The Church of the Final Goodbye Senior Thesis

Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University

Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing Stephen McCauley, Advisor

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts

by Gwenyth Fraser

May 2017

Copyright by Gwenyth Fraser

How to Kill a Cat

I

“Well, it’s got a collar on. Maybe we can call its owner,” Trent said.

To my ears, it sounded like expert case-cracking from Sherlock Holmes himself.

“You’re right,” I said. “You’re so right.”

Trent Beaulieu and I had been working together as counselors at Camp K.V. for exactly twenty days now. This was also how long I’d been in love with him.

“Welcome to camp,” he had said that first day- to all the new trainees, but looking directly into my own eyes. “We’re so glad to have you here.”

He was handsome. Tall. Even his braces looked good. And no one could play a better game of kickball in the upper field during Free Time. Today he was taking charge of the situation once again, like the hero I knew him to be.

“Who wants to check the tag?” he asked the crowd. “See if it has a phone number on it?”

I saw an obvious opportunity to get his attention.

“Oh, I’ll do it!” I squealed. “I love cats!”

I fixed my hair, smoothed my skort, and bent down to inspect the creature in front of us.

It was cute, a tabby of some sort, with speckled fur and three different colors on the face.

Unluckily, it was also dead.

The waterfront at Camp K.V. was a veritable goldmine for such finds. It had something to do with the flow of water currents in the surrounding lakes. I didn’t really understand the particulars, but the long and short of it was that all the debris floating in the nearby waters made its way here and was dumped in our little buoyed gulf. The kids were always finding something interesting as they swam. Sometimes it was a mere water bottle, or an old waterlogged watch. But most days there was an exciting discovery just itching to be stepped on by one of our tiny swimmers. An injured crab, perhaps, or a water snake. Once, a dead turtle without a shell had washed up on our little beach (it looked remarkably like the cat in front of us now).

A few weeks ago there had been The Great Floating Mystery of Camp K.V. As usual, it had started with screams from the camper adventurous enough to have the first sighting. Soon, kids were flocked around the object (except the little girl who had spotted it: she fled to the shore and started to cry). But it was floating outside of the buoy line, which meant the kids weren’t allowed to swim to it.

The Camp Director, an overweight man with unfortunate hair patterns, had been called down to fetch it in. He grabbed one of those nets designed for cleaning pools, and tried to scoop the mystery object toward the docks. It was much heavier than he anticipated. He almost fell in on top of it before a few of the lifeguards grabbed on and stabilized him. Soon, their haul had been dumped in the sand for closer inspection.

It was like a fat, hairless dog. Except different, in that its head and limbs had been cut off.

What could it be? was the talk of the camp all week. At lunch, in the lean-tos, and throughout the main lodge all anyone could talk about was What was it? Where had it come from? What does it mean?

That was when Trent Beaulieu had asked to make a small speech during the weekly variety show. He stood up, cleared his throat.

“It’s a pig roast,” he said. “There’s a restaurant a ways upstream. I’ll bet they started preparing the pig, realized the meat was no good, and tossed it out for the fish to eat.”

The audience had roared with applause. Today’s was a similar case, except that the cat had made it all the way to the sandy beach before it was spotted. This meant it must have floated in overnight, and was discovered when camp started the next morning. We didn’t think it had drowned. It appeared to have been badly injured before it wound up in the water, as its midsection was something of a mess.

“There’s no number for a home phone,” I reported back to Trent. “But there’s a phone number for the veterinary clinic it used to go to.”

Trent nodded his head wisely. “That’s a lead.”

Another counselor ran to the payphone and called, and before long we had an address for the place. It was agreed that Trent and I would go together, once the Camp Director had bagged up the cat’s body. He wrote out directions, handed me one of the camp cell phones in case anything went wrong, and then gave Trent keys to the K.V. jeep. I wasn’t old enough to drive.

I couldn’t focus as I sat next to him in the car. My palms were sweating. Should I turn on the radio? Did this count as a date?

It was quiet, and I wasn’t sure whether I should ask a question, or tell a joke, maybe, but before I could think of anything clever he turned on the music and then I wasn’t sure if maybe we should talk about the song that was playing. Luckily, before I knew it we were turning into the parking lot at the Kennebec Valley Animal Clinic.

Trent got out and started walking around the car. For a moment, I thought he might open the door for me, but it turns out he was just grabbing the bag with the cat.

We said hello to the woman at the counter. She looked quite alarmed when we told her we’d brought a dead cat. We explained (very reasonably, I thought) where it had come from and why we brought it to her. Trent had to fill out a bunch of paperwork. On our way out, I grabbed a handful of lollipops from a dish by the door and offered him the root beer flavored one.

He declined, but I assume this was because he needed both hands for driving.

II

Yesterday I killed my girlfriend’s cat.

“Dinner at my place,” she had said, and I consented, forgetting in the spur of the moment that meeting her family was not part of my original plan for the prom. I wanted to dance with a good-looking girl, show her off to my modest friend circle, and maybe see some action in the back of my ’98 Ford Focus. But I agreed anyway, and found myself at her house on the night of the dance. I parked my car in front of her two-door garage, her white picket fence, her two-and- a-half-children perfect American family.

Dinner was spaghetti and a salad that her mother had prepared. It exceeded expectations: the salad had bits of some citrus fruit mixed in, and the spaghetti was home-cooked. We ate off china that was decorated with a tasteful floral pattern.

I had no trouble with the parent-friendly banter. Said all my thank you’s, my please’s, even complimented the room decor (“What a lovely painting, is there an artist in the family?”).

And as soon as it was acceptable to do so, I excused myself from the meal and went to start the car so that my date wouldn’t freeze in her dress.

I decided to turn the vehicle around so that I could make a clean getaway once she was ready to go. I turned down my music to a respectable volume, turned up the heat, shifted into reverse, released the brake, felt my wheels glide over a small bump. I parked the car. It was only when I was out of the vehicle and walking back toward the door to the house that I saw my fatal error, the little pile of something hairy between my front and back left tires. I muttered a string of expletives, and shuffled over for a closer look.

A cat, I thought to myself, Oh, shit. I had seen enough cats in my day to recognize the horrible mess as such a creature, though their backs did not usually have such a deep, flat valley and typically all of their insides remained inside.

I felt a little sick at the sight of it. And my next thought was, They’re gonna kill me.

My eyes darted to the door. She wasn’t there yet, and no one else was watching. No one had seen its demise.

Quickly, I popped open the trunk to look for a blanket, or a tarp to scoop up the flattened feline, but there was no such luck. I grabbed my schoolbag instead, dumped its contents into the trunk, and replaced them with the cat. A bit of him got on my sleeve in the process. But he fit in the bag and he didn’t stink yet.

When I got inside I placed my coat on the counter (next to a food bowl which could only have belonged to the poor flat creature in the trunk of my car) and excused myself to the restroom. I washed my hands and tried not to notice the litter box beside me, cat turds pulsating in my mind like Poe’s telltale heart. I was a guilty man.

Guilty, as I opened the car door for her and she attempted to be witty with some remark about chivalry. She looked good. The dress was blue, but you couldn’t call it that to her face. It was one of those pretentious garments with color names like “Sparkling Sky” or “Midnight

Azure” or “The harbor of Toulon, France on the Mediterranean Sea during a sunny mid- afternoon in April.” Guilty as I changed the station and she dabbed at the “spaghetti sauce” on my sleeve.

Guilty, guilty, guilty as we drove home later and kissed goodnight and I waved at her parents in the window. Guilty as I drove to the boat launch near her house, and dumped the cat’s carcass into the water, where it drifted off across the lake. Guiltiest of all as I coaxed cat guts out of a rented tuxedo.

I thought about telling her, maybe sending her a text explaining the situation, but I knew that it would be a while before they noticed his absence and then more time before he was officially “missing” and even more time before they started searching and drawing conclusions and making accusations. I knew I would have plenty of time to craft a messy break-up with her and avoid the dead pet conversation altogether.

When I got home I asked my mum what the citrus fruit in the salad might have been, and she guessed it was a tangerine. I liked it, whatever it was.

III

My daughter’s prom date would be arriving any minute now, so I sent the cat outside in case he was allergic. Plus he was always jumping up on the table- the cat, I mean, not her prom date- and I’d already set out the nice china.

Lindsay had been holed up in her room for hours. My offer of assistance was laughed down, but every now and then I caught a clue as to what she was doing up there: the beep of the curlers heating up, the iPhone alarm telling her to take them out, even the chemical smell of her toenail polish. It all made its way down to me.

I looked at her senior portrait above the fireplace. She was truly beautiful, the kind of beautiful that most girls can only dream of, and certainly prettier than I had been at that age. She got younger across the hearth. Future prom queen on one end, gradually getting smaller and softer until my eyes arrived at the tiny cherub baby on the far left, face framed by curls like the ones she was perfecting upstairs.

I missed those days. I mean, I know what people see when they look at my life. The

Georgian colonial with the two-car garage, tall pines shielding us from the road and a brick chimney pouring smoke. Inside, husband and wife: one a successful attorney who always makes time for her kid, and the other a supportive writer who picked up the homemaking slack when his wife was busy. To the rest of the world, we looked like the pictures on our own mantle. Smiling, proud. They see my husband’s books, our china dishes, the fireplace turning the house into a home. They see the garden out front. They see me baking, and my husband scribbling away at his work desk, music playing. Sunshine streaming out of our windows, rather than into them.

They don’t see that Derek and I can’t stand each other, or that last night Lindsay screamed at me when I asked why she was getting home so late on a weeknight. She had, in fact, called me a “menopausal bitch” who “couldn’t leave her alone for one second.”

I don’t remember when we started pretending everything was perfect. Possibly it goes back several generations. I also can’t remember the last time that Derek and I had a pleasant night together but it may have been our honeymoon. After that, his career tanked (no one ever asks me but I don’t think he’s very talented) and he blamed his career on our problems and now his “career” is one of our problems. I cook, I clean, I work, and Derek writes shitty little articles that no one will ever read. Most of the time, I can’t even remember what I loved about him.

I know what people see when they look at me because they’re constantly saying things like You have such a sweet family, Or Gosh, how did you get so lucky? Or I’d give anything to have a family like yours and I hate those people almost as much as I envy them. But it’s not really their fault that my family is crumbling, or that sometimes suburbia can feel like a special circle of hell reserved for mothers and wives who settled.

The doorbell rings, Lindsay’s date, and I shout to let her know he’s here so that we can have a perfect dinner at our perfect table in our perfect house. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.

At least I’ve got the cat.

Prints

Anyone could tell you that the people in forensics, they all have those cases that stick out and stay with them forever. The stories you tell to the new guys, the reporters, maybe to family members you haven’t seen in a while when they ask you about work at the Christmas party.

And Tom Wyatt knew right away that this would be one of those cases. Working prints in his county for over fifteen years, he’d seen far more than his fair share of weird shit. There’d been that camping homicide, with the vic poisoned in his sleeping bag: from the waist down he looked newly dead, but his top half was eaten down to a skeleton, like some bizarre, half- finished art project. Then there’d been the guy stuck within the walls of a restaurant for nearly a year, neatly embalmed and surrounded by the smell of fresh food, which is why it took so long for the mummified thing to get noticed and dug out. He’d seen bombs, fires, and an endless train of suicides. It was all sick. But it was always worse when there were children.

Three this time, tiny and blonde. Aged 4, 6, and 9. Their mother had been killed too, each of them with numerous stab wounds.

Valerie was already there working blood spatter by the time Tom arrived on the scene.

“It’s gonna be a doozy for trace,” she said. “Totally ransacked. Looks like the perp touched just about every damn object in the house.”

She wasn’t kidding. Most scenes contained a fair amount of chaos, Tom knew, especially once the whole team of LEOs descended and there were people all over the place trekking around and clumsily trying not to contaminate things. But today’s house was different from anything Tom had ever seen.

In the kitchen, it was like a whole colony of something ravenous had savaged the place.

Cupboards were dumped out, their contents scattered, and a box of cereal had rained down on the entire tiled floor. The fridge door was ripped open and the food trashed. Even the garbage had been overturned and rifled through.

“No sign of any blood on the first floor,” Valerie told him. “If they didn’t hear all this mess in time to get the hell out, that means it probably happened after they were dead. Anyway, good luck down here. I’m gonna head upstairs.”

Tom nodded.

There would be hundreds upon hundreds of trace samples, that much was clear. He did a preliminary scan of the ground floor. He was used to seeing broken items, but usually it was something much more personal: with homicides, it was always a stabbed pillow, or ripped clothing, something with an intimate connection to the victim’s body. But here it was an overturned litterbox with its contents scattered. Or a heap of foodstuff, with nothing eaten. The

Christmas tree had also been turned over and most of the ornaments smashed. That could have been personal, Tom decided.

He checked in with one of the other officers, who let him know that the basement had already been searched. Nothing of note turned up except a smug-looking housecat.

No sign of visible prints yet, either, but that wasn’t as unusual. Patent prints didn’t tend to show unless they stuck in something like blood or on mirrors. Sometimes even shiny black appliances: Tom remembered a domestic violence case where the vic tried to defend herself with a microwave.

After a while, he made his way upstairs. He found Valerie in the first bedroom, with the youngest two children, both girls.

“Look at them,” she said. “They’re so precious. I can’t wait to start having kids.”

One of the photographers shot her a disgusted look. “Oh, and check this out.” She led him over to the larger of the two bodies. “It’s all shallow stab wounds, which means a short blade. That kind of weapon, slicing would have made them bleed out faster, but this guy stabbed. It’s clumsy. He didn’t know his way around this kind of work.”

“He?”

“Well, I’m just assuming male. Based on the spatter this guy was well over six feet tall.

We can rule out murder-suicide by mom.”

“Hmm. Any missing valuables?”

“Nothing missing at all, far as I can tell. It doesn’t seem like a robbery, anyway, since these people didn’t have much. Even the house itself technically belongs to the parents of her former husband.”

“And where’s that guy now?”

Valerie shrugged. “Somewhere in St. Leo’s cemetery. Lung cancer, about three years ago. She’s still wearing the ring.”

Leave it to Val to have this all pieced together already. She was brilliant, attentive, curious, and creative. Tom wondered if any department in the county had ever seen someone so perfect for fighting crime. Plus, there was something automatically sexy about a woman who could stomach this line of work: forensics was not a science for the faint of heart. She joined the force about a year ago, and Tom had been a bit obsessed with her ever since.

“Nice work there, Val. Maybe save some for the rest of us?”

She smirked. “You just try and keep up, kiddo.”

And Tom tried, he really did. At first he thought there was some kind of technical problem with his equipment that was holding him back. But the county was still operating with cards and tape, so there wasn’t much that could go wrong besides human error. So after the first ten prints came up the same, he flagged the lead investigator.

“Uh, Detective Cooper?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think the database is gonna be able to help us on this one.”

“And why’s that?”

Tom handed over some of the cards he’d just pulled up, placing his own finger alongside the prints for scale. “That’s the first joint right there. It’s a clear whorl, but the problem is… well, one single joint of the finger is over two inches long. I’ve never seen anything like it. But I can tell you it’s not a human hand.”

Cooper crossed his arms and frowned. “What are you saying?”

“I think we might be looking at some kind of animal invasion.”

Tom was about to continue, but Cooper waved him away and reached for his radio.

“Yeah, it’s Coop. Get me an entomologist and a veterinarian over at the O’Shea residence. We’re either looking for Andre the Giant, or some kind of ape.”

“Copy that,” another man radioed back.

The detective looked down at Tom and sighed. “Look. Run those through the system anyway, just in case. Then, start picking up any cat hair you can find, and send it over to DNA.

We need to find out if it’s really from the cat.”

~

It wouldn’t be the first time a monkey killed someone. Not by a long shot. Every few years there was another news item: that woman who got her face eaten, or those two apes that broke free and got shot by a neighbor-- the guy ended up getting jailed for destruction of property. There’d even been that case (Chicago or somewhere, Tom couldn’t remember) where someone’s pet chimp attacked them with a knife. Having a wild 400-pound animal as a pet was dangerous enough already, and Tom couldn’t understand why anyone would also pick a species capable of using tools.

So as ludicrous as it seemed, Tom and Detective Cooper were now on their way to the residence of Trisha Reynaud, a certified loony with some thirty-odd exotic apes living on her property. Her ‘sanctuary,’ as she called it. Cooper had chased down names and addresses of every known exotic pet trader in the entire state, only to find that Reynaud and her thirty monkeys lived less than five miles from where the O’Shea family had been killed.

Detective Cooper turned right, onto a long dirt drive marked by a giant “KEEP OUT” sign that Trisha had described over the phone. For the next hundred yards, they bumped along a rocky stretch flanked by other hand-made signage. “Beware of APE,” one read. Another warned

“NO Monkey Business.” Every so often, they reached a gate, where Detective Cooper had to enter a code that Trisha had given him over the phone, before they could pass through. Normally, she explained, she charged admission.

Cooper snorted. “I can’t believe shit like this is even legal.”

Tom nodded. A kid he’d known growing up had a pet African serval. That had been legal, too, until it ate the little terrier that lived down the street.

Tom glanced over at the detective. The man had been surprisingly friendly in the car. He was stupidly handsome, and had a reputation for being a bit of a hot-shot, although he was still one of the most successful cops in the county (maybe even the state). Tom was one of the scrawny forensics nerds that Cooper didn’t usually bother talking to, and he still wasn’t totally sure why he’d been brought along for the ride. And Cooper held off on explaining until they were already at the end of the ape-lady’s long driveway.

“So listen,” he said, parking the squad car and turning to face Tom. “I’m gonna do all the talking, alright? She was a real bitch over the phone, but I think I can get through to her.” He winked. “I have a way with the ladies, once they meet me in person.”

“Right.”

“And while I do that, you’re gonna go take a look around. Check all the cages, see if you find anyone who might be our guy.”

“Sorry?”

“The apes. Go check out the apes. Get a print, on your little note cards, or whatever it is that you do.”

Before Tom could protest, Cooper hopped out of the car. Tom stumbled out after him.

“Uh, wait, sorry. You want me to get prints…right now? I… I don’t think I should really be getting that close to any of the-”

“So don’t get too close,” Cooper said with a shrug. “I don’t want her protecting her favorite chimp or anything like that. Which is why you’ll go look around, while I talk to the old windbag and keep her busy.”

Tom gulped. “Don’t I need a warrant?”

“We have one, genius. Now go on out back. That’s where all the cages are.”

“What? How do you know?”

Cooper sighed, turned, and placed his hands on Tom’s shoulder. “Listen, guy, stop freaking out. It doesn’t suit you. I checked her out on Google maps, alright? She lives in a shed, and the monkeys live behind it.” “Right,” Tom said, nodding frantically. “I just… shouldn’t we have brought back-up?”

Cooper smirked. “I’m your back-up. Now get the hell outta here before she even realizes there are two of us.” He gave Tom a forceful clap on the back and started up the front steps.

“Right,” Tom said again. His evidence collection kit was slung over his shoulder, where it usually was, but he hadn’t imagined he’d be using it during today’s visit. Cooper gave him once last shooing motion with his hands. Tom looked longingly at the car, and then started, begrudgingly, toward the back of the tiny house.

Cooper was right that it was more of a shed than anything else. Behind it, the woods started immediately, but there was a trail leading through the tree line, marked with a huge sign announcing the animal attraction. It didn’t take long for him to find them. After a few yards, the trail took a hard left, and opened up into a vast clearing.

“Holy shit,” Tom said.

He was surrounded by a circle of massive cages. Most were at least eight feet tall, he guessed, and several yards across, all filled with wooden structures and ladders for the monkeys to climb. There were apes of all shapes and sizes, with a few feet in between each cage, presumably so they couldn’t reach through the bars and bother each other.

The monkeys, for their part, were not as impressed with Tom as he was with them.

Mostly they seemed to be asleep or resting, lounging around on floor mats, or hanging in hammocks suspended from the tops of their cages.

One smaller monkey came to greet him, shuffling over to the front of its cage and clasping the bars in a disturbingly human gesture. It was mostly grey, but had a rather distinguished pointy mustache of white fur. Tom took a few steps toward it. The creature watched him with interest. “Hey buddy,” he said. Helpfully, Trisha Reynaud had labeled each cage with a laminated card. She may have been crazy, but she was certainly organized. Each card listed the monkey’s name, species, and then some facts about it.

“Hello, George,” Tom corrected himself, addressing the mustached ape. Its notecard explained that it was a Patas monkey, about three feet tall and normally found in West Africa, rather than upstate New York.

The monkey looked at Tom for a few moments, expectantly, before returning to its hammock. Tom noticed the cage contained a few plastic toddler toys, brightly colored gadgets that could be spun, or rattled. It seemed like an insult. Tom thought that George, with his lofty facial hair and human features, deserved better.

Of course, the Patas monkey was much too small to be their killer. Tom soon realized that this was true of all the animals in this bizarre sanctuary.

The largest ape, according to the descriptive cards left by Trisha Reynaud, was a Bornean orangutan named Peanut. He was four feet tall, thirty-five years old, and weighed about two hundred pounds: according to Val’s blood spatter analysis, even Peanut was a few feet shy of the killer’s stature. Of course, her analysis had been conducted with humans in mind, and Tom supposed that a large ape might wield a knife differently. But they’d be hard pressed to find an experiment that could confirm that, short of releasing Peanut and his friends into Val’s lab.

To be fair, they did do a lot of weird shit, in that laboratory. Valerie was always trying to figure out which combinations could leave which blood spatter pattern. If assailant X used weapon Y from a distance of Z, could it create the marks that the homicide team found at such- and-such crime scene? There was really only one way to find out for sure. Tom remembered a particularly disturbing experiment where Val had drawn her own blood, filled her mouth with it, and tried spitting it as far as she could.

“The suspect claims he was across the room when the vic got stabbed,” she explained, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “But he was drenched in blood that the victim coughed up. Even spitting as far as I can, I’m not getting much mileage. So when the vic coughed up a pint of his own blood onto this suspect’s shirt, the suspect can’t have been farther away than arm’s length.

Probably, he was the one holding the knife.” She was right, as was usually the case, and the prosecution eventually got a full confession.

But still, trying to get a monkey to recreate the conditions of a homicide would be a little more complicated. Plus, none of the lethargic creatures in Reynaud’s sanctuary seemed capable of causing much harm. They looked painfully bored, and a bit sad, but not filled with the kind of homicidal rage that usually accompanied a quadruple-murder.

Tom took one last look around at all the cages, taking it all in. There was a chimpanzee, a capuchin, a spider monkey, and many others that he’d never seen. Tom was no veterinarian, but they all looked a bit sickly, moping about in their rectangular, metal worlds. Even though he didn’t care much for animals, he couldn’t help thinking this wasn’t exactly the life they were designed to live.

Detective Cooper was leaning against the car when Tom returned. “Find anything?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think any of them are nearly tall enough. I’ll talk to Val about it and see what she thinks, but the tallest monkey was only about four feet.”

Cooper nodded. “That fits with everything Reynaud said. She’s the only one with access to the locks on their cages, and there’s no way one of them could’ve got out and then back in without her noticing. Plus, they get fed every few hours. So none of them could’ve been gone long to have done it, without her noticing. I guess the chimps have an alibi.”

Tom climbed back into the squad car. All in all, it had been anti-climactic. Instead of hulking gorillas, all possible killers who might have filled him with fear, he just felt sad for the intelligent little animals trapped so far from home.

~

Once a week, Tom called his parents. His dad, who still made a living driving trucks, was home about half the time. Although even when he was there, he didn’t say much. The calls were mostly for Tom’s mother’s benefit. She kept him updated on all the important things: when the lawn had last been mowed, what she was reading that month for her book club, the health of their decrepit cat.

“Did you get the coffee mug we sent you?” she asked him, this time. He knew that ‘we’ meant ‘she’ had sent it. His father, away this week, probably had no idea about the gift.

“Sure did,” Tom replied, raising the mug even though she couldn’t see him. It was mostly white, with bold black letters that read ‘Prints Charming.’ According to the packaging, she’d had it custom made. “I’m drinking from it right now, actually. The folks at the station are gonna be pretty jealous.”

“I made it on Amazon!” Tom’s mother had recently discovered Amazon.com and she was smitten.

“I figured, yeah. So listen, you’ll never guess what case we got this week.”

“Let’s hear it!” his mother gushed.

As usual, he spared her the details regarding the victims. Not everyone wanted to know the gory details of a few murdered kids (although Tom was always surprised by how many people couldn’t resist the details). Instead, he told her all about his bizarre trip to the monkey sanctuary, and the mess they’d found in the victims’ home.

“I mean, you should’ve seen their place, you would have had a heart attack. What a mess.

We think the ape swung through some of the rooms, since the Christmas tree and some of the light fixtures had been yanked out.”

“Oh, sweetie, that couldn’t be it.”

Tom blinked. “Sorry?”

“A monkey wouldn’t do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The big monkeys, like the ones you’re talking about, they don’t swing in captivity.”

“What?”

“Nancy and I were just watching a documentary about it. They only swing like that when they’re out in nature. Or maybe if they had a really convincing habitat. But in a house? Not a chance. Whoever did this, they’re no monkey expert.”

Tom was stunned.

“Oh, and those poor orcas, you won’t believe what happens to them, in captivity. Nancy and I watched a whole series. Their fins don’t stay up, on their backs? They just fold over like they’re made of paper. It’s the saddest thing. You remember Nancy, from up the street?”

Tom’s mind was racing. The scene they found at the O’Shea residence looked like an ape attack, but only to someone who’d never seen a captive ape- not someone who, say, kept one as an exotic pet. Or as a hired gun.

“Listen, Mom, I really should-” “She still asks about you all the time, you know. Wondering when you’re ever gonna go and get married.”

“Mom.”

“You’re not dating anyone, are you?”

“Mom, I-”

“But you’d tell me, if you were?”

Tom was already pulling on his coat and loading up his gear, dumping his ‘Prints

Charming’ coffee into the sink. “Gotta go, Mom! You’ve been really helpful. I’ll call you again soon.”

~

He got to Super Party Plus a few minutes before closing, and flashed his credentials to the kid working the cash register. The kid’s nametag said “Jimmy.” He was covered in an even mix of acne and freckles, looking half asleep, but he perked up a bit at the sight of Tom’s badge.

“Whoa. What do the pigs want with this shithole? We haven’t been robbed or nothing, I woulda called you.”

Tom waved his hand, signaling for him to shut up. “Look, do you guys sell a gorilla suit here?”

“What?”

“You know, a big monkey costume. For an adult to wear.”

The kid shrugged. “Nah, man. We don’t sell one of those.”

Tom slapped his fist on the counter. Damnit. Still, he could be onto something. There were other stores. “You know, it’s funny though, we had a guy come in the other day looking for the exact same thing.”

Tom froze. “You what?”

The kid nodded. “Yeah dude, for real. A big guy wanted one the other day. Which is weird, cuz it’s not even close to Halloween. But I sold him our Bigfoot costume, he said that was close enough to what he was lookin’ for.”

Tom was already dialing his phone as the kid pointed out the sasquatch suit hanging in one of the aisles. They walked over to it as the phone rang. He had cards and tape with him, for comparison, but as soon as he saw the costume’s gloves he knew he wouldn’t need them. He would have recognized that two-inch whorl print anywhere.

“Hello?”

“Detective Cooper!”

“Jesus, Tom, is that you? It’s nine o’clock at night, my guy, this better be good.”

“I found our gorilla.”

There was a pause. “What?”

“From the O’Shea place, I found our ‘monkey.’ Wait til you see this.”

Tom heard some shuffling in the background, then Cooper shouting. His voice was muffled, like his mouth was away from the receiver. “Val! Get dressed, we got a lead.”

Tom blinked. “What was that?”

“Nothing, man, where are you? Send me an address.”

“Is Valerie with you?”

“What? Look, just stay where you are. I’m on my way.” Tom hung up the phone, slowly. He stared at the cashier, and the kid stared back, wide- eyed.

Time seemed to freeze while Tom waited. The Super Party Plus kid kept asking questions, but Tom didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything while he waited for Cooper and

Val, and he didn’t say anything when they showed up at the same time, spilling out of the same squad car, even though there was no blood spatter for her to analyze. He just waited, quietly, hands in his pockets, while Cooper grilled the store clerk about the Bigfoot suit. The perp had used a credit card, and it wasn’t long before they had a name.

~

If Tom had been more focused, he might have noticed the creepiest part about the whole thing. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had been up all night, thinking, during an investigation.

And he was the expert on prints.

See, the creepiest part about it all has to do with the way a fingerprint gets left behind.

It’s not enough to just have grooves and ridges in your fingertips. Think of it this way: you can have a stamp, made up of any shape you’d like, but it won’t leave a mark unless you dip it in the ink pad first. In the human body, the ‘ink’ is all the different oils that the skin secretes. It’s invisible, of course, but that’s where people like Tom come in.

But a Bigfoot costume doesn’t secrete anything. There are no oils oozing out of the plastic sasquatch fingertips, just waiting to leave a mark. So the perp, who turned out to be Mrs.

O’Shea’s new boyfriend, he was smart. And he wanted the cops to think it was an animal. Which means he needed to leave behind some evidence on purpose.

“We should have caught on right away when there were no footprints,” Valerie would joke, later on. “How many gorillas do you know that wear socks?” How many gorillas do you know that kill a family of four? Tom would think, bitterly. He should have known, alright. But the perpetrator didn’t think about footprints. Or how apes behave in captivity.

After he killed them, stabbing the three children a combined total of twenty six separate times, he had walked all through the house with the bodies slowly cooling upstairs. He had trashed the place. And he had stopped every few seconds, carefully pausing to rub the gloves of the Bigfoot costume on the skin of his own chest and face.

Ink.

It helped with the conviction, being able to show that he did this, to demonstrate how cold and deliberate the perp had been in his delivery. No blind rage, no insanity. Just a very sick man walking around in a hairy suit and wiping the plastic fingertips all over himself. But Tom wasn’t actually the one who figured out about the oils, and the gloves. He never found out who put that final piece of the puzzle together. Hell, maybe the psycho confessed.

Tom had more upsetting things to think about.

The Woods

It didn’t happen the way you’d expect. Mark figured that out pretty quick. Hell, a man with a chainsaw, flailing around in the woods next to his two little kids…anyone could put that together. So Mark expected to see kid soup out there beyond the tree line and he was just glad someone else had been the first responder.

He’d find out later the guy’s wife had been nagging him ever since the last big storm. All what are you gonna do about that tree out there and that lumber, you gonna call John to take care of it or what? But the guy didn’t want to call John and Mark didn’t blame him. In rural

Maine, good wood was good money and it was a whole entire good winter if your house had a wood-burning stove.

Some grief counselor was up from Tri-County asking why the man had a chainsaw in the first place and what he was doing out there in the woods instead of calling a professional. Mark knew right away she was useless. City-slicker. She would side with the kids, and that was kinda understandable, but at the same time they were dead and not exactly her target audience. Mark could tell that the cop she was talking to already heard about enough of her shit.

“Where are the parents?” Mark asked, clipping on his walkie and approaching the house.

The other cop was his buddy, Kirk. “Inside. Giving their statements.”

“And the kids?”

“Out back.”

Mark nodded and walked around the place. It was little more than a trailer home, with a rickety swing-set rusting next to the driveway. Ants or something had destroyed the asphalt around the edges and he kicked a loose chunk aside as he made his way around to the back. The tree line wasn’t far from the place itself. Mark could see the rest of the team milling around in there, and he knew the bodies would already be covered in white sheets. What was left of ‘em, anyway. He figured he was probably walking into one of the worst cases he’d ever see, little limbs scattered far and wide, maybe, depending on who got sawed up and how bad. He remembered the case in Patton where a 5-year-old got fed through a woodchipper.

Bobby, who was actually the fire chief but lived nearby, was the first to come talk to

Mark. “Looks like Litchfield finally got that case.”

“What?”

“You know, that case.”

“I don’t understand.”

Well, Mark understood part of it. When the cops around here said ‘that case’ they meant the one that would define the town or city. You know, the first case people thought of when they heard the name, often because of some political fallout or press drama. To qualify, the death had to be both awful and preventable: it helped, too, if it was a kid. In Gardiner for example it was the Train Boy. A 9-year-old who got absolutely obliterated by a train right in front of his two kid sisters, papers from his backpack floating down on them like snow. After that it was a big legal battle about new guard-arms and new train whistles and new bells and new crosswalks and new traffic cops and all of a sudden everyone knew about Gardiner because of the Train Boy who ruined public transportation.

“It’s gonna be some crackdown on DIY yard projects, I guarantee it. ‘Call a professional or bury your children’ and all that. Just you wait. I bet you a million dollars we get news articles now about how dangerous trees are. Bullshit.” Bobby paused and let out a little snort. “You know what? Bet they call it the ‘tree terror’ or somethin’ dumb. I mean, it’s not the first time a tree ate some people, but since we got two dead kids, we’re gonna be the ones who get all the policy change.”

Mark had no idea what Bobby was going on about but he was starting to realize this wasn’t the grisly chainsaw accident he had expected. In fact, as he stepped into the woods, he realized there were no bodies anywhere. No gore, no limbs.

The commotion seemed centered around one especially large tree. It stood tall and massive in the middle of a clearing, although Mark noticed that the tree, albeit upright, looked a little beat up. Some limbs had come off. And the tree was hooked up to a truck with a load of chains. The driver was about to inch forward, which would pull the tree down toward the earth.

Bobby noticed his confusion. “Marky. Didn’t they tell you what happened?”

“I don’t get it,” Mark started, “They said… On the radio, they said he was out here with a chainsaw and that the kids got killed. I guess I just figured…”

And that’s when it dawned on him.

“Ohhhh. Oh, no. Ah, Jesus.”

Bobby nodded.

It wasn’t long before the truck started creeping forward, jangling its chains, pulling hard on the big tree. Pulling it back down toward the earth where it must have fallen, the first time it fell, during the last big storm. And then Mark could see them. The kids.

See, this guy, he was rural, but not enough. Yeah, he was ‘local’ but not really. Not from around here the way people like Mark and Kirk and Bobby were from around here. Hell, even

John, the man who shoulda been called in to collect the fallen tree, John was from around here.

This guy was woodsy enough to have a chainsaw in the shed but not woodsy enough to know that sometimes (not always, not even very often, but sometimes) you’d have a tree that fell and then you started sawing up the fallen wood. But when you took a little weight off the top, next thing you knew the whole damn tree went and righted itself. When there was enough tension in the roots, you barely had to take off a limb or two, before the fallen tree would go springing back into an upright position.

Those poor kids must have been playing around under the exposed roots when the tree was still down, making ‘troll forts’ and ‘faerie houses,’ the way kids did when Mark himself was growing up. Before they even knew what was happening probably there’d been a big sighing heave of earth and some rustling leaves as the tree began to stand back up and then all of a sudden those roots they had been playing under got closer and closer and closer real quick.

And it was awful. But in a way, it was beautiful, too. Mark had been expecting some lurid combination of sawed off limbs. He had been prepared for severed arteries and gore and blood spatter. But instead it was just two children curled up together in the ground like they’d been playing and they fell asleep. Nature’s most perfect burial. A weight had been lifted and the tree folded those beautiful children up under it like two little seed pods. Like so much earth.

The Church of the Final Goodbye

Sometimes Uncle Mack gave them homework assignments. One week, they each had to pick out a rock from the parking lot and carry it everywhere with them until the next meeting.

Megan picked out a gray one with white flecks. She liked holding it until it got warm, and feeling the weight of it in her pocket as she went about her day. At the end of their next meeting,

Uncle Mack took everyone out into the field behind the church and told them to hurl their rocks out toward the tree line, hard as they could, never to be seen again. All this was to practice letting go.

But for Megan, this really starts with the heroin she got from a guy called “Juice.” She never found out his real name but he sold her an east coast stamp bag for ten bucks, which wasn’t bad. It was the first time she’d seen heroin in real life. It was a little disappointing, like a stringless teabag, or one of those silica gel packets except without the warning: DO NOT EAT.

Ultimately the heroin cost her about $15,000 in forfeited tuition and she never even got to smoke it: it was still in her room when the drug dogs showed up.

Although for Megan’s story to make sense, you’d probably have to go back even further.

Probably you should start with the Dean of Students at Megan’s school and a lanky Jewish boy named Sam. You won’t have to remember much about Sam. The important thing, really, is just that he died, and no one knew for sure if it was an accidental heroin overdose or a suicide. No one knew which, so the administration went ballistic trying to run postvention for both scenarios.

It was never good, when a kid died.

Dean Gordon had met with the family and they were in a real jam. On the one hand, if it was suicide, they all blamed themselves. But if the overdose was an accident it still kinda felt like their fault. They had sent him to a detox clinic shortly before, which sometimes kills your tolerance before it kicks your addiction: maybe he meant to take a regular dose, but because of that program they put him through, his whole heart stopped. Dean Gordon had nothing to offer the family. The situation was a lose-lose.

He had been forced to call in the Kyle Foundation, a real know-it-all organization who thought that bad stuff could never happen to a kid so long as everyone adhered strictly to the rigorous health and wellness task force strategic plan as outlined in the Kyle Foundation handbook. A real headache. Not to mention, the whole group was named for some kid who had offed himself: not an auspicious namesake, Dean Gordon thought.

It had been weeks of meetings for him. There were now thirteen subcommittees on the task force for health and wellness, and naturally, they all reported to Gordon. Presentations had been shared. Events cancelled, parties shut down. Today, Gordon was meeting with yet another

Kyle Foundation representative who’d been conducting an assessment of the University’s Means

Restriction and Environmental Safety Status. Gordon zoned out during most of her report.

“…pleased to see the changes your on-campus pharmacy has made regarding medication storage, and very pleased with your restricted access to rooftops and balconies…”

Yes, what a comfort that would be to Sam’s family. Sure, your kid died, but don’t you know we have excellent rooftops? Don’t you know the Kyle Foundation is very pleased?

“…which brings me to the final item on our Means Restriction and Environmental Safety

Checklist. Before you can receive the Kyle Foundation Gold Standard in Environmental Safety

Certification, you’ll need to replace all the closet rods.”

“Sorry?”

“The closet rods, in the dorms. You need to switch them all to breakaway rods.”

“Oh.” “To reduce the risk of hanging. You understand.”

“Of course.”

He wondered how badly the school actually needed this whole gold sticker for Kyle’s rooftops bullshit. Closets would be a huge pain in the ass to fix during the semester. He supposed it could wait until everyone went home next spring.

But Dean Gordon was wrong about that, among other things, and in mid-September

Megan’s R.A. came and banged on her door to help her switch out her closet rod for a breakable one. At the time, Megan had no idea why this was happening. She had no idea that this odd interruption would turn out to be the least of her worries.

Soon all thirteen of the subcommittees for health and wellness were hustling about with various anti-suicide initiatives, which just left the problem of the drugs. Say he meant to die,

Sam’s parents reasoned, there’s still the question of how a polite young boy managed to score heroin on a small, liberal arts campus. Surely that was someone’s fault. Someone else, they meant.

And as much as Dean Gordon truly believed that actually quite a lot of kids did drugs in college and most of them turned out alright (it wasn’t such a big deal, more like a natural part of growing up), he understood how all this looked for the school. At work, in his suit and tie, he wasn’t allowed to make decisions the way Jim Gordon made decisions. He was Dean Gordon, he was THE DEAN, capital D-E-A-N. He was an institution.

And by God, this institution would prove, beyond a flicker of a shadow of a doubt, that it did not have a drug problem. No, sir. Not on his watch.

So Dean Gordon went straight to the source. Being the dean at a small school like this, you hear things and you know things. He knew, for example, that a student named Billy Mendoza had financed his college career by selling dope to the burnouts, Adderall to the nerds, and steroids to the athletes. The ‘roids are what earned him the nickname “Juice.” Dean Gordon cut him a deal.

“You’ll graduate, but you won’t march at graduation, and if you mess anything up between now and next May, you don’t graduate at all. You understand?”

“Okay?”

“And here’s what I get in return: your client list.”

Billy leaned back in his chair, fingers laced together over his mouth. He considered

Gordon and smirked.

“Look, kid, you don’t have a lotta options. You know I could expel you if you sold to the dead guy? Hell, maybe you even get hit with something like a criminal negligence charge. And we can check his phone, you know. But help me out, and I’ll help you.”

Billy thought about it some more.

Dean Gordon had been bluffing about the ‘criminal negligence’ thing (he was no expert on that stuff) but it must have worked because it wasn’t long before the kid nodded. “Yeah, okay.

You want the one-offs, too, or just regulars?”

“Everything you’ve got.”

Dean Gordon felt like a real tough guy that day. A real good-cop-bad-cop situation, and he’d done it all by himself.

Armed with Billy’s list, it wasn’t long before the administration caught up with Megan.

In a way, she would have been much better off if she’d been closer to the guy she knew only as

“Juice.” Like for example if she’d been the type of person who did a shitload of drugs every weekend, coke, ketamine, oxies. They all fetched good money, and Juice protected his money. He protected the people he really cared about. Megan, on the other hand, had only earned him ten bucks. And the people in suits wanted names.

They sent in drug dogs, which Megan thought was a bit much. Unlike past room searches, from which she had always emerged unscathed, this was costly: they found her whiskey, the marijuana that she kept in a pencil box in her desk drawer, and the little baggie of heroin tucked into a shoe. Interestingly, the dogs didn’t smell the tabs of LSD in the back of her freezer. Possibly because she had never thrown out that moldy Hot Pocket.

After she met with someone from the Dean’s office, she was sent off to meet with a mental health counselor about her ‘drug problem.’ Right away she realized they disagreed about whether or not this problem actually existed.

“My job is to help you develop a plan for your semester off to deal with your substance abuse disorder.”

“Well, I don’t actually have a substance abu-”

“This isn’t just a suspension. Think of it as an opportunity to focus on your wellness. We want you to figure out why you feel the need to abuse drugs.”

“No, look, I don’t need to, I just-”

“So you want to be the kind of person who abuses illegal drugs?”

“What? No. I…”

Megan sighed.

The counselor was a grossly overweight woman in her fifties. She had squeezed in

Megan’s ‘emergency appointment’ during lunch, and was eating sushi while they spoke. The chopsticks made her look like a plump little bird, tapering off into a thin beak as she poked around at her seaweed and avocado. All of this was turning out to be a lot more complicated than Megan would’ve guessed, this whole getting-sent-home-from-college business. Her family hadn’t bothered with tuition insurance (she was a good student, after all), so that would be a huge financial loss. She even had to clear out her room, which she thought was ridiculous since she’d be back for the spring semester and no one else was slated to use the space in her absence. And because of her

‘substance abuse problems’ (which is how the school insisted on framing all nine of the cases it processed that fall), her time off was considered a ‘medical leave’ rather than a disciplinary sanction. It still meant Ws on her transcript, but came with added complications.

“Think of the W as standing for ‘Wellness,’” the fat woman explained, polishing off her maki. “We don’t want you to return to the rigor of academia until you’ve demonstrated stability and wellness outside of school.”

It turned out what she meant by this was that Megan couldn’t just go home and vegetate: she needed to participate in support groups, individual therapy, and community service.

“It’s all about engaging in productive activities while you’re out, so you can come back with a sense of confidence.”

If Megan managed all that, plus a note from her primary care physician asserting that her drug problem was under control, she could return to campus in the spring.

So Megan’s first trip to the church was a purely pragmatic one. She had never been religious, not even ‘spiritual,’ as she often heard other students describe themselves. In fact, she was especially wary of the Mormons (didn’t one Holy Book leave enough room for disagreement and misinterpretation?). But geographically, the nearest place of worship- right down the road, in fact- was a Church of the Latter Day Saints. She figured a church would be one-stop-shopping for support groups and volunteer opportunities. The first person she met there was Jacob, the bishop’s son. She walked into the church on a night when a particularly large fleet of cars cluttered the parking lot and found him sitting just inside the entrance.

He was young, 13 or 14 maybe, with acne spattered across his face and greasy hair pushed up in the front with too much product. Dressed in poorly-fitted formalwear, he seemed totally engrossed with something on his iPad.

“Um. Excuse me?” Megan said.

He didn’t even glance up at her. “You here for the dance?”

“What?”

“The fall dance. It’s through those doors. You can leave your coat over on that bench.”

Megan wasn’t wearing a coat. “Actually, I was wondering if I could get a schedule of the different groups that meet here.”

At this, he glanced up. “The support groups?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? What’s wrong with you?”

Megan just blinked at him. He looked at her with interest.

“I mean, you don’t seem crazy. But the groups are for crazy people, right? So I’m just asking. What’s your issue?”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Dude. Do you interrogate everyone who comes through here, or am I getting special treatment?”

He finally put the iPad down. “You know, you’re funny. I like you. My name’s Jacob.”

“Great.”

“Are you from around here?” “Look, I’d really just like a schedule of the support groups.”

He stood up and puffed out his chest importantly. “Yeah. All the flyers are in the office.

It’s locked, but I mean, I have a key. I can take you.”

Megan glanced around the room. “So…it’s not those flyers? On the bulletin board?”

“Oh! Yeah, you know what, I guess they are the same. But you probably want your own copies, right? Let me give you a tour of this place.”

Jesus Christ, Megan thought, and then felt a little guilty. It was a church, after all. “No, thanks. I’ll just take a picture of the flyers on my phone.”

Jacob nodded. “A cell phone. Cool. You like texting?”

Megan ignored him and walked over to the bulletin board. It was a real grab-bag: some of the postings were for pot luck suppers, community breakfasts, and the ‘church dances,’ which seemed to be wholesome social gatherings for high schoolers. But mixed in were brightly colored flyers for a variety of conditions and crises that might cause a person to seek out the support of the church.

‘Good Grief! Loss and Bereavement’ was bright pink. Two different substance abuse groups were advertised in yellow. An orange one read ‘Human Papilloma Virus And You.’

There was one for abstaining from sex, one for people who had too much sex, one for teaching your good Mormon sons and daughters about sex. All in all, it was a whole lot of sex. Megan snapped pictures of all of them.

A small white scrap of paper at the bottom of the bulletin board caught her eye, mostly because it wasn’t nearly as eye-catching as all the others. In a plain black font it read: ‘Welcome to the Church of the Final Goodbye.’

Megan untacked that one and brought it over to Jacob. “Hey. What’s this?” He laughed. “Oh, yeah. That’s our cult. They meet here every Wednesday.”

“Seriously?”

Megan didn’t know much about religion, but she was pretty sure that inviting cults to meet in your spaces of worship had to be frowned upon.

“Serious. The guy that runs it, Uncle Mack? He’s real-deal crazy, like total Looney

Tunes. My dad’s the bishop here and he feels bad for him, so he lets him use a room for the meetings.”

“Why do you call him that?”

“You mean the ‘uncle’ thing? I dunno. But wanna know something?”

Megan shrugged, which Jacob took as an invitation to keep talking. “His actual name is

‘Mackerel.’ Honest to God. I’ve seen his driver’s license, ‘cause people have to show an ID when they rent the rooms here. His whole family is probably nutty.”

~

Jacob wasn’t right about a lot of things but he was right that Uncle Mack’s entire family was a bit on the unconventional side. Mackerel Lawrence had been the “son” of “Lawrence &

Son Funeral Home.” Since the death of his father, it would have been more accurate to simply call the place “Lawrence Funeral Home,” but a new sign would have been expensive.

Money was tight. Like many small family businesses, undertaking was going corporate.

It didn’t help that cremations had become increasingly trendy. Before, pretty much every family wanted their loved one to rot, rather than burn, but those were the good old days. Now the business was lucky to see a full-fledged funeral, casket and all, with an expensive headstone to boot. It used to be that one body would rack up as much as seven grand for the Lawrences.

Today, beloved family members were incinerated and scattered, a luxury that Lawrence & Son Funeral Home simply could not accommodate without a crematory of their own. Death, like everything else, had cheapened.

Megan learned about Uncle Mack’s profession early on, though not from the man himself. During her first meeting with the Church of the Final Goodbye, she sat next to an elderly fellow named Gus. Based on his matted hair and grimy appearance, Megan guessed that he was homeless. He proudly sported a tattered hospital bracelet, which listed his full name as

‘Augustus Duffy,’ and his date of birth as ‘March 17th, 1944.’ She wondered vaguely what he’d been hospitalized for. Looking at his skin, she imagined it was something like cirrhosis of the liver. Perhaps cirrhosis of the everything.

“Praise the Lord, for I have seen the light,” he said to Megan as she sat down beside him.

She didn’t know of an appropriate reply to this, so she just nodded and took her seat.

After a few moments, he stuck out his hand. The yellowed skin was thin and translucent, giving the impression that everything inside it might spill out at the slightest provocation. Old people, Megan believed, were best from a safe distance. Up close, the bags of bone were nothing less than creepy. But she shook his frail fingers. He beamed.

“I’m Gus,” he said. “And I’m an alcoholic.”

“Um, I’m Megan. I’m…not.”

She was beginning to regret getting to the meeting early. It should have occurred to her that small talk with the members of the Church of the Final Goodbye might be different from, say, small talk with the students on her liberal arts campus.

Just as she was about to stand and switch to a seat further away from Gus, he struck up a conversation with her. “Your first meeting?” he asked.

“Um, yeah. I go to school out of state, but I’m home for a couple months.” “Home,” he repeated. “Well, I been here a long time.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, sure. Lived in Litchfield my whole life. Seen a lot of culture, here.”

It was news to Megan that there was any ‘culture’ in Litchfield, but she decided not to question him. “You must really like it here,” she said.

“Oh, you betcha. I’ve been here a long time. My whole life.”

“Right. I guess you’ve met Uncle Mack before, then?”

“Uncle Mack? He’s a nice man.”

At this, Gus leaned close to Megan. He had lots of skin bulged up around his eyes, and they looked like they might pop out at any moment. He whispered excitedly. “He’s a warlock, you know.”

“Really.”

“Oh, yes. You bet he is. But I like warlocks. They get things done.”

Well, Megan couldn’t argue with that.

The room around them filled up quickly as 7:00 approached. It was set up like a classroom, and Megan guessed this was where the children went for Sunday school after the regular mass. The front of the room had a chalkboard with Bible verses scrawled across it, and there was a piano off to the side. She was easily the youngest in the room. As she scanned the small crowd, an older woman with curly blonde hair caught her eye.

The woman walked over. “You’re new, right?”

“Yeah. I’m Megan.”

The woman nodded toward Gus. “Is he botherin’ you?”

“Oh, no, we were just talking about Uncle Mack.” The woman wore a faded floral dress and a dust-colored windbreaker. She had the kind of Maine accent that you see in the movies, brassy and thick, with the letter ‘R’ long-forgotten.

“Well, my name is Shirley. Gus, what are you on about tonight?”

Gus was happy to rejoin the conversation. In fact, Megan wasn’t sure he realized he’d been left out of it for a moment as the two women discussed him.

“Uncle Mack is a warlock. He speaks to the dead.”

Shirley chuckled. “Oh, don’t mind old Gus here. It’s not nearly as spooky as he makes it sound. Uncle Mack is an undertaker.”

“I’m a son of God.”

“Sure you are, sweetheart.” Shirley patted Gus’ hand affectionately. “You know, it takes a lot to do what Uncle Mack does. To be around so much death all the time, and make some kind of meaning in it. He’s a wise man.”

As if on cue, the door opened, and a tall man strode to the front of the room. Megan noticed he was carrying a bowling ball. Every part of him was long and gaunt, which made the heavy object in his hands seem even more solid.

As he passed each row of people, the energy in the aisle changed. The people shifted in their seats, sitting up a little straighter, a little taller, and pointing every fiber of their being toward the thin man in front of them. As he walked by, a hush fell over them, until it filled the room.

When everything was silent, the tall man beamed right at Megan. “Welcome,” he said,

“You can call me Uncle Mack. Welcome to our Church of the Final Goodbye.”

“Praise the Lord!” Gus sang out. Uncle Mack cupped both of his hands underneath the bowling ball, then slowly lifted it until it was level with his sternum. He closed his eyes for a moment, lost in deep thought, or maybe prayer.

“This bowling ball weighs about ten pounds,” he said, finally. His voice was slow and deliberate and rich, like syrup churning into sorbet. “What else weighs about ten pounds?”

His audience thought this over. “A cat?” someone offered.

Uncle Mack nodded, slowly. “Perhaps.”

“A baby?”

He nodded again.

Shirley, who had taken the chair on Megan’s other side, raised a tentative hand. “A melon?” she guessed.

The smile that lit up Uncle Mack’s face was so full of genuine happiness that he seemed about to burst. “A melon, yes, I suppose you could call it that. Ten pounds is about the weight of an adult human head.” He tapped his knuckles against his temple. “Your melon, if you will.”

“Praise the lord,” Gus said.

~

Megan’s parents weren’t thrilled to have her living back at home. At least, not given the present conditions. They wanted to know why she’d done it, and she wished she had more to offer them.

Not that you necessarily need a good reason to take up heroin. But it helps. Most people who start using, it’s because some far greater shit has already hit the fan in their lives: they moved in with their meth-head boyfriend, maybe, and suddenly heroin didn’t seem any scarier than a glass of Pinot Grigio to take the edge off. Or maybe they were homeless. Maybe they’d been human-trafficked, and their pimp offered it to them like a vaccine, in between the johns and the beatings.

“Were all of your friends doing drugs?” her mother asked.

Megan didn’t have a lot of close friends, but there had been a few regulars that she spent most weekends getting trashed with. “No. I mean, they smoke weed and stuff, but everyone smokes weed.”

“Not your brother.”

Ah, yes. Megan’s brother.

It’s odd, maybe, that he hasn’t come up sooner in this story from Megan’s life but if you knew them better, you’d understand. Even growing up, back when they lived under the same roof, he didn’t occupy much space on Megan’s radar. He was the human equivalent of the color beige. Unassuming, inoffensive, but not very exciting. No one’s favorite color is beige. There’s not much else you can say about it.

From a parenting perspective, though, beige is a wet dream. It doesn’t take risks. It doesn’t stay out too late with friends in high school or come home one night drunk or with a nose ring or a gerbil.

“Yeah, well, everyone besides him smokes weed. Wake me up if he ever decides to start acting like a normal human being.”

Megan was more of a fuchsia, herself. Maybe a hot magenta. Electric lime.

Her mother crossed her arms. “You know, not everyone needs an illegal substance to have fun.”

Megan thought ‘fun’ was probably overstating the excitement of her brother’s beige lifestyle, but this seemed like a discussion for another time. “You know what most girls your age do when they get bored? They paint their nails.

They go on dates, or catch a movie with some friends. They go shopping.”

Well. Megan had bought the heroin. Shopping, in a way.

“They don’t go out and take up hard drugs. I just don’t understand what’s gotten into you.

Where did we go wrong?”

And Megan was stuck, because she couldn’t really explain herself without being an asshole. She didn’t think she had a problem. The problem was every person who could operate in the world without drugs. The problem was the people who could watch the news and read the paper and not want to get out of their skulls. While sober, the world struck Megan as an awfully bitter pill to swallow. She didn’t see how other people could stand it.

“There’s just so much ugly shit,” she started, trying to find the words to explain herself.

“I don’t understand.”

“You know, in the world. It’s all so shitty. And the people are the worst part, I mean,

Jesus, look what we’ve done just in our own country. Look who’s in charge of this circus.”

Her mother furrowed her eyebrows. “You bought heroin because Trump is president?”

“Well.”

Another pause.

“I mean, it’s a little more nuanced than that.”

Megan’s mother let out a long, slow sigh.

~

It was clear after just a few meetings that Megan’s worldview converged with Uncle

Mack’s on quite a few important points. For one thing, they agreed that most of human history had pretty much just been one colossal fuck-up after another. Things had been nice, once. Simple. The apes had a darn good thing going until the more humanoid iterations started messing around. It was all about eating and sleeping and mating and surviving. But just look at the monkey now: he had a 401k and an anxiety disorder, for god’s sake.

Of course, there was some disagreement about how exactly they got there. Uncle Mack didn’t believe in evolution, and Megan didn’t really believe in God, but they’d still arrived at the same conclusion: after enough generations of humans, society had really taken a turn for the worse. Uncle Mack was clear, too, that God hadn’t invented most of the shitty things in life, like sexism, or racism. Man came up with that all on his own. Then he spent the past few centuries perfecting it.

“We’ve become so attached to these physical vessels,” Uncle Mack explained one night, gesturing to his body. “We’ve forgotten how temporary and meaningless it all is. But I see our shells for what they truly are. I see it every day.”

And in a way, he was right. Uncle Mack did have a much greater understanding of the human body as a purely physical object than most people could ever imagine. He’d powdered thousands of lifeless faces, for example, and he knew that purple lipstick is the best color for a dead man. Or that you can use a trocar to vent the gases from a body that comes to you bloated, well past rigor mortis, so it doesn’t squeak or fart or (god forbid) explode during a viewing.

It was not a transferrable skill set.

“Luckily,” Uncle Mack told his flock, “There’s a life after this one. Real life. Our best life. It all starts when we leave our physical husk behind, and our souls can return to be with

God. Our Final Goodbye to mankind and all its sins.” Most of the other members didn’t have homes of their own. It was all part of letting go of the material realm. They frequented soup kitchens and shelters, and though they were mostly jobless, they could occasionally scrap together enough to all live someplace for a little while.

Most nights, though, they slept in the funeral home itself. The embalming room was no good because of the chemical smells, and the parlor, where small services were held, needed to be kept spic and span. But the showroom was perfect. Lined wall-to-wall with caskets, it might as well have been a buffet of beds.

At first, Megan only joined them for the weekly meetings at the church. She had to be there anyway. For her community service, she’d taken over Jacob’s duties of cleaning the church each week.

It was a surprisingly daunting task, much more so than she guessed when she volunteered for it. The main room contained row after row after row of wooden pews. Trying to navigate it with the ancient church vacuum cleaner was an absolute nightmare. Normally, she just wouldn’t have bothered actually doing any of the chores. The place always looked fine anyway: it’s not like the churchgoers were scratching “Tammy iz a SLUT” into the pews or anything. But the

Jacob kid usually hung around while Megan was working, so she had to at least pretend to give it an honest effort.

“Do you like college?” Jacob asked one night, about a month into Megan’s purported medical leave.

She shrugged.

“Like is it fun? The parties and stuff?”

Yes, Jacob would someday be a huge hit at college parties. Megan could see it now.

“Look, whatever you think you know about college, forget it. It’s not like that, alright? You get there, and you realize that everyone else was in high school two seconds ago, just like you were, and nobody’s any more mature or exciting than the group of people you just left.”

“Oh.”

“They’re childish, and everyone sucks.”

“Right.”

Megan continued wiping down the counters of the church’s kitchen in silence for a while before he butted in again. “Is high school fun, though?”

“Jesus, kid, you’re not even in high school yet? Leave me alone about the college stuff.”

She threw her paper towels down in frustration, but unluckily, he seemed to take her comment as a compliment.

“You thought I looked older? Cool. I mean, I get that a lot. Guess how old I am?”

She shrugged again. “Don’t care.”

“No, I mean, I want you to guess. Like, how old do I look? How old do you think I could pass for?”

Megan threw her paper towel wad into the waste basket, narrowly missing Jacob, who waited eagerly in the doorway for her appraisal. “Do I look like I could be a teenager?”

“You look like a ten year old.”

Jacob pouted. It did nothing to make him look older, but Megan decided not to comment on that.

“Why are you so mean?” he whined.

“Maybe I’m not. Maybe you’re just annoying. Ever think of it that way?”

He stormed off. As far as Megan was concerned, it was just as well.

~ Probably her favorite thing about the other members of the Church of the Final Goodbye was that they didn’t much care for the human race, either. It was a ragtag band of misanthropes.

Megan viewed them as a welcome relief from the rest of society.

“Praise the Lord,” Gus said as she came in one night. “Praise the Lord, for I have seen the light. Ohhhh, yes.”

“Whatever you say, buddy.”

“You wanna know the secret to life?”

“Sure.”

He leaned in close to her. Luckily she’d gotten used to his smell by then. She hardly noticed his rank breath as he whispered “I have an army of a thousand virgin men.”

Megan raised her brows. “That’s a lot of virgins, Gus. Where do you find ‘em all?”

“Well, I’m a son of God. I’m not a homosexual.”

“Right.”

Gus didn’t seem to have anything else to say on the topic. Megan didn’t know how to reply, having never commanded an army of virgins, herself. Luckily Uncle Mack walked in just then and everyone snapped to attention.

“My dear friends, I have something very exciting to tell you all tonight. The Final

Goodbye is fast approaching. For all of us.”

A few members shifted in their seats.

“It won’t be long now until we can all dedicate ourselves to eternal service at the side of our Lord.”

“Praise the Lord!” Gus shouted.

~ Sleeping in a casket is better than you’d expect. They’re built for a blend of style and comfort- quite a bit of unnecessary luxury, given their intended occupant. Megan was impressed.

“I don’t know why I’d ever go back to a dorm bed after this,” she whispered to Gus and

Shirley.

“You’re tellin’ me,” the old woman replied. “I tell you what, I did my time. I worked hard my whole life, you know? Used to have a job, and a family, and all that. But I ain’t never slept so good as I do now. Used to be I was up all night, tossing and turning.”

Have you ever tried to toss and turn in a casket?

“Use to worry so much about every damn little thing. But I tell you what, little lady. I come to find out none of it matters.”

Shirley had advanced leukemia.

“None of it matters a bit, in the end. All that time I could have spent getting closer to our

Lord. But I’m here, now. I sleep like a baby in one of these things.”

Each coffin even had a little pillow to keep the occupant’s head elevated. Part of making man’s ten-pound bowling ball look more natural, relaxed, and animated. For the folks who wanted an open-casket service. You understand.

~

Dean Gordon was sitting in his home office when he got the call.

As soon as he saw the caller ID he felt a hot sensation of panic throughout his body. They knew better than to contact him at this number unless it was bad news. And not just bad. Can’t- wait-until-morning bad news. Incredibly awful and urgent bad news.

“Hello?” he said finally, after several rings. The man on the other end of the line spoke quickly. Dean Gordon listened. He responded only occasionally. “Right. Again? Oh, dear. I understand. Of course.”

He booted up his desktop. “Could you repeat that, please?” he said. He typed the information into his web browser, and sure enough, the article popped up right away. The link referred to it as ‘breaking news.’

MASS SUICIDE OF RELIGIOUS DEATH CULT: EIGHTEEN DEAD.

“Right…” the dean said into the phone, though he was no longer listening. His eyes flew back and forth across the screen, trying desperately to piece together what had happened.

The story was unbelievable. Some religious wingnut named after a fish had convinced a bunch of other lunatics to follow him down a bizarre path of rejecting all material objects and possessions: including their own bodies. The group had named itself based on this final step of bodily rejection, the act of suicide. They called themselves The Church of the Final Goodbye.

It wasn’t until he got to the last few lines of the article, which described the cult’s

“youngest member,” that he finally understood why he’d been contacted.

“She was one of ours.” He listened, then, “Only a sophomore?”

Another pause.

“On medical leave. Just like we asked. Ah, hell.”

It took a while for him to get all the info he needed before he was allowed to hang up.

And he would have many other calls to make that night. He glanced over at the clock, saw that it was already past ten, and wondered if he could plan on getting any sleep that night at all.

His eyes wandered over to his bookshelf. His wife, never much of a reader, wouldn’t touch it. It was the only place in the whole house that was truly and entirely his own. He reached for a thick book. The spine read Crisis Management Strategies but Dean

Gordon had hollowed out the inside of this particular copy. He had an intact version on his bookshelf at school. This one instead contained his stash of marijuana. He looked at it for a long time and brought the false pages up to his face so that the weed was right under his nose. He closed his eyes. After a few moments, though, Dean Gordon snapped the book shut, placed it back on the shelf, and returned to his desk.

He sighed, heavily, and picked up the phone.

Coach

In a parking lot behind Sabattus High School, the girls’ soccer team is getting ready for an away game. There’s a hose with a rusty old spigot out by the baseball diamond, so a few of the girls have gone out that way to fill up the team’s water coolers. The rest are lounging around near the bus. Natalie is among them, but not really-- her mind keeps wandering.

She’s lucky to be playing for the varsity team. She knows that. Most freshmen can count on at least one year of JV before being promoted to the big leagues, and she knows of a few seniors who are on the varsity line-up this year for the very first time. Plus, today’s a big day for the whole school. They’re up against West Gardiner, a long-time rival, and they’ll be playing without one of their best forwards: the team captain tore her ACL a few days ago at practice.

She’s out for the season, and Natalie will start in her position today. It’s a long bus-ride, and it’ll be dark by the time they arrive— but the girls are excited to play under the lights.

Natalie and some of the other girls are sitting on the ground beside the bus, putting their hair up and taking their jewelry off for the game. One girl wraps her bracelet in medical tape rather than removing it. Natalie is in the middle of French braiding her hair when Coach

Remington calls for her.

“Hey Nat?”

“Yeah?”

“I left my clipboard in my car. Can you grab it?”

“Sure thing.” She lets her hair fall loose down her back.

“It’s in the shotgun seat.”

She jogs across the lot toward the red SUV with the vanity plate that she recognizes:

RMNGTN. Coach Remington is young, in his mid-thirties, maybe, and handsome. He teaches in the science department and is famous for experiments that would get other teachers in trouble.

He held up a girl’s textbook once and set it on fire, to demonstrate some point about thermodynamics. And everyone hopes they’ll be assigned to his class for the dissections junior year. Instead of selecting a rat from the formaldehyde-filled bucket, like in Mr. Helms’ class,

Coach Remington’s students walk in to find each dead rat set out on a tray with a name tag next to it. Last year, the rats were named after different superheroes.

Natalie tries the passenger door of the SUV. It doesn’t budge. Reluctantly, she heads back toward the bus, where Coach is inflating the game balls while another girl holds them in place.

“Hey Coach? It’s locked.”

“Ah jeez, that was stupid of me. Hang on.”

He straightens up, leaving the girl holding the game ball to finish the job herself. The girl rolls her eyes at Natalie, and waves over another player to operate the pump while she holds the balls steady. The girls that Natalie was sitting with have finished getting ready, and are already making their way onto the bus.

Coach fishes around in the pockets of his letter jacket for his keys, laughing to himself.

“Got ‘em. I knew they were in there somewhere. Come on.”

He gestures for Natalie to follow him.

“Um. You could just give me the keys.”

He raises his eyebrows at her. “You think I’d give one of you girls my car keys? I know how long you’ve all been waiting to get a license. Now come on.” She follows him, and the two of them walk across the parking lot toward his SUV. She glances back at the rest of the team as she walks. They’re only a dozen yards away, but it might as well be a mile.

Coach Remington unlocks his car with the clicker, and there’s a long pause before

Natalie realizes that even though he’s closest to the car, he’s waiting for her to walk in front of him and collect the clipboard. She snatches it from the front seat and turns to leave, only to find that he’s taken several steps toward her.

He towers over her. “You know, I’m glad I got a chance to talk to you. How are you feeling?”

Natalie swallows.

“About the game, I mean. Today’s a big day for you.”

“Oh. Um. I’m fine.”

He smiles. “You’re not nervous?”

“No, I’m good.”

He rests his hand on her arm for a moment and her skin crawls. For a moment she has a strange thought-- she feels like she might reach up and grab the whistle that hangs at his chest, ripping it off his neck and blowing as hard as she can.

“You are good. I’m glad you know that about yourself. You’re gonna kick ass out there today, kiddo.” Coach Remington winks. “I know I’m not really supposed to swear around you girls, but you don’t mind, do you, Nat?”

Natalie shakes her head.

“Good girl.” Coach turns and walks back across the parking lot, toward the bus, where most of the team has already climbed aboard and taken their seats. Natalie follows. Inside, some of the players are listening to pre-game playlists, others are texting their boyfriends or chatting together about the upcoming game.

Natalie rushes to join them on the bus, but she only makes it up the first few steps before she hears him.

“Nat.”

She turns.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Standing there in the fading after school sun sun he looks like a god. Even though she is standing on the steps, somehow he is taller than her, and he is so satisfied, so pleased with himself.

Natalie just freezes. She doesn’t know what he wants from her until he points to the tar beside the bus where her gym bag is still sitting on the ground. It contains her shin guards, her mouth guard, her cleats— everything she needs for today’s game.

“Oh,” she says, and walks past him to grab it. When she stands up, he is watching her, smiling. He watches her walk back up the steps.

As she boards the bus, she pretends not to notice that the rest of her teammates, already seated, are staring at her. Some seniors sneer, clustered in the front few seats nearest to Coach

Remington’s usual place. “Teacher’s pet,” one of them mutters loud enough for Natalie to hear.

She walks past the rows of faces toward the back seats. No one else says anything, but they don’t need to.

Stuck-up bitch. She’s not even that good.

She’s probably sleeping with him.

It takes a long time for Natalie to reach the very back. By the time she crosses the entire length of the bus, her face is burning, and she can’t wait to duck down behind the tall backrests, as far away from Coach as possible.

Her friend Grace is waiting for her at the very back. She sees the look on Natalie’s face and places a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about the other girls,” she says. “They’re just jealous.”

Natalie nods.

It’s going to be a long bus ride. She puts in headphones, and closes her eyes.

Candle

It had been a disgustingly hot day, one of several in the hottest week of what would come to be known as a historically hot summer. “Scorching” was the word that later came to mind. It was the kind of dry, suffocating heat that people don’t believe exists in Maine: a heat that belonged several hundred miles down South.

The pond in our backyard had lost its appeal as a way to cool off with the appearance of a baby snapping turtle in late May. In their youth, snappers have a prehistoric charm. They are clumsy little dinosaurs, with mouths too small to attack anything and shells that still look breakable, like the little glass bones of a baby’s skull. But the presence of the snapper raised questions about its origins, and concerns about where mommy and daddy snapper had chosen to hunker down, unseen, waiting for my little sister’s toes to break the surface and dig just deep enough to get snapped up. My mother’s well-intentioned suggestion of putting toxic chemicals in the water was poorly received: my sister, as it turned out, had already named the baby turtle

“Sheldon.”

Without the pond, Katie and Becca (who lived next door and was nine, just a few years ahead of Katie) had been bored to tears and temper. They picked fights, with each other or with our parents or with their esteemed babysitter- and even I could only stomach so many card games, so many hours running through our front yard sprinkler system. It was agreed that the heat would simply be unbearable unless we found a way to break the monotony.

“What about the fair?” my mother suggested, and the girls squealed with delight.

I was surprised. My mother and I generally had the same opinion about carnivals: we found them filthy and chaotic. She used to say the fairground in her childhood hometown was “not worth the price of admission,” even though admission to the Springville County Fair had always been free.

“I was thinking you could take them,” she said, looking at me.

“By myself?”

“Sure. Unless you’re not comfortable with it.”

And there it was, laid out in front of me like a dare. I would be the adult for the day. I would be in charge, responsible for shepherding the girls around and driving through town unsupervised on just a learner’s permit.

I had never done anything like this before: it was always assumed that I’d be a willing babysitter whenever my family needed it, but I had never been offered so much power in return.

I would get to drive across town without an adult riding shotgun, get to choose which activities the girls participated in (and when). I imagined running into my friends at the fairground with their families. “Is your mom here?” their parents would ask. “No, just me today.” I could picture their surprise, my friends’ jealousy.

And so we went to the fair. The girls packed their play purses with real money, dressed in pink and skirts and sunhats like tiny little debutantes. We climbed into my mom’s Toyota

Sienna- new to me, old to the industry, and laughably decrepit to my peers- and drove to the makeshift parking that got set up every year behind the fairgrounds and across from the cemetery. My wheels sank into the ruts of the unkempt field. A boy about my age- I recognized him from school- pointed us to a spot with a sizable pothole in the middle of it. His acne looked like it might burn on the best of days and out in this sun, with his heavy reflective vest and translucent skin and copper hair I wondered if he might just spontaneously combust before he could even finish filling up our row. We paid for tickets, and I was foolishly flattered that at fifteen years old I was expected to pay as an “adult”. But I certainly felt like the grown-up that day, holding one little hand in each of my own and escorting my charges throughout the crowded fairground. It seemed everyone in town had shared our idea about breaking up the dogged heat with a trip to the

Litchfield fair: less expensive than a movie, shorter drive than the beach, and with a satisfying layer of grime that needed to be washed off as soon as you returned home- your day had surely been a grand adventure if, at the end of it, you needed a good scrub.

“Can we go to the petting zoo first?” Katie asked.

I agreed, hoping that I had actually remembered to pack hand sanitizer, and the two of them raced off toward the barn stocked with under-fed and over-crowded livestock. Dry dirt was kicked up in clouds by their little sandaled feet and I remember thinking it was like the whole earth needed a cool glass of water.

They dropped quarters into the feed machine, which poured out tiny handfuls of grain to give to goats and sheep and chickens and other animals that were only exciting in this context.

Katie oohed and ahhhed over a goose, even though hundreds of them desecrated our yard every year as the Atlantic flyaway made its way back to Canada. Cows that served as a livelihood for some families were paraded around as pets. And after watching while one of the petting zoo pigs was sold to a family as a food source, I wondered if we’d made the right decision in coming to the fair at all.

But there was no stopping the girls now. After generous dollops of Germ-X, we left the dusty straw of the petting zoo and headed for the rides. The smell of fried food hung heavy in the air. The lines were as gross as the prices, and they seemed to follow us everywhere, bottlenecking whichever attraction the girls wanted to see next. To get to the carousel we had to walk single-file, strung together hand-in-hand so I wouldn’t lose them in the crowd. I waited with the parents while the girls spun, feeling very grown up as I took pictures of ‘my kids’ just like they did. But I felt young again and vulnerable when I noticed the carny eyeing me like a piece of meat. I tugged the hem of my shorts down as far as they would go, and wished I had worn more clothing, or that this damned heat would give way to a crisp autumn of cardigan conditions. As soon as the ride stopped I hustled the girls away as quickly as I could in the throng of people, all waiting impatiently for their own shot at musical motion sickness.

It wasn’t long before I’d had enough of playing adult. I was hot, exhausted, and sticky: a passing stranger had accidentally smeared her candy apple on my shirt. We walked through the

House of Mirrors and I thought bitterly about how the girls might love their warped reflections now, but come puberty they would cry and diet and hate themselves when every time they looked in a mirror a new part of their body had swelled or stretched. Plump bodies in one reflection, then dangerously thin in the next. I decided to treat them both to a fattening plate of fried dough while they could still enjoy it.

To get there, we had to walk through the midway, a gauntlet of garish lights and canned music and people trying to sell us a ticket, a dart, a ring to toss. “Step right up,” they roared,

“Laaaaaaadies and gentlemen. Make a basket, take a prize, folks, that’s all it takes!” I kept my eyes forward, knowing that eye contact was an invitation for a more personal appeal. Something like “you there, with the pretty girl on your arm” and here I was toting two little girls. They were prime targets, spending money they hadn’t earned. That’s why I saw him before I heard him. My eyes were trained dead ahead, desperately focused on pushing my girls through the crowd and past the enterprising barker ready to con small children into a game that didn’t let them win.

He was on a mission too, pushing with a far sicker desperation than my own, throwing people onto each other or onto the ground and trying to run through the mob as his latex smile trickled onto his teeth. The unpainted centerpiece, where his red clown nose had fallen off, looked obscene: a fleshy hole above a grin that was grotesquely distorted. If he noticed, if he tasted his waxy face crumbling onto his own tongue he didn’t seem to care because he only cared about one thing a single word which he was screaming over and over and over again above the roar of the midway at the top of his lungs:

“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”

I remember thinking for a second that “fire” had been Katie’s first word, when she had tried to ask for her pacifier but had been too young to pronounce it in its entirety and then my second thought as the mob of people behind him descended on us was Oh god, Katie!

The girls were too short to have seen the clown, the coal mine canary, the prophet pushing through a Red Sea that refused to part. They shrieked in protest when I yanked them close to me but shrieks turned to screams when they saw the flood of people hurtling toward them, adults turning to animals as the crowd became a stampede.

It was like a tidal wave of screaming faces and voices rushing toward us and our only hope was to get out of the way. I dove to the side, pulling one little hand in each of my own and smashing against the wood of the nearest booth.

I climbed up, knocking aside squirt guns, then reached down to pull the girls after me.

Panic or fear or divine intervention let me lift them up like they were dolls and we all three crashed over the counter just as a man in a wifebeater bulldozed through the spot where we had been standing. I looked at the flood of bodies just long enough to see heads disappearing and not resurfacing, a little boy fall without getting back up, before I dropped down off the counter and into the booth, pulling the girls along behind me. We tumbled through plush pandas as big as

Katie, fought through prizes stacked and suspended to entice the crowd. But their frozen smiles and plastic eyes had no power over us now as we tumbled through the booth and I flung open a door for EMPLOYEE USE ONLY PLEASE that brought us into sunlight on the other side of the midway.

We would find out on the news the next morning that it had been arson, that someone had lit up the booth at the top of the midway, and the flames had flown down the line, wildfire, faster and surer than dominos. By the time the midway ended the fire was a living thing that swallowed the neighboring concessions stands, the Exhibition Hall, the tent where live bands sometimes came to perform. See, what they don’t tell you about the fair is that everything burns. Grease rags and gasoline generators every few feet, stacks of dry hay and straw for the animals. The fire lane was blocked by cars parked sloppily, attempts to accommodate as many of them as possible. One tent pulled out of storage to provide extra shade was still coated with paraffin wax from the old days before people knew better. And the permanent structures, the ones that belonged to us and not the traveling carnival company that turned my town into a candle, were made of old, dry wood. Brittle planks and scorched grass were kindling for the bonfire that sucked all the air out of Litchfield and replaced it with smoke.

Afterward, we walked home in silence. I had one little hand in each of my own, and I wondered if I would ever stop seeing the fairgrounds every time I closed my eyes: the Ferris wheel standing tall and blackened, firefighters solemnly sweeping up broken mirrors and plucking feathers from the charred remains of the petting zoo. They stacked smoked carousel horses and I thought about the children who had been on the ride when the operator abandoned it, wondering why their parents had stopped taking photos as their sticky smiles spun round and round and round. I thought about the clown whose face had melted in front of me, a wax statue destroyed by the heat. I thought about the marching band in the Hartford Connecticut circus fire that had played The Stars and Stripes Forever while the bigtop collapsed around them and their brass buttons burned circles into their skin. When I got home that first night and crawled into bed, ash on my skin and smoke in my lungs, I thought about my sister. And as I drifted off to sleep, I thought about the little boy who had fallen down on the midway.

Recess

Surrounded by boxes, Sarah doesn’t know quite what to do with herself. She’s never been good at packing. While her mother can find a reason to pack anything under the sun for even the shortest trips, Sarah prefers to purge, and college will be no exception. She plans to pack only what she needs, and she doesn’t hold onto things without a purpose.

But the basement is her mother’s territory, which means it’s stacked wall-to-wall with endless boxes and bins. Helpfully, many of them are labeled, although already Sarah can see a few that are simply marked “miscellaneous.”

She knows better than to touch anything with “Photos” or “Clothes” on the label, so she starts with a big blue bin marked as “Sarah – Elementary School.” It’s heavy, and she figures most of it will be paper products- artwork of her own, mainly, plus a lot of school bulletins and handouts. Sarah’s mom held onto every scrap of paper the school had ever given her. She treated an announcement about head lice the way some people would treat a birth certificate. Some of the bins, Sarah knows, contain nothing other than old copies of the Sun Journal.

She sets the bin down on the ground, wondering if there’s really any point to this project.

Surely nothing from these basement bins will make her back-to-school packing list. And she doubts that her mother will let her throw anything away. We might as well hold onto it, she can just picture her saying. We have the space! And besides, you were so little, then.

At the top of the bin, there are a few birthday pencils: the school’s way of apologizing to students who didn’t have a summer birthday. She doesn’t remember which one is from which year. In fact, Sarah doesn’t remember very much of elementary school at all. She pulls the pencils out and sets them aside. They’ve never been sharpened, but she figures maybe if she just dumps them in the kitchen drawer with the other writing utensils, her mother will use them eventually.

Beneath the pencils, she finds an elementary school yearbook.

The concept itself is ridiculous, Sarah thinks. She attended a tiny elementary school in rural Maine, where the kids you went to kindergarten with are the same exact kids who march across the high school stage with you at graduation. Yet the yearbook is full of scribbled notes and phone numbers as though the children leaving second grade that year might never see each other again. As though anyone, at age seven or eight, has anything important that they might need to say to each other.

Sarah doesn’t remember that she got a very important note, once, when she was seven.

There’s a lot about elementary school that she just can’t remember.

She flips through the pages, but stops when she notices something strange. It’s one of the boys, a few years ahead of her in school. His face is gone. She must have scratched it out, or erased the cheap ink, maybe. She doesn’t remember why she did it, although she vaguely remembers getting in trouble because of it. She’s pretty sure she got scolded for ‘destroying memories that she would want someday.’ She’s not sure why, now, but she knows that she doesn’t want to remember the boy with no face. She feels a bit sick, looking at what’s left of the picture.

There are people who do remember. They could help her, if she asked.

Probably she should start with Miss Leslie, the teacher who was usually on recess duty when Sarah was in second grade. She always liked Miss Leslie. Sarah wants to study English when she starts college in the fall, and she remembers learning a lot of language from Miss Leslie. One day, for example, Sarah rushed to join her friends Abby and Izzy on the swing set during recess.

“I like your dress,” Abby was saying, as Sarah got there.

Izzy beamed. “My daddy got it for me. He buys me everything I want. Except trans fats.

Those are horrible.”

Miss Leslie, who had been walking by just in time to overhear this, let out a long laugh.

“Oh little Miss Izzy, you and your daddy are a hoot.”

A hoot, Sarah remembers thinking. She would have liked to be a hoot.

Another time, they were all in art class. Miss Leslie was with them because of William, the special needs boy. He was called a “one-on-one,” which meant that one of the special ed teachers, like Miss Leslie, always had to be in the classroom with him in case he required one- on-one attention from an adult. Sarah had seen this happen a few times. Like the time that

William got angry and started banging his head on the wall, or when he snuck his toy dinosaur into the cafeteria during lunch and started dunking it in his mashed potatoes and then licking them off the top.

Sarah thought William was the most disgusting boy in the whole school. He was always doing something strange, and he had a licking problem. The teachers knew differently, though.

And by now you, too, are starting to suspect that there was another faceless boy who may have been much worse.

But anyway, on that day in art class, they’d been working on paper cards and Sarah had a brilliant idea to make hers three-dimensional. It was going to be a masterpiece.

“Careful with that,” Miss Leslie had said. “Someone might see it and try to steal your thunder.” Steal your thunder. Sarah had never heard this expression before, but she knew what it meant. That happened sometimes when she heard adults talk. Like when Sarah overheard two teachers talking about her friend Abby, and one said that she was sweet, but a real “Plain Jane.”

There was another expression Miss Leslie had taught her. ‘Hands off the merchandise.’

Sarah doesn’t remember this, but Miss Leslie does.

At least, she remembers part of it. She remembers that Sarah came up to her one day after school to complain about a boy who was picking on her at recess. Miss Leslie had smiled, cutting her off, and saying “Oh, honey. If a boy is chasing you at recess, that just means he likes you!”

Sarah had looked disappointed, which prompted Miss Leslie to continue, “But if you don’t like him back, you just tell him, ‘Hands off the merchandise.’ Okay?”

Sarah had nodded.

But that’s about all that Miss Leslie would remember about Sarah and the boy with no face. The conversation wouldn’t tell Sarah much, and she’d have to ask other people, too. But it would be a start. Maybe next she would talk to her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Wagner.

Mrs. Wagner hasn’t thought about all that in years. She tries not to. If you asked, she’d probably tell you she has no idea what you’re talking about. Unlike Miss Leslie, Mrs. Wagner is well aware that the way she handled things may not have been 100% correct. If you asked, she’d deny any involvement.

But if Sarah asked, well…that might be different. If it was important to her. See, unlike

Sarah, Mrs. Wagner remembers about the note that Sarah got.

It had been Mrs. Wagner’s idea to start the classroom mailboxes in the first place. “Like

Valentine’s Day, all year round,” she’d said. Mrs. Wagner had once been the kind of little girl who got a lot of cards on Valentine’s Day. Plus, this was back before every tyke and toddler had their own cell phone or iPad and their friends were just a text away. Back then, kids actually enjoyed writing mail. And she was sure it would help boost language skills, or something.

So each kid decorated a cute little cardboard mailbox and wrote their name on it. The program went smoothly for many weeks, maybe even months, before the boy sent Sarah that note.

I want to touch you again, it read. Meet me at recess.

If she hadn’t been paying attention, Mrs. Wagner would never have noticed anything. But she happened to glance over just as Sarah was opening her mail, just in time to see her read it, crumple it into the trash, and start crying quietly at her desk.

“If it had been anyone else,” Mrs. Wagner would be tempted to tell Sarah, if she asked about it now, “I wouldn’t even have said anything. Kids are always starting drama amongst themselves and it’s the teacher’s role to stay above it. But you were a cherub. So nice and so bright. So many friends. I just couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to start a fight with you.”

Which is why, during recess, Mrs. Wagner had fished the note out of the garbage can and read it. Her jaw dropped.

It was from a boy, that much she could tell by the handwriting. And it was unsigned, but she suspected that Sarah would know exactly who sent it.

I want to touch you again. Even years later, the words would be seared into Mrs.

Wagner’s memory. They made her skin crawl.

She had thought about phoning the girl’s parents, at the time. She really had. But the school-wide mailboxes had been her idea, and even involving the principal or the other teachers, well, it seemed like it would just blow everything out of proportion. It might even bother Sarah more. Drawing so much attention to her. And after all, it was just a note.

So she threw it back into the trashcan where it belonged. And when Sarah came back from recess, Mrs. Wagner made a point of checking in with her. Asking about how her day was going. Asking about what had happened outside. And Sarah was a good kid, she always had been, she never made any trouble. She just smiled and nodded and talked about how she and her friend Abby had gotten matching stuffed kittens and how recess was fun because the kittens would ride with them on the swings.

Mrs. Wagner put the whole thing out of her mind.

Abby would remember the matching stuffed kittens, too. Although she didn’t keep hers.

Sarah’s kitten is still packed away in one of her mother’s bins.

Abby wouldn’t think of it right away, but if you asked, Abby would remember something weird about Sarah and the kittens. “Oh, she loved that little cat,” Abby might tell you now, if you asked. “Maybe a little too much. She used to make everyone wash their hands if they wanted to hold it or play with hit. Which was stupid, ‘cause she took that thing everywhere, including the filthy playground. And she let it sit on the swings and the bus seat on the way home.”

Abby would never realize that for Sarah, it wasn’t about the dirt. It was about the hands.

Dirty hands. Touching. A dirty feeling that she could never scrub clean.

Hands off the merchandise.

But Abby, like everyone else in Sarah’s life, had no idea how bad things were.

Mrs. Wagner could have found out, if she asked. Maybe even Miss Leslie if she’d given

Sarah a chance to explain what was going on with the boy. And there was another person who could have done something. Should have done something. Mr. Feldman worked as a guidance counselor for the middle and elementary schools in the district. Sarah met him for the first time when he came into her second grade classroom to give them all a presentation on good touches and bad touches. He used a cat puppet to explain to the class about “bathing-suit places” and how a bad touch was when someone touched you on one of those places without permission. Especially if they were a stranger, and they offered you candy, or they drove an unlabeled van. If that happened, Mr. Feldman explained, you were supposed to tell an adult right away.

Every now and then, once every few years, maybe, a kid would ask a question that made you realize they knew something they shouldn’t know. The funniest ones were when a kid caught their parents in the bedroom. They always struggled to make sense of it. A first grader, for example, had once asked “Why do mommy and daddy lock the door when they wrestle?”

The most disturbing were the questions that revealed first-hand knowledge of subjects vastly inappropriate for the kid’s age. He remembered a seventh grade girl who had raised her hand and asked, without any shame or hesitation, “Why does sex hurt more when the girl is on top?” He hadn’t even known where to begin, with that one. He just knew the girl needed far more help than what he would be able to offer her during the course of his presentation.

There was another question that Mr. Feldman would never forget, no matter how hard he tried. It wasn’t even necessarily the question itself that bothered him. Maybe there could be an innocent explanation, for that. But the way she asked.

Sarah had been quiet during the presentation. He liked her, mostly because she didn’t giggle at everything he said, like a lot of the other kids. He was happy to call on her when she raised her hand.

She hesitated. “Can a bad touch…is it supposed to feel kind of good?” Something about the way she asked. It made Mr. Feldman’s stomach drop into his feet, and he froze for a moment, then stammered out something about how different parts of the body felt different at different times and with different people and so on.

And there were lots of perfectly innocent explanations, he had told himself. When a father hugged a little girl, the girl might notice that bathing-suit places were touching, but the hug felt good, and she only had cause to question it after hearing his presentation. Or a mother helping her young daughter try on clothes, or something. There were lots of perfectly innocent interactions that might seem, when taken too literally, to fly in the face of the good-touch-bad- touch rules that Mr. Feldman had set forth. So he assured himself.

And even if Sarah did ask him about second grade, now, years later, he wouldn’t say anything to her. What could he say?

Your question could have been harmless, but I knew. I knew. It was the way you asked it.

But there was so much else going on. I have kids too, you know, and that was the year I was going through a divorce. I wasn’t myself. Plus, there were the budget cuts in the school and I thought I might lose my job, might be replaced by a video that you youngsters could watch instead of talking to me, and that was also the year my daughter got so sick…

It could go on and on. At the time, it had seemed like it probably wasn’t such a big deal and there was so much else going on and he was only human, after all. And she was a bright, happy girl. He forgot all about what she had said.

Of course, Mr. Feldman would never say any of those things to Sarah. And Sarah would never ask him. She’d never talk to Mr. Feldman, or Mrs. Wagner, or Miss Leslie. She would stay in touch Abby for a while, but only to wish her a happy birthday on Facebook. Sarah would never remember exactly what happened with the boy with no face. But for the rest of her life, there would be the dreams. Bad ones. Not very often, but just when she thinks this time they are gone for good there’ll be another one and she’ll wake up sweating. Feeling dirty, and scared. Those first few foggy moments after waking will be painful, because for a second, she will think she is still on the playground. Still at recess. Many times throughout her life, Sarah will be seven years old.

But today, Sarah is surrounded by boxes, and she doesn’t know quite what to do with herself. It isn’t long before she realizes there’s nothing in the elementary school bin that she’ll be allowed to throw away, much less want to pack for college. Instead she puts all the junk back the way she found it. Even the pencils. Although she puts the yearbook on the very bottom of the bin, and piles everything else on top of it.

She brings the box back over to the basement shelf where she found it, where she will not have to look at it, or think about it, ever again. Where it belongs.

Nonantum

Michael had gotten lucky with the crime circuit. You see it all the time, even if you don’t realize it: the suspect in season two of Bones, turns out he’s the same guy as the beat cop in L.A.

Crime, and he’s also a grieving widower in season 4 of Criminal Minds, a mad bomber in The

Forensic Files, maybe he’ll even have a cameo as a rapist in Law and Order: SVU. Only the main cast from each show is famous, so the rest, the supporting actors, they get rotated around like side-dishes on a Lazy Susan.

With Kathy in marketing, money hadn’t been such an issue for a while now. Not like when Michael first started out. He missed that period, in a way. Fresh out of school. Something romantic about working at Starbucks, or Target, or wherever (it didn’t matter) until he missed too many shifts for auditions and had to start over somewhere else. Every now and then he’d run into a group of his own kind and the gig would last longer. Michael could drop a shift last second as many times as he needed, because the rest of the actors (or baristas, or bartenders, or whatever else they were posing as for the moment) knew they could always count on him to take over for them at the drop of a hat.

And he wasn’t a total hack. Unlike many of the other busboys and cashier clerks, he’d made it as a real actor. He’d been in a few feature films here and there (never as anyone you’d remember). He’d also had a couple of recurring roles on TV, which helped, because those contracts always lasted longer. It’s just that the crime shows had really been carrying him, these past few years, and those were drying up- despite what the TV guide might have you believe, the number of crime dramas out there is, in fact, finite. It’s one thing when the shooter from CSI:

Miami shows up as a local cop on Dexter, but it’s a whole ‘nother issue if the shooter comes back to CSI: Miami again, only this time, playing somebody else. Plus, Kathy had been on his case about money. Her sister’s family just bought a summer home in Vinalhaven and now capital-p property was all Kathy could talk about. Never mind that real estate wasn’t a goddamn game of Monopoly, or that her sister and her brother-in-law were both making bank as pharmacists. This was why Michael handled the finances.

But even without a second place on an obscure plot of land somewhere in rural Maine,

Michael and Kathy had grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle that Michael’s paychecks were no longer keeping up with. So when Dave called, happier than Michael had heard him in years,

Michael was in no position to play hardball.

“A boxer?”

“You bet. A real tough guy type of role, the kind they save for the real studs. You still got it, Mikey.”

“How’d you land a thing like that?”

Michael was nobody’s fool. He’d seen plenty of sports movies and he knew he was getting way too old to star in one. Those types of roles went to the Channing Tatums and Mark

Wahlbergs of the industry. Guys with about eighteen abs and jawlines drawn on with a protractor.

“Well, so, that’s the thing. You’re not the boxer, I guess.”

“What?”

“You’d be playing the boxer’s dad. But still, the dad of the protagonist, he takes up boxing. You know, to get closer to his son.”

“Damn.”

So it wasn’t exactly the starring role that Michael had imagined for a fleeting moment.

But Michael couldn’t complain. Especially after Dave told him who they’d cast to play the son. “Jesus, so this thing is gonna be big, isn’t it?”

“You’re damn right, Mikey. Swank Motion Pictures already put in for the distribution rights.”

“Jesus.”

And just like that, the whole thing got started. A call from his agent, like so many others, and a flight out to Boston to read the sides. Michael and Kathy lived in L.A., but they both traveled a lot, and Michael was no stranger to this particular route.

Dave had explained to Michael that the audition was more of a formality than anything else. For on thing, Dave had an on-again-off-again romantic relationship with the casting director, which worked to their advantage this particular month. But according to Dave, they also really liked Michael for the role. He bore a strong resemblance to the young guy they’d cast as the lead, and he wasn’t famous enough that people would spend half the movie seeing another character when they looked at Michael (God help those poor Harry Potter kids). And Dave didn’t mention this explicitly, but Michael knew that his paycheck- albeit the largest he’d seen in a while- would be seen as a steal for the producers, compared to hiring someone more famous.

“So the next step is boot camp,” Dave explained, about a week after his first call.

“Boot camp?”

“Yeah. Unless you got a secret boxing career you wanna tell me about?”

“Right.”

“Anyway, we found a guy just outside of Boston who’ll train you for next-to-nothing.

Probably hoping it’ll bring some buzz to his training gym. He’ll whip your ass into shape.”

Michael looked down at himself. For a guy in his fifties, he thought his ass was pretty well in shape as it was. Kathy was always calling him her ‘silver fox.’ She also said that actors age like wine while their wives age like milk. There was some truth to it, in their case, though of course he’d never admit that to Kathy.

“Listen, Mikey, don’t fuck this up, alright?”

“What do you mean?”

“The training. Don’t give ‘em a reason to change their minds and go with somebody younger.”

“For the dad role?”

Dave snorted. “You’re no spring chicken, pal. All I’m saying is to take it seriously. They want eye-candy for two generations, you know what I mean? Not a hot young boxer, and his lardass dad.”

“Aw Jesus, Dave.”

“I’m just telling it like it is. You don’t want ‘em to realize they can’t get caviar from a dog’s ass.”

Michael hung up on him.

Of course, Kathy was thrilled with the news. Partly because of the money, but mostly,

Michael figured, because he’d be out of the state and out of her way for the next few months.

She jumped at the chance to help him find an apartment to sublet and a car to rent while he was in training. They had dinner together his last night in L.A.

“So Dave tells me you’ll be in shape the next time I see you,” she said, taking a sip of her wine.

“You talked to Dave?”

She shrugged. “He’s always calling me when you don’t pick up right away. You know how he gets.” Michael certainly did. He wondered if Dave had given her the same spiel about caviar, but he decided not to ask.

The next morning, Kathy drove him to the airport. “You’ll call when you get in?”

He nodded, sipped his coffee, and kissed his wife goodbye.

~

Michael sat in his car for an extra moment to double check the address, but the location in his GPS did, in fact, match the one that Dave had given him. “So where the hell am I?” he wondered aloud.

He stepped out onto the cracked asphalt and scanned the rest of the parking lot. There was a surprisingly large number of cars around, given that the only building on the property was unmarked, an ugly gray thing, all cinder blocks and scattered ivy. It reminded Michael of a movie he’d made in college, one of his first cracks at a feature film. He and his buddies shot it in an abandoned one-room schoolhouse that they pretended was a prison. Michael wondered briefly if the building in front of him would have the same smell: stale beer, mildew, and rat piss.

The gray cinder blocks were broken up by a patch of bright red. Michael guessed that this door was the main entrance, but mostly because he couldn’t see any other options from his vantage point in the parking lot.

It wasn’t until he actually set foot inside that he knew he was in the right place.

The first thing he saw was a giant, snarling gorilla. It was massive, just a floating head, painted on the wall across from the door where he’d come in. Its angry mouth hung open, revealing enormous fangs that dripped red onto the writing below: The more you sweat at practice, the less you bleed in the ring, it read.

“Jesus,” Michael muttered. It was a moment or two before he could look away from the giant ape and take stock of the rest of his surroundings. The wall on the left side of the lobby was totally blank, except for the words “Nonantum Training Gym” in large black letters. The right side of the room was crowded, with two doorways and a cluttered front desk. It was mostly piled high with paperwork, but Michael could see a handful of mouthguards, a set of keys on a brass ring, a stopwatch, and some other miscellanea that he couldn’t identify. The place smelled like a locker room, even from out in the lobby, and he could hear the crashing and clanging of free weights from beyond one of the doorways.

He was alone in the lobby, but not for long. Just as he was about to make his way toward the closest of the two doors, the other one opened. A lean guy strode in, talking on his cell phone.

“Yeah, I understand. Listen, I think your guy just walked in right now. Tall? Brown hair?

Kinda doofy looking?”

Michael recognized Dave’s booming laugh on the other end of the line.

The lean man continued. “Yeah, I’ll let him know you checked in. Uh-huh. Sure.

Whatever you need.” The man snapped his cell shut and looked up at Michael. “I’m Russ,” he said.

Russ looked like a junkyard dog. He was thin, but tough-looking, all muscles wound tight around a wiry frame. He had big bags around his eyes and a sunken look to his mouth and cheeks. He wasn’t ugly, exactly, but looked like the type of guy who maybe you’d cross the street if you found yourself walking toward him alone at night.

Michael stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Russ. I’m-” “Yeah, I know who you are,” Russ waved his hand away. “You’re the actor guy. I just talked to your agent. He always babysit you like that?”

Michael wasn’t sure how to respond, but Russ didn’t wait around for an answer anyway.

He walked to the other side of the desk and started fishing around in the piles of junk. “You ever punch somebody before?”

“Uh, no. I haven’t.”

“Anybody ever punched you?”

Michael shook his head.

Russ sneered. “Well, Hollywood, today’s your lucky day.”

He tossed something at Michael, who barely caught it. It felt like a balled up pair of socks.

“Watch what I do, alright?”

Russ held his hands out. There were so many bumps and scars on them, it looked like they’d shattered into a million pieces once and been put back together by a group of schoolchildren.

Michael watched, perplexed, as Russ’ mangled hands deftly unwound the fabric into two long strips. He wrapped them, one at a time, around each wrist and each set of knuckles. He would switch between the fingers and the wrist until it looked like each arm was bandaged from the mid-forearm down to the knuckle joints.

“Now you try it.”

And Michael tried. He really did. He could just picture Dave and Kathy, holding their breath, and watching him. Don’t fuck it up, Mikey. But within seconds of uncoiling the wraps he’d messed them up. They smelled like the inside of an old gym bag, and they tangled around his clumsy hands like cobwebs.

~

It didn’t take long for Michael to realize that he had no particular talent or fondness for the sport of boxing.

Nonantum itself terrified him. After he finally got the wraps sorted out, in a passable imitation of Russ’ own handiwork, Russ led him out into the main room of the first floor. There were four rows of punching bags, with just enough space between them so that adjacent bags could be used at the same time. Around the outside of the room, the walls were lined with speed bags. Michael didn’t know what they were at the time. They looked like big teardrops dripping down from wooden discs, like some kind of bizarre UFO.

Russ led him through the rows of bags. He was unfazed by the violence of the surrounding activity, although Michael felt like he walking through lanes of highway traffic. The room was loud. Hip-hop music blared over a loudspeaker, but the real racket was the other athletes. A dozen of them, maybe, punching and kicking and wailing on the heavy-bags, which jerked on their chains like fish on hooks.

The weirdest part was their breath. Which each hit, the men seemed to let out a little hiss of air, a sharp exhale that coincided with each strike on the bag.

“Why are they doing that?” he asked.

Russ frowned. “What, boxing?”

“No, no, I mean the breathing thing.”

“You ever had somebody knick the wind outta you?”

“Uh, no.” Russ nodded, unsurprised at the answer. “Well, it doesn’t feel so good.” He pointed to his diaphragm. “This shit seizes right up. You can’t breathe for a minute, and you lose the fight.”

“Oh.”

“But you can let the air out yourself. It takes all the pressure out of your head and chest.

Try it.” They had reached the far side of the gym, and Russ gestured toward a heavy-bag that no one else was using. “Seriously, try it. Throw a punch while holding your breath, and then try it again with the exhale. You’ll see.”

Michael took a step away from the bag. “Oh, um, I probably shouldn’t. I don’t exactly…well, I don’t know my way around one of these things.”

Russ just waited, arms crossed.

After a moment, Michael looked back at the bag. He took in a deep breath, and then tossed his right fist out at the bag. The hit was hesitant and unimpressive.

Russ snorted. “Okay, you know what, forget about the breathing shit. We’ll come back to it. We got a lot of fucking work to do. Come on.”

Michael followed him up a flight of stairs and through another doorway. The second floor, it turned out, was designed primarily for strength training and general fitness. There were two locker rooms, but most of the space was devoted to floor mats and free weights.

“Do some stretching. I’ll check on my guys downstairs, and when I get back we’ll get you started.”

“Uh, right. Sure.”

Russ left, leaving Michael alone with a handful of other men who were doing various cardio and strength exercises. Michael had no idea what to do. He was 52, and he hadn’t played a competitive sport since his days of intramural broomball in college.

“Right,” he mumbled again. “Stretching. So I’ll just… uh… stretch.”

He shuffled around awkwardly for a bit, cracking his knuckles, before deciding to just hide in the locker room until Russ returned.

~

By the end of the first day, Michael could hardly move, and he doubted that a proper stretching routine would have been enough to save him.

Nonantum was in chaos throughout the day. Navigating the ground floor was like a high- stakes game of dodgeball every time he had to go anywhere. Don’t get hit by the swinging bags of sand, don’t get hit by flying fists, don’t get hit by that one guy who spits on the ground all the time even though he’s indoors.

Michael noticed that everyone in the gym his first day was at least a decade younger than him. He hoped the others were not all as painfully aware of this as he was. And they all seemed to be there for a good reason. Everyone was focused, some angry, some looking surprisingly manic, and all totally drenched in sweat. Some of the boxers beat a steady pulse into their bag like a heartbeat, while others swung around arhythmically, adding to the overall chaos. Michael had stopped to watch one man who was punching and kicking, the kicks landing at eye level or higher. Russ assured Michael that this was “MMA shit” and that fists were the only necessary weapon for Michael’s training regimen.

It was one of very few comforting things that Russ said that day. For the most part, he just shouted. He shouted the names of exercises, and issued impossible orders for sets and reps that Michael just couldn’t fill. The worst of it was burpees. Invented by Satan, probably, these involved dropping down into push-up position, kicking one’s legs out, and then leaping back up into a standing position and reaching high into the air. It was torture.

“There are eight punches,” Russ explained, once they had moved on from fitness to technique.

“That’s it? Michael asked.

He realized his mistake almost immediately. Though there were only eight distinct types of punches, each one required a completely different string of motions. And just standing still, there was a certain posture, a stance, that had to be maintained. Walking and running were out of the question. Boxers, it turned out, took a difference kind of step. Michael’s hands and his head and his chest and his feet and his breath and absolutely everything else all had to be constantly regulated. Not to mention the range of different defensive moves designed to deflect the various types of attacks.

On top of all that, the eight punches were a numerical code that Michael just couldn’t keep straight. Russ would yell out combinations of numbers that corresponded to punches for

Michael to throw. He’d shout out “1-2-3-2” and Michael would watch his hands instead of listening, trying desperately to imitate what he saw. If he messed up, Russ slapped his head or his shoulders. If Michael let his hands drop slightly, leaving his face unprotected, Russ smacked it.

And if Michael stopped altogether, letting his hands fall hopelessly at his sides, Russ stood so close to yell at him that all he could smell was sweat and cigar smoke, and he’d start up again immediately.

He left the gym around 6:00, feeling battered and bullied. He’d never been one of the tough guys. He had a degree in the arts, for crying out loud, and he had always looked down on jocks and their toxic masculinity with great disdain. But Nonantum was their world. And he would have to find a way to survive in it.

~

By the end of the first week, Michael was so sore he could barely stoop to pick up his gym bag at the end of the day. He was forced to admit that maybe there was a reason the Matt

Damons and Mark Wahlbergs of the acting industry generally landed this sort of role. It was back-breaking. But he had also already lost a few pounds, and he was starting to get used to the

Nonantum soundtrack. The chains rattling, the hip hop that underscored their workout, even the fighters who hissed with every punch.

After a few days, he went out and invested in his own gloves and wraps. He was sick of sticking his hands into equipment still sweat-soaked from the last user. Putting on his own stuff, he felt a little bit more legitimate. It was an important step toward fitting in, becoming dedicated, real, like the men around him. Russ gave him a once-over and a nod of approval when he saw the new gear. Michael was sore and cranky, but strangely satisfied.

Michael had Saturdays to himself, but he spent his first one at Nonantum anyway. He didn’t know the area well, for one thing, and he didn’t have much else to do. So he brought a notebook and pen to the gym with him, hoping to learn from the techniques of the other athletes.

It beat hanging out in his cramped hotel room.

He hadn’t seen a lot of women at Nonantum, but Saturday was when he saw her for the first time, the woman with the messy red curls down her back. He couldn’t picture her in anything other than gym clothes. That Saturday was also when Michael first met Bigfoot.

Bigfoot’s real name was Martin, but the guys at Nonantum had nicknamed him after

Everett “Bigfoot” Martin, an American heavyweight born on the 4th of July sometime in the sixties. He was thin, but not the way Russ was thin. Russ had muscles that leapt off his frame, a walking strip of meat, but Bigfoot looked like he might blow over if you sneezed on him. He was the only one at Nonantum who was older than Michael, with long wisps of grey hair sticking out at odd angles.

Michael was jotting down drills in his notebook when Bigfoot crept over to him.

“Hey. You’re the actor guy, right?

Michael put his pen down and nodded. “Uh, yeah. That’s me.”

Bigfoot grinned and Michael noticed he was missing a bunch of teeth. “Wow,” he said,

“Russ told me all about you.” He sat down on the bench next to Michael and placed a wiry hand on his knee. “You know, you and me, we’re the oddballs around here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I’m not a boxer, either. I just like to watch them. I’m a janitor.”

Ah. Given his build, this made more sense, but it did make Michael wonder what happened to the man’s teeth.

He kept talking. “This is a nice place, a real nice place, but somebody’s gotta clean up the cages after the gladiators go home.”

“Sorry?”

“After fight night. Lotta blood to mop up, on fight night.”

Michael frowned. “Wait a minute, people actually fight here?”

Bigfoot nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, you betcha. Every Friday night we got a new card lined up.”

“There was a fight last night?” “More than one. Whole buncha kids throwing down. Six fights, I think, this week. You should be there for the next one.”

Michael felt like he was in high school again, getting invited to a kegger with all the cool kids. He realized right away that Bigfoot would be a useful friend to have at Nonantum.

“What’s it like?” he asked him.

And Bigfoot was more than happy to explain. He practically salivated when he talked about fight night. He spoke with a reverence about the way people of all ages mobbed Nonantum at night when the fists were flying and sweat shone on gnarled backs. But those people left once things got civil again. Only Bigfoot stayed as the sweat dried, when the fighters were no longer hard and wet like stones under a waterfall. He was the one who mopped up their dried blood and sweat and spit. Some nights, he told me, he picked up teeth and kept them in a mason jar at the bottom of his locker.

He knew everything. He saw everything.

“That lady you were starin’ at, the redhead? Her name’s Barbara.”

Michael flinched. He hadn’t realized he’d been so obvious.

“Oh, and keep your wrist straight on your left hooks. You’ll fracture it if you’re not careful. Those take a while to heal.”

“Right. Thanks.”

It turned out that Bigfoot had been working at Nonantum for almost as long as Michael had been making movies, and they both had some stories to tell. Bigfoot wanted to know how sex scenes worked in films and Michael told him about the privacy blankets, little pieces of cloth that kept things from actually touching. Bigfoot told him about the time a guy had eaten a burger right before a fight, and how he’d thrown it up after one single punch to the gut. Bigfoot had been called into the ring to clean it up. He said you could have put the burger back together and sold it again, it was so fresh.

Michael told him how you felt like royalty when professionals combed your hair, and

Bigfoot explained that a lot of grown men cried in the locker rooms when they lost a fight, after everyone else had gone home. Not because their hands hurt, or their noses were bleeding, or their vision swam, but because they had always wanted to be good at something.

~

Michael spent a lot of time talking to Bigfoot over the next few weeks. He was Michael’s refuge from Russ’ temper.

“What the hell is his problem?” Michael asked one day, after being called a ‘Hollywood pussy’ one too many times. “What’s he doing opening a gym and offering lessons if he hates other people so goddamn much?”

Bigfoot laughed. “In his defense, he didn’t open this place. He inherited it.”

“Well. His parents should have left it to somebody else.”

“Not them, actually, I think they died when he was pretty young. He got this place from his big brother, Nate.”

Michael did feel a little bad for Russ, after hearing that. It was a lot of important people to have lost. As an only child, he’d always wanted a sibling, but he figured it was better to never have one than to have them die while you were young.

Still, Russ’ verbal abuse didn’t exactly soften Michael’s heart. He was glad he had

Bigfoot to confide in.

And Barbara, the redhead. They spoke for the first time on the Wednesday night of

Michael’s third or fourth week at Nonantum. She came in just as he was finishing up a particularly traumatic ab workout with Russ.

Michael’s wedding ring was buried beneath three layers of Everlast wraps, and he made his way over to the bag next to hers as she was throwing combos. He recognized a 6-7-9-5, and started in on a routine of his own that he’d seen another boxer working on that weekend.

She stopped after a while to catch her breath and Michael followed suit, turning to look at her. She wasn’t particularly beautiful. Baggy and butch, like Hillary Swank in Million Dollar

Baby except without the professional hair and makeup crew. Still, there was something striking about her.

“How’d you get into boxing?” Michael asked her, as they reached for their water bottles.

“That’s a long story,” she said.

“I’ve got all night.”

She didn’t even pretend to blush at the thinly-veiled invitation, just smiled and told

Michael that she had to work in the morning.

He laughed. “I don’t think any job can compare to the torture that Russ has planned for me tomorrow. I wish I had to work in the morning.”

Right on cue, Russ called over to him. “Hey, Hollywood, get your ass over here. Cardio.”

Michael gave Barbara a what-can-you-do shrug and trotted over.

~

Luckily, Michael wasn’t Russ’ only project during those summer months. Russ taught one-on-one lessons to other fighters, usually younger and more experienced than Michael. He also taught group fitness classes. He even taught kids sometimes, too, and at first Michael wondered what sort of parent would leave their child in Russ’ shattered hands, but he realized quickly that he was a different person in their company. When a child flailed instead of throwing a real punch, Russ would say “Swiper, no swiping” like from that kid’s show. Or when an elbow was thrown up too high, he called it a “chicken wing.” And he never hit any of them. Michael watched jealously.

Russ acted different with the Yoga Moms, too, Michael’s nickname for one of the

Sunday group classes. It seemed to consist of a bunch of young mothers looking to burn some calories before carpooling to bookclub. When he wanted to, Russ could be downright charming.

But at least when he was busy with these other pursuits it gave Michael some freedom.

Of course, he was supposed to be leading his own workout (no boxing, just the general fitness torture), but he found it considerably more difficult to sweat and groan his way through crunches and pushups without Russ looming over him. Usually he would either half-ass part of the workout, or just crawl away to the locker room like an injured animal.

It was during one of these breaks that Bigfoot found Michael hiding in the showers, and made an interesting offer.

“I want to show you a Nonantum secret,” he said.

Michael was wary at first of the proposition. Bigfoot had proven to be a useful friend, but there was still something a bit off-putting about the way he spoke, carried himself, and spent his days watching grown men work out. The word ‘secret’ sounded creepy, coming from his cracked lips. Michael didn’t think he was being too paranoid, to be skeptical of Bigfoot’s willingness to spend nights mopping up other men’s bodily fluids and wringing out their towels.

He had joined Bigfoot for three Fridays at this point and he was always struck by his fascination with the fights. The way he hung on every punch, smiling and jeering at the men in the ring. Sometimes his hands would twitch at his sides, like when you scratch a dog’s ear and its leg starts kicking. A phantom fighter. “You’re gonna like the secret,” Bigfoot assured him. “You of all people.”

Michael wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but he wasn’t sure what Bigfoot meant by a lot of the strange things he said, so he decided to just take a chance. He figured he could always overpower Bigfoot easily enough if things got weird.

Bigfoot led Michael down into the basement. This was the first time Michael had seen it empty, since he didn’t usually go down there except on Friday nights. They walked past the locker rooms, and past the ring, eerily sacred with its red canvas floor and gold rope walls. It had served as the stage for countless broken players. And at the far end of the room, there was another door, which Bigfoot opened.

“This was Nate’s office.”

Michael looked at him blankly.

“You know, Russ’ big brother. The one I was telling you about? He founded this place.”

“Right,” Michael said, stepping in behind him.

They were greeted by a cloud of dust, and there wasn’t much room once the two men were inside. A metal desk took up most of the space, covered in more paperwork, gear, and a framed photo of Russ as a teenager. He was held in a headlock by what appeared to be an older, thinner version of himself, and both were grinning: an expression utterly incongruous with my own experience of Russ. Michael figured the other guy had to be his brother.

Bigfoot reached behind the desk. He rummaged around a bit and then lifted a crate, which he set down gently, reverently, on the dirty surface. It was overflowing with movies: old

VHS tapes on one end, and DVDs- some looked brand new- on the other. “Nate collected every boxing movie ever made,” he explained. “If it came out during his lifetime he would see it in theaters. He loved the big screen, and he was always trying to convince Russ to be an actor. Russ is the good-looking one of the family.”

Michael decided not to comment on that.

“Anyways, Russ kept on collecting these after Nate died. He brings each one to his grave over on Centre street where I pick em up a few hours later to bring em back here. Might pick up your movie, someday.” He grinned at the thought.

Michael reached for the crate and started pulling out films. The collection started with

City for Conquest (1940), then Gentleman Jim (1942) and Body and Soul (1947). One had a faded Kirk Douglas looking rugged and aloof on the cover. The Rocky series spanned over a decade. And the last few DVDs, ending with Cinderella Man (2005) and Tough Enough (2006), were still in their plastic wrap.

“Nate loved these,” Bigfoot continued, “But Russ always hated them. Said the men were too pretty. It’s fake, he meant. They’re not fighters. Not like Russ and Nate. They don’t have the disease.”

Michael flipped through a few more of the movies, and felt a moment of immense pity for boxers, always having their stories portrayed onscreen by better-looking people. Too many hits in the head to learn lines, too many broken noses to land screen time, and then their voice was taken away. He realized he must have seemed so offensive to these people, walking the line that cinema so often crosses between searching for beauty and searching for truth.

But the moment of sympathy was fleeting. His hands ached and he realized that well, we can’t all be good at everything. But he did wonder if he could ever make an audience believe he was as sick as the people upstairs. ~

Michael slept with Barbara on a Saturday. They watched Off Limits, a comedy about a manager who enlists in the army after his boxer gets drafted. Nate had the UK version, Military

Police, and a version that was released on DVD years later, but they watched the original from the 50s. Michael had been working his way through the collection in chronological order, taking them back to the hotel one or two at a time to watch while he iced his limbs or held a hot compress on his lumbars. That time, though, his hands were busy holding Barbara. His muscles screamed in protest as they rolled across the mattress.

Michael would never tell Kathy about his various indiscretions, but he didn’t think she would have been terribly surprised. She probably knew, in fact. She had a weird way of knowing things like that without him telling her. Over the years, their marriage had morphed into more of a political partnership than anything else. They worked well together, they understood each other, but they didn’t touch each other much these days and they hadn’t slept together in a very long time.

After, Barbara fiddled with Michael’s wedding ring and massaged his hands and finally told him the story of how she started boxing. Her boyfriend used to beat her. He would throw her against the wall one night and touch her like she was made of glass the next, calling her his “little

Dalmatian” when bruises freckled her pale skin. She learned to fight, not so that she could fight back, but so she could justify her injuries to strangers, parents, doctors, and friends. Her boyfriend punched eyes that were already puffy and she punished herself at Nonantum.

She told him about how she’d spent a few nights at a shelter for battered women after he broke her collarbone, and that’s when her sister had found her, and now the two women lived together in a flat on the other side of Newton. She said she must be doing better now since she thought about sex more than suicide. But she hadn’t been able to give up boxing. On Saturdays, or late weeknights, or whenever her sister didn’t need the car for work, she came here.

Michael fell asleep at some point while they were laying in the dark together. She left sometime after he fell asleep. He didn’t know how long she had stayed, but when his aching back woke him up around 4 a.m., she was gone.

~

After two full months, Michael started getting to Nonantum early. He would arrive before his scheduled practices with Russ, so he could work on moves without Russ scowling over him, leering at his sore muscles and bruised ego. He switched his morning routine from coffee to ice water (Kathy would have been proud). Russ, he noticed, never strayed from his trusty black-and- milds.

In a sick way, he was starting to enjoy the sheer, unadulterated violence of boxing. Even the language was aggressive. The words themselves always seemed to slap or slice: palooka, uppercut, crossover, jab, glass jaw, corkscrew, knockout. He was starting to speak the language of weights and wingspans, finally getting fluent in Ringside, Everlast, and Title. And then there was the boxing itself. It was like a daily tantrum for grown-ups, extraordinarily liberating, and

Michael was starting to wonder how he’d ever gone so long without it.

It was beginning to seem like a long time ago that he had punched the bag hesitantly, apologetically, wondering if he looked like a heathen to those around him. His self-conscious days were gone. People at Nonantum had started talking to him instead of about him, and he was no longer “that actor guy” that Russ warned them about. By then, he wasn’t even the newest member of the gym. He had slowly become one of them, and he wasn’t as upset about that as he might have expected. ~

Michael slept with Barbara again a few weeks later, after a fight night. She stayed over this time, and wanted to go out to brunch in the morning at “her favorite place.” They were the only ones in the restaurant. Possibly because it wouldn’t occur to most people to eat wings before 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

Of course, Michael knew how to behave on dates, but he hadn’t been on a real one with

Kathy in years. He knew how to flirt, where to place his hands, when to smile, but it was odd to take a sip of his drink and not have a stagehand replace it immediately for the next take. Odd to have the conversation flow continuously, without a director stopping them every few minutes for feedback. When he leaned in close to her, there was no camera lens creeping in, no mic hovering so close to her that it would tickle if the boom-operator twitched. And when she gave Michael her hands to hold onto, he was allowed to just keep them, allowed to run his fingers over her knuckles where the scar tissue puckered like a cigar burn.

“Do you love it? Acting?” she asked at one point.

“I kinda just grew up with it,” Michael explained, telling her about his first television commercial when he was only three. “Going to an audition was just normal for me. Like how other kids my age went to soccer practice.” He smiled to himself. “You’re gonna think this is dumb, but I modeled a little, too, in high school. My friends worked retail or fast food joints while I was having my picture taken by middle-aged women.”

Barbara laughed. Michael felt comfortable around her. He told her about how it took a while for his acting to become a real career, but how it had just always been part of his routine, in one capacity or another, and she listened, intently. She wanted to know if he’d ever felt isolated from his peers, or mad at his parents for launching him down that career path at such a young age. Michael just explained that his skin was as thick as the scars on her knuckles.

~

“Who’s on the card for tonight?” Michael asked one Friday, part of his weekly routine with Bigfoot. Bigfoot always knew the schedule better than anyone.

“Couple palookas,” he answered. “Two of those three Hispanic guys, the ones that don’t talk to nobody but each other. Then Galway is fighting Samson. Oh, and Russ. Russ is up against some upstart from the city.”

“What?”

Michael froze. He had been at Nonantum for almost three months by then, and hadn’t once seen Russ in the ring. Some of the newer guys at the gym speculated that he quit fighting years ago, after Nate died. Maybe the fun had gone out of it once his brother was gone. Or maybe, some thought, his brother’s ghost haunted him in the ring. Others said he’d just been crippled somehow and that his heart was in it but his body couldn’t keep up.

Michael knew the truth, though. Bigfoot had explained it to him. It turns out that nobody wanted to fight Russ: Russ was mean, and wiry, and relentless. Fighters broke their own knuckles hitting him and he didn’t flinch. Even if he got knocked down or knocked out he had the same dead look in his eyes, and it just plain scared people.

“I can’t believe he’s going in. Do they know each other?” Michael asked, wondering if this ‘upstart’ had any idea what he was getting himself into.

“Nope. The guy used to know Nate, though. I guess he was always saying he needed to come check out Nonantum. He must need the street cred now, to get on some other card.” The two men were silent as Bigfoot poured scotch into two glasses from a not-so-secret stash in his locker, another part of their Friday routine. Bigfoot always said a Hail Mary before they drank (god knows why), and then generally they didn’t speak again until after the fights.

The first few fights of the night passed without much excitement. They each meant a lot to the people involved, but everyone else, the regulars, they were all just waiting for Russ.

Michael and Bigfoot included.

By this time, Michael had watched a few real fights, both in-person and online, and he’d seen a whole shitload of boxing movies. He knew that people talked about fighters the same way they talked about meat. But he didn’t totally understand why until he saw Russ in the ring.

Whatever human emotion might have lurked behind Russ’ gaunt face, it disappeared as soon as he stepped onto the red canvas, and brought gold gloves up to grey eyes. The upstart, who called himself “Ruta”, might as well have been pounding on a frozen cow carcass like

Stallone in the first Rocky.

Ruta had brought a friend with him, and Michael had talked to the guy during the earlier fights. Samson trounced Galway, while the friend explained to Michael that Ruta got his name from “rutaceae,” the citrus family of plants and fruits.

It happened when he started keeping orange peels in his gloves. Michael knew Barbara stuffed hers with cedar chips, and a few guys tipped Bigfoot to spritz theirs with Febreeze each night. He also knew that Russ didn’t clean his at all, preferring the stench of hand sweat and long-dried blood. But Ruta ate two oranges every day and stuffed their skins into his gloves, only dumping them out when he needed them for a match. It didn’t matter how many times he showered, or washed his hands, or scrubbed the skin under his fingernails, the scent of citrus clung to him. His buddy said it would follow him to the grave. It was the first thing boxers noticed when they tapped gloves before each round, or shook hands post-fight. And the first thing they smelled when they woke up after a KO was that dry citrus scent, like week-old tangerines or blood oranges that had been left out in the sun.

Michael watched the fight from just outside the splash zone, far enough away that he couldn’t smell Ruta’s hands when he squared up against Russ. But when the two started fighting,

Michael forgot about smells altogether.

That’s how it works, Bigfoot had told him once, that’s how it traps you and keeps you coming back. You realize that somehow jawbones breaking are the loudest sounds you’ll ever hear and that everything else in your life will get the volume turned down. You forget that you even had a brain to think with or a body that ached from too few rest days and you no longer exist in a world beyond the ring because there’s no such thing as a world outside of Nonantum.

The 20 square feet of red canvas becomes the only space, a three-minute round becomes the only time, and on this battleground, Russ became a high, blank wall.

Some boxers can win because they’re quick. Some survive because they’re strong. Russ was neither, but he somehow got by just by being exhaustingly solid. Unresponsive.

Uninterested. He looked maddeningly indifferent as Ruta sank punch after punch after punch, and almost bored, even as his head snapped back and forth on his neck dangerously, even as his eyes swelled in their sockets and his forehead burst open above his left brow.

Ruta got angrier as the fight went on and by the end he was as wild and sloppy as an overgrown child. He didn’t seem satisfied even when Russ collapsed on the canvas, looking like a man who was finally allowed to sleep after an endless day at work.

When Russ didn’t get back up, Bigfoot crawled into the ring, hunched over him, and shook him. But even then he didn’t stir. Galway, still recovering from the earlier fight, dragged ice water from the locker room and dumped it on Russ’ chest and face. But Bigfoot had to dig smelling salts from the medical cabinet before Russ would come to. Michael was also in the ring by then, and when Russ finally came around, Michael offered his hand to help him up.

Russ looked at it with disdain. “Who the hell are you?”

Michael froze, wondering at first whether he was joking. But when Russ continued to look at him with a blank confusion on his face, Michael took a few steps back. Ruta’s friend shook his head sadly.

Someone had already called an ambulance when the ice water didn’t work, and the EMTs arrived within a few minutes. They took Russ to the hospital. While everyone waited for more information, Bigfoot mopped up the ring, and Michael downed the rest of his scotch.

~

Turns out retrograde amnesia is a relatively common problem in boxers. Russ had sustained damage to his frontal and temporal lobes in the fight. This damage was exacerbated,

Bigfoot told Michael, by Russ’ utter lack of interest in his own safety. His complete disregard for the proper defensive techniques that he insisted Michael needed to master.

As was characteristic of such an injury, his most recent memories were the most damaged, but his older ones had been preserved. He remembered Nate, but not Ruta, and someone had to explain to him why he smelled oranges before his MRI. He remembered

Nonantum, but not the last night’s fight. And he remembered Bigfoot, but not Michael. It was odd for Michael to think that he would be a stranger again, after spending hours upon hours with him every day for such a long time. He couldn’t even imagine what it must have felt like for

Russ himself. Russ was back at the gym the next day, though, and Michael found him sitting in Nate’s office when he brought back Fat City (1972).

“So you’re an actor,” Russ said. “Well. Nate loved these.” He pointed to the crate of movies, where Michael was returning his most recent watch.

“I know,” Michael said.

“Did I tell you?”

“Bigfoot did,” Michael admitted, hoping Russ wouldn’t consider this an invasion of his privacy.

Russ just nodded, then reached into the crate and pulled out Fight Club. “1999,” he said,

“The year he died. Same year as The Hurricane and Rocky Marciano. He must’ve watched this shit a hundred times.” He paused. “Did Bigfoot ever tell you what happened? To Nate?”

Michael shook his head, and Russ sighed.

“Killed himself. I walked in one morning and found him strung up like a heavy-bag.”

“Oh, Jesus. I’m so sorry.” Michael had a horrible image of the boy in the photograph jerking and twitching on chains like the bags upstairs.

“Nobody knows why. They said he was sick, but we all got a sickness, everyone in this gym. We got it bad. And we don’t kill ourselves. I’m still here.”

Michael didn’t bother pointing out that Russ had nearly killed himself the night before, and that a few more knocks to the head might do the trick. Instead, he told him again that he was sorry for his loss. Russ nodded, unmoved, and stared into the distance as Michael walked away.

~ Michael called Kathy first, who called Dave, who called the casting director, who called the producer, who called someone else, who called Russ’ doctors, who called the casting director, who called Dave, and so on. Eventually, Dave wound up on the phone with Michael.

“Well, it’s too bad about the whole thing,” he said. “But your flight is booked for tomorrow. Kathy took care of it.”

“What? What flight?”

“We’re setting you up with a new trainer. Didn’t she tell you? The gym is in Vermont this time, but we’ll ship you back to Boston before shooting starts.”

“What! Why can’t I stay here?!”

There was a pause.

“Mikey. I don’t mean to alarm you. But that man just got his memory punched right out of his fuckin’ skull. I can’t have him responsible for your safety.”

Michael felt surprisingly defensive. “It wasn’t his fault,” he snapped, “He just…well…”

And that’s when Michael realized he didn’t have the words to describe Nonantum to someone like Dave. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to explain it to anyone. How could he make someone understand about the phantom brother haunting everyone here, or the little sibling who’d had to plan his funeral? How could he explain that Russ was simultaneously the best and worst teacher he’d ever had, teetering somewhere between genius and abuse? How could he explain about Bigfoot? Or Barbara?

“At least give me the weekend,” Michael begged. “I have to take care of some stuff here before I go.”

Dave sighed. “Take it up with Kathy. That one’s your business, not mine.”

~ Michael had his last meal with Barbara that Sunday night. There was nothing scheduled at Nonantum for the rest of the weekend, but they ordered takeout and ate it in the basement, sitting right smack in the center of the ring. Wings seemed to be her favorite.

Once they had finished the food, Michael told her about Vermont. She didn’t seem particularly surprised. She just nodded her head and looked away.

“When do you leave?” she asked, after a while.

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. Michael didn’t know if he should hug her, or give her a business card, or what. He felt like he owed her something. He wondered vaguely if there was really such a thing as ‘etiquette’ when it comes to ending an adulterous relationship.

“Listen,” he said, finally. “I hope I haven’t… you know… hurt you, or anything. I’m sorry to be leaving so suddenly.”

Barbara just looked at him, laughed, and then shot a meaningful glance at his wedding ring. “Don’t sweat it, Hollywood. I knew you weren’t exactly my Prince Charming from the start.”

She had a point.

“Well, just, you know. I hope you’ll be alright. With your sister and everything.”

“Thanks. Good luck with your movie.”

“Thanks.”

Eventually, the two of them hugged goodbye, and headed their separate ways. Michael wondered if he had ever meant anything to her, or if she would ever think of him, but he decided probably not. She had bigger fish to fry. They’d been like two trains passing in opposite directions: proximate, but never quite touching in any meaningful way.

Michael was surprised to find that saying goodbye to Bigfoot was much more difficult.

He tried to leave him an email address, but Bigfoot didn’t use email-- said he was “holding out for the next big thing.” In the end, Michael gave him his phone number, as well as the address that Dave had given him for Vermont.

When he was just about to leave, Bigfoot grabbed his arm. “You know, Mike, you’re the best friend I ever had. You be sure and keep me posted on that movie, alright?” He looked like he might cry, and Michael fought the urge to look away.

“I want to see your face on the big screen,” Bigfoot said, “Just like Nate would have done. Maybe Russ will go see it, too. Maybe he’s forgot how much he hates the damn things.”

The two men laughed at the idea. Michael hugged him one last time.

As he left, Michael looked up at the hideous gorilla in the lobby and thought to himself that maybe Nonantum wasn’t hell after all, but a kind of purgatory. A place for people in transition. People who needed to lose their memories and break their knuckles in order to find something better.

He didn’t know what was waiting for him in Vermont. He didn’t know if his film would ever be able to capture the woman with red hair or the old man with a jar of lost teeth. But as he walked out of Nonantum for the last time, Michael felt sure that someday there’d be a boxing movie about an ugly, skinny guy, or about a woman who chased men that hurt her. Maybe not this movie. But the next one, or the one after that. Someday, Bigfoot would pick up a film that got it all exactly right.