together. She went to Minnesota with me and met my family and friends, hung out with their wives while we fished. Had a couple days to herself in a hotel. My friends' wives reached out to her. Invited her over, so she wouldn't be alone on the eleventh. It was sweet of them. They're kind people. You'll meet them. Anyhow, this thing that grounds everyone else in time, our 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot,' or whatever. Well, I was reeling in the biggest fish. Missed the whole damn thing.

“So, you remember the scare that followed? How gas spiked to four bucks a gallon. How terrorists were probably everywhere, strategically targeting areas: malls, city centers, military bases, power plants, water supplies. And the horrors were color-coded. Every day was “Red.”

High-alert. My firm was in Pueblo, Colorado, you know.

“How did you end up there, again?” Adrienne asked.

“That's another long story. Bought in with a friend of my dad's, Gregg. That's were

79 Gregg's firm was, in Pueblo.

So, the reservoir that supplies most of Southern Colorado with its water supply is in

Pueblo. There's an army base and an air force base just north of the reservoir in Colorado

Springs. NORAD, the undermountain military control center, the place the president goes in the event of a nuclear attack is just north of there. People are so on-edge, that every time someone went for a walk near the reservoir, someone would report it as a suspicious activity, you know.

Everyone, the whole country is freaking out. And I just can't understand it because 9/11 was like a Nicolas Cage movie that resulted in higher gas prices, to me. And then on the eighteenth, I understood why everyone was so nuts.

“I was sitting with the partners from the firm at a Barnes and Noble, drinking coffee, talking about how the market was responding to the attacks. We were looking for avenues of divestment. We made our clients a fortune at this meeting. I had compiled a list of manufacturing companies that sold parts to weapons manufacturers. Everyone knows to buy munition stock at a time like that, the big guys, Lockheed Martin, et cetera, but not everyone knows who supplies the parts to the big names that make up the defense industry. It was an interesting time because technology was expanding so fast, and these technologies were being used in bombs, in missiles, in planes. Drones were becoming smaller, more capable.

“Our firm invested hard in these second-tier manufacturers. I also predicted this Chinese oil company was set to outperform their track record because they provided cheap product to tons of small plastics manufacturers. Their value went bananas, big time. And everyone, I mean all of our clients, made a killing. I gambled almost all my personal wealth, and I won big. By

2007, I'm personally quite wealthy.”

80 Adrienne felt a rush of blood to her cheeks. She was embarrassed that she knew how much money he had in his accounts, and that she had known for some time. She felt guilty and wanted to confess that she had illegally snooped. She swallowed hard.

“But anyhow, during this meeting, one week after the attack, exactly, almost to the hour, it was my first day back in the office after vacation. I was good friends with those guys, too, you know, the partners. Good guys. We camped together. Went out Friday nights sometimes. Gregg's kids called me Uncle Pete. Merle's collection of ex-wives all pretended to be my Mrs. Robinson.

We were friends.

“I was the youngest, by almost a decade. I was a real go-getter then. Different than I am now. I was certain of everything then. Made decisions quickly, on instinct based on a shred of reason. Nothing but winning. Winning. Winning. Winning. I was killing it. We trusted each other.

Finally, someone bothered to ask me about fishing. Had to wait almost a week to tell anyone I had caught the biggest fish. I had the picture in my brief case. It was a good sized fish. They were impressed. But mostly we talked about terrorism.

“The news was telling everyone, you remember this, to beware of anthrax, remember?”

Adrienne nodded.

“Merle and Gregg wanted to establish a protocol for opening the office mail. 'We should buy gloves and masks for the administrative staff,' one of them said. Merle maybe, he was the most frightened. I said we should buy them brand new letter openers, maybe a box knife for packages. We need to proceed with fearlessness. Besides, no one is out to bring down a tiny investment firm in a mid-sized town stuck in an ongoing economic decline at the foothills of the

Rocky Mountains, I said. I lacked the national fear.

81 “I said, we can let unknown mail sit for a day. If the news reports another incident of anthrax in the mail, we'll use Merle's precautions. Gregg, the principle partner—my dad's friend, how I ended up in Colorado—said that we couldn't let important mail sit for a day. I asked him why not. I was upset because my level-headed friends—and this guy was a mentor to me—were just going nuts like everyone else. What comes in the mail that cannot sit for a day? I asked.

Gregg said, 'Bills, for starters.'

“Bills? I said. We can't let bills sit for a day? What bill is due the day it arrives? That's nuts. Let the mail sit. Keep calm. That's a viable response. Our clients are looking for steady hands, right now. 'What about news? Requests from our clients?' Gregg demanded. He was really getting sour. And I was getting angry, too. 'The Journal comes in a fucking rubber band, and all of our clients use email or the telephone. When was the last time you got a handwritten sell order?' I said. 'People are looking to us for leadership,' Gregg said. 'You cannot lead one day late!'

“So, I'm broiling by now, too. 'But you can lead from a state of obvious over-reaction?

Let's put our administrative staff in hazmat suits to demonstrate our precaution. That'll inspire confidence. We'll have to turn clients away. Everyone will admire our confidence. If people are looking for leadership, let's show them our confidence beginning at the administrative level. We are fine. We are fine.' We were practically yelling in the back of this Barnes and Noble. Merle was mostly watching.

“We were arguing about what a leader should do, how leaders respond to crisis. At this point in my life I was real concerned with what a leader does—it was all anyone was talking about in business at the time. Business people, you know how they're always blabbing about

82 becoming leaders, especially those turkey-necked chickenshits without a shred of god-given leadership ability. I was always arguing that leadership is a gift. You got it or you ain't got it. I was certain of this because I had so frequently been right about the market. Success spoils a young person. Everything was changing so actively. The internet was becoming more useful, businesses were in flux. Transition was everywhere even before the attacks.

“We're drinking coffee discussing our leadership roles, our civic responsibilities as small time investment brokers in a new age of global terrorism, and all of a sudden there is this huge exploding noise. I mean, I never, never heard anything like it before or since. It was so loud. And

I wondered if I had been wrong about everything and Gregg had been right.

“Were we victims? Were we all the ghosts of ourselves, remembering what the last few moments of our lives have been like. The nozzle of the cappuccino machine was making that forceful drowning, sudsy sound until the barista dialed the knob off. All other noises stopped. No one was moving. The whole store stopped. “Babylon” was playing over the store speakers, “Let go in your heart, let go in your head and feel it now.” I have never understood what that song means. But we all sat in place obeying David Gray, and the seconds seemed like minutes. Then we realized that we were still alive.

“I suppose we were all wondering if there'd be a second explosion. If we'd be more likely to be riddled with shrapnel if we moved toward the explosion. You have this impulse to hunker. I watched this toddler, little guy, he had a giraffe puppet on his hand, a long neck, from the kids' section. He was making the puppet bite his face. His mother scooped him up. The puppet began biting his mother's face, which made her look less worried. Goddamn puppet made me feel better. Braver.

83 “We started moving toward the noise, and we learned that we weren't in danger of terrorism. A Crown Victoria had burst through the wall and was parked in the middle of the store, two shelves deep, and there was a little dark-haired lady behind the steering wheel. Her airbag had already deflated by the time we got to her. She was wearing her seatbelt. Through the windshield you could see the confused look on her face. She didn't even look scared. Her expression looked like she was trying to solve a math problem. Studying something.

Adrienne put her hand over her mouth. “Seriously, how have you not told me this story already?”

“I thought I did.”

“Then what?”

“The car had knocked over the shelves. The first shelf to go was bestsellers and staff picks. On the backside of that shelf was the travel section. The car stopped when it tipped over the second shelf: on one side self-help, the other side Eastern Religion and philosophy—those leaned up against the row of gift bibles. The whole mess leaning precariously. Travel guides and religious texts tumbled from their shelves. Books were discovering gravity. There is a sound a book makes when it hits the ground pages-first, the ruffling of the pages sounds hollow, almost liquid. The engine of the Crown Vic had stalled. It was steaming. Finally, someone began to cry.

“It was weird. The three of us moved like we had expected a car to drive through the brick facade of the Barnes and Noble. Merle, I'll never forget it; he walked up to the driver's side door and opened it. He crouched right in that poor woman's line of sight. 'Are you okay?' You should hear the way Merle speaks. He speaks in the key of enthusiasm. Hearing him say any word makes you calmer.” Peter was tearing up a little. Adrienne wondered if she'd hear any more

84 about Cecilia.

“I've heard Merle argue, and even then he sounds like he's, like he's about to make a joke at his own expense. Thick with empathy. Like he might toss his arm around you and make you feel bigger. 'What's your name?' Merle asked. He's a real religious guy, even though he's had a few wives and probably some girlfriends too. He plays piano and sings at his church. That type of guy. A genuinely likeable guy with a woman problem.

“'I was pressing the brake,' the lady says. And Merle says, 'I'm sure you were. These cars. . . .' Hell, I believed that brake pedals routinely malfunction, the way he said it. She said it again: 'I was pressing the brake,' like a question. And Merle says, 'I know you were.' And there he is in the middle of the religion shelves, telling half-truths to a disoriented old lady.

“'What happened? I was pressing the brake,' she said again.

“And Merle says, 'You still haven't told me your name.' She was beginning to awaken from her shock. 'My name is Merle,' he says.

“'Is everyone okay?' the lady asks.

“'Sure,' Merle says, 'My name is Merle.'

“'My car didn't work right.' You could see her fading back into shock, getting whiter. I was grateful she was starting to glaze over a bit. But Merle knows better than me and he tries to keep her attentive. I didn't think she should see exactly what was happening. Merle was keeping her awake, but she was in that middle state of awareness—like a dream, like if you've broken a bone. You've broken a bone, right?”

“My arm, doing a cartwheel when I was seven,” Adrienne said.

“That's right. I remember that story. You remember that? That weird state of pain?”

85 “Yes, I told my mom that my arm hurt. It was bent in the middle.”

“Yeah, like that. Anyhow, Merle said, 'We called an ambulance. Someone will be here shortly.' And the woman said that she didn't need an ambulance. Merle told her it was protocol, that an ambulance was called whenever these kinds of things happened, and he said it like this kind of car-through-a-wall happened at least once a day. She looked so confused. My heart was breaking in my chest for the woman. And Merle says real calm, 'My name is Merle, and I'm going to sit here and talk to you until the ambulance arrives. What was your name again?' He tricked her.

“'Doreen,' she said. 'Is everyone alright?' Merle said that everyone was fine. He asked if she was coming out to do some shopping. Merle, God, he's a good man. And she starts saying again how she was pressing the brake. And he's telling her that he knows, there must have been a malfunction with her car, and was it a Crown Vic? And, oh, he liked the ragtop look, it was classy. And he asks again if she was shopping for anyone in particular, and Doreen says that she was shopping for a gift for her grandson. Merle asks what the boy's name was. And Doreen finally starts crying because she's so goddamn shaken up that she can't remember her grandson's name.

“'What does he like to read?' Merle asks, and she says maybe he likes to read adventure stories. And Merle says, yes, that those are fun to read. He puts his hand on her shoulder. I think he was holding her in place. Keeping her pinned gently to the seat.”

“It sounds awful. So everyone was all right?” Adrienne asked.

“No. So while Merle is talking to Doreen, Gregg and I are standing there between Doreen and this woman lying on the ground. Dead. She had been sitting in one of those reading nooks,

86 big comfy chairs arranged to feel like home. Doreen's car must have hit her directly, throwing her into the middle of the store's main walkway. Anyone leaving the store had to go around a dead body.

“At first I was too scared to look under and between the shelves to see if anyone needed help. I didn't want to see a mother and child pinned under the rubble of Eiffel Tower books and the teaching of Sun Tzu. I didn't want to see a dead mother and child. That was the only thing that really scared me.

“But I was able to look right at the old lady lying on the ground, motionless. After looking at her, I was able to look under the shelves, and thank God there was no one stuck between them. Looking at that dead woman made me momentarily brave. Strange how quickly courage can come to you. It wasn't a choice. I just had some courage. I walked around the shelves because I knew I must walk around the shelves looking for people who might be suffering. And I knew I must look because there was a lady laying dead on the ground, and someone might need to be saved, and I might have been born for this moment. Every movement, felt purposeful.

“The woman on the floor, her back was obviously broken. No opportunity for anyone to be a hero. Blood was puddling around her face. He back was not rising and falling with breath. I was thinking about lawsuits and how it's not uncommon to read about a victim suing their hero.

The woman on the floor was very dead. Her hips were pointed at the ceiling, a complete twist; she was laying face down in her blood. Gregg stayed standing between Doreen and the dead woman. Doreen didn't need to see that. I joined him after taking a look around.

“There was a book about Italy near her twined body. Maybe she had already purchased

87 tickets. And I imagined this little old twisted woman made whole and young and she was floating over the Liguria Sea in the moonlight trailed by a dozen ships with hundreds of sailors; a man maybe her late husband, leading the brigade into port across the blue black water, wearing a hat too large for sensible seafaring. Hints of ancient houses reflecting white on the cliffside shores, lit by the moon, and moon's huge white reflection stretching across the sea, and this woman moving toward Tuscany to bathe and lotion herself. Undressing her skin was flawless and taut, sunkissed, and the whites of her eyes like charms drawing masses of sailors, but needing the man in the big, dopey hat. Christ, it was a beautiful thing to imagine.

“I was awash, for the first time, in uncertainty, but I believed in everything. Except heaven. I liked my image of the afterlife better. I believed in the Earth. I was believing in the things that were falling from those leaning shelves, landing with that distinct hollow sound. Her dead body was so real. And my body was so real. Gregg put his arm around my shoulder. I felt like we were saluting this woman who was leaving for Italy, a hero. Arrivederci!

“When the emergency crew arrived, we cleared the store. Everyone left quietly. Later, I wondered if anyone purchased anything, or if that day was a total financial loss. But I think we all left grateful, because for a second we all thought we were goners, and instead we were only witnesses to an accident. A woman thought her gas pedal was her brake pedal. Eight inches of separation. The dead lady probably had a mess of grandchildren. I understood September eleventh a week late, but I knew why everyone was afraid. Why everyone believed in innocence all of a sudden. How granting innocence to people can turn to patriotism. And now, here, how all of that goes to shit and turns to cynicism. Mostly with good reason. That blind Americana bullshit. But also with terrible reasons. You know, that mind trick we can play on ourselves: the

88 abandonment of all hope to avoid losing our last shred of hope.”

“Sour grapes,” she said. Adrienne sat there shaking her head. “Something like sour grapes. I know what you mean.” She was thinking about her own romantic history and wondering about Peter's.

*

The driver of the LeBaron emerged from the drugstore with a white paper sack and a sheaf of papers billowing in the wind, revealing bright yellow stickers, warnings. She was still carrying her cane, walking directly towards the pair seated on the bench. She interrupted Peter's story as Merle had soothed Doreen, her doppelganger. Peter's eyes were teary when she hobbled toward the couple.

As the woman approached them she announced her intention to speak with them, saying loudly: “I have this friend who lives next door; she's like me. She has this gentleman friend who comes calling and spends the night. Parks his truck in the driveway between our houses. We share a driveway. I've got to tell you this,” she interrupts herself, “his truck has been parked there for days without moving. I wanted to go check on them, but I figured they'd think I was being nosey. Figured I shouldn't bother them. But I wanted to ask him if he needed a jump. I have jumper cables and everything,” she said, and she laughed. Peter and Adrienne laughed with her.

“I'd jump him!” she said. “I would! I don't care. I'd jump him. I don't know if my friend would have laughed at my joke, but I bet he'd have found it funny. I know about you men,” she said, shaking her finger at Peter.

Adrienne laughed with her. “Have a good day,” Adrienne called after the woman.

“I will, but it won't be as nice as the one you're having.”

89 “It is pretty tolerable,” Peter said.

“Tolerable,” the lady said, scoffing at him. She pulled her door closed, started her engine, turned her head over her shoulder. She pulled out of her parking space further than was necessary, nearly backing into one of the dozen cars spread across the huge parking lot. She waved and drove off.

“That was all innuendo, right?” Adrienne asked Peter.

“That was one horny old lady,” Peter said. “The weather must have her body believing it's springtime. Or that she's forty years younger.”

Adrienne laughed. Peter lit a cigarette.

“I remember standing there with my friends looking at that dead woman. I was with my friends; I loved those guys, and I felt so alone. I think we all did. We all took the rest of the day off. I went home and laid down on my bed. I didn't feel like crying or anything, I just wanted to go to sleep. Cecilia was working. I called her and told her what happened. In the middle of that story I told her for the first time that on September eleventh I caught the biggest fish of the trip.

She laughed. That's when we almost got married, but you know how that saga ended.”

Adrienne knew how that story ended. She didn't like to hear about Cecilia, except that she wanted to hear about her. She wanted to believe that Peter came without a past. She pulled away from him, but she was conscious that she pulled away so she brought herself close to Peter again.

And while she hated hearing about Cecilia, she was also fascinated that Peter had been in love before and he had almost been married once. That he'd been a different person, had a strange life elsewhere, a career in business. She wondered if Peter had loved Cecilia like he loved her.

Exactly how comparable were the two relationships, Adrienne wanted to know. But there was no

90 acceptable way to format the question, she thought.

“Cecilia came home early from work and lay by me on the bed. Smoothed my hair. I didn't get off the bed until the next morning. The pit in my stomach went away, but I was in a dizzy head-space for a few days.

“I thought I should be able to boil that experience down to a repeatable aphorism, like a politician or some kind of civic leader, a businessman, someone with answers. Something that my clients could believe in. I wanted them to have faith in our firm. Maybe I just wanted to have faith in something. The next day I set aside numbers and I tried to work out a saying on a legal pad:

'Certainty is the conclusion of everything.'

'All things conclude by certainty.'

'In certainty all things end.'

“I had a dozen of these bullshit statements worked out. I realized I was just changing prepositions and it was the prepositions that made the explanations so difficult. So I removed them. I wrote, and I'll always remember this line because I thought it was true in two ways:

Certainty is our finest conclusion. You know, once you're certain of something, you're done with it. And once something is finished, you're certain, like a funeral, or whatever. And then I wrote:

'so we must continue and continue.' But continuing makes no sense. Keeping on doesn't make sense. Anyhow, none of this had anything to do with acquiring or managing wealth.

Adrienne twirled a piece of Peter's hair behind his ear. “And that's how you quit the firm?” she asked.

“That's pretty much the story, yes. I mean, I stayed there for six more years, but I was

91 itching to do something else. I was good at my job. I enjoyed it. None of it was real, you know. I started buying some property. I figured being a landlord would be good work for me. I listen to tenants' complaints and call someone else to fix them. I cashed out of the firm. I bought a few more properties.”

“Do you miss it?”

“The work? No, not at all. This suits me.”

“I'm still your favorite bankteller, right?”

“I'm starting to prefer that Asian gal, but you two are neck and neck.”

“When I first met you, not the very first time or anything, I peeked at your balances. All of them.”

“Should I report this activity?” Peter said, flirting.

“You probably should. I've felt guilty about it for a long time.”

“Confession is . . . isn't there a saying about confession?”

“I think there is.”

Peter was finishing a cigarette. Adrienne asked him for some quarters to go start the dryers. He stood, emptied his pocket, and handed her a heap of quarters. She said, “I like how you are in this world.” Peter smiled and believed her. He sat back down, and Adrienne went inside.

They spent the afternoon like lovers, for whom the Earth had been created. Nothing pressing happened. An old lady filled several prescriptions and managed to differentiate between her brake and her accelerator while Peter told Adrienne about a foundational day in his life. Their clothes were clean. Adrienne pulled their sweaters from the washing machines and set them

92 aside, wet, in a separate basket. They folded their dry clothes at the laundromat. Peter drove home, tired. He said that he needed a nap, and Adrienne agreed. When they got home they spread their damp sweaters out around the apartment to dry flat. They lay down on top of their mattress under a comforter without sheets. Later, they woke up, made the bed, and put their folded clothes in a chest of drawers.

93 Vague States of Near-Understanding

We drove to the home we will no longer own together in my fourth-hand, tan BMW, the car I get to keep owning according to the documents we had just finished signing. The car is threatening to slide into permanent disrepair. Maintenance is expensive; so, too, is non- maintenance, but the important thing is: I will have an asset that has finished depreciating.

Collector's plates are two years away and I am looking forward to the added value of owning a registered antique.

My wife and I drove to the lawyer's office together to demonstrate solidarity in our break- up. This absurd post hoc commitment to unity was her idea, one that implies that the two of us may depend on the other for “healing” (her word) and holds both parties harmless. Begging the question: why would anyone need healing if this whole separation situation occurred blamelessly? Appearance is important to her, and I suppose appearance is not unimportant to me either. She doesn't want to look guilty. Who does? Me, I do not want to look surprised. But I was surprised, or was I foolish? Or am I foolish, actively? And if I am, tell my daughter, should you ever meet her, that the foolishness of this story makes you smile every time you read it.

The initial paperwork complete, we drove home, falling quietly into our own thoughts. I wondered if we were both raging and confused on the inside. In the silence, I promised myself

I'd sit down and work on this story, which is an American Story because it begins with a car, and the first-person narrator begins to dimly understand himself around the time he takes ownership

94 of his first vehicle—a common American coming-of-age trope.

My very first car was an 84 Ford Tempo GLX. I don't know what the initials stood for. If ever there was a vehicle which deserved no initials it was this particular Ford Tempo and maybe all Ford Tempos ever assembled. The Tempo was dull gray, the exact color and sheen of Bondo, with two pencil-line pinstripes in bright red. The thing looked like it was in a perpetual state of body work. The interior matched the pinstripes, a dynamic red, which I imagine its first salesman passed off confidently: “This little number, check out the inside, she's got a Sweet Wine Interior.”

My friends had cars with nicknames. Jer drove a Dodge Colt. The Bolt Colt became B.C.

It had a top speed of around forty-five. Boyd kept his mom's hand-me-down Ford Taurus perfectly clean. That car was named Brenda's CLITaurus. There is no eating in Brenda's

CLITaurus. Brenda's CLITaurus needs a wax job. The jokes were endless. Bird, he bought a V-6

Mustang with a clutch that didn't acknowledge first or third gears and featured intermittent power-steering. “Mustang?” I said to Bird, “This piece of shit handles more like a buffalo.” So, that became its name until Bird stole some 5.0 decals from an automotive store, then The Buffalo became the Mythstang. My car should have been called Indifference, but naming it anything may have ascribed it some value beyond Point A to B transportation.

If the initials actually stood for something, I bet it was the map light. Great Light eXists

—GLX. It was the Tempo's only distinguishing feature—chrome-color paint-plaited plastic, the edges showed white from wear, about three inches long on a ball swivel. You'd push a clip and the light would be released from the Sweet Wine cloth ceiling, and you could cast a concentrated beam of light on the driver's side, the passenger side, the console, or the dashboard; in effect, it became a miniature spotlight.

95 This light handed me a small advantage in dating girls. I could push the clip and light up my singing face with the map light, grab the hand of the girl riding shotgun, and croon soft pop songs into her thumb like a microphone. Popular music at the time was undergoing a Motown- sound revival, featuring East Coast R&B, but this was also during the reformation of country music into the pap it has become today—the dismissal of Merle Haggard's depression in favor of handsome boys with crystalline pitch. If you didn't feel moved to kissing and light fondling by the smooth harmonies of Boys II Men, you could seek up one station and slip into something a bit more sentimental, which I did with frequency whenever there was a girl riding next to me.

Singing Luther Vandross could get you laid once a quarter, while singing Sammy Kershaw could get you kissed every night of the week and maybe let you feel some boobs on a Friday or

Saturday night in the mall parking lot.

Garth Brooks's “Shameless” worked for serious girlfriends. For those one-off teenage nights, “The Dance” was more appropriate. It prepared you for the dull ache in your hormonally- charged heart you knew to expect the following day or week or until your next shot at a one-off night with someone else or the arrival of a more serious, long-term girlfriend. So, I sang mostly country music to a number of girls until they leaned across the console and kissed me. They tasted like Comfort and Coke. They tasted like Strawberry Boone's. Like Zima and cigarettes, mostly. I sang “Looking Through Patient Eyes” to only two girls in high school. This P.M. Dawn song is a euphemism for sex. I used “Patient Eyes” carefully, though I was rumored to have sung half the song to hordes of girls. Though I must admit to singing irresponsibly, which led to spurious bouts of kissing on multiple occasions, in other, more serious ways, I have always been beyond responsible—I've been careful. With these kissing girls and with my own self. And I

96 think this sense of responsibility for everyone's well-being is why I keep writing this story over and over. I want everyone to be okay at the end.

Katie had long blonde hair that fell about five and a half inches above her waistline. Her hair curled a bit on the end, probably not without a curling iron. We walked the halls in the same direction Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays during the final semester of my senior year. Katie walked toward her Advanced Trig class, and I walked two classrooms past hers toward a D in

French III; because, let me be frank, Jacques' raison d'être had already been accomplished by the time he took his seat in Madame Swanson's class.

Madame was a pleasant woman; while she was not French, she fulfilled every image I maintain to this day of French women—tall, slender, an easy smile, brimming with poise. She often waited by the door of her classroom to welcome ses étudients de français. “Bonjour,

Jacques, est cette jolie fille ta petite amie?”

“Non, madame. Elle n'est pas ma petite amie encore, mais j'essaie.”

“Ah, bonne chance, Jacques!”

“Merci, Madame,” j'ai dit.

One time, when Katie walked by my locker, I asked if I could carry her books, something

I'd seen on old TV shows. She thought it was an outmoded question and laughed at me. I insisted that I was serious, and she looked into my eyes while she handed over her books. Katie's eyes were light green with sleepy lids. I suppose she thought the book-toting business was a sweet, n'er-to-be repeated gesture as I shoved her large Advanced Trig book into my armpit. Having said everything I had planned to say, we said nothing to each other and walked up the stairs, noticing our footfalls. This became our pattern until we eventually found a few somethings to

97 talk about. I carried her Trig book to class three days a week until I graduated.

I should note that Katie's real name was, and I suspect it still is, Katie. A more seasoned fiction writer would make alterations and make things fancier or more floral, but I lack those gifts. Her name was actually Katie. I'd drop her off at her Trig door, handing back to her the large

Trig book and her neat notebook titled: Trig. There were no other markings on her notebook. Her notebook was fastidious and clean.

Mr. Bjork, her advanced mathematics teacher stood sentinel in his doorway, stoic, perhaps figuring on the fly some quadratic equation or approximating the sine or cosine of points on a triangle only a math teacher can see. He seemed like a nice man and capable teacher. He always watched us approach his classroom and he smiled. Perhaps he thought us odd, or since he was nearing the end of his teaching career, maybe he appreciated the nostalgia of a boy carrying books for a girl. Katie was a good student and probably always showed her work with every equation. I often wonder if she became an astrophysicist or a surgeon.

Now, I am not the world's greatest singer but I do all right. I can carry a tune, and I like the way singing in front of people can make you feel safely naked. R&B is a striptease, and the lyrical themes of country songs are embarrassingly thin and therefore perfect for singing to young would-be lovers. So when I sang under the map light, it wasn't uncommon for whichever girl I had in my Ford Tempo GLX to put her own moves on me as a kind of echo to the auditory moves I was putting on her. Katie rode in my car exactly once, and I did not get the chance to sing to her under my mobile spotlight because the sun had not yet set by the time I returned her home, and the sunlight would have rendered the map light routine even more ridiculous than it appears on the page.

98 I asked her out because I was given two tickets to a local theater production of the wistful musical, Lend Me a Tenor. Katie had some conflict. It may have been a boyfriend. Or it was a dance-squad meeting—I'm hazy. Something came up or someone else existed which precluded her from attending the musical with me—I'm clear about that. My friend Stephen was the star of

Lend Me a Tenor. He was the one being lent, the titular tenor. Stephen's real name is actually

Steven—you can see how I've grown as a fiction writer even today as I've been working on this story.

I couldn't go see Lend Me a Tenor on my own, because Willmar, Minnesota is a small town, just large enough to keep a small-scale, not-for-profit theater from going belly-up. It seemed, in Willmar, Minnesota, fairly gay to go see a musical by one's self. Today, I wouldn't think twice about going alone, but these were the days when “gay” was a derogatory adjective for everything—anything effeminate, anything labeled Sweet Wine Red, anything generally unpleasant, or mildly unusual, like a small town operetta. Had I attended the musical alone, I may have been forced to explain why I was so gay that I couldn't, say, change my own goddamn spark plugs while listening to “John Deere Green” on a hot summer's night.

Katie, anyhow, was unavailable to go with me to watch my friend Stephen—who is, by the way, gay for the purposes of this story—in the production of Lend Me a Super Gay Tenor.

Steven (the real-life Stephen) has had a few girlfriends but is celibate and his sexuality is unconfirmed and unimportant to this or any other story. We were good friends. Two rumors persisted: one, that I was gay because of my friendship with Stephen, who was older than me; and two, that I was not gay but enormously successful with girls, a carver of constant bedpost notches due to my map light singing trick. Neither were true. Both rumors were desperately

99 untrue. One lives with the fictions. Anyhow, I could not attend the damn production alone, obviously.

When Katie was unavailable, I took one of her close friends, Jenni with an “i.”

Ultimately, although I was a perfect gentleman to Jenni, taking her was a mistake, and I should have gone alone, feeding the rumor of my practically exploding homosexuality. In case anyone from my small hometown is reading this, I should mention that I am not writing about Jenny with one eye, who spelled her name with a “y.” (And if Jenny with one eye is reading this, I am sorry to include you for your appearance. I think you look just fine, and we always got along well. I am planning to honor you in a future story, making your sight and visage whole and perfect. I wish you every happiness.) There was a host of Jennys in our town, only a few of them signed with an “i,” the symbol of creative parents—probably genius parents, certainly artists.

That should clear things up about my town.

In addition to the “i,” Jenni was a vegetarian, well before vegetarianism was chic, so I took her to Burger King and ordered her a Whopper sans patty. I asked her if that made her happy and she said not especially. She ate her Whopper quietly and smiled when I tried to make small talk. She didn't talk back. Nodded mostly. Jenni was fairly blue as a person; though her gray eyes matched the exterior of the Ford Tempo GLX. We did not have a great time. I dropped her off without singing under the lamplight. A non-event except for Stephen's performance, which wasn't awful despite the script, which was. I was proud of my friend Stephen.

*

I'd walk Katie back from class, too. I'd hand her books back to her when we'd reached the stopping point of my locker. Sometimes she paused at my locker for a while and we'd continue

100 our benign conversations until I watched her walk away. Katie smiled at me over her shoulder like we shared a handful of secrets she trusted me to keep. I think the main secret she implied by her smile was that she knew I was a real fine young man, despite the rumors of my sexual and maybe homosexual prowess. She knew that I was a responsible, caring gentleman, and she didn't want anyone else to know this. I believed she was falling in love with me by how she walked away, looking delighted and simultaneously saddened. I wished that Katie would've drawn hearts on her notebook and written my name in a few of them. There were never any hearts. And looking back, I'm not sure Katie was the kind of girl who'd have drawn visible hearts on her notebook even if she had been nurturing invisible hearts in her actual heart. But she'd walk away so slowly, never breaking her gaze until people taller than her filled in the sight lines between us.

One spring afternoon I took her to the Dairy Queen. This event required some convincing on my part. I screwed up the courage to call her. On the phone, I asked her, “Hey, you wanna go to the Dairy Queen?” I was trying to sound nonchalant, be cool, like in the hallway, but phones have always made me nervous.

“Um, not really,” she said, after some hesitation.

“Are you sure? Because I'm thinking about going there, and I could just pick you up.”

“I'll ask my mom. It's a school night.”

“It's still very early,” I said, pleading my case. It wasn't even dinner time.

The line went quiet. Muffled voices. “Okay,” she said, “for a little while.”

“I'll be there soon.”

“Okay,” she said.

Everything about the phone exchange confused me. Maybe I was not myself that evening

101 because I was spending all my energies trying to figure out the meaning of her hesitation and reluctant acceptance. I ordered a medium Heath Blizzard and made the whole Dairy Queen menu available to her. Burgers, dogs, sloppy-joes, fries, Blizzards (small, medium, or large, who cares!). I wasn't about to spare the slightest expense. But Katie declined to eat anything. Had she eaten, maybe we could have spent enough time together that the sun may have set. Maybe I could have sung to her in the glow of my Tempo GLX map light.

But some decorum of exchange had been breached, and the whole of my life has been fashioned by trying to pinpoint what part of young love went missing that evening. Given my present circumstances I am prone to wonder if I have ever accumulated that lacking mysterious quality.

I ate my ice cream on a sticky DQ bench, painted primary blue. Katie would not look at me. We watched the traffic on Highway 12 near the train yard, and listened to the sound of freight cars coupling.

I have never been so aware of the plasticity of the long red spoons at Dairy Queen. How you can almost taste the spoon's manufactured date and name the molecules. Picture the robotic arms that poured the molten plastic into revolving forms, and the cooling belt, where the fully- formed red spoon hardened; see the clean, soapy hands and the hairnet of a Chinese quality- control inspector. I'm not certain how the long red spoons are produced, but this is how I imagine the process based on the taste of the spoon. One almost never considers the spoon. Most spoons seem like a common appendage, a go-between for hand and mouth. A mediator. But every spoon has a genesis. This long-handled red spoon had evolved from a simple polystyrene molecule. Or was this particular spoon borne of polypropylene plastic? Taste and see. Formed of natural gas

102 and oil. This is how the world works.

The great abilities of a spoon. I mean, think of the spoon's versatility: to scoop mashed potatoes and ladle gravy; or procure the perfect amount of sugar, to then stir that sugar into the coffee, which was brewed through grounds measured by a spoon; to sit perfectly still on the tongue curved to accept the spoon; the seductive way an upside-down dessert spoon trails off the tongue, how neatly spoons stack; how easy, compared to forks, they are to keep clean; how safe, compared to steak knives, spoons are to wash.

I took Katie back to her house and walked her to the front door. I felt like I should apologize, but I couldn't place what it was that I might be sorry for doing or failing to do. She mentioned returning to her homework. There it was. I said, “I'm real sorry to have taken you from your homework.” Maybe I should have said “kept you from your homework.” I am slow to find the perfect phrasing, and I am, now, as an older man, convinced that had I located the phrase

“kept you from,” we might have had the opportunity to visit other fast food restaurants and maybe I could have sung to her.

“What?”

“Your homework,” I said. “I'm sorry I interrupted you.”

“It's no big deal.”

I believed every word she said. I memorized those words. Our whole fake date was no big deal. The phone call was no big deal. The ice cream was no big deal. Even—and here is the revelation that has become my ongoing confusion—even the uncomfortable moments were no big deal, they were okay, too. Though I continued to walk Katie to class, we never discussed what didn't happen between us—why we never fell in actual love, though I maintained my orbit

103 of her, and she resumed her practice of looking at me with steady admiration in the school hallway. We should have been able to fall easily in love. I should have been able to hold her hand. But I never dared to ask her out again. The whole situation was so cool and so adult and thoroughly confusing.

It's no big deal. I've continued to remind myself to this day.

*

The whole of my young life had bled into confusion. My mother had just gotten married.

She and my step-dad were expecting a baby. I was in the process of hating everything and in the process of compiling a list of reasons for my hatred of everything that I hated under the sun. I hated the misery most. And I hated, too, that I was beginning to understand misery to be forthcoming to all the people I knew and loved. To Katie and the curl of her hair. I would have preferred to have spent my teen years carelessly masturbating, like everyone else. But I spent too much time worrying about oncoming sadness.

I bloomed late. By this I mean, I remember praying to God to allow me to grow some pubic hair and some armpit hair. Looking down in the shower and cursing my not-yet-manhood

—all of my parts had grown larger, yet I remained bald like a polished Roman statue. So, I was already angry about many things; the new housemates, my step-dad and my soon-to-arrive baby sister, weren't the only issues. By the time Katie rode in my car to the Dairy Queen, the time I did not sing but instead thought quietly about how my spoon had been manufactured, I had grown plenty of hair. But all the body hair in the world could not inspire in me the confidence to sing to her when she was not comfortable enough to eat one tiny ice cream cone, dipped or otherwise, on a blue bench lacquered in melted vanilla.

104 Because my new step-dad was a man, I was forced to relinquish the ineffable power and foreboding sense of responsibility that comes imbedded in the Y chromosome. I still mowed the lawn, but now I was told when to mow the lawn and how the lawn must be mowed in alternating diagonals each week, or every five to six days during the spring months. A man knows the trash must be brought to the curb on Friday; a boy must be reminded. I should have been relieved to have the oversight of a father-figure; instead, I felt smaller and smaller. I wonder if Katie watched me diminishing during that semester, if I mistook her sympathy for attraction.

*

One day, one of those unusual days a person remembers for his whole life, Madame

Swanson held me after class, so I missed my return trip down the hall with Katie. It was a third- person event. Madame said that Jacques seemed unusually quiet, and while she didn't mind the change for classroom purposes, she wondered, more importantly, if everything was all right with

Jacques. If things were, say, okay at home or personally. Jacques said things were fine. Jacques thanked her for asking. She told Jacques that the school was equipped to provide support in an ongoing, confidential manner. A couple gay tears formed, so Jacques took his gay time leaving the gay classroom in order to appear as the fine, confident young man Katie secretly knew him to be, just in case Katie had waited for Jacques to partir (or is it sortir?). She did not. Elle n'a pas.

That same week another teacher had a first-person conference with the English version of

Jacques which took an opposite tone. Mrs. Traulich pulled me into the hall to warn me of potential consequences for my nonconstructive participation in her classroom, wondering why my behavior had become, lately, so intolerable. Some baffling version of me, but clearly not the actual me, asked her why she was being such a huge cunt about my refusal to read To Kill a

105 Fucking Mockingbird. Everyone else seemed to have the reading covered. What's it to Ms. Lee to have one fewer reader, or to Mrs. T. to have one fewer pubescent loser providing his under- developed understanding of the text during class discussion?

Later in a windowless room, as I recall, the vice principal asked me what I said; he made me quote myself, using all the words I had spoken to Mrs. Traulich in the hall. I was angry but mostly embarrassed about being forced to properly cite myself outside the English classroom.

Then he asked why I thought it was okay to use such language with those in positions of authority and respect. I asked him why our school district was so intent on employing huge cunts. I was further embarrassed, about to really lose control. He didn't answer my question. I began crying and backpedaling; I told him that I didn't mean that. I mentioned that Madame

Swanson was a fine teacher, even if she did think that learning a foreign language was the pinnacle of American secondary education. Even Traulich was okay, I told him, and I didn't think that she was the “C” word, really.

I told him I was pretty angry.

“About what, specifically? Reading a required book, an American hallmark of literature?”

“No, I don't think I am angry about reading a book. I like reading.”

“I'm forced to suspend you, you know?”

“Okay.”

“Do you have anything else you'd like to say for yourself?”

I sat and thought about it. “No,” I said, “nothing you could understand.”

“Try me,” he said, winsome. “Administrators are people, too.”

“I'm just sorry about all of this.”

106 “Is that it?” The vice principal told me to go home for a few days. I think he believed my apology. It was sincere.

I went somewhere. Not home, specifically. I went elsewhere, to a place that felt like home. I spent the greater part of my suspension fishing by a dam and catching bullheads, unhooking them, and leaving them on the shore to die. I watched gravel collect on their smooth skin while their bodies thrashed, longing for water. The water by the dam was black with bullheads. This was around the time Kurt Cobain wrote: “It's okay to eat fish / Cause they don't have any feelings.” I supposed that was true. No one eats bullheads and it's a shame. There are so many of them and they lack feeling. No one wants them.

What I should have told everyone, Madame, Mrs. T and the vice principal, is how it feels to be a boy who wants to be a man. And maybe there is no such thing as a fully-formed man despite the convincing growth of ball hair. And maybe everyone has only ever been a child, playing at roles. Mrs. Traulich's confrontation about my irresponsible scholarship and declining civility in her classroom made me realize that although I appeared to be a mere boy, I had been playing the role of “man” for years and years—before one should be a man—and there in the hallway, at the age of seventeen I learned I had been lying to myself about my future manhood because I was already in the future, and I sucked at being whatever it was that a man is.

And I was ashamed that a man is not something greater than this. I should have told all of them about these vague states of near-understanding that slip right from your mind and your soul as soon as you almost apprehend them. But an explanation like that would have required too many words. And even if I had the vocabulary, I doubt I could have articulated the sentiment with any clarity, much like I can only hint at this strange sense of loss even now.

107 In addition to permanently relocating a hundred bullheads to the shore, I started writing stories about Katie in her Candy Apple Red Chevy Beretta on my three day vacation from education. They were terrible, but the point is, I started writing this exact story, the one I promised myself to sit down and write in the first paragraph. I've only ever written this story, which is not so much a story as it is a lament, a protracted observation. I started writing this same story over and over and sometimes it turned out better than before.

In my twenties, the story began to bore me. All the pointless pining. Plus, I had acquired some things: a wife, a house, a pair of cars, a lawn mowed in alternating diagonal patterns and, of course, a mower. Eventually a daughter came, too. I was distracted for a few years by the pleasure of cutting the grass. By the pleasures of collecting and maintaining objects.

Then I started to write stories again sometime after my thirtieth birthday. They were all the same. Some of my friends liked to read them. But the point is, they continued to be a version of this story.

My wife liked the predictability of the story and encouraged me to continue. Maybe my obedience is what separated us. I was writing this story and writing it, and I still am writing it, which should be obvious by now. Then, I lost my job when the market crashed, so I began habitually repeating this story while taking on various part time gigs. My wife became my patron for a while; her career allowed me some flexibility. If I've learned anything, it is this: keep your patrons at a distance. Especially do not share a mortgage. Business should always be business.

She'd say, “I like this one.”

“It's the same as all the other ones,” I'd tell her.

I've tried to write other kinds of stories. “Deer Head” is about a severed deer head, for

108 example. An ex-husband delivers a deer head to the doorstep of his ex-wife's lover's tan and white trimmed bungalow. The ex-wife finds the deer head as she is leaving her lover's house to go have a shower and a comfortable shit at her own apartment. The ex-wife screams because she is frightened by blood. Her lover is a soft man who doesn't care for blood either. The ex-husband is a ruddy outdoorsman. He has no problem severing heads. In the end of “Deer Head,” the ex- wife drives to her apartment in her small red car.

I thought “Deer Head” was a turning point, but it became clear that I was still writing the same theme. The outdoorsman and the market-analyst, two vastly different types of men, both want to be loved by the woman in the red car. The woman wants to be loved and to take a hot shower and have a satisfying evacuation. A deer head shows that all of these simple desires are unobtainable.

*

On Friday, I will sign the final set of dissolution documents. The signed documents will be funneled through the court system, and I will start using the uncomfortable prefix “ex” in front of comfortable words like “wife.” She and I haven't even argued about our predicament, but we've both been suffering. We began untangling ourselves after examining all the angles. After business became business. Her therapist told us in a joint meeting that we were the kind of people who could avoid the hassles of divorce. She said this for two reasons: one, we don't own anything of value; two, because we managed to have just one child, whom we worshiped with the reverence of all modern, middle-class parents, bestowing upon our daughter, whose time we will now divide into periods of absence and presence, so many needless bullshit gifts; and three, because we still love each other.

109 I guess that's three reasons. Maybe I imagined that the therapist said this third thing. It is true. We each love our image of the other but we've misplaced all of the want. We've divested our want.

I told her therapist that I was glad to hear this. “I don't want to start using the language of enemies. All legal documents bind the signing parties to hatred.” The therapist agreed. My wife agreed. My ex-wife agreed. We drove separately to the therapist. She rode with me to the lawyer's office. Dissolution is different than divorce, kinder.

After our legal appointment, on the way to my almost-ex-home, riding in the BMW I had legally retained, I asked my almost-ex-wife how she was feeling. And she said not good.

“It feels strange to drive and not hold your hand,” I said.

And she agreed. “Doesn't this feel really wrong and only a little bit right?” she asked. She looked out the window.

I touched her arm and she didn't respond. “Isn't it funny that the word dissolution sounds exactly like disillusion?”

“What?”

“You know, to dissolve, and to hold a false illusion?

“I hadn't thought about that,” she said. “You're talking an awful lot.”

“Sorry. It's weird to me. I don't feel like I've been disillusioned. I feel like I've known what I've been doing this whole time, and then, here we are, unraveling. I know I still love you, so it's funny to learn only now that we've been disillusioned. I wonder how long it's been?”

The ride was silent for a long time. Finally she said, “I still love you, too.” I touched her arm again, and she grabbed my hand. She looked out her window and I focused on the road

110 through the windshield. I bet she was crying. I was. And I wished to Christ I had a map light and that all the radio stations weren't playing commercials. I'd have sung something, though the map light in my old BMW does not swivel.

*

A friend of mine has been monitoring my progress or whatever you want to call it, my regress. My emotional state. She calls periodically to ask if I am okay. I tell her I am. I tell her that I am almost finished with this story. She says she is proud of me. And then she says that she'd like to see me to be sure I am telling her the truth about my well-being.

“I want to look at you,” she says, “so I know for sure.” She chooses her words carefully because she writes stories too. I am jealous of her because she has three different stories, while I just have this one on repeat.

I tell her that she couldn't see a visible difference in my nature. She says she knows I am a horrible liar, and she can see things in my eyes. “I am working on my acting skills,” I tell her.

“Oh good. Something you could parlay into a new career, I hope.” She is not unsympathetic, but she joins me in my self-deprecation. The company is enjoyable.

“I'm not a bad singer. Maybe I could catch a part in a musical. You wanna hear a few bars?”

“Yeah. Go,” she says and pauses.

“No. I'm kidding.”

“Idiot,” she says. I think my depression is weighing on her, but she has the grace to call anyway. Her tone becomes terse while trying to show that she cares. “I still want to see you.”

She says this as a doctor would to a once-familiar patient who hasn't had an office visit in half a

111 decade. “Maybe you can sing to me this weekend?”

“We'll see,” I say. “It's nice of you to want to see me.”

“Don't be silly. I'm not trying to be nice.”

One of her story themes is about how we, all of us, do not know what we want or why we want it. Her characters are content to want things they don't actually want. They achieve their longings only to discover their misappropriations, and this disappointment is the truest story of all.

Another of her stories is about not dying in a car crash. Her goal in real-life is to avoid dying in a car crash. She rides her bicycle wherever possible. I wonder if she's considered why she does not want to die in a car crash; seems like she is missing an opportunity to combine the wanting and the crashing into a strong, cohesive third kind of story.

“You need someone around you,” she tells me.

“It's no big deal,” I say.

“Well, let's make Saturday a big deal. Let me take you to dinner.”

“Okay.”

“Where do you want to go?” she asks.

“How would I know? It's only Tuesday.”

“Let's go someplace nice.”

“Let's just go to a bar,” I say.

“No. I want to look fancy. I want you to look fancy, too. I like how you are when you look fancy.”

“How am I when I look fancy?”

112 “You're different when you dress nice.”

“Different good?”

“Yes. You're funnier and more confident.”

“Well, you know how to get all the things you want,” I tell her.

In her stories her characters can interpret the thoughts, words, and deeds of those around them; they just fail to choose in line with their interpretations. Her characters are real prescient and accurate, like soothsayers. In her personal life she can interpret dialogue and events no better than anyone else, but on the page she is clear.

I change the subject. I picture her face holding the phone. I ask her if she wants to appear in a story I am working on about a construction crew working out of town for three months in a major metropolitan area on the West Coast, probably Sacramento, but I'm not sure of the exact setting yet. She says she'd like that.

“You'll have to show me your breasts.” I pause while she says nothing. “For accuracy. I won't look for too long. Just long enough to capture their, you know, their oeuvre or whatever.

Maybe Saturday?”

“Are you drunk already?” she asks.

“No, just disappointing. Sorry.”

“You have no idea how to get what you want, do you?”

“What?”

“Never mind. It's okay. G'nite. See you Saturday.”

“What's okay?” I ask.

“Your verbal overstep—I'll forgive you this time.”

113 “Okay. Thanks, G'nite.”

You see why I want so badly to write a different kind of story? One that doesn't end in admissions of failure. Nothing happens except that some version of Katie walks or drives away in obvious longing, and everyone—everyone—wants some specific thing that someone else cannot give them because there is a goddamn deer head or something like a deer head, one bad sentence, in the way of actual momentum towards realizing a meaningful goal. Hell, a conclusion of any kind would be welcome. I want to write a different story, but this is the one

I've been consigned to write over and over.

And this story doesn't fly because modern people who still care to read have been taught the folly of desire, its dangers. Leave desire to the Young Adults and lead them to want in broad categorical concepts, like stylish clothing or justice for all humankind—that kind of well- intentioned bullshit—something boring and ill-defined. We can barely write the word desire with a straight face. Who could tolerate an actual fully-formed desire rolling around in the mind and falling from the mouth?

*

And now, I am driving this old German car. This is what I have to show for myself. The price of an oil change on this car is obscene. Repairs come in waves. I'll have to start squirreling money in a jar to remain solvent during bouts of routine maintenance. The exterior is near- perfect and it rides fine. I've kept the leather interior conditioned and the mats vacuumed.

Everything on the inside works, but just barely.

114 Mild Distress

What Sherry wanted was to have a nice, comfortable shit, and she lay awake thinking of the relief. Davis was sleeping soundless and motionless, his breaths as steady and predictable as the ceiling fan, which was on its lowest setting. The blades moved slowly enough to number them if Sherry had wanted to number them, but she did not. Sherry wanted to evacuate her bowels. Every morning at Davis's inviting bungalow Sherry had troubles—minor troubles. She rearranged the pillows upright with the knowledge that the arrangement was temporary, that the pillows would shift under her and she'd be nearly prone again in a few minutes. She wondered if she should prop herself up at a steeper angle, but she worried she'd rouse Davis from his perfect pattern of breaths, unusual for a man of his age. Sherry was aware how patterns could be disrupted.

Her mother had called the toilet “the stool.” “Did you scrub the stool, Sher?” she could hear her late-mother ask. Sherry had never had a problem before. She knew something was wrong, and she knew it wasn't serious. Even though she knew she'd be fine, she'd live, she lay awake wondering when her insides would relax. She sat half-cocked against Davis's headboard thinking about her apartment, her stool, how nice it would feel to rid herself of the quiet knot in her lower abdomen above her hips. To have a lukewarm shower without interrupting Davis from whatever pleasantry he was dreaming. To choose a top from her chest of drawers, one that matched the color and texture of her mood, which she best understood after relieving her bowels and toweling her hair dry. Then, she thought, I'd know who I was for the day, and I could dress myself accordingly; her choice of top would be natural, an extension of herself.

115 She wanted coffee and a cigarette to cool the dull ache in her belly. She grew increasingly anxious and she felt as though she could cry or maybe even sob. Then she felt like a toddler for being so near an emotional collapse over something so stupid, over a failure of function beyond her control. So stupid. Felt nearer to collapsing by acknowledging her emotional frailty. Felt weak and then small. The pressure to keep her composure. If one tear escapes, a calamity of tears would follow. If only this magnitude of release were possible elsewhere in her body.

Davis could not see her like that—in that frightful state of disrepair. Keep yourself together, she thought. Think of something humorous. Am I in love, she wondered? She examined that thought and found it funny. If you have to ask . . . she said to herself. But then she reprimanded her own consternation. Who cares? Relax.

She had recently purchased a self-help kit for $299—a seminar, a book, a workbook, a

DVD series, a CD series for in the car, and special access to the speaker's forthcoming materials via immediate digital download. Hans Judson spoke and wrote extensively on the dangers of judging your emotions. Sherry was judging her ability to not judge her emotions, which was a new and perhaps unhealthy level of self-incrimination. She wondered if sitting in the bed at this angle counted as meditation, and why did she feel so far from her own self? Hans would offer that Sherry was “experiencing intense withdrawal symptoms from her former patterns of self- judgment. The human brain,” according to Hans, “is full of grooves and our feelings travel, in the form of brain chemicals firing from synapse to receptor, in literal neural ruts. But there is good news: we can get ourselves unstuck.” Hans Judson was not a medical doctor.

Sherry's copy of the book The Wholest You had been pre-signed. At the seminar, Hans had written above his signature: “To Sherry—May you conquer your obstacles! Best Wishes.” She

116 thought it was cheap, but she tried to believe in Hans's message anyhow. She took a series of deep quiet breaths and felt a little better for taking them. “You are not your feelings,” Hans echoed in her head. Of course not, Hans, Sherry thought to herself; I have none except the urge to bawl without reason.

She scanned the room in its low-light. Davis kept house deliberately, something Sherry appreciated about him. The trait eased her mind but, apparently, she chided herself, not her internal organs. Sherry pressed her left foot against Davis's calf and soothed her toes down— down his leg. He lay so flat and stretched out that her toes could only reach the middle of his calf. As muscles go, Davis's calf was okay. It was neither impressive nor disappointing. It was an okay calf, she thought. He was not hairy. This was neither pro nor con for Sherry. She felt as though there was a “too hairy” category for men, but other than that, she didn't much have a body hair preference in men.

While she smoothed her foot down Davis's leg, she thought about Saeed's leg. He was not covered thick with hair either. Like Davis, the fullness and thickness of Saeed's body hair would be categorically labeled as “medium,” but the hairs on Saeed's body were abnormally long. She thought about his patients, looking down at his ever-sandaled feet through the hole in his chiropractic table, the unruly black weeds sprouting from the thin brown furrows of Saeed's long crooked toes.

Across from his bed hung a photo of Davis's children, two girls and a boy, the three of them now grown. Sherry looked at the photo and wondered how many years ago it had been taken. When he was awake he was not inclined to talk about them. They'd been seeing each other for four months. She found it strange that his children didn't people his conversation. Perhaps he

117 withheld from Sherry as a means of maintaining her comfort, shielding her from the intricacies of his life, as they got to know each other. Sherry worried about this; she planned future conversations with Davis about his children. Tell me about your favorite vacation, she thought.

Tell me about soccer games and about baseball games. Tell me about their careers. Their studies.

What are their interests? Which one is most like you? The more she thought about these questions, the more she wondered if she even cared to know the answers.

One of Davis's children had called him once when they were splitting a large hunk of cheesecake at Bartolo's. One of the girls. Which one? From where she lay, she could not tell which one was Annie and which one was Laurel, which one was older. Annie and Laurel were suspended in time. Smiling girls in a faux-rustic frame. The trendy French farmhouse-chic décor suggested the frame had been purchased recently, and Sherry wondered if Davis had the fashion sense to update his frames alone or if he'd had help. There were so many things she did not know about him. All Davis's hanging photos were framed in the same rough wood.

Sherry and Saeed had delayed children until the idea of children became impractical.

They took turns telling each other “Not right now, but soon, I promise.” There were careers to consider. They were building up to a family. She used to think it was fear that kept them from completing the family they had imagined. But she realized now that neither she nor Saeed were fearful. Saeed relished the impossible task of straightening the spines of his patients and ordering his practice. Sherry's bakery had expanded like yeast.

Splitting was easy; they each had built a small manageable empire. The legal proceedings were uncomplicated; both parties concerned to do right by the other person. Saeed got what he built, and Sherry got what she had built. Saeed paid Sherry a fair lump-sum to keep his house.

118 Sherry had difficulty articulating why they'd divorced. At the time she thought the shared gentleness and kindness were elements of a generous friendship, not evidence of love. Now, she suspected she had been wrong.

Before they were married she used to daydream about tan-skinned babies with her blue eyes, and how perfect a baby of such human composition would look in a stroller or toddling in a pure white onesie. Maybe with a beach hat on its little baby head with black, oily curls, supported by its creased and rubbery neck, lolling and smiling and filled with the wonders of acquiring knowledge, mostly by inserting the great world's items into its curious, wet mouth. But the couple managed to delay creation until they found themselves comfortable and in their comfort, they found an unwillingness. They never fought about this. They rarely fought about anything. Certainly not about the big things, like children, upon which they agreed or deferred to one another in laconic turn.

Sherry's back was twisted as Davis's collection of pillows had let her down. If gravity worked to push her into this uncomfortable position, could it not have the same effect on her digestive system? Down and out, she thought. She slid her arm across Davis's chest, twirled her fingers gently through the hair around his nipples. He did not rustle. She envied his rest.

She wondered if comfort and rest were the enemies of life, specifically, her own life, wondered if her comfort and Saeed's comfort had made the image of the tan-skinned baby evaporate. Had Saeed's comfort stolen—is that too strong a word—from her, from them? And if she could incriminate Saeed for his comfort, could he not damn her equally if he were so inclined? But he was gracious, a good man. Sherry wondered if she was gracious too, or if she'd been imitating Saeed's easy nature during the decade and a half they had been married. Strange

119 how four years after their split she continued to judged her own goodness according to Saeed's mild constitution.

Saeed had a particular vision for his life. Sherry used to call him White Man. Saeed would laugh at her and entertain her by speaking in a Middle-East accent. He'd launch into a story about the Arabian village he was not from, and how difficult his life had been as a goat- herd, as a television repairman with “certain astrological giftings in the proper affixments of satellite dishes,” as a rug salesman in a village without American or European tourism—with only a handful of cheap Chinese tourists who would refuse to buy rugs, who would instead take pictures of his rugs as souvenirs. His real accent was from Northern Kentucky, just the hint of a

Southern drawl. Both his gentle Southern dialect and the second-generation immigrant Arabic of his childhood home had been educated from his speech. He spoke from his throat with the clarity of a newscaster.

His obsession with hunting began as a boy in the Kentucky hills, and he let it drag him around the United States. By the time he was forty, Saeed had shot everything he could get a license to shoot. He'd eaten every kind of American meat, four-legged and winged. Saeed looked like an outsider, but he considered himself more American than the pilgrims. The blood of the

American fauna fueled his own blood and forged his bond with his country and the land ceded to him by Woody Guthrie lyrics he'd learned to sing in a public school music class. This land was indeed his land as long as he was willing to share. He took this calling seriously. He was a patient hunter. He read books about the American Indian, specifically about his hunting patterns, his use of the whole animal, his reverence for the life he took to sustain his own. He loved to tell of the time he ate organ meat on the site of the kill, the rich, warm bite, an action he never

120 repeated. When he traveled to hunt, he gathered recipes from local sportsmen and their wives or girlfriends he'd meet in taverns.

Sherry lay in Davis's bed and recalled the time she had traveled to Leadville, Colorado with Saeed. He was a patient traveler and didn't mind being profiled. He made jokes while checking his baggage. “Everyone likes an Arab flying with a rifle,” he'd say in his news-voice. “I am a hunter.” Saeed followed all the rules for air travel and everything else. He took Sherry into the woods. “Look at this, Sher,” he whispered in loud excitement, “this is what we're looking for.” He pointed to, then picked up a handful of, a neat obelisk of elk shit. Sherry remembered being surprised at the small size of the turds and how they appeared to be stacked from largest to smallest. They hiked deeper into the woods, Saeed noticing and whispering about every branch- break and game trail, every hoof and paw print. She now smiled at her recollection and the deep sense of symmetry she imposed on her memory; the whole trip had seemed remarkably ordered by her former husband, even the elk scat complied. She compared Davis to Saeed and Saeed to elk. Everything in its place.

Sherry did not hunt, but Saeed liked to take her into the woods to scout with him. When she traveled with him, they'd spend a day in the woods, and Sherry would spend the remainder of their trip shopping or reading or being massaged while Saeed pursued game. In Leadville, after

Saeed's successful hunt, they played nine holes at the highest golf course in North America.

Sherry shot a forty-one and beat Saeed by one stroke. She bought an ugly screen-printed souvenir hat to commemorate her victory. The greens were shaggy. The sun was brutal, though the air was freezing. The course was covered in piles of elk shit; she thought of them as distance markers. In between shots, Saeed walked Sherry through his hunt, from the drive up the old

121 logging road to dropping the bull elk on the edge of the tree line. On the ninth hole, Saeed's drive leaked right into a heap of pine needles and aspen leaves, or maybe his ball was swallowed by the small bank of melting snow beyond the piled debris. Either way Saeed was OB. He penalized himself—one in, one out—and Sherry two-putted for bogey and the win.

A fellow golfer took a picture of Sherry and Saeed that day. Sherry had the photo blown up and framed, and it hung in their living room until she moved out. She recalled how raw her cheeks and lips had felt, and she didn't know if she'd been sunburned or wind-whipped. Saeed's face had turned dark brown. She wondered if the picture remained where she had hung it. How clearly she could see his golden face and her own pinched red cheeks, forehead, and chin— beaming, accomplished, and relaxed, above all, relaxed—the highlight of blazing aspen trees behind them, a lingering spritz of color hanging on the tree tops, glorious, the limbs like bones filtering the fading sunlight. Sherry stood easy with her hand around his thin shoulder; his arm around her, his hand resting on her hip bone.

The dry ice for shipping. His stocked freezer. His preparedness for slow-cooking, roasting, defrosting. He was a patient man, a planned man. And here was Davis: the same build, the same disposition, the same gait, the same youthful confidence despite the lines of knowledge on their faces. How similar, Sherry thought.

She massaged her stopped belly, clockwise. Even the disappointment of something black and hard would be fine, would be better than nothing. Sherry thought, why can't I just . . . get the ball rolling. She pushed herself a quarter-turn away from Davis, closer to getting out of bed.

Last night, the sex had been more than satisfying, less than noteworthy. She came two or three times, a lingering vibration coupled the second with the third. Did that count as three

122 orgasms or two? She didn't know the answer to that question. There were no victims; neither had a transcendent connection occurred between them, and yet, the act had not been merely physical.

Had it? A minor need sated with minor effort from both parties, like sharing a piece of cake with most of the frosting scraped to the edge of the plate. Her legs and arms felt good and rested, full of life. She felt her skin with her own hands and was warm. She pushed her curls from the sides of her face. Beside her, Davis sucked in a wad of air and coughed it out.

He did not wake when Sherry slid from the bed and padded, barefoot, into the kitchen.

She had retrieved last night's socks from the floor and carried them with her and pulled Davis's bathrobe from its hook on the back of his bathroom door. She made a pot of coffee and put on her socks. She stood at the counter watching the coffee pot, leaning over the counter top, enjoying the sensation of her nipples brushing against the soft robe, smelling the fabric, which smelled unfortunately like laundry detergent, lacking the scent of another human being.

Her cigarettes were on the kitchen table. She grabbed one from the pack and let it dangle in her mouth while she waited for the coffee to finish brewing. She whispered to herself that she needed to quit. She thought about coffee and cigarettes and their effects on her parasympathetic nervous system. She held on to hope, but she experienced no physical indications that today would be the day her bowels would respond to the rituals of coffee and cigarettes.

When the coffee had brewed, Sherry poured herself a cup, black. On her way to the patio, she paused at the door of Davis's spartan home office. A laptop sat on his desk giving off no light. She imagined him sitting in the leather chair thinking about moving the bottom number of one column to the top of new columns, little monetary thought experiments, followed by phone calls: “Mr. Elwood, Davis Barnes calling. How are you, good sir? Do you have a minute? I have

123 an idea for you, a strategy. Listen, I've been doing some figuring . . . ” he often used that word to describe his thoughts, what few he shared with Sherry or anyone else.

She didn't understand how Davis's job worked exactly, but she knew that he managed the money of others. He made other people comfortable; rewarded them with modest gains and the mildest of losses. His client's comfort contributed to his own comfort. She leaned on the door frame and wondered if his comfort could spill over, modestly of course, and compound her own comfort. The bakery was doing well. She had slept well-past six A.M. twice this week—a miracle. The years had paid off. Becky had become a more than adequate baker and manager, allowing Sherry time and slumber. Becky was punctual and had mastered Sherry's efficiency.

Sherry was comfortable. Perhaps today she would talk to Davis about a more aggressive investment strategy. Should she mix business with whatever is close to pleasure?

She sat on an Adirondack chair and crossed her legs. She held the cup with two hands, held her cigarette between her fingers, held her nose over the brim of the cup, enjoying the steam warm-wetting her nose and the aroma of coffee. The trees had shed most of their leaves; the remaining leaves had turned to brown. The sun was climbing. Sherry inhaled and exhaled cigarette smoke. She heard the door knob behind her release the patio door from its jamb.

“Morning,” Davis said.

“Morning. You were sleeping soundly.”

“Oh, like a baby,” Davis offered. “Is there enough coffee for two?”

“Of course.” Before filling his cup, Davis walked up behind Sherry and tried to figure out a way to embrace her over the tall back of the Adirondack chair. Finding this impossible, he slid his warm hand across Sherry's neck to the inside of the bathrobe she had borrowed from him. He

124 rested his hand on her clavicle and brushed his fingertips across her shoulder gently, his forearm against the side of her face. Sherry nuzzled against his arm and made an audible purr. He moved his hand down toward her breasts. He suddenly jerked his hand away. “Ouch,” he said, “damn chair gave me a splinter.” Davis stood there for a minute picking at his fleshy white underarm covered in medium hair. Sherry craned her neck to look, but she decided she did not want to look at his skin.

“You okay?” she asked.

Davis made a grunt. “Fine. Be right back,” he said. “I need to get coffee and find my robe.”

“Good luck. I haven't seen it.” She was happy they had resumed verbal flirting.

When Davis returned, he was wearing a blanket over his shoulders. He motioned Sherry toward the patio bench, and when she had set down her coffee on the table in front of the bench,

Davis wrapped her in the blanket and pulled her down onto his lap. They sat there quietly and let the morning creep over the trees. It was not bad, Sherry thought.

“I was figuring I'd swing by the office for a few hours this morning,” Davis finally said.

“Will you stay here and wait for me? I want to spend the afternoon with you.”

“Maybe I'll run to work while you're gone. Make sure all is well.”

“But the afternoon?”

“Sounds nice,” Sherry said. “The afternoon is yours.”

Eventually they stood. Davis began his morning routine. He showered. He shaved. Sherry opened the bathroom door. “Get in here,” he said. “Don't let the cold air in while I'm shaving.”

She sat on the tub behind him and watched him scrape his beard from his face. She watched him

125 manipulate the skin under his nose, pull his cheeks downward to create the perfect edges of his sideburns. Especially, she watched him lave his shaving cream and whiskers down the drain and wipe the sink shiny with a first, then a second, wad of toilet paper. A third wad rid the faucet of potential spots, polishing it to patina.

“You smell beautiful,” she said.

“You too,” Davis replied. He untucked the corner of the towel he had wrapped around his waist. He stood naked, awaiting approval. Sherry approached him, leaned into him, and ran her hand up his spine while Davis finished maintaining his face. He swabbed his ears. She wrapped her arm around his medium chest underneath his regular white arm, recently splintered and scraped. He stood there and looked at her forehead and eyes in the mirror, visible over his shoulder. Sherry glanced down at the toilet. She felt very comfortable. “Are you going to get ready?” Davis asked her.

“Is it okay if I take my time? I'll lock up.”

“Of course. Mi casa is your casa.”

Davis dressed, and Sherry got more coffee. He turned on the television in his bedroom. A man was enthusiastically discussing the market, saying, “If I were a new investor . . .” in an entertaining tone.

“Does he know what he's talking about?” Sherry asked from his bedroom doorway, watching him choose, then smooth his already starched clothes. He buttoned and zipped.

“Him? I doubt it, but his writers do.”

“This is all scripted?”

“I'm sure of it. Maybe a little improv, but not about the numbers and trends. Those are

126 facts.”

“Do you pay attention to him?”

“Does it look like I do?” he asked. He turned his backside to the screen and bent over deeply to tie his shoes. “I don't need to. Our analysts are golden. I'm not bad at figuring, myself.”

Davis walked from his room. Sherry followed him. When he hit the dining room his shoes reverberated. When he reached his home office, his footsteps filled the room. They made small talk while he sheathed his laptop. Sherry listened to their quiet voices bounce off the dark walls.

Sherry thought she should find some heavy things to hang on the walls of his office so the sounds wouldn't be so severe.

Saeed's office walls had pelts and mounts and crisp paintings of inviting rooms which featured pelts and mounts. She pictured the tanned hides and the big brown eyes of animals, their leathery noses lacquered to look wet. Of all Saeed's trophies, Sherry most admired a small buck mount above his credenza. The deer looked pure, and she imagined the permanent look formed on his face to be determination. Saeed was a boy himself when he single-handedly caped that deer for its lasting mount. When Sherry wanted Saeed's attention, she'd walk into his office, tousle his hair and perch herself behind his desk chair on the credenza. She used to poke the tips of her fingers with the points of the antlers.

Davis was ready for work. He kissed Sherry on the forehead. His lips echoed as they left her skin. “Is that it?” she asked. He grabbed her chin and kissed her on the mouth. “That's better.”

“So much better,” he said. “Have a good day. Early afternoon?”

“I'm looking forward to it.” Sherry slid her hand inside the robe she was wearing, without

127 knowing if she intended to appear seductive or if she was mimicking seduction. Davis could not divine her intentions either, so he smiled and tilted the crown of his head in her direction. He walked from his office toward the door. Sherry trailed him.

“See you soon,” he said. He opened the door and stepped out. Then, he emitted a wavering garble, a masculine imitation of a scream, which sounded to Sherry more frightening than a scream. He tried to shout, but his voice was constricted like in a dream. He managed an emphatic whisper, “Jesus Christ, Jeannie! Call the cops!”

She rushed to the door in answer to his excitement, and who the hell was Jeannie, she wondered? When she saw the severed deer head on the front porch, she thought much of the animal had been wasted by such a crude, unnecessary cut. “Who is Jeannie?”

“What?” Davis looked incredulous. “It slipped. A girl I saw for a while. Last year. It slipped. Sorry. Call the cops.”

“Last year, when?”

` “Don't give me this now. Call the cops. There's a deer head on my fucking porch.”

There was blood puddling around the neck of the deer. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. His tongue was hanging to one side, and the head looked peaceful.

“What the fuck?” Davis said. He kept repeating this. “Oh Jesus.”

“Saeed,” she said.

“You don't have to pay me back. It was an accident. I was startled. It slipped. Jeannie was a girl I used to see. No big deal. Jesus Christ.”

“No. I mean, it's Saeed. He did this.”

“Why would anyone do this? This is an act of terror. He's a radical.”

128 “He's definitely not. Not a radical. He's not even a Muslim. His parents weren't religious.”

“I don't need to know his family history, Sherry. I don't care. I want him locked up. Why would he do this?”

“Just go to work, Davis. I'll take care of it.”

“You're going to clean this up? Why would he do this?”

“I don't know. Because someone had to do something eventually.”

“It won't be that bad. I've got it,” she said. “Go to work.” She moved Davis around the deer head and walked him down the two stairs. She kissed him. He accepted her forgiveness for calling her by someone else's name. She walked him to his car. He was shaking and when he spoke his words trembled. “I've got it, Davis. I'll clean it up. Don't worry.”

Sherry looked at the head of the dead animal. Such a brutish waste, a hurried cut, so uncharacteristic of Saeed, she thought. Then Sherry nearly bounded back into the house. She closed the bathroom door behind her. Finally, she thought, feeling much better.

129 I-35 South

It's been thirty-four, thirty five years since I've been to Texas, if you don't count layovers, and I do not count layovers. I am traveling to Texas today and I will be traveling through Texas tomorrow to gather my father who had gotten lost in a border town. But he has been recovered and is being held, amiably, in a county facility until a family member can see to his care. His care has fallen to me since I am his family member, something my mother warned me would happen eventually if I continued to answer his quarterly phone calls and check in on him a few times per annum. She wonders if he has any money left. I am certain he does, though I am not sure if its stuffed into his boot or in a hole he's hollowed out in the underside of the four-by-four that stabilizes his RV or if his remaining money is tied up in an easily vacated business venture; I am certain his money is not in a bank. I wonder if he remembers where he's stashed his bankroll.

And I wonder how bad he is.

Though I am driving, I will try to keep the road grime and the tire song to a “dull roar,” as

Mr. Stevens in fourth grade used to call permitted whispers during class time. Travelogues being done and kaput, requiring too much patience and visual calisthenics for the modern reader. And anyhow, I've had enough of the idea of Texas. I am tired of it. My father has never tired of Texas.

So, he moved there, or rather he parked his RV there and decided Presidio, Texas was the perfect spot to lose his goddamn marbles. And now, I am heading to Texas to collect what marbles I can recover.

130 This is my inheritance, maybe. Marbles.

“Isaac?” a woman asked me on the phone.

“Yes.”

“This is so-and-so calling from Presidio County Hospital. Isaac, do you know a Mr.

Charles Fodder?”

“My father.”

“Ok, Isaac, we have your father here at Presidio County Hospital,” so-and-so said. “Now, he's okay, he's okay. May I call you Mr. Fodder?” she asked.

“Isaac is fine,” I told her.

“Do not worry, Mr-sir-Isaac,” so-and-so stumbled. “He is stable.”

Finally, I thought to myself. “Oh, I had no idea he was in the hospital. I'm sorry.” I don't know what I was sorry for.

“He does seem to be suffering from dementia. We found your number in your father's contact list on the phone he had in his jacket pocket. Very few numbers, sir. I just started dialing them.”

“I'm sorry for the trouble,” I said again.

“Oh, it's no trouble, sir. It's my job. Only three other entries before yours and none of them answered the phone.”

More than three decades ago he took me “down to Luckenbach, Texas” just like Waylon

Jennings suggested, because I had been begging my father to take me there. I was too young to conceptualize the enormity of Texas. I think, technically, we went up to Luckenbach, but I cannot be sure. I loved that damn song when I was a boy, and I suspect I liked the song because it was

131 about Texas, which was where my father went after he disappeared, although singing the word

“Luckenbach” is also a pleasant activity. To my mind, Texas was a bit like heaven: an ill-defined place that held the folks you could no longer visit. Although the summer trip was long and mostly boring, I remember it fondly. I have no idea how long I stayed with him, a week or two, maybe.

Anyhow, my father followed a map to Luckenbach and I fell asleep in the back seat of his

Lincoln on the drive. He woke me in front of a building that was both a saloon and post office. I was disappointed to learn that the saloon and post office was all there was of Luckenbach. As I came to from my nap, I had already taken in the whole town. Luckenbach was where you could discover and return to the “basics of love,” as advertised by Waylon Jennings. The basics of love are truly rudimentary, involving a shot of whiskey and sorting junk mail. My father laughed.

“Shit,” he said, “this is it. We been had, son. Lying country and western bastards. Ain't nothing here.” And he kept laughing.

A man I remember as being a cowboy, because he was wearing the correct styles of hat and boots, bought me a Coke and piece of hard chewing gum from a glass canister on the postal counter/bar. I cried, later, when I got spanked for spilling the Coke in the Lincoln. We headed back to San Antone after the cowboy or vagrant or whatever the man was informed my father that this was indeed it, all of Luckenbach, Texas. The two men talked for a minute about nothing important, and we headed for home, my father's home, the big RV. That's when I spilled my

Coke. I was angry at myself for spilling the Coke. I sat in the back seat muttering goddammit, like cowboys probably do.

“What's that, Isaac?” my father asked, his voice stern.

132 “Nothing.”

I began to like the song about Luckenbach less after visiting the town; the lyrics made no sense. “Ain't nobody feeling no pain.” I got my ass swatted and that cowboy, while kind, didn't look, even to my young eyes, like he'd lived a life of ease or comfort.

On the way back to San Antone, I remember seeing an oil rig around sunset that featured an advertisement for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. Tony the Tiger's smiling face was on the horsehead of an oil well, bobbing up and down, slurping up crude oil instead of milk, I suppose.

Other than his pool hall, those are my only personal stories about visiting Texas. Nothing memorable.

As a boy, he'd try to convince me that one day I would run his pool hall in San Antone, and he'd buy another pool hall in a neighboring suburb, maybe up to the north end of town, he said. Often I didn't understand the things he was saying, but he said them so often, like he was reading me a script over the phone. I parsed out his meanings. He made it sound like we'd have our run of Texas, that when I was old enough to reproduce, he'd have a grandson who would likely become governor of the state. The state would be forced to expand its borders to contain us. I believed him about the pool hall business, and I didn't mind the other bluster.

But Chico Gonzalez, my father's friend and the one-time manager of my father's pool hall, Can't Stop Billiards, located on Can't Stop Street, got himself a cocaine habit so bad that after he had chiseled away most of my father's operating funds, he stuck around, according to legend, to ask my father for a few more dollars. My father always pauses and laughs when he recounts this story, repeats some version of the story's punchline, “He asked for more money.

Can you believe that?” I didn't ask my father if he gave Chico more money to buy cocaine, but I

133 bet he did. He was my father's most constant friend, and before the coke he was, as my father told it, a helluva pool player.

I know now that my father staked Chico before the drug habit. My dad could beat anyone at nine ball. Chico could beat everyone. All the hustlers and big pros came through Can't Stop.

News from the pool hall still travels as gossip.

“Skinny Mexican guy, smokes Newports. Wears white tennis shoes. Hair parted in the middle. Real loud sonofabitch. Don't give him any action. Took thousands offa Efren Reyes over in Arizona after a UPA event. Plays a Joss cue. He calls himself a common name: Jose or Juan.

Everyone else calls him Mancha—means: to disgrace.” The player changes, but the method of disseminating information never does.

I met Chico when my father took me to see Can't Stop Billiards. Chico was thin with a beer belly. He was wearing a long braided belt, the tag end hung free from a belt loop, and snakeskin boots. He didn't have time for kids, but he was passably pleasant to Charlie's boy. He winked at me and chewed his gum ferociously. His mustache looked like it was wrestling something. A character. That's what my father said about him: he's a character. Chico hunched and slunk around a pool table in a kind of dance. He entertained his opponents. Whistled conjunto tunes in harmony with himself, a real talent.

I learned to listened for the difference between a smooth stroke and a pool shot. The weekend pool player strikes the cue ball with a whack and when the cue ball makes contact with another ball it makes a smack. Whack-smack. A real pool player, my father showed me, is all fluid elbow. When a real player strikes the cue ball there is a dull ping, and when the cue ball, spinning as he's coaxed it, contacts his intended target it sounds like a hollow kiss. A player's ball

134 falls; a weekender's ball bangs around in the back of the pocket.

Shortly after Chico's cocaine fiasco, Can't Stop Billiards failed to live up to its name. It stopped abruptly, right there on Can't Stop Street. The oddly named street, of course, became

Chico's new nickname. My father, to my knowledge, never heard from Can't Stop Gonzalez again. The news spread: “If Chico comes in here, give him a game. He's on something. Can't concentrate. Gave him a new nickname: Can't Stop.”

I am somewhere in Missouri. Three hours in and I have just run over an orange cat. Got him with front and back tires. Poor bastard.

Everyone's father becomes an enigma, and sometimes the puzzlement becomes a lasting feature. Kristin claims there are effective therapeutic methods for accepting the unavailability of one's parents. My wife is completing her Ph.D. in psychology, so she offers her counsel to me gratis, but I am inclined to decipher history as mildly as possible and try to enjoy the present in spite of the ghosts rather than mope around wishing things had been different a long time back.

This frustrates her because she believes I could be happier if I tried things her way. But I tell her,

“Happy is a yuppie word—that's what Johnny Cash said.” And then I continue with, “I'm sure by now you've learned a handful of coping mechanisms for dealing with an obstinate spouse.” I know well how to increase her frustration. She tells me I have misused the concept of coping mechanisms, and I say, “Don't we all,” and I laugh at my joke.

I am not afraid of history, the formative years, and all of that stade du mirior Lacanian bullshit. I'll have a good long look in the mirror whenever I have the time. And when I pull at the seams of my youth I always think about a photo of Joe Carter that appeared on a cover of Sports

Illustrated when I was a teenager.

135 Joe Carter with his hands in the air, blue batting gloves, open palms. In the photo he appears to be floating, willing himself through space, and suspended like a piece of a mobile.

The crowd in the background and Joe Carter himself are watching the rest of the Toronto Blue

Jays (not pictured) pour out of the dugout and onto the field, as Joe Carter, in Game Six of the

1993 World Series, nears home plate, the game and series won with one swing of Joe's bat.

I've painted copies of this picture two dozen times. Perhaps my painting habit has minimized my need for formal analysis and clinical forms of behavioral modification. This is what I tell Kristin when she complains about the paint mess I leave behind me. I have thrown my most recent attempt in the back seat to show my father when I arrive at the county hospital. If he is in bad shape, maybe Joe Carter can nudge him back into the present or at least into 1993.

The Joe Carter in my paintings never looks quite right, probably because I lack the patience to learn proven techniques or because I appreciate gesture above realism. Since I lack skill, I imply Joe Carter and though I know I am not attempting to replicate Joe Carter verbatim,

I am always disappointed in the outcome. I am trying, when I paint this picture, to capture his joy. I cannot get the angles even close, but the colors—that distinct and brilliant blue, the gray and the white, the green of the grass and the baseline—I have the colors perfect. As I paint him,

Joe Carter looks joyful but lonesome.

My father called me a week and a half ago to remind me that it was mathematically advantageous to play the Power Ball, even post-tax, as the jackpot had topped $700 million. The following morning, USA Today ran an article making the same claim. His tables for calculating the odds-cost of a single ticket include lesser prizes—including the probability of a break-even two number match. He's got it figured out. If you meet him at a diner, he will chart an algorithm

136 on a napkin for you. He called both me and my sister and reminds us to invest two bucks before

Wednesday's drawing. Both she and I bought tickets; neither of us won. Someone did. Three people from around the country will split the money and the pot will reset, and I will save two dollars twice a week until the pot is mathematically right to buy a ticket again.

My mother refers to my father as a degenerate gambler. There is no value in arguing semantics with her, but my father is, technically speaking, a generate gambler. He is a careful and measured gambler who knows his limits in accordance with the pamphlets for problem gamblers available in clear plastic display boxes at casino concierge booths. He has tended to his career with care in order to avoid developing a gambling problem, an addiction. He even stopped drinking.

What has degenerated is my mother's opinion of my father, who has not changed much from my earliest memories of him. He still wears plaid, short sleeved, button-down shirts with the top two, often top three, buttons below the neckline left unfastened depending upon the heat index. Other than his steady, ill-advised fashion choices, my father is a careful man—the kind of man I've somehow become myself, a character trait that must be completely genetic. If time heals all wounds, time might want to remind my mother of its passing.

My mother holds in her teeth a bitterness for my father's modest successes. I use the word

“success” loosely. But I figure, my father, especially in his now fragmented state, estimates that he's accomplished everything he ever set his mind to. My mother still wishes him penniless and destitute. The further my father fades into her past, the angrier she becomes that she ever met the man, but this is because she feels his absence on my behalf.

He did not make it to my wedding. I did not take it too personally. My wife says he skips

137 out on important events because he does not wish to become grounded by others. She suspects some attachment disorder that formed at a critical developmental phase. I think he does not wish to be rooted by something as dull as time or recurring dates. He sent a card:

Sorry I will not be there for your big day.

Been running cold.

Wish this was more. Hard work to build this empire (HA-HA)

Best of luck,

Dad

There was a fifty in the card. I hung his note on the fridge because it made me laugh. My wife analyzed the shit out of that particular behavior. I told her to relax in her efforts to figure me out.

She promised that she would never relax about that issue, which is fine by me, actually.

Two weeks after our wedding, when we gathered our mail after our honeymoon, my wife and I received an insured envelope in the mail compliments of the Sisters of Perpetual Mercy, via my father. Inside were instructions for claiming our all-expenses-paid trip to Aruba. He'd won the trip and mailed us his good fortune. The expiration date has now passed by a year, but as with all strange, exorbitant gifts, it is the thought that counts. Isn't it? I have lied to my father, and told him that our trip is scheduled for the summer. Next fall I will phone him and tell him that we had a fine time in Aruba. I have lied and will continue to lie about Aruba because, I figure, it is the thought that counts. Perhaps, since he as lost his mind he may not remember winning or sending us the vacation at all.

Chinese auctions have become a gambling staple, which is why I wasn't shocked to have received a merciful, expense-free trip from those Sisters. He attends all fund-raisers with a

138 Chinese auction because the odds are in his favor and they have proven to be a money-maker. He gets max value for his wagers, plus his chances of winning something are always augmented by an all-you-can-eat supper of some variety.

The price of a ticket goes down the more tickets you buy. If a buck buys one ticket, twenty bucks will get you twenty-five, sometimes forty tickets. The values vary auction-to- auction. So, he'll donate forty or fifty dollars to the cause, and get up to one hundred chances to win. He chooses a few items he'd like to win and divides his many tickets between the two or three items with the greatest resale value.

The Aruba vacation cost him forty tickets, and as he figures, he was no worse than 5:1 to win the vacation and probably closer to 3:1. Plus, he gets his tickets into the bags early to make them look full in order to sway additional bidders away from the items he'd like to win.

His favorite items at charity auctions are the spa packages. They are easy to resell, plus he gets to talk to women while trying to unload his winnings. He likes women. He has no problem selling a two hundred dollar spa package for one hundred bucks after the auction is over. He only has to find the right woman. He'll take fifty, if the wrong woman starts to walk away.

Technically, fifty bucks is a victory.

I am tired and hungry. I would like to stop at a diner and eat a special. Whatever they offer that is salty. Something that can linger in the belly, some meat and potatoes. A beef commercial sounds delicious, with a fruit pie. A berry pie, but not just blueberry. A berry mix would be nice. But there is an Applebee's off the next exit, just north of Wichita. The ease is irresistible; the menu immutable. I order the riblet basket. The basket is filthy as I imagine a similar basket might have been at a mom and pop diner, pasted with sweet clumps of barbeque

139 sauce left from riblets that were probably the grand-daddy of my riblets. I do not bother with dessert.

As he tells it, his baseball gambling career began and ended with the Toronto Blue Jays.

He placed a preseason bet on the '92 World Series because he read an article about the big heart of Joe Carter in Sports Illustrated following the Blue Jays loss to the Minnesota Twins in the '91

American League Championship Series. That series went seven games. The '91 World Series is commonly regarded as the best World Series in modern history, with the Twins winning in seven.

Though we were, as Iowans, regionally conscripted to be Twins fans, my father believed in the future prospects of the Toronto Blue Jays. It was the Blue Jays, not the Twins, who became

Charlie Fodder's favorite team the following two seasons. I know all of the details, because they were communicated to me carefully and frequently.

Joe Carter represented, to my father, the value of athletic competition and the value of caring, as a spectator, about sports. He phoned from Texas to say: “Ike, you have to read an article in Sports Illustrated.” I walked down to the drugstore and read the article in the aisle. I walked back home, dug around for money, went back to the magazine rack of the drugstore and bought the issue of Sports Illustrated and read every page.

My father had been researching baseball like he was a paid analyst. “He's another Kirby

Puckett. A good guy. Someone to root for. Helluva bat,” he said into the phone. I nodded on my end of the telephone.

Cito Gaston, the Blue Jays Manager, became his next baseball obsession. He used a

Quebecois accent to say Gaston; he sounded like he was reading Stone Soup. “Gaston has a unique passion for the game. He's a hungry manager, but cool. Comes from his days as a player.

140 A nine-ten year Major League career. An average player, just on the cusp of being an everyday guy. Good but not great. So he's always hungry to win. To extend his time on the field. He manages like a spurned player. Like someone who was looked over, who didn't get the credit he deserved. So he's out there giving back in order to prove his worth to Major League Baseball,” my father said. I am sure he was quoting from The Sporting News or Baseball Digest, but my point is that my father had done his homework. When he began gambling on baseball, he was prepared.

To this day, he will opine about Gaston's credentials. Gaston never won Manager of the

Year. He finished second only once, even though he managed two World Series champs. Some men are easy to dismiss; who can say why this is.

He was already an accomplished gambler. My father did not place his first sports bet because he liked Joe Carter or his manager. That would be irresponsible and not at all representative of his character or his career as a gambler. He studied the forming '92 Toronto

Blue Jays during Spring Training. It wasn't hard to believe they would be a solid club that year having been memorable also-rans the previous season. The Jays acquired Black Jack Morris from my beloved Minnesota Twins in the off-season. Sports writers had called Morris washed up for half a decade, and then he pitched ten innings of one-run baseball against the Braves in game seven of the vaunted '91 World Series.

There was Morris and jerry-curled Juan Guzmann, a second-year guy, runner-up in

Rookie of the Year voting the year before, anchoring the starting rotation. Guzmann had incredible upside, and if healthy, according to my father's calculations, Morris and Guzmann should rack up between thirty-five, forty wins between them leaving the remaining staff to pick

141 up just fifty-five, maybe sixty wins to push the Toronto Blue Jays back into the postseason.

Black Jack and Guzmann combined to win thirty-seven games in '92.

It was Duane Ward who convinced my father to place his first Major League wager, a

12:1 windfall. Duane Ward was not unheralded; he did not fall from the sky or from the retractable roof of the SkyDome. In '91, Ward received votes for the Cy Young award as a middle reliever. My father read the trends in statistics. Ward had improved his ERA in each of previous two seasons. If Ward pitched 100 innings in '92, according to my father's predictions, the Blue

Jays were a lock for a trip to the World Series. Ward wouldn't need to eat innings in long relief.

He'd be responsible for an inning or an inning and third every-other game. Ward was dominant.

“Ike, if he just does what he did last season (even though I think it is a safe bet that he will actually improve), these Blue Jays will be in the World Series,” he told me over the phone. “I've invested in them. Come October, these Blue Jays are going to make me a bunch of money.”

Of course they won and he won, too. He parlayed some of his winnings on the Blue Jays to repeat in '93 at 8:1. Which they did. The picture of Joe Carter that I have tried repeatedly to paint is from the '93 World Series—Joe Carter, struggling in the series, hits a walk-off three-run homer against closer Mitch Williams to win the series. After the 1993 series, my father stopped calling to talk about baseball. I'm not sure if he even watched baseball after that. He stopped talking about baseball on the phone.

I remember watching Carter smash that ball out of the park. I was happy of course, but

Mitch Williams looked broken. All season long he'd been unhittable. He was a sensation. Proud and brash. That delivery that looked like a ten-car pile up happening inside the body of one human being. Williams had to walk off that mound while the Blue Jays danced around him. His

142 head down, glove behind his back. His mullet draped to the left side of his neck. He looked as low as a man can look. I wonder if my father saw Mitch Williams and Williams sapped his enthusiasm.

I watched plenty of baseball. I moved to Minneapolis and studied at the U. Lived a faster life than one I left in Iowa for a couple years, but then I met Kristin who convinced me to choose a slower life, again. When we both had degrees, we moved back to Iowa; Kristin to further her education, and me to return to the family farm. I hung my diploma on a wall at my mother's house and went to work for her father, who was not an enigma like my father except in the way absolutes, like gravity, are mysteries. I absolutely do not know why I earned a degree to frame and hang in my mother's living room in order to labor on the farm. Maybe I needed the four year break from all the talk of the inevitable.

We'll lose the farm soon enough. Taxes are already catching up to us. We'll be forced to sell to some magnate. They'll raze the foundations planted by my grandfather's grandfather. Plant a shitload of soybeans where our cattle grazed, where I rode my motor bike, where the sweet corn was, over the rotated alfalfa and feed corn, on top of where my mother was conceived. I hope it happens while grandpa is still alive. I don't want to feel responsible for all of that. Kristin would tell me how it wasn't my doing. She'd want me to tell her how I felt about it all. That's inevitable, too, I suppose.

I think what I'll say is “I feel a lot like Mitch Williams.”

She will ask, “Who's Mitch Williams?”

I will say, “He's a baseball analyst on MLB Network. Great sense of humor. Real witty.”

And Kristin will think that I am full of shit. But I hope I will feel like Mitch Williams when the

143 farm belongs to someone else. Williams seems to have adjusted to that horrible day he had in

1993, which was a fine day for Joe Carter.

I don't know if my father will recognize me. I know very little about dementia. I think I'll pull over in this rest stop and nap until that becomes tiring, too. If I keep traveling at this rate, I will arrive in Presidio around midnight, tomorrow. Too late to find out how bad he might be. I'll have to wait one more day. When I head north, I will have a traveling companion. “Dad, I have to take you back to Iowa for a while,” I will say to him. I have no idea what I'll say after I've said that.

144 Joy is a Liquid

For Dawn

I will begin speaking into the microphone right now, and people will wonder if I am reading a story or if this is some familiar meta-textual schtick. A few smiles will grow on the faces of my friends, and a few groans will be swallowed by my fiercest critics, who will rightly assert that “Ryan Lind is a clever one-trick pony,” whispering to their guests, “do not be deceived just because he provides commentary on his own writing in a seemingly endearing way—that's all he does.”

“Touche, critics,” I'll say aloud, reading and obliterating the fourth wall—that unacknowledged agreement that readers make with texts, and hearers make with spoken words that allows a story to be told. But now, I will take this schtick to new depths or heights, temporarily addressing myself in the third-person. Ryan says all this into the microphone. What an asshat; but Ryan does believe he has invented and broken a fifth kind of wall: delivering protrusive commentary on the already provided commentary of the written word while it is being written. How convoluted. He believes he has won some sort of prize and looks out at the crowd, smiling. Ryan will resume writing in first-person, and the instructors gathered here today will visibly cringe at this series of choices, as if he's completely unteachable—this perspective shift is, after all, a conscious choice the writer has made and not a lazy error. Here goes the shift back into first-person: (a rough start)

145 As I begin my introductory remarks, I will thank my children, my mother (for the mild neuroses and just-sufficient care), my gracious and lovely wife, and I will move on to mention by name a handful of minor players on my journey toward a useless degree: Ricca, Giffels, and

Miltner; moving on to more major forces in my shiftless literary endeavors: Ted Lyons and Nick

Fuller, my dear friends and second readers; Eric Wasserman, for always providing lengthy feedback; Catherine Wing, for helping me pay attention to everyday lyrics, and Varley O'Connor for helping me almost organize these lyrics into near-tangible scenes working toward general cohesion.

I lay on my couch last week and read. In the past ten or twelve days I have read most of three books, 900 assigned pages, plus a handful of non-assigned things, two essays about teaching writing to writing students, and several pages of a book on ethics by a renown Harvard moral philosopher. And for the first time in three years, I have enjoyed reading.

Here is my “Am I enjoying reading” test, which may be useful to readers and can be self- administered and analyzed: You read, and then during your reading you become so engrossed in the text that you do not realize you've stopped reading. Your eyes become unfocused and you're engaged in a searing personal inventory, even though, once you become aware of your daydreaming, you could not name the emotion, deity, friend, situation, or whatever it was that you were just thinking about, even if the object materialized and stood before you without clothes on, bearing only a “Hello, my name is” sticker where its genitals might be. Part womb, part Valhalla, part nirvana. A deeply personal, accepting bonhomie.

I have called this collection of stories Lovers in Vague States of Mild Distress, and this is the final story, which is non-fiction and a non-story, probably. There are better stories in this

146 collection, but this is the one I wrote as a conclusion, specifically with the intention of reading it aloud at this event surrounded by these newly minted Masters of this Fine Art—Creative

Writing. So I beg your indulgence as we cooperatively pick up steam and as you, the audience, listen to “A Final Word about Lovers.” I hope it is something that can make you daydream for a minute.

Last year, my friend Dawn Hackett was reading at this very event, newly accepted into a

Ph.D. program at a prestigious Midwestern school. She was reading and reading. If you were there you remember the scenario because you could not possibly forget the scenario. You may recall her odd selections including rape and incest, and while these scenes were integral to the telling of her long story, they were paragraphs that seemed inappropriate for a gathering such as this—a celebration of accomplishments. I don't want to remember that night with any sort of cleaned-up gloss. Mercifully, Dawn's reading was interrupted as she began her twenty-first minute of her allotted five minutes, sparing us from another gruesome, if literary, public plundering of innocence, leaving the audience to wonder about the identity of the victim, as

Dawn wrote carefully researched non-fiction, the perpetrator: a holy man. Dawn's reading ended with a pall.

Two months later, I was on my knees installing a floating floor, ironically, in a church sanctuary cleared of pews. Karly called and when I answered she said, “Dawn's dead.” And I said, “Goddammit, Dawn.” I went home and spent a few hours sitting with Karly. The email sent to NEOMFA students told us the tiniest truth: Dawn had been found dead, and that there were no further details at the time. I suppose we all knew how Dawn died; we just didn't know exactly how. Many of us in this room messaged each other to uncover what details we could. This story

147 belongs to all of us, and I merely want to say a few words.

And I want to say a few words because we've not been officially given the space to say a few words, where a few words, said and heard, might be helpful.

Dawn had few living blood relatives, an aunt and brother with whom her relationship was often contemptuous. As such, there was no memorial service. I never got to read Dawn's full manuscript. I don't know how it reached its written end. But I know I feel cheated by her suicide, and I suspect I am not alone. I am mystified, not by the tragedy. We understand tragedy. But the wholesale disappearance of a person and her belongings is strange. I don't suppose I am alone, awaiting a memorial ceremony that I know won't come, a eulogy that will not be delivered, a simple, impossible interment, the appearance of a ghost. A sense of closure.

Dawn's collection of things was impressive. She had a thing for every situation. More than one set of concert speakers, a closet of just boots, instruments she didn't play, at least two active cell phones. She and I were in her basement once as I was preparing to cat and house-sit for her; she opened an unplugged basement microwave. I don't know why she opened the door to the abandoned appliance or why she had a microwave in her basement. She just did. She pulled three packs of cigarettes from the microwave, none of which were her brand. “Huh. Don't know where these came from. Two packs of menthols, want em?” I declined. She said they were stale, but later she admitted to smoking them anyway. In fiction, nothing in this scene is permissible.

From a shelf behind her furnace, she pulled out a small revolver. I'd like to note the make of the gun here because we all appreciate details. The fact is: I didn't check the make or model. It was a revolver. In the event of a burglary, she assured me, I could sneak downstairs, wind through a maze of boxes, stand on my tip-toes, pull down a box that held an implement for my

148 protection. I must have said “Good to know” or something like that.

“Oh, and if you find a black buttplug,” she said, “it belongs to this gay guy who rented a room for the summer. He lost it and it has never turned up.”

“Seems hard to lose,” I suggested.

She said, “I'm sure these are his cigarettes. He was weird.”

Like all the best characters, Dawn wanted. If she couldn't be your best friend, she didn't quite know how to befriend you at all. I mean, Dawn could need you beyond what you could give. And desire is the necessary component of literature, the most egregious inbred flaw passed through the human genome.

When you couldn't meet Dawn's needs (and I could not), I think she was genuinely confused because, I have concluded, Dawn believed with near-religious zeal that sometimes, if the conditions are perfect, human beings are capable of meeting the needs of other human beings.

I am writing this, and my wife is in the next room waiting for me to be done writing for the day. I am stealing time from her. This is our agreed-upon theft. I took a picture of Karly last year: she was sitting at the edge of our garden, writing in her large black notebook. I was standing in our kitchen, washing dishes, lonesome as hell for having looked out the window. The dirty screen made her look tiny and distant in the photo, smaller than the cobwebs. We want things of each other, but we learn to temper our want.

Literature and life are often dissimilar.

“Forgive me,” I want to call out now in the direction of the other room. And last spring, I should have slid the kitchen window open and hollered to Karly, preemptively, “I forgive you,”

149 but that window is very old and hard to open and close.

Dawn disappeared after her reading, embarrassed for taking too much time, likely wounded. I looked for her for a minute, but not in earnest, like I now wish I had. I was embarrassed for her, but I wanted to throw my arms around her. I believe that Dawn's face would have registered only confusion, and I am not sure I could have explained to her that we, as a crowd, were incapable of delivering what she might have needed that night. I'd have asked her forgiveness.

Karly and I had invited her over the weekend before she died. We didn't hear back from her. Karly messaged her again, hoping to illicit some response. We heard nothing. I didn't call

Dawn, and that's what I'm saying here. I did next to nothing. I'd like to be forgiven.

Living is the trickiest business. Writing about life is no picnic either. The writing life and the reading life are lives of theft. Both take so much time. Films are more efficient. TV demands little from its viewers. Songs are almost meaningless anymore, and getting shorter. And here we are, readers and writers mired in this shitty meme culture where everything is boiled to simplicity and politics. And still we spend our time doing this hard ignorable, ignoble thing. Wasting time.

Frustrating ourselves and the few good folks who drum up the temerity to love us.

At the risk of sounding prescriptive I want to remind us all of a Salinger line: “Happiness is a solid, joy a liquid.” I am suspect of happiness in all its forms and those idiots who continue to chase after it, but I believe in joy because joy allows for suffering and loneliness; it does not wash anything away.

This is a small nonfiction story also, the absolute truth: when the makers of Joy dish soap developed a superior dish washing formula they called their new product Ultra Joy. Their former

150 product, for a time, was marketed as Non-Ultra Joy. And that is what I have been trying to sell you in every story I've included in this collection—non-ultra joy. Just enough joy to recognize the near-perfection of a fading moment. A moment about the size of a citrus fruit, imperfectly clean, only half as sudsy as alternatives.

Do you remember those early minutes of Dawn's reading last year? How great it felt when Katie Stephen joined Dawn at the podium to sing an old American hymn. Do you remember that? The lyrics were part of Dawn's story.

“When I die—hallelujah, by-and-by—I'll fly away.”

And I want to say to Dawn and to my friends in this room, or reading this on their own couch somewhere: I want to say: though it is not great form, if you must, you can—no one will mind too much—if you end your a story with a song.

151