University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

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MASCULINE TOUCHSTONES OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CINEMA

NEAL HAMMONS

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To Jerry and Gabo

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank David Leavitt for the feedback he offered me in his role as my thesis chair. I also thank the rest of the fiction professors of MFA@FLA—Jill Ciment, Padgett

Powell, and Amy Hempel—as well as the other members of my thesis committee—

Michael Hofmann and Eric Kligerman.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 6

ABSTRACT ...... 7

LIFE-COACHING SESSIONS WITH MARLON BRANDO ...... 8

REFLECTIONS ON THE TIME WHEN LEE MARVIN MAY HAVE STABBED A PHOTOGRAPHER (BUT PROBABLY DIDN’T) ...... 30

Arlington, 1997 ...... 30 My Brother’s Lee Marvin Story, 1965 ...... 31 The First, 1978 ...... 33 The Second, 1987 ...... 39 Fact-Checking the Lee Marvin Story, 1990–1992 ...... 44 The Third, 1993 ...... 46 Arlington, 1997 ...... 55

THE FUTURE-GHOST OF CHARLES BRONSON AT HOME DEPOT ...... 57

THE STERLING HAYDEN OF SHIPPING AND RECEIVING ...... 67

A PROMISED LAND IN THE CENTRAL PACIFIC ...... 85

THE SEXUAL IDENTITY OF JAMES DEAN AS A MODEL FOR THE MULTIVERSE 100

LOVE AS AN EIGHT-POUND CALICO OR TABBY...... 114

Sunday ...... 114 Monday ...... 116 Tuesday ...... 121 Wednesday morning ...... 123 Wednesday evening ...... 124 Thursday ...... 125 Friday morning ...... 127

GRIEF AS AN EVENING OF RECOLLECTIONS ABOUT BREAKING AND ENTERING ...... 129

THE LEGACY ASSESSMENT ...... 139

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 145

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

Figure 1. The Sturgess subterranean bunker ...... 141

6 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

MASCULINE TOUCHSTONES OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CINEMA

Neal Hammons

May 2018

Chair: David Leavitt Major: Creative Writing

This is a collection of short stories, the first six of which focus on issues related to masculinity as viewed through the characters’ relationships to different male icons of twentieth-century Hollywood film—Marlon Brando, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson,

Sterling Hayden, Yul Brynner, and James Dean. Two other stories use surrealistic elements to address how men confront death and marriage. The final story, presented as a “found document,” addresses how men confront the prospect of their legacies after death.

LIFE-COACHING SESSIONS WITH MARLON BRANDO

My son, Jonathan, lives with his mother—Shelly, my ex-wife, as of one year ago—in our old house near Chickamauga Lake in Chattanooga. The house isn’t on the lake, but it’s close enough that Shelly can take Jonathan over there with the jet skis on the weekends, and if Jonathan brings one of his friends, they can just use mine, which I left over there because the apartment where I’m at now doesn’t have a garage. He’ll usually tell me, on the weekends when he stays with me at the apartment, if he’s used my old jet ski recently.

During one of our weekends, Jonathan and I were sitting on the couch and eating chicken patties and Spaghetti-Os for dinner. The Cardinals and Cubs were on television, and the Cubs were up big in the fourth (Wainwright got run out after two-and- a-third). Jonathan’s sandwich was a chicken parmesan-esque thing with a layer of

Spaghetti-Os above and beneath the chicken patty. By the time he took the last bites, pieces of the hamburger bun were wet and stuck to his fingers.

“How is it over there?” I asked. “With Lance and coming over and everything.”

Jonathan finished chewing, swallowed. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I know he doesn’t live there. I just mean, is it all right for you? Are you comfortable with him being there?”

“I guess. It’s just weird.”

I muted the television. “Son, if something’s wrong, you can always—”

“Oh my god, will you—” He stood from the couch. “That’s all you talk about.

You’re obsessed with Lance. Can we just watch this, or not talk about it?”

The Cardinals lost the game 19-0. By the ninth inning, one of the outfielders was pitching.

After Jonathan went to bed, Marlon Brando and I sat in my living room. The first time I’d seen Marlon, six months prior, I didn’t recognize him. I was accustomed to On the Waterfront Brando, a young man who gave people the impression they were discovering something perfect. This Brando, the old Brando, post-The Score Brando, looked like a bloated corpse. This Brando looks like Terry Malloy would have looked if the union bosses from On the Waterfront had put two bullets through the roof of his mouth and his body had dragged the bottom of the Hudson River for a few months before washing up in my living room.

I reclined on the couch, and Marlon sat on a bean bag next to the television, his

450 pounds of muumuu-covered girth nearly eclipsing the bean bag. His face was a sagging square. He was balding, with a few strands of white hair across the top of his head. We watched Don Juan DeMarco on cable. The movie wasn’t one of his best, but

Marlon was still powerful. He could talk to this delusional Johnny Depp character and get him to listen. And the kid looked so grateful.

“I wish I could do what you do,” I said. “Shelly—she can do it. She can change herself to come off as this new thing that everybody actually believes, some inspiring parent. Me, I can’t ask Jonathan two questions without him wanting me to shut up.”

Marlon’s eyes scanned the carpet, the coffee table, as if searching for his next word.

“You don’t become someone else, Neal.” He reached into a bag of Ruffles and stuffed a fistful into his mouth. “The ocean, you know. It’s beautiful. It can look so

beautiful. But there are sharks out there, whales, giant squid, nuclear submarines, shipwrecks, skeletons—do you know how many skeletons there must be in the Pacific

Ocean?—there are storms out there, storms that can wipe out entire islands. That same ocean that looks so beautiful. It’s doesn’t have to become anything else.”

My conversations with Marlon began after my separation from Shelly. Jonathan was twelve at the time and had begun the terrifying transition into an entity whose responses I could never anticipate. I could no longer make our conversations move forward. It was like I was taking care of a stranger’s kid on some of our weekends. In the days leading up to our weekends, I would write out some ideas of things to say to

Jonathan in case he ended up in one of his difficult moods, things that could soften a person determined to be inscrutable.

As a teenager my father showed me the movie version of A Streetcar Named

Desire. I hated it. All the characters were awful people. Stella Kowalski couldn’t see past the virility of her binge-drinking husband, for most of the movie; Blanche DuBois was condescending, unlikable even after she got raped; and Mitch’s love for Blanche was just depressing to watch. Marlon was something unexpected, though. He was so good that he didn’t seem like an actor. He seemed like a real guy, Stanley Kowalski, who did not know he was in a movie. A real guy surrounded by actors doing their best to approximate real people. Later, when I saw On the Waterfront and Viva Zapata!—and even The Score and The Fugitive Kind—I couldn’t believe how he showed up as a real guy, but always a different real guy, in each of those movies. That ability to adapt, perfectly, to any storyline was what I needed.

Along these lines, I asked my psychiatrist for Klonopin during our first session after my separation from Shelly. I’d been all right at work so far, but I anticipated needing something more to help me through my new home life and the divorce negotiations, as well as any potential arbitration, litigation, freezing of assets, custody trials, and depositions. My psychiatrist declined the Klonopin request, claiming that I should continue with the Paxil and Buspar until I was certain they were not sufficient.

On the way home from my appointment, I pulled the car into an Arby’s parking lot and sat with the engine running. I couldn’t make myself go back to the quiet apartment.

From the passenger seat, Marlon reached over and gripped my shoulder. I told him about how I couldn’t get Jonathan to talk and how my doctor wouldn’t give me

Klonopin and how much I hated Arby’s and their spring-shaped fries.

Marlon pointed a finger, directed me to the drive-through line.

“I remember,” he said, “there was a pigeon once. I used to see this pigeon, I mean—” He glanced upwards. “—there he’d be, every time I walked outside. Every time

I…went to get the paper, or to check the mail for a neighbor, anything. I’d always see this pigeon. Then one morning, there was a moving van outside. My upstairs neighbor, she was leaving, her children were putting her into a home—she’d been calling the FBI, the CIA, and telling them that the squirrels outside had been tracking her movements and reporting them back to the Khmer Rouge. And, so…I go outside, to get the paper.

And the pigeon is stuck, flat against the back bumper of my car, smashed flat. The moving van had, I guess, bumped into my car and parked there while the movers packed up. And I was devastated, seeing that mat of feathers and the flat beak. But I was out on the sidewalk, and I still had to get the paper. I still had to scrape that bird off

my bumper with a spatula. And I still had to live there and think about that every morning. See those empty morning skies. But, we’re—” He pointed to the drive-through speaker. “—you should give the curly fries another shot.”

The next morning I woke up, took the Paxil and Buspar, turned music on loud enough that I could hear it in the bathroom, and then forced myself into the shower. It took a while, but I figured out how loud the music needed to be for me to hear it over the sound of the water without being loud enough to anger the neighbors into pounding on the floor above me. It wasn’t perfect, but the music gave me something other than an empty apartment to hear. I’ve found that if there’s a silence around me, I’ll start thinking loudly enough to fill the silence, and my loudest thoughts aren’t good ones. Especially on Mondays, which had been the loudest mornings for our family at the house—Shelly scrambling to find all her weekend-work papers, Jonathan asking what we had done with his homework.

Before I left to go to work, I took down the picture of me, Shelly, and Jonathan that was hanging in the living room and hid it behind the couch.

During my first hour of work at the hospital, the helpdesk was flooded with calls about a system outage. The in-patient admissions manager called every ten minutes, and we took turns trying to calm her down.

“We’re not sure when your MedSeries session can be restored, ma’am,” I said.

“The server hasn’t come back up from an update the admins ran last night, and they’ve all been working on it since then.”

“Can you at least try to reset the session?” There were lots of precise customer- service voices in the background. “We’re doing this all by hand right now.”

“It won’t work, not until the server’s back up.”

I tried to be calming, a positive voice when people were overwhelmed by these work-related problems. It made me remember a trip we took to Epcot when Jonathan was four years old and I lost my keys in the Captain EO theater. I had to talk to a security guy at the front gate and then we spent the hour retracing my steps through the park. Shelly waited with Jonathan near the front gate and they watched the other families leave. Eventually Shelly, exhausted by the day and by the effort required to keep Jonathan happy throughout all the walking and waiting in lines, began to cry.

Jonathan, sitting on Shelly’s lap, reached out and hugged her. “It’s okay,” he said. “We live at Disney World now.”

Throughout the week I would have moments like that when a call I received or a phrase spoken by another helpdesk analyst would remind me of something from the past fifteen years—mostly good things, such as Jonathan’s spelling bee performance

(ninth place!), when the three of us got to see the elk when we visited Shelly’s grandparents in Montana, and when we started looking for houses after I got my job at the hospital.

On the day before my next weekend with Jonathan, I overheard Vishal, one of the other helpdesk analysts, on the phone laughing. It was a slow morning, no system outages or network problems, mostly just session resets and printer jams.

“Have a great day, ma’am.” Vishal removed his headset. “Ah, Neal, listen to this, bro. This lady tells me I’m a superhero for telling her to reboot, but it was—she says,

‘You’re like that one with the eye patch.’ Nick Fury, she means. So now I’m black.”

I nod and chuckle, but I’m not sure who Nick Fury is. Vishal is younger than me, and superhero movies weren’t that prevalent when I was growing up. I’d never been excited to see any of them until I heard about Superman Returns. On opening night—

Jonathan was fourteen months old and still cute enough that relatives agreed to babysit instantly when asked—Shelly and I left him with my sister and we went to see the movie. At the restaurant afterwards, we ate half-price appetizers and agreed that the movie was a failure but disagreed on where it had failed. I thought Lois Lane was too difficult, too self-absorbed for someone like Superman, but Shelly thought Lois was the strongest character in the movie. I thought Kevin Spacey was wonderful as Lex Luthor, but Shelly couldn’t stop wishing for Gene Hackman. I thought Marlon Brando’s appearance via unused footage from 1982’s Superman II was reason enough for the movie to exist, and I mentioned my father’s oft-repeated claim that Brando and Sean

Penn were the greatest film actors of all time. Shelly scoffed at the Sean Penn comment.

“He’s dead and he still ruined this movie,” she said. “Besides, he’s no Olivier.”

I’d heard the argument a million times.

“Marlon’s more organic,” I said.

“Olivier was Copolla’s first choice for Don Corleone.”

I dropped my jalapeno popper. “One of two. They were both on the list.”

“Olivier would have learned his lines. He was a pro.”

“Being a pro didn’t help Clash of the Titans.”

“You’re kidding.” She pushed aside her pretzel sticks. “How did ‘organic’ help

The Missouri Breaks?”

She was right that Marlon didn’t learn his lines. Pieces of paper were strategically placed so that he could, while seemingly searching for the right words, actually be searching for the right words. He drove Coppola nuts by showing up on set of

Apocalypse Now without having looked at the script. Shelly used this as proof that

Marlon’s process was detrimental to filmmaking.

“Coppola managed,” I said.

“That’s because,” she said, “Coppola’s a pro. Just ask Brando’s kids what they think of him.”

Jonathan and I were sitting on the couch, the family picture back up on the wall behind us. Jonathan was using his tablet to fill out an NCAA tournament bracket online.

He was due to graduate from sixth grade at the end of May. That meant middle school for him, which had been the worst time of my life—cruelty of the newly adolescent, absent from the influence of older and slightly-less-heartless students that a high school offers. If things turned out as badly for Jonathan, I wasn’t sure I could help him. I still don’t know what I should have done differently in middle school.

“You get to go out on the jet skis last weekend?” I asked.

He kept his head down, tapped on the tablet. “We went wakeboarding, me and

Jaylen.”

“Wakeboarding? Who took you?”

“Jaylen’s dad. And Lance. Lance went. He brought the wakeboards.”

“And you didn’t have—there were no terrible spills or anything?”

He shrugged. “Jaylen hit face-first. It looked like he’d lose a tooth, but his face was just red.”

“How did Lance do?”

“I don’t know, he sucks.”

“He sucks? How does he suck?”

“I don’t know, he just sucks. I don’t want to talk about Lance, it’s fine.”

I didn’t say anything else about Lance. Unfortunate. Jonathan and I finally agree on something, and he doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Who are you picking?” I asked.

The light from the tablet glowed on his chin.

“Son,” I said, “who are you picking?”

“What?” He looked up.

“For March Madness. To win it all.”

“I don’t know yet. I’m still on the Elite Eight.”

“Kansas looked pretty tough last weekend against Oklahoma.”

“Hmm.”

I went into my bedroom and took out my notebook from the dresser. I had one conversation idea left.

During our dinner of microwave ribs, I told him the story about losing my keys at

Epcot and him telling his mother that we lived at Disney. I still couldn’t make it through the “We live at Disney World now” line without laughing.

“I’ve done things since then,” Jonathan said. “I’m not still in kindergarten.”

“I know you have. I’m only bringing—”

“Then why do you keep acting like you wish I was still five?”

“I don’t,” I said, “wish you were still five.”

“Why do you say it like that? Wish you were still five. I don’t talk like that. You always do that. You think I even talk like I’m still five.”

“Telling stories—by the way, you were four—telling stories about something nice that happened isn’t wishing you’re still five. I’m trying to share something nice.”

“That’s not what it sounds like.”

Two weeks before Jonathan’s sixth-grade graduation, at some point between the

Elite Eight and Final Four weekends, Lance moved into my old house with Shelly.

It was a relief to spend time at work because I couldn’t focus all my attention on thinking about Lance living in my house and spending his evenings with my son, but I started messing up basic procedural stuff. I forgot to set up an alert for the rest of the helpdesk after one of the admins told me about an outage in the maternity building. I left multiple people on hold and forgot they were on hold until they called back and yelled at someone else. After a few days of this, I explained to Vishal what was wrong.

“The guy’s a clown. Listen.” Vishal scrolled through a list on his phone. “I’m going to call my boy Rashid, and we’ll go out on his uncle’s boat this weekend. It’s a 23-foot

Moomba with the underwater lights. The stereo’s sick. You’ll love it.”

I drove myself with one hand to Jonathan’s fifth-grade graduation because of the separated shoulder I got wakeboarding with Vishal and Rashid. The pain wasn’t too bad if I didn’t move my left arm. I just had to take more Advil than the bottle’s recommended maximum.

On my walk into the cafeteria/auditorium, I was high on a kind of false-positivity from post-separation shock, a natural opiod that makes you believe (for a few weeks after a new guy moves into your old house) that you can pull this off. It was ridiculous, looking back on it now. But I walked into the school expecting for the night to end with me feeling confident.

I made it halfway to the last row of chairs before Shelly approached me. She motioned for Lance to join her.

“So glad you could make it,” she said. “This is Lance.”

“Jonathan’s told me a lot about you, Neal,” he said.

We shook hands and I couldn’t match his grip. His hand was squat and his fingers stout. He had over-gelled hair, spiked. I could see every bit of his scalp. His forehead looked like well-oiled leather. He was six inches shorter than me and fatter, but his arms were twice the circumference of mine, arms of someone who didn’t have to use two hands to turn the tricky cold-water knob in the shower. A fat guy who could hit home runs in softball but might, a decade or two from now, have a heart attack running the bases. He could certainly repair broken toilet tanks.

I yanked my hand away. “So Jonathan said you went wakeboarding?”

I think it was a combination of shock and denial-energy, like that scene in

Scarface when Pacino inhales the cocaine pile and then gets shot dozens of times and

still staggers around, his mortal wounds not as powerful as the coke. (Though Pacino’s

Scarface owes a lot to Marlon in Viva Zapata! for showing him how to play a different ethnicity.)

After the pre-ceremony introduction to Shelly’s boyfriend, I paid attention to all the speeches, clapped for every award winner, started a standing ovation for the janitor when her retirement was announced. The graduation ceremony lasted two hours and a girl even cried during the we’re-moving-on-from-elementary-school speech. The whole class presented the principal with the traditional framed photo of the graduating class, which I think they hang in the school entryway. The graduating class sang “Good

Riddance (Time of Your Life)” as a finale. A few rows in front of me, Shelly had her splayed fingers resting on Lance’s back. I kind of felt sorry for Lance. I’d never sit through an elementary school graduation unless my son was in it.

Jonathan got an award from his social studies teacher for completing a state- sponsored geography-workbook module and also got a certificate from his gym teacher for special achievements in indoor kickball.

After the ceremony I drank three glasses of weak strawberry punch and loitered around the shuttered cafeteria counter with a few of the other fathers. Across the cafeteria Shelly held Jonathan’s award and certificate and introduced Lance to the teachers, even though Jonathan wasn’t going to be in this school next year. The teachers were probably shocked she was even here. I remember when she left

Jonathan’s third-grade spelling bee before the two final students broke the tie and—

“They should serve booze at these things,” one of the fathers said.

“They don’t?” another asked. “Then how am I drunk?”

“I was about to say, you looked like you were dancing in your chair during that song.”

“I’m not the only one.” He grabbed my shoulder and I almost screamed. “Neal did a slow-clap for the janitor.”

I pulled away and touched my burning shoulder. “I loaded up beforehand,” I said.

Actually I hadn’t had a drink in weeks (I was afraid if I started I wouldn’t stop), but

I wasn’t going to tell the story now. I said goodbye to the other fathers, promised to bring a flask to the next school event, and walked out of the cafeteria. On the way out,

Shelly’s back was to me and Lance’s hand was resting on her lower, lower back.

In the parking lot, Marlon was wearing an oversized Hawaiian shirt and crouched in front of the bumper of my car. He tapped a place next to the headlight.

“Some of these rust spots,” he said, “you can sand them off, add the touch-up paint, then don’t even think about it any more.”

I vomited on the pavement and then got into the car. Marlon sat in the back seat and filled up most of the rearview mirror. I told him what happened. He listened and finished off his large Oreo McFlurry.

“These kids,” he said, “it’s amazing how good it can be, just seeing them live.

And a geography award? I mean, that’s a big deal if you want to talk about big deals.

They’ve gotten away from it. These kids, they have to know where these places are, so they can, you know, figure out where you want to do business or live or any of that.”

My next weekend with Jonathan, he brought over a stack of homework that covered the entire dining room table (which was our old card table). We had to eat in

the living room for the whole weekend. He explained to me that he hadn’t been able to finish any homework during the last week, and now his algebra grade was going to fall if he didn’t make up all of last week’s work by Monday. On three straight nights, Jonathan had been forced to retreat into his room because Shelly and Lance were binge-watching a TV series about a murder on a bridge.

“The whole show’s in Swedish,” Jonathan said. “I mean, it has subtitles, but the actual voices aren’t English, and they have it turned up even though they can’t understand it because Mom says that’s the only way they can fully appreciate the actor’s performances. I’m supposed to wait to play Xbox until my homework’s done, but how am I supposed to do homework when all I hear is people talking Swedish? It’s retarded.”

He had a point. The agreement was that we’d work together to help our son succeed, but Shelly had to uphold her end when I wasn’t not around, even while trying to impress Lance by watching Swedish TV. My apartment wasn’t the greatest, but I only watched TV late at night and nobody spoke Swedish.

And it wasn’t just about the homework. Shelly got to have her son with her every day. Other than those four days a month when Jonathan was with me, Shelly had literally everything she wanted. She got to live in a house that I’d paid for, almost half of it. She got to live in that house with Lance, who evidently had no problem scavenging on another man’s life (he’d probably be wearing my clothes if I’d left them). She had the other parents at school supporting her. She got plenty of likes whenever she posted

Instagram pictures with captions about how being a mom is her purpose or when she posted quotes credited to “Anonymous” about how challenges can make us the person

God knew we could be. She even got to keep my jet ski. Whereas I had to live in a silent apartment twelve days out of fourteen, in an apartment furnished with the extra couch and end tables I took out of our old basement. On the days Jonathan wasn’t around, I had to figure out how to get myself to work and clean my apartment and appear to be a normal, functioning human so that my son wouldn’t think I’m a monster when he did come over. And Shelly couldn’t even turn down the TV volume so that our child (her “inspiration and north star,” according to “Anonymous”) can do his homework?

On Sunday, when it was time for me to drive Jonathan home, I called Shelly and told her he was sick. The next day I texted her and told her he was sick. I texted her the same thing for the next week, and then I stopped. I could only explain it so many times.

I wasn’t making my son go back there. He didn’t want to go back there. He didn’t like

Lance. And if Lance was mad about that, he was welcome to come find me.

With Jonathan out of the school for the summer, we got by easier. Shelly couldn’t just show up at Jonathan’s school and take him back. Her only recourse was coming by my apartment, which she did, eleven times. Twice the police were called by the neighbors. The only time Lance came with her, I stood at the top of the stairs with a wrecking bar in my hand and waited. Shelly made him leave, and I wasn’t sure whether

I was relieved by the resolution. I wanted him to come at me, but I knew I shouldn’t want that. Each time the police came, they talked to Jonathan. It was clear that I wasn’t keeping him there. “I hate it there,” he would say. She called him several times a day, and most of their conversations, at least the ones in the evening, ended after she cried and explained how I had put her in the position where she had no choice, how you can love a person so much (as she loved Jonathan) that you begin to panic when the

person is absent, like the panic of being held underwater. He stopped taking her calls, but I made him call her every few days, at least for a while.

On Thursday of the last week, we drove back from dinner and saw a police car in the parking lot outside of our building. We kept driving and spent the night at a hotel. I called in sick to work the next morning.

“Hey, man.” Vishal’s voice was muffled from his hand covering his headset mic.

“The security guys were here looking for you earlier. They said to tell them when you got here.”

Jonathan and I spent the weekend in Atlanta. We visited the Coca-Cola Museum and went to a Braves game. I didn’t want to go back to Chattanooga because I knew they’d be waiting for us, but I couldn’t afford to live in a hotel and I couldn’t do this forever—Jonathan was 12, and I couldn’t possibly keep us living in hotels for the next six years.

On Sunday we rode the ferris wheel across from Olympic Park and then ate on the second-floor patio of a beer garden. We sat at a picnic table and hot waves of wind rustled our hair. I drank beer from a foot-tall mug.

“Can’t I just tell the judge that I want to stay with you?” Jonathan asked.

“You can,” I said. “But I screwed this up. I should’ve stuck to the agreement.”

He held his palms against his eyes and sniffed. “I hate everything. It’s so stupid.”

We drove home that night and slept in my apartment. We ate pop-tarts and drank

Gatorade in the morning because I was out of juice. At 6:45 a.m. on Monday, a police officer came to my apartment with a court order. Jonathan had been with me for five weeks.

My evenings started to get longer. The time between getting home from work and going to bed would last days, weeks. On many evenings I could remember that there had been other days prior, but I didn’t really believe it. I felt as if I’d been condemned to wait out the days in silence until bedtime. There was a restraining order that said I couldn’t go within 500 feet of my son or talk to him. He called me a few times, and I had to just look at his name on my phone and not answer and continue sitting in my silent apartment. I tried to drink myself into sleep a few times, but then I’d wake up too early and have to sit alone for two hours before it was time to get ready for work. If I had one positive thought during the weeks leading up to the custody trial, I’ve forgotten it.

I imagined criminal charges. I imagined Shelly and Lance using this time to unravel every connection Jonathan and I established during our five weeks. I imagined

Jonathan feeling a sense of relief at being able to wakeboard again, realizing that he loved it and never wanted to be away from it for any reason. I imagined Shelly getting full custody and me getting zero visitation. What if Shelly and Lance decided to move? I wouldn’t be able to take Jonathan to Lookouts baseball games any more, not unless

Jonathan came back to visit and we went then, but there’d be so much pressure to make the day memorable that it wouldn’t be the same. I wanted to take him to the stadium knowing that our team could get blown out and it could rain and a drunk guy could fall over the railing trying to catch a foul ball and everything would still be fine (for us). We needed the option of having unmemorable or depressing or traumatizing moments while not having our relationship permanently soiled.

There were other things I thought of, things we could do together, none of which

I’d thought of before, most of which did not interest me or Jonathan, but they were things I wanted to be able to do if either of us ever decided to be interested in them.

Ride a snowmobile. Host an annual day-long badminton tournament. (I would be grilling burgers while Jonathan and Jaylen and his friends played and talked badminton/shuttlecock smack—though I would need to buy a grill.) Restore an old

Mustang. Watch all three Godfathers in one day. Go to a football game at my old high school. Visit the childhood home of Ed “Too Tall” Jones in Jackson. Tell Jonathan the story of falling in love with his mother without the story turning sad. Tell Jonathan and his friends to keep it down without worrying that they won’t ever want to come back.

Hear him in the other room trying to play the drums. Start a plumbing business, Neal &

Son, which Jonathan would inherit after I inevitably drown in a toilet-tank mishap. Go on a Segway tour of Knoxville. Make a list of every Cracker Barrel along I-75 and cross them off the list as we travel, until one day there is only one Cracker Barrel on the list so we take a six-hour detour on the drive home from Hilton Head (where Jonathan competed with his friends in a national badminton tournament) to eat at the Cracker

Barrel in Dalton, Georgia.

“There is no Cracker Barrel in Dalton, Georgia,” Marlon said. “I’ve been to every

Cracker Barrel along I-75. Twice. With Ed ‘Too Tall’ Jones. A very underrated run defender, for a pass rusher.”

I asked Marlon about The Island of Dr. Moreau and One-Eyed Jacks, and he said he knew exactly what had gone wrong, when the promise of a great script became jumbled, why the cast didn’t work well together, why directors were fired, why audiences

failed to show up on opening weekends. Why every effort he made to do a good job seemed to fail.

“I wish I could do that,” I said. “Figure out all that stuff—when things went wrong, why they went wrong—but, like, as it’s happening. To know all that as I’m going through it.”

“You definitely know,” Marlon said. “You know as it’s happening. But for those pictures, there was no better way. It was too late or—or it didn’t matter, it was always too late. By the time you’re doing it, it’s too late. When you start preparing for it, it’s too late. Anyway, that’s not my job, trying to fix everything else. You can’t walk around the set pointing at—‘Take care of that mess. There are—the bugs are crawling all over the pastries.’ Worrying about the craft services and lighting guys—you can’t do that. You can’t do that.”

At the custody hearing, I sweated so much that my pants had dark spots down the back of the legs, like I’d decided to just piss myself all morning. Even the buttons on my shirt were wet. I could smell myself, and I’m sure the judge could too.

I was on the stand for two hours. I told the judge that keeping Jonathan for those five weeks had been the worst mistake I’d ever made. I understood why I did it and why it seemed reasonable, but I wished I’d had the detachment and wisdom to take a longer view. If, because of the loud Swedish TV series, Jonathan had started to get lower grades, I could have pushed the issue through my attorney to the judge and, eventually, either I would have got more time with Jonathan or Shelly would have been forced to

think about what she was doing and turn down the TV. Whatever happened, it would have been better than this.

Shelly’s attorney kept asking me about Jonathan’s sixth-grade graduation and the aftermath. The fathers I’d spoken with had sworn in depositions that I claimed to have “loaded up” before the ceremony and that, when one of them touched my shoulder, I was so drunk I almost fell over.

Attorney: Did you have a long-standing relationship with the janitor?

Me: I was being polite.

Attorney: Multiple witnesses said you vomited in the parking lot.

Me: I’d just met my wife’s new boyfriend.

Attorney: When you called your wife’s boyfriend—Lance Wyatt—the next afternoon, what did you say exactly?

Me: I can’t recall. I may have quoted some movies.

Attorney: “There’s nothing I detest more than the stench of lies”?

Me: Apocalypse Now. Colonel Kurtz.

Attorney: “Horror and moral terror are your friends”?

Me: I thought he’d recognize that one.

Attorney: “You’re an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill”?

Me: It seemed fitting.

In the back of the courtroom, next to a statue of a blindfolded woman with a pair of scales in her hand, a cloud formed and there was Marlon, wearing a white robe and hovering above the heads of everyone in the courtroom. Marlon was enormous, bigger than everyone else in the room, bigger than the room and the law. A light emanated from his belly, so intense that I was certain I was about to witness God’s next act of creation. I couldn’t see the judge any more, I couldn’t see my hands, Marlon’s belly light

was everywhere. He spoke to the entire courtroom from above our heads, but—like

Noah before the Flood—only I listened.

“In Florida there’s this tree,” Marlon said. “It’s got this name, a monkey-puzzle tree, and there’s also one called a false monkey-puzzle tree. Those names, they make it sound like these are going to be the most exciting trees you’ve ever seen, you know.

Monkeys, puzzles? But it’s all lies. When you see a picture, it’s just, you see nothing but a regular tree. Throw all the best words at it, change its name, it won’t matter. This is a regular tree. Its name is a lie, which will rot and disgust the world, like the feculence of a great mammal.”

I woke up in a hospital bed. In the courtroom, from what I heard later, spit had bubbled out of my mouth and I slumped over on the witness stand and then, at some point between the courtroom and the hospital, I actually did piss myself. The good news was that when I told my psychiatrist, he eventually relented and wrote me a prescription for Klonopin.

The judge had heard enough, though. Jonathan went back to Shelly. There was a restraining order that said I couldn’t go within 500 feet of my son or talk to him. He called me a few times, and I had to just look at his name on my phone and not answer and sit in my silent apartment. Shelly now has a story to back up all her claims about how I emotionally/creatively stunted her during our marriage, how I (not her affair with

Lance) was the reason she never showed up for PTA meetings.

After the restraining order is up, my attorney says I can probably see Jonathan once or twice a month with court-appointed supervision. The goal is to ask for

unsupervised visits within the year if everything goes well (i.e., if I don’t abduct my son again).

So it’s not over for me. These things are never over. I mean, technically, Marlon has been dead for 13 years. He was a great actor—the greatest actor—but a terrible father. Sixteen children by somewhere between five and nine different women. One child killed herself, another murdered someone else. Marlon was a legend, yet Coppola gave up on him and George C. Scott hated him. But look at him now, in my apartment, adjusting the thermostat in the hallway, turning up the heat so he doesn’t have to change out of his bathrobe. Even when he was underappreciated and people all believed he couldn’t cut it as a father, Marlon wasn’t done. It wasn’t the end for Marlon, and it won’t be for me, either. When everyone thinks I’m finished, we’ll make our move.

REFLECTIONS ON THE TIME WHEN LEE MARVIN MAY HAVE STABBED A PHOTOGRAPHER (BUT PROBABLY DIDN’T)

Arlington, 1997

When I was twenty-nine years old, I went to Arlington Cemetery for the second time in my life. Earlier in the day my wife, two-year-old daughter, and I had visited the

National Mall, and got to tour the Capitol Building and stood at the base of the

Washington Monument, but our daughter grew restless when we mentioned the Lincoln

Memorial. I showed her the back of a penny.

“Look at that, and then look over there.” I pointed across the Reflecting Pool. “It’s the same thing. You want to see it?”

She didn’t want to see it, so my wife, Yun, took her back to the hotel and I walked straight to the Metrorail station and took the Blue Line out to Arlington Cemetery to see my father. I’d only been there once before, when I was ten, for his funeral, so I didn’t remember how huge and overwhelming the place was.

Hundreds of acres full of white stone markers. Monuments to more tragedies than I could remember—Kennedy, Vietnam, Iran Hostage Rescue, Challenger, Flight

103, Gulf War, 9/11. Then gentle hills and rises with laurel oaks and paperbark maples and redbuds and more white gravestones, stretching on and on. I had to look at my feet, take a few breaths. If I hadn’t known exactly where my dad was, I wouldn’t have stood a chance of finding him. There had to be a thousand visitors mulling around, but they were so spread out that I didn’t pass anybody on my walk to section 7.

There was my father—Jerry Walter, SGT, US Army, World War II. From in front of his gravestone, I could see the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Memorial

Amphitheater. A few birds squawked in a nearby cherry tree, and a rush of wind lifted

the scattering of blossoms near the trunk. I walked a few circles around the gravestone.

Even though I knew my dad was in this ground, I didn’t know where exactly his body began and ended, where to stand to be closest to what he once was.

I did know that in a grave in section 7A, in front of the Tomb of the Unknown

Soldier, the actor Lee Marvin was buried. I knew where my dad was and I knew where

Lee Marvin was, but I didn’t know where my brother Curtis was. He was still living somewhere in California, I think. I hadn’t talked to him in a few years. Whenever I did finally talk to him, I wouldn’t know what to tell him about this day, if Dad and Lee Marvin being here together should mean anything to either of us.

My Brother’s Lee Marvin Story, 1965

The Lee Marvin story was Curtis’s most memorable story. According to my sister

Donna, it was his only memorable story.

In 1961, Curtis started working as a photographer’s assistant for the celebrity magazine Screen Stars, which focused on the lifestyles of the biggest Hollywood stars and included full-page photos that readers could remove from the magazine’s pages and tape to their walls. As an assistant, Curtis attended photo shoots with Sandra Dee,

Debbie Reynolds, and Vic Damone. He oversaw faux-candid shots of the stars out on the town—Donna Reed shopping for jewelry, Patty Duke trying on sunglasses. After

Curtis showed some initiative and captured a series of legitimately candid shots of Max von Sydow, who’d recently played Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, stumbling out of the Troubador on the Sabbath, he received his first red-carpet assignment: the premiere of the comedy-western Cat Ballou.

Here’s how Curtis’s telling of the story usually went:

None of these photographers in the sixties were into westerns unless it was Sergio Leone, or, later on, Sam Peckinpah, or somebody doing a subversive western that didn’t really feel like a western. So I get this movie…it was Cat Ballou. (What’s that? someone says.) Cat Ballou! Jane Fonda! I know you’ve heard of Jane Fonda. I know your dad’s heard of Jane Fonda. Ask your dad, just don’t ask when your mom’s around. (Chuckling.) Jane Fonda’s in it, and she’s just a becoming a star at this point—she had a Tony nomination, she’d just done Sunday in New York. And Lee Marvin—the gruff, gray-haired guy—he’s the other star, he’d just done Liberty Valance and The Killers. But the other photographers, they didn’t care that these were big-time actors. They heard “western” and checked out.

Now I’m on the red carpet, wearing a tux—they made us wear tuxes back then, at least Screen Stars did—and I get knocked in the ribs by the guy from Picturegoer, and while I’m off-balance this Picturegoer guy edges his way in front of me. Then I see Jane Fonda stepping out of her limo. Remember, this is my first big assignment, and I’m getting these shots of Jane Fonda, I’d been out there for hours. So I raise up my elbow like this (Curtis reaches over his shoulder as if to scratch his back), and then I bring my elbow around and clear this Picturegoer guy’s head out of the way. Well, I guess it looked pretty bad. The guy falls over and breaks his camera, and I kind of stumble onto him. Okay, I’m basically standing on his back. But at this point, Jane Fonda is literally (Curtis points to the closest listener), she’s literally from me to you. And I guess, I’m stumbling toward her with a camera raised—and our cameras were huge in those days, with the giant flash bulbs—and I’m standing on an unconscious guy—when I see a couple security guys coming toward me, but they’re small and I have to get some great shots of Jane Fonda. So I keep taking pictures, but what I didn’t know was—you know who was a few steps away, so close that the other photographers were all blocking him from my view? Lee Marvin! And when Lee Marvin sees me knock a guy unconscious and then make a move toward Jane Fonda, he rushes over and blindsides me as I’m taking pictures. So I’m falling to the ground, still taking pictures, Lee Marvin’s shoulder lifts me up and then slams me onto the red carpet. And he starts wrestling with me and his face is red, but he’s looking at me calmly, all business, like he’s done this before. Then the other two show up—maybe Fonda’s bodyguards, I don’t know what they were—and then I’m being jostled by everyone, even some of the other photographers. So as I see Lee Marvin’s face pulling back from the scrum, he grimaces and I feel this pain cut through me, right through my stomach, and after a minute or so, when everyone finally lets me up, I’m bleeding from my stomach. And I had a stab wound right here. (Curtis raises his shirt, shows the listeners a jagged three-inch scar on his abdomen above his pelvis.) Lee Marvin reached in and stuck me. Liberty Valance! He stabbed me! (Laughter, and protests of “Lee Marvin did not

stab you!”) He did. Lee Marvin stabbed me. (More laughter, more “Lee Marvin did not stab you!”) Well, fine. Maybe he didn’t!

Though his final line drew laughs, I would hear him afterwards talking to individual listeners, restating his case that it truly was Lee Marvin who stabbed him. I heard Curtis tell that story three times in my life, and each time was memorable.

The First, 1978

I was thirteen years old, and Curtis was taking me to my first concert. Our dad had died in 1976 and Curtis had finally, in compliance with my sister Donna’s demands, come home to help support the family. Now, at thirty-five, Curtis managed the King

Quick convenience store near the bowling alley. His arrival couldn’t have come at a better time for me. Donna and I were fighting every day. I knew Mom wasn’t up to doing as much after Dad died, but Donna seemed to relish the opportunity to boss someone around, as if she wanted to tell the story later and hear all the compliments of how she stepped up and raised her little brother alone. I even heard her mention to Curtis over the phone how she was thankful that I had her around. So Curtis quickly became my favorite sibling.

The day he got the concerts tickets, he was so excited that he left his shift early to come tell me.

“Guess what, buddy?” He smiled so hard it became laughter. “We’re going to see

Foghat on Friday. I won tickets on WEBN.”

I tried to match his smile, but I had to tell him I’d never heard of Foghat.

His smile faded. “That’s okay. I’ll help you out. You’re going to love it.”

The next day he brought me a copy of Foghat Live from the library. The record only had six songs and I recognized three of them, which made me feel good. The end of Side Two was scratched up, so “Slow Ride” skipped repeatedly after the first verse.

On the day of the show, we drove to pick up the tickets from the radio station in

Hyde Park before continuing on to Riverfront Coliseum. Once we got onto the interstate,

Curtis put his 8-track of Stone Blue into the player, and we listened until the Norwood exit, when the tape got twisted up in the player. I pulled on the cartridge but the tape was a crinkled mess and tangled up inside the 8-track player.

“God, I got to switch to cassettes.” Curtis yanked the cartridge out and the tape snapped, some still hanging from the player. “These things are too expensive to not work.”

For the rest of the drive, we talked without any music playing. Curtis told me about why he’d decided to leave Ohio before I was born. Near Franklin, where we lived, there was a paper mill, a steel mill, an auto plant, and hundreds of small construction, plumbing, and roofing businesses. From the front door of our house, we could see ten other houses and eight of them had pickup trucks in the driveway. One summer my uncle gave Curtis a job in his roofing business, and two weeks later Curtis drove a nail through his own pinkie and my uncle had to pry the nail free with a hammer. The next summer Curtis only lasted six days at a gas station before getting in a fistfight with the manager when the manager yelled at him for spilling oil all over a customer’s engine.

The year before he left for California, he got a job unloading trucks at McAlpin’s department store where my dad worked in furniture sales. Curtis didn’t have a lot of work clothes, so sometimes he would be unloading trucks in a dress shirt. The other

guys didn’t give him much guff because they knew my dad, but Curtis could tell how they felt about him. After two months of subpar performance, he was transferred to the portrait studio where he worked until the day he left for California. Whenever he ran into the truck-unloading guys on break, they made it clear that they didn’t like how Curtis carried himself, acting as if he were better than them now that he had some artsy job.

There were a lot of arguments with my dad and slammed doors and threats during Curtis’s last months at home. Curtis explained to me that everybody in Franklin wanted him to be a certain type of person, and when he wasn’t that type of person, they didn’t have any use for him.

But California, that was a different story. He made me wish he still lived there so I could go visit him and go to the beach and see the movie lots and all the girls he swore were hotter than any I’d ever seen in person. (“Even the black chicks, man. I never would have guessed it. Afros and daishikis and whatnot. Jesus. Think about that for a second.”) He talked about how he got to take pictures of Donovan and the Monkees and how he got to hear Janis Joplin play at a small club and how crazy the teenagers were in San Francisco in the sixties. (“These chicks would be baked and just, like, get naked and dance, for no reason. Paradise, man.”) People out there didn’t care whether or not you wore suits and went to museums and ate sushi. People out there didn’t give him a hard time or question his masculinity for growing his hair long. People out there were so focused on themselves that they didn’t care if you did whatever you wanted, but there were some drawbacks to being around that much egotism. They never stop being impressed by themselves.

“Even John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, actors in the cowboy movies,” Curtis said,

“eventually they start to believe it’s real. They talk about it like they’ve done something heroic, something that really happened. When John Wayne sees an Indian in real life, I bet he reaches for his holster. And Lee Marvin, well…”

That’s when I heard the Lee Marvin story for the first time, an abridged version that focused mostly on Curtis getting fired after his boss learned about the incident. The way Curtis described Lee Marvin was as a war veteran who wished the war had never ended. According to Curtis, Lee Marvin, a man desperate for conflict, started to take his roles so seriously—the lieutenant colonel in Attack, the cop in M Squad—that when confronted with an imaginary threat to Jane Fonda, his delusional sense of heroism compelled him to tackle my brother and stab him in the stomach. Lee Marvin hated

Curtis because he looked like a war protester. Lee Marvin carried a knife with him wherever he went. Hearing all of it made me furious. I hated Lee Marvin. I decided right then I would never watch any of his movies.

By the end of the story, Curtis’s mood had soured. Neither of us said anything on the rest of the drive or on the walk from the parking garage into Riverfront Coliseum.

But once the concert started, the evening became great again. I recognized the famous songs, I got to go crazy at the opening bars of “I Just Want to Make Love to

You” and “Fool for the City” with everyone. It was exciting, at twelve years old, to be screaming for joy along with thousands of adults, mostly teenagers and twentysomethings, but some older people too, like Curtis, though he looked much younger. I was allowed to be at the party, and I was as much a part of it as the adults.

Curtis spent the second half of the concert dancing with these two girls, one a blonde

with feathered hair and the other a redhead with a pixie haircut who looked my age but whose voice sounded like my mom’s.

“I know these girls from King Quick,” Curtis yelled into my ear between songs. “I always sell them beer.” He gave me a smile that I didn’t understand. In return I gave him an understanding nod.

At one point Curtis placed the redhead’s hands on my shoulders and told me to dance. I tried. She looked at me and almost smiled, as if she knew something I didn’t. I put my hands on her waist and she wrapped her arms around my neck and we danced, me taking small lateral steps, her whole body swaying. She ran her hand through my hair at the end of the song, mussed it up, and then rejoined the other girl and two new guys who had just arrived. Curtis didn’t look happy to see the guys.

“They used to work with me at McAlpin’s,” he said. “Unloading the trucks.”

After Foghat said goodnight, the lights went out and everyone screamed for an encore. As the crowd grew tired of screaming, the noise died down and I heard one of the guys, the short one with squinty eyes and a dirty face, call Curtis a “faggot-ass photographer” and then fake a first step toward him to make him flinch. The stage lights came back up, Roger Earl got back behind the drum kit, and soon the whole group burst into “Terraplane Blues.”

After the song, my redhead and the two guys were gone. Curtis was yelling something to the blonde girl as she walked away, but she just waved and kept walking.

Curtis came back and patted me on the shoulder. “We still got ‘Slow Ride,’” he said.

When we got to the car, my ears felt as if they were underwater. Curtis’s voice came from the other end of the pool. The radio was on, but I couldn’t recognize the song.

We waited in the parking lot traffic for two hours. We were stuck in the row where we parked. “Can you hear anything?” I asked. Curtis explained to me about concert hangover and how your hearing will bounce back within a few days, no harm done. He was wrong. I went to concerts with my friends throughout my teens and by the time I was twenty-five had to turn up my television so loud that my neighbors complained to my landlord and nearly got me evicted. But Curtis didn’t know that. After explaining to me how youthful ear drums will repair themselves after a few days, he said, “That was a great first show, right? Could have been better, though. We should be partying with

Crystal and Shonda now.”

Crystal (the blonde) and Shonda (the redhead) were sisters that Curtis had met six months ago at the convenience store. According to him, Crystal was sixteen and

Shonda, the one he knew I’d like, was around nineteen, just out of high school.

He struck the steering wheel with his palm.

“Sometimes it doesn’t hit me until afterwards, you know,” he said. “Like with those guys tonight. I can be cool in the moment, but later on, it all hits me. Seriously, man. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever saw Lee Marvin again.”

“I would be mad, too,” I said.

Curtis laughed, barely. “Yeah, we got the same blood.” He smacked my shoulder. “I guess you would be fired up.”

We finally got out of our parking row, and then we finally got out of the lot and back onto the highway. Curtis turned the radio on, I think, although we were on the interstate with the windows down and my hearing was shot, so who knows? A few miles from home we pulled off the highway and passed the King Quick where Curtis worked.

In the parking lot, a few guys were standing around a white Firebird parked out front.

Our car’s tires squealed and we went sideways on the road. Curtis pulled into the lot, the bumper clunked against the curb and my forehead bounced off the passenger door lock. Then he jumped out of the car, ripped his shirt off, and started punching the guy sitting on the trunk of the Cutlass. It was the short guy with the squinty eyes. Two other guys converged on Curtis and a lady wearing a King Quick vest dragged me inside the store and called the police. She put me in the bathroom and told me to hold paper towels against my forehead. In the mirror I saw that blood had slid down from my forehead onto my shirt. The lady probably thought I had been in the fight, too. I didn’t put any water on my face and I didn’t wipe off the blood with paper towels. I couldn’t stay there, useless. I left the bathroom and tried to get back outside to help Curtis in his fight, but the King Quick lady had locked us inside the store.

The Second, 1987

I was twenty-two years old the next time I saw my brother. Our sister Donna was still having trouble rebounding after her hysterectomy, a presage of the trouble she would have a few years later due to uterine cancer. She and I had been getting along better. Her parental tendencies toward me were still there, but I no longer had the adolescent desire to get far away from her smothering love. My mother was hoping that seeing the entire family again would improve Donna’s perspective, which my mother was always hearing had a great impact on a patient’s ability to recover. So my mother,

my aunts and uncles, and several cousins came over for a weekend gathering. Mom fixed chicken and dumplings, cole slaw, baked beans, and biscuits, and most of the women played cards in the living room after everyone ate. A few of the men watched college football on the black-and-white TV downstairs, and Curtis and two uncles sat in lawn chairs outside with their banjos and tried to remember the songs they used to play together.

I went into my mom’s bedroom to call my girlfriend in a quiet room. Katie was eighteen, a short girl with crimped red hair and a tiny mouth that became a pinhole whenever she was trying to concentrate. We’d met at my cousin Derek’s graduation party, and I was relieved to find out she wasn’t a relative. She was wearing a sleeveless

Motley Crüe shirt, a band she’d seen twice on the Girls, Girls, Girls tour and once when they opened for Ozzy. I’d heard some of their songs and seen the video where the band members pull a guy into a mirror, but I was more of a Fishbone fan.

“Fishbone?” she asked. “The black ones?”

I laughed. “Yes, the black ones! The album’s incredible—ska, reggae, rock. They do all of it.”

For the next three weeks, I saw Katie every night. Usually we stayed up late with friends, listening to music and drinking and shooting pool. She didn’t have a job yet and was thinking about going to a beauty school to do nails, so she wanted to make the most of her nights as long as she could, which meant that I stumbled into work at the electronics store each morning, exhausted and happy. By the time Mom had the family over to cheer up Donna, I’d been dating Katie for six weeks, but I had trouble believing that there had ever been a time when we weren’t together. On Sunday morning she’d

be getting back from a family vacation, and then that night we were supposed to go bowling with a bunch of friends.

“You have to come over and meet Curtis first,” I told her on the phone. “He’s only here until Monday.”

I was thrilled that Curtis had flown home for the weekend. After a short prison stint following the King Quick melee, he’d moved back to California, mainly because of the flak he was taking from Donna and Mom, both of whom had been appalled by the gash on my head. I didn’t tell them about Crystal and Sasha, but I did think about Sasha a lot during my adolescence. Actually, the first time I met Katie I started to wonder how she would look dancing with me at a Foghat concert. I was thankful to Curtis for that experience, turning me on to rock music and girls who dug rock music.

Katie came over on Sunday afternoon and we sat with Curtis on the back porch, drinking a twelve-pack of Bud Ice that he had somehow convinced the current King

Quick employees to give him for free, out of respect for the former King Quick employees who’d partied before them. I was embarrassed for him when he brought out the banjo, which I’d never heard played in a Motley Crüe song, but Katie thought it was hilarious. When she laughed, the sound came from her throat, her head tilted back as if normal posture were too restrictive for her joy.

“You have an Old Hollywood smile,” Curtis told her while he messed up a song on the banjo. “What does a starlet like yourself think of Lee Marvin?”

Until I was seventeen, I refused to watch a Lee Marvin movie. When some of my friends wanted to go see a new Chuck Norris movie, Delta Force, which co-starred a sixty-year-old Lee Marvin as an elite team commander, I told them Curtis’s story and

then endured a week of badgering and insults and objections before I finally gave in.

The movie was decent: Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin killed a bunch of Muslim terrorists who hijacked a planeful of Americans. Nothing surprising. But it did start me thinking. I mean, from what I read about Lee Marvin, he wasn’t violent or tough to deal with on a movie set, even when he was drinking. Plus, I never read anything about him being questioned by police or having a reputation for knife fights, and I never heard the stabbing story from a source other than Curtis. In the mid-eighties, the National Enquirer still printed occasional articles about the decades-old Black Dahlia murder in between features like “Burt and Loni on the Rocks” and “Bo Derek Herpes Scare.” Why then didn’t the Enquirer make an occasional big deal out of Oscar-winner Lee Marvin stabbing a photographer on the red carpet right in front of Jane Fonda? I loved Curtis and missed him and wished he lived in Ohio with us, and I think my family overreacted to his post-concert fight. But if you’d put a gun to my head and asked me whether I believed the Lee Marvin story was true—I don’t know what I would’ve said, but I wouldn’t have said “Yes.”

Still, I enjoyed hearing Curtis tell us the story again and then tell us about his second stint in California. He’d seen Hollywood Rose perform at The Roxy on the

Sunset Strip. He’d been to a record producer’s house for a party where there was a bowl of cocaine next to the guacamole. He’d worked at a talent agency, as a courier for

Capitol Records, at a Blockbuster Video warehouse, and as a street performer with his banjo.

We finished off the case of Bud Ice and headed over to meet our friends at the bowling alley. By this time, Curtis was drunk enough to lift up his shirt and show off his

scar from the Lee Marvin stabbing. All of the guys at the bowling alley had seen Delta

Force with me, and they threw a barrage of questions at Curtis. Why didn’t he call the police? Why didn’t the photographer with the head injury call the police? Didn’t that look like an appendectomy scar? Why didn’t Curtis sue or blackmail Lee Marvin? How did it feel to get shivved by Col. Reisman?

During the second game, Katie lay down on the chairs close to the ball return and tried to punch each of us in the crotch when we walked past. I had bowled a 136 the first game, but during this second game I only had a 65 going in to the eighth frame.

“I’m going to be sick,” Katie said, and then headed off to the bathroom.

I could never tell when she was drunk. The stuff she did while drunk wasn’t any stranger than the stuff she did when she was sober. She laughed less, but she never slurred her words or stumbled around. I would have walked her to the bathroom if she had showed any sign of needing help. Her drunk walk and sober walk were identical.

I finished the second game with a 111 after ending on two spares, and I hit 150 on the third game. I usually didn’t get going until I was three or four games and five or six beers in. At the beginning of the fourth game, when I really started feeling it, Derek walked back to the lane with a plate of nachos and a drink carrier filled with beers. He set them down on the scoring table and then whispered, “Dude, come with me.”

We walked past the racks of bowling balls and past the front desk with the rental shoes and went into the arcade. All the room’s light came from the pinball machines and the Pac-Man and RoboCop games. I followed Derek to the back corner of the arcade. It was empty.

“They were sitting back here a minute ago,” he said.

We went outside to check the parking lot. On the far end of the lot, where I’d parked my Cutlass, we found them. In the back seat, Katie was lying with her head leaning back as if about to begin an intense laugh that was going to last forever. She was gripping Curtis’s hair in her fists, and his head moved between her legs.

I turned and started walking to the other end of the parking lot. I heard Derek kick the car door a few times and call Katie a cooze and Curtis a middle-aged bitch. I kept walking. Eventually, Derek caught up to me and we walked home together in our bowling shoes.

I didn’t talk to Curtis for the next six years. I yelled at Katie the next time I saw her, but it didn’t make me any less angry. By the time I thought everything through and wanted to fight Curtis, he had been gone for a week. Several of my relatives called him long-distance just to tell him how awful he was and how ashamed my father would have been. I saw Katie two times when she came back to visit her family, once at the grocery store and once at the dollar movie theater, and I refused to make eye contact with her.

Six months later she moved out to California to live with Curtis.

Fact-Checking the Lee Marvin Story, 1990–1992

The passage of time didn’t diminish my anger. When I visited Mom and Curtis called on the phone, I had to go sit in my old room with the door closed until I heard her hang up. When I showed Donna the old family pictures to try and keep her spirits up while she got weaker and weaker, I would look away whenever we came to a picture that included Curtis. Even though he and Katie were both out of the state, so many things in Franklin caused me to feel that they were right around the corner. After the incident in the bowling-alley parking lot, Donna had said she would shoot Curtis if she ever saw him even smile at one of my girlfriends again. My sister was tough, overly

much at times, but seeing her be that mean to someone on my behalf made me feel loved more than I’d ever been. She wasn’t even gone but I knew I was going to miss

Donna, and Curtis didn’t even try to visit her, and yet here he was in all these family photos, more prominent than I was.

After my shifts at the electronics shop, I started driving up to the University of

Dayton library and doing research on Lee Marvin and the premiere of Cat Ballou. I found a few significant pieces of information. First, the premiere had been a week-long event in Denver, not Los Angeles, which Curtis never mentioned, and I’m not sure if

Screen Stars would have paid for a photographer on his first red-carpet assignment to spend a week in Denver. Second, there were no articles that definitively said that Curtis was there or that any photographer got stabbed. There were, however, references to an incident involving a photographer on the red carpet.

The Denver Post, April 8, 1965, “Hollywood Hills reach the Mile-High City”

Denver got a taste of Hollywood glamour at the Centre Theater yesterday as Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda arrived on the red carpet for the premiere of their new Columbia Pictures western-comedy Cat Ballou, in which Fonda plays the title character who is threatened with a hanging and Marvin plays the dual roles of the villain and of Fonda’s drunken sidekick.

The premiere capped off a week of festivities that included a staged “hanging” on Thursday of a look-alike of Fonda’s character from the film at the Civic Center and a ceremony on Friday afternoon that ended with Marvin receiving the key to the city from Mayor Thomas Currigan. Upon receiving the key, Marvin joked that he would “have to hide this under a giant rug in Edgewater,” eliciting much laughter from the appreciative fans in attendance.

Fans lined up as early as 1 p.m. to catch glimpses of Fonda and Marvin on the red carpet. Besides a brief dust-up involving a few Hollywood photographers that required Marvin’s intervention, the all-star event went off without a hitch and gave some young Denver residents a glimpse of real-life silver screen stars.

Susie Renfro, 15, of Union Station, said…

The article established three things: (1) Lee Marvin was in Denver for the premiere, (2) he seemed to be in good spirits while accepting the key to the city, and (3) there was a photographer-related incident in which he intervened. No mention of Curtis,

Screen Stars, any act of violence, or significant injuries such as a stabbing.

There was one other item that almost certainly has nothing to do with the incident. It was from Sunday, April 9, 1965, two days after the Cat Ballou premiere and one day after the stories about the photographer incident. This was one of the fifty-eight items listed in the downtown police blotter.

Friday, April 7, 9:05 p.m.—Police were called to assist a stabbing victim on the sidewalk 1400 block of Pennsylvania Street. Victim was transported to Denver Health in an ambulance.

I called a few numbers for the Denver Police Department and asked if they’d have any record of the incident, but the public information officer couldn’t find any record of charges filed. The address given in the newspaper report, though, was only five blocks away from where the Centre Theater stood.

If Lee Marvin were put on trial for this a hundred times, he’d be acquitted by all hundred juries. I had no proof that Curtis had been in Denver or that he’d had a physical altercation with another photographer or that Lee Marvin had even tackled him. But I didn’t find any proof that Curtis wasn’t there or that Lee Marvin didn’t stab him.

The Third, 1993

In 1993, my sister Donna finally died of uterine cancer. Uterine cancer had become bladder cancer that became something else and something else. The last months of her life forced me into the role of voyeur, watching her die while making no effort to help because there was no way to help. In the last few months, the hospice nurses showed us how to give Donna her morphine, haloperidol, and lorazepam and

made sure we knew what her impending death would look like. Donna had a few bumps on her scalp that looked like half-emerged golf balls. Her bed was in the middle of my mother’s living room, so it was hard not to look at her when she was sleeping and search for signs that her body had deteriorated since the last time I’d visited. I always found something.

I was dating a Korean girl named Yun whom I’d met in 1992 at the electronics repair store. She’d brought in her Super Nintendo and started telling me how she’d spilled 7-Up on it, and I couldn’t keep myself from staring at her green hair. I’d seen other girls, white girls, with the green hair recently, but none looked, as Yun did, like like a pretty and exotic cartoon. A few days later, after I’d replaced her controller port, she came back to the store and I asked her to get a drink with me. Yun didn’t drink, so we went to the new Starbucks down the street. We talked about video games and sitcoms and the state of alternative music. By then I was no longer listening to Motley Crüe or any of the hair metal bands. Motley Crüe was fake—a pop band pretending to be a gang of wild, devil-worshipping rock-n-rollers, and they were as good as hair metal got.

Nirvana, though, when I saw them play live, looked as if they were playing their songs for the first time. The emotion on Kurt Cobain’s face didn’t result in a Nikki Sixx–caliber guitar solo, only a mess of distorted notes and slips of feedback that indicated very little pretense. Yun thought Kurt Cobain was better than Paul McCartney.

After we’d been dating for a few months, I told Yun about Curtis and how I didn’t talk to him and about everything he’d done to ruin my relationship with Katie and to steal her from me and how, even though I was over Katie completely and never wanted to see her again and they both lived thousands of miles away, it was the principle of the

thing that bugged me. Though Yun didn’t know who Lee Marvin was, I told her about

Curtis’s story and the reasons why I no longer believed it. Lee Marvin was a much, much better person that Curtis. So much so that I couldn’t figure out what Curtis could have against the guy, besides jealousy. Lee Marvin was not a stabber. He was not even the aggressive masculine ideal that he played in so many movies. He was different kind of masculine ideal—an ex-Marine, an avid sailor and fisherman, a man with plenty of drinking stories—but not an abrasive, John Wayne–type. Also he looked nothing like my father. They had both served in World War II and seemed to possess a sureness about themselves that would hold up in any epoch, but the similarities ended there. My dad looked like a pissed-off Ozzie Nelson. Lee Marvin had gray hair even when he was young, while my dad had light brown hair that disappeared before I was born. Lee

Marvin had a deep voice, while my dad was a tenor whose pitch rose as he spoke louder, making it hard to tell who was who when he and my mom argued. Lee Marvin had the air of a man about to bring a sense of reason to an insensible situation, my dad had a smile that reddened his face and made his cheeks rise and gave strangers the impression that they might be seeing a real-life lunatic. Lee Marvin was an outspoken

Democrat who publicly supported John F. Kennedy, my dad stayed home on Election

Day in 1960 because he disliked Nixon but didn’t want to vote for a Catholic. Lee Marvin seemed comfortable in the sixties and seventies, my dad just pretended it was still the fifties.

Yun listened to all of it. She knew about conflict and conflict resolution because she had minored in psychology at UD, where I’d done most of my fact-checking. Letting off steam, she argued, wasn’t the best way to go.

“Indulging your anger won’t make you a less angry person in the long run,” she said. “If somebody watches pornos, does it make them think about sex less?”

Yun was the opposite of Katie. I didn’t stop drinking altogether because of her, but since she never drank, I rarely drank around her. We didn’t stay out past ten, so I was never exhausted at work in the morning. My mom loved her, and Donna had been ecstatic to see me dating somebody whom she didn’t have to worry about.

Donna’s funeral was scheduled for a week after she died, and Curtis and Katie were coming. I didn’t want to see them or talk to them or introduce them to Yun and act as if everything was fine. I didn’t want them to think they’d done nothing wrong. I didn’t want to witness their subtle reactions to seeing me with a Korean girl. I didn’t want

Curtis to think he’d been there for our sister.

Two days after Donna died, Yun took me to Frisch’s for lunch and spelled out her concern over my reluctance to speak to Curtis. We ate burgers and she listed all the reasons it would make me a better person if I talked to him, and I couldn’t think of a valid counterargument.

“Do you want to give him a reason to not talk to you?” she asked.

“I don’t think I care,” I said.

“You will, eventually. You’re a good person. Make sure that he’s the only reason—that they’re the only reason any of this continues. Don’t let yourself be a cause.”

But in the days leading up to the funeral, my resolve began to wane. My mother and my aunts were going through their boxes of family photos and choosing which ones

of Donna to display. Curtis was in about half the photos, which was crazy because

Donna was always angry or disappointed with him for something.

The funeral home had neutral colors everywhere—carpet, drapes, wallpaper, upholstery. There were chandeliers in every room and the whole place smelled like potpourri. Flowers were stacked around the coffin, including a garland of white carnations draped over the bottom of her casket, as if she’d just won the Belmont

Stakes.

The funeral was open-casket, Donna’s body lying inside a coffin padded with frilly taffeta. I barely recognized her face. The funeral home had fastened a short blonde wig to her scalp and put makeup on her cheeks and eyes. She looked like a hooker from the

Old West.

I stood in front of the casket with my fingers just inside. I needed to feel what she’d be lying on. The lining was soft but my fingertips could sense the hard wood beneath. I didn’t want to touch her, not because I was scared but because this wasn’t

Donna, this was a picture or a sculpture or a memory of Donna. It would be like stroking her school yearbook photo. If our places were reversed, though, she’d probably be fixing my hair and trying to warm my cold hands.

I sighed. I extended my fingers and patted her dead arm, just so she knew I wasn’t scared.

Across the room, I saw the funeral director with his arm slung over Curtis’s shoulder. Curtis now had messy, spiked hair that was much lighter than I remembered.

He was staring at the floor somewhere ahead of him, his eyes red from rubbing away tears. Behind him Katie was talking to my aunt. Katie’s hair had changed from red and

crimped to brown and straight. Her face was fuller, which made her tiny mouth appear even tinier, and overdone with makeup. Neither of them showed signs of being as uncomfortable as I was.

For the eulogy I sat in the first row with Yun to my right and Mom to my left. On the other side of Mom, Curtis and Katie sat together. As the speaker talked about

Donna’s time as a nurse at Middletown Hospital, one of my uncles leaned forward and patted Curtis on the shoulder. There were stories quoted from former patients who raved about how nice Donna had been and how much she had seemed to care. There were anecdotes from vacations with my cousins and accounts of what a vicious card- player she could be. What elicited the most smiles and laughter was a story about

Curtis and Donna from when they were nine and three years old, respectively. While

Curtis was at school, Donna went into his bedroom and decided to eat two of his baseball cards. Evidently she’d seen Curtis open his packs of baseball cards and start chewing the piece of gum that came in every pack. Donna, in an effort to emulate her brother and his apparent baseball card-eating, had scarfed down a Stan Musial and half of a Frank Robinson rookie card. Most of the people in the funeral home laughed, even the funeral director, even Yun. Mom reached over and gripped Curtis’s knee.

There was nothing in the eulogy about Donna taking care of our mother in the absence of our deceased father and our absentee brother. There was nothing about how Donna was basically my guardian for the year after my father’s death when Mom stopped waking me up for school and spent most of her mornings tending to the rows and rows of grape tomatoes and zucchinis and cabbage in the garden, all of which were slowly being decimated by ferocious rabbits. There was nothing about how, after Donna

ate the baseball cards, Curtis went into her bedroom and tore up her My Fair Lady paper dolls and how Dad slapped Curtis so hard that Curtis hit his head against the wall and then needed a few minutes to remember where he was and what had happened to his baseball cards.

Whatever wall separates me from feeling the sum of everything that has ever happened—that wall came down. I cried loudly enough that I didn’t even bother leaving the room. There was no chance of this going unnoticed. I was splitting apart. The speaker stopped for a second and then finished the eulogy through the audible sobs. I wasn’t trying to be quiet, I didn’t care. Yun gave me tissues and wrapped her arms around me and said something soothing, I don’t remember the exact words. The speaker ended the eulogy with a prayer and I had to leave mid-prayer because the tears had made my nose start to gush and I’d already used up all the tissues.

I went into the bathroom in the lobby and used up a half-roll of toilet paper blowing my nose, which left my nostrils redder than my eyes. I looked sad and drunk.

One of my uncles came into the bathroom a few minutes later. It was a one- person bathroom but I’d forgotten to lock the door. My uncle hugged me, and being hugged by an uncle in a one-person bathroom shocked me out of the crying fit. He told me that Donna was in heaven now, or that she was waiting to hear the Lord’s voice, or that she had gone home. She wasn’t in hell, was the gist.

“When you started crying, and then ol’ Curtis, he started up,” my uncle said,

“about every one of us in there wanted to run over and hug the whole family.”

By the time I opened the door, I didn’t mind how awkward the one-person bathroom hug had been. It was just nice to know that I wasn’t the only person who had no clue what he was doing that day.

Yun was waiting for me outside the bathroom. She hugged me for a long time, the longest non-pre-sex hug we’ve ever had.

In the lobby near the bathroom, I could hear Curtis talking to three of Donna’s work friends.

“So now, I guess, they think I’m making a move toward Jane Fonda,” he said,

“but who I didn’t see coming was Lee Marvin.”

Yun and I walked back toward the casket and started talking to the rest of the family. I introduced her to my cousins and I got hugs and tears and some moving words of encouragement and some nearly incoherent words of encouragement. My tearing- apart feeling was subsiding, I was too exhausted for emotional complexity. I was glad the funeral was over and glad the sobbing was over.

The pallbearers carried Donna’s coffin out to the hearse. In the lead car, a black

Lincoln, my mother sat in the front seat with my aunt and the driver. I opened the back door and saw Curtis and Katie. I froze. I was standing in the parking lot, my fingers interlaced with Yun’s. There was only one seat left in the car. Yun rubbed my shoulder.

My jaw was tense enough that it was difficult to talk. I looked at them up close for the first time today. The first time in six years. The hair on Curtis’s head had thinned out enough that I could see his scalp. He had deep, deep grooves in his forehead. He looked like Katie’s dad. Katie wore a pleated black skirt that, in the car, had ridden up to

her mid-thigh. They both looked at me as if their minds had been wiped clean of every bad thing that had happened between them and me.

“Where was the premiere, Curtis?” I asked. “When you got stabbed, what city?”

He shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“What. City.”

From the front seat my mom turned around. “Boys. Not today.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

Curtis touched Katie’s arm, letting her know he could handle it. “I don’t know why that’s important today.”

“Where was it? LA? Denver? Phoenix?”

“We’re not doing this, buddy.”

“Where.”

“Today is about Donna.”

I lunged for his neck and there was screaming from my mother and aunt and probably from Katie. After several seconds of trying to choke each other and land punches without hurting the girls, whose hands were all over us and in between us, the pallbearers yanked me out of the car and shoved me back toward the funeral home. My mom and aunt were in hysterics. Eventually the lead car left without me.

Yun wiped my face with a tissue.

“I think Katie cut you with her nails,” she said.

We caught a ride to the cemetery with Derek, my cousin who had kicked the car door on the night of the bowling-alley incident. I told him what had happened, why Curtis and I had started fighting in the back seat of the lead car. Derek nodded but didn’t say

anything in response. Yun and I sat in the back seat, I on the right side and she on the left. She stared out the window all during the ride. When we got to the cemetery, there were more tears, there was another short eulogy, and then they lowered my sister into the ground. For the rest of the day, Yun looked at me sadly, as if I were something other than me.

Arlington, 1997

I walked toward the Memorial Amphitheater and spent ten minutes looking for

Lee Marvin’s grave. It was growing dark. The clouds were heavy and gray. I spotted the massive headstone for Joe Louis and his wife. Next to it, two bouquets of flowers rested against a small white stone: Lee Marvin, PFC, US Marines, World War II. I stepped around the stone a few times as I’d done at my dad’s grave. Somewhere below me was a movie star who had probably never stabbed my older brother.

On the train ride back to the hotel, I thought about how I’d feel if Curtis died before I talked to him again. I was twenty-nine and he was fifty-one. Soon we’d both be potential heart attack victims. I hadn’t asked Mom about him recently, but I assumed that he hadn’t become a father or married Katie yet, if they were still together. What if I had to speak at his funeral and maybe even organize and pay for the services and shell out the twenty-five dollars to get his obituary printed in the Middletown Journal? If I did speak, I wouldn’t be able to avoid Lee Marvin. I’d have to tell about all the times I heard

Curtis tell the story, about how he even told it at our sister’s funeral to her former coworkers who barely knew who he was, and about the articles I found in the Denver

Post that didn’t corroborate but didn’t disprove his story. And I’d probably have to tell about how he’d told the Lee Marvin story to my girlfriend Katie and five hours later I

discovered them in the back of my Cutlass outside the bowling alley. And I’d have to be ready for that story to get the biggest laugh.

THE FUTURE-GHOST OF CHARLES BRONSON AT HOME DEPOT

It is 1995. Your mother is standing in a ceiling fan aisle at Home Depot, where she works to supplement the disability checks she receives because of her emphysema. If she stands for more than ninety minutes at a time, she gets out of breath. She is fifty-two years old. Her hair, formerly a perm of tight curls, is now a drape of gray with partly dyed loops. She likes that her orange Home Depot apron covers up the zone where her protruding stomach catches her falling breasts. The apron makes her feel more relaxed.

After a young couple, both of them in their early thirties (about your age), decide on a indoor-outdoor fan for their screened-in porch, the ghost of Charles Bronson walks down the aisle and stops in front of your mother. His hair is dark, his face tan and creased, his mustache combed and trimmed, his ethnicity ungraspable. He wears a leather jacket with a wide fur collar and jeans that flare and cover his shoelaces. The entire outfit looks like its from the wardrobe of a 1970s movie, but he owns the look.

The ghost of Charles Bronson smiles at your mother.

“Hello,” the ghost of Charles Bronson says. “I’m the ghost of Charles Bronson.”

Your mother is intrigued, of course, lifted out of her hardware-store haze. And yet your mother is no fool.

“You’re not the ghost of Charles Bronson,” she says. “Charles Bronson is still alive.”

He smiles, his eyes intensely grateful for her directness.

“Well, then,” he says. “Looks like I’m early.”

He’s right. He is eight years early. Charles Bronson will die in 2003. The present- day Charles Bronson has grayer hair, a weaker voice, more kindness in his face than

volatility. Your mother decides that this must be the future-ghost of Charles Bronson— this isn’t a past-ghost (this ghost seems too comfortable in a hardware supercenter), there shouldn’t be a present-ghost (Charles Bronson is still alive in 1995), so that leaves the future-ghost. And this Charles Bronson, this future-ghost, he still has the physicality, the physique, of a man whose shoulders and chest are sculpted underneath his collared shirt and sweater, a man who isn’t past the age of using his body to get what he wants.

The future-ghost of Charles Bronson offers to take your mother to dinner at a nearby steakhouse buffet and, maybe afterwards, to visit a local country music show that she likes—at least, she liked it the last time she went out, which was months ago when her sister (your aunt) came to visit.

Later that evening your mother thinks about calling it off. She remembers the previous husbands—your father, mainly, but also your temporary stepfather and the few others who never reached step-fatherhood. Granted, there are no young children now.

You, your sister, and your brother are all grown up, with children of your own. But she doesn’t want to worry again, doesn’t want you to have to worry again, wishes you never had to worry when you were younger. Still, there must be something important that brought the ghost of Charles Bronson to her early, something that conjured him before the traditional moment when a ghost shows up in a hardware store to ask a woman to dinner.

Your mother goes home, watches the Oprah and Ricki Lake episodes that she set the VCR to record earlier in the day, fills her lungs with her Advair inhaler, and goes to bed. During the night she dreams of you and your children. Except you aren’t your age now, you’re a child again, the same age as your children, and you’re all in a car

with your father, and your father drives all of you into a river and the car vanishes and the bubbles sweep you away with the current.

You remember that first time you met your father. It was during a visitors’ weekend at a prison. You knew, of course, that this wasn’t really the first time you’d met him.

“Don’t you remember me?” he asks. “I know you remember your daddy.”

As a present, he gives you a plastic dinosaur that you saw your mother put in her purse before you left the house. Now you walk the dinosaur across the table and roar as your father and your mother smoke and talk in low voices. A few minutes later your father smacks the table and the dinosaur falls sideways onto your mother’s lap. A guard drags your father from the room.

During the whole scene—your father smacking the table, hissing a threat to your mother about some guy named Gus, your father’s shoes leaving black marks on the tile as he’s pulled away by the guard—your mother doesn’t flinch. She hands the dinosaur back to you, finishes her cigarette, stands up, and then you both walk back to the car.

For her second date with the future-ghost of Charles Bronson, your mother arrives early at the Italian restaurant, which is a nicer place than she’s accustomed to.

The host asks your mother, rather abruptly, where the rest of her party is. Your mother is only fifteen minutes early, but the restaurant is busy and the host resents that he has to explain this to your mother. A party cannot be seated on Friday evening until every member is present.

“That was made clear when you called,” the host says.

She tries to replay that this is her first time here and she wasn’t the one who made the reservation, but the host turns away. It’s another ten minutes before the future-ghost of Charles Bronson arrives. Immediately your mother tells him she wants to go somewhere else. The host has made her feel small and unimportant. Can they get pizza instead?

Tonight, the future-ghost of Charles Bronson is wearing jeans, a wide-collared white shirt, a silver chain with a dream-catcher medallion, and a denim jacket. His hair falls over his ears. When your mother tells him what happened, his eyebrows rise and he does not smile. For a moment he looks away, toward a spot that isn’t inside the restaurant, and then he pats your mother on the hand.

“Wait right here,” he says, and goes to speak to the host.

While they are being seated, the host never looks them in the eye. He seems to be stifling a sob when he calls your mother “ma’am” and asks that they let him know if there’s anything he can do for them.

Your mother and the future-ghost of Charles Bronson both order the chicken parmesan. They share a bottle of merlot. Your mother talks about her work at Home

Depot, her income-restricted apartment complex, the upstairs neighbors who always complain about her television volume and her wind chimes. She talks about her worry over whether she’ll be able to get by on social security and disability when she turns sixty-two, her hope that she can stay on the Advair inhaler and avoid going on oxygen for as long as possible. The future-ghost of Charles Bronson listens intently. He asks follow-up questions. He assures her that everything will be fine. He has a much lighter

disposition throughout dinner, as if a potential tragedy has been avoided. As they leave the restaurant, the host waves at them but does not meet their eyes.

The prison visit is your first real memory of your father, but your second memory is what gave you the story that you tell more than any other.

It happened when you were seven, soon after first grade ended and summer vacation began. You were on a coach-pitch baseball team for the first time that summer, and you were excited about using aluminum bats. Your father was out of prison, but you hadn’t seen him and your mother was reluctant to give you a solid answer when you asked when he was coming over. You remembered the prison visit and the dinosaur

(which you lost soon afterwards), but your hopes about your father were separate from what happened during that visit, separate from the things you’d heard about him from your grandfather and your aunt.

It happened late at night, waking you from sleep. You closed the bedroom door behind you so as not to wake your younger brother, with whom you shared a bed. You walked down the hallway and squinted your eyes to adjust to the fluorescent lights in the kitchen. Your father held your mother’s hair wrapped around his fist and was throwing her face into the silverware drawer, until the force broke the drawer and the silverware clattered onto the floor. Your mother’s face was bloody. A fork had stuck in her hair and she swatted it away. She kicked at your father from the floor and they were both yelling, her yell high-pitched and his slurred. You got your twenty-five-inch aluminum bat from the closet and hit your father in the knee hard enough to send him into genuflection. He didn’t seem hurt and you swung again but he caught your swing in

midair. He yanked the bat out of your hands and it rolled under the kitchen table. He moved to stand up but your mother smashed a toaster against the side of his face and kept smashing until he went quiet. You thought he was dead. She picked up the phone with shaky hands and asked you to bring her the cigarettes from her purse.

Your father went back to prison for a while. You didn’t see him again. But even now, you know where he is. You’re the kind of person who keeps track.

Your mother opens her apartment door on her way to work and sees her wind chimes lying on the porch. The strings that hold the aluminum chimes have been cut, the wood top-piece smashed into shards. She doesn’t see the striker or the windcatcher anywhere. It must have been the upstairs neighbors—the kids are always running around and making noise, and yet the father stomps on the floor whenever he hears your mother’s television. It’s not a huge deal. Those wind chimes were old anyway.

Over the phone, your mother tells the story to the future-ghost of Charles

Bronson. Unfortunately, the future-ghost of Charles Bronson has to go away for a week to deal with some future-ghost business.

“I need to take care of something,” he says. “Don’t you worry.”

The night before he leaves, he takes her to a Mexican restaurant at a strip mall and impresses even the waiters with his command of Spanish. The all-you-can-eat tostada chips are a meal by themselves, and the enchiladas and Mexican rice are so good that your mother is tempted to come back the next day. The future-ghost of

Charles Bronson talks about his time in the military and about his early career. Your

mother tells him about how well you and your siblings turned out and repeats that the wind chimes needed to be replaced anyway.

“Maybe we can find some new ones after I get back,” the future-ghost of Charles

Bronson says.

For the rest of the week, your mother is busy at work because Home Depot has had a rash of drug-related firings that has left the branch shorthanded on the registers.

Although the register isn’t your mother’s favorite place in the store, at least she gets to sit down. After three straight five-hour days on register, she gets home at eight in the evening and falls right into bed without watching her episodes of Oprah and Ricki Lake.

Some noises wake her up during the night—the upstairs kids being rowdy, lots of screaming—but she quickly falls back to sleep.

The next morning she finds an envelope taped to her front door. Inside there’s an apology letter from the upstairs neighbor along with eight crinkled-up five-dollar bills.

The handwriting is shaky but the words seem sincere. Over the phone that night, when your mother tells the future-ghost of Charles Bronson about the letter, he sounds elated.

“I’m glad for you,” he says, “and I’m glad the man came to his senses.”

The next time your mother and the future-ghost of Charles Bronson see the upstairs neighbor in the parking lot, the man drops his groceries and runs up the stairs two at a time.

When your mother tells you she has a new boyfriend, you’re worried. Your mother’s choice of men has not, to say the least, been good. Your father, whom you had to hit with a bat; your stepfather, Gus, who once disappeared for days and, when

he returned, tore the hallway light out of the ceiling to search for an FBI listening device; the boyfriends, the best of whom, Lance, was unemployed and stayed home and played video games with you for most of your ninth-grade summer vacation.

When you meet the future-ghost of Charles Bronson at the Mexican restaurant at the strip mall—“Kind of our place,” your mother says—you are relieved and dismayed.

The man is wearing kind clothes, but his body is a rock. You would be helpless against him. You could never break the future-ghost of Charles Bronson, much less the actual- ghost of Charles Bronson, whenever he arrives.

“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” he says to you when your mother has stepped away from the table.

Although you’re pretty sure your mother must have told him about the incident with your father, that’s not, you think, what the future-ghost of Charles Bronson is referring to. He is referring to the things your mother never knew about. The gun you kept under your bed as a teenager. Your visit to your ex-stepfather Gus’s apartment after he started calling your mother and demanding that she let him use her van, even though she never owned a van. Your phone call to the hiring manager at Home Depot after she was turned down for the part-time sales job. Your yearly calls to your father to explain what would happen to him if he came back.

The words aren’t complicated—“I appreciate everything you’ve done”—but you’re afraid you’ll cry and that your mother might notice your reddened, post-crying eyes when she returns to the table. The future-ghost of Charles Bronson puts a hand on your shoulder and nods to you.

You’re so relieved that it’s over.

Your mother is fine.

The future-ghost of Charles Bronson cannot do everything. He cannot forget the cost of protecting the people he loves. He cannot make your mother forget what has already happened—the death of your grandfather, the sight of you needing to hit your father, the guilt that has seized her nearly every day since your childhood. The future- ghost of Charles Bronson cannot redress the wrongs imposed by Gus’s contractor friend who took your mother’s money and then overdosed before he finished remodeling her bathroom, leaving the family without a bathtub for three months, forcing you to bathe at the kitchen sink. The future-ghost of Charles Bronson cannot bring back the hope that once filled your mother’s bellyless body and made her feel like a coiled spring that was ready to pounce on the day. He cannot give her a photo album full of trips to

Branson and family reunions and church picnics and road trips that never happened.

He cannot open fire on emphysema. He cannot threaten to castrate your mother’s eventual need to be on oxygen. He cannot dismember the bodies of intrusive thoughts.

For that, she has to wait for the actual-ghost of Charles Bronson, and so do you.

For you know that soon, someday, the actual-ghost of Charles Bronson will be here, and the sky will turn gray, and the real bloodbath will begin. In the meantime, watch your mother smile as she puts on her coat before she leaves for another date. Watch your own children hop in place before they drop their toys and run to hug grandma.

Watch the future-ghost of Charles Bronson as he meets the eyes of someone who has

hurt her—a dishonest mechanic, an irate customer, a spiteful coworker. Watch the future-ghost of Charles Bronson smile barely but defiantly before he starts his work.

THE STERLING HAYDEN OF SHIPPING AND RECEIVING

In the bathroom of her apartment, April removed the beating human heart from the bathtub and placed it inside a forty-eight-quart Coleman cooler. The heart continued pumping blood, coating the bottom of the cooler. It was impossible—the heart was attached to nothing, had no source of blood, yet continued pumping without regard for its separation from a body. While handling the heart, April was unsettled enough that she could temporarily forget about the problems with her ex-husband and daughter.

April put the cooler into the trunk of her car, which she left open, and drove to the

Sizemore house. Two times on her drive to the Sizemore house, she pulled onto the shoulder and emptied the cooler full of blood that the heart had pumped, and the blood formed a rivulet that washed away some of the loose rocks and cigarette butts and bottle caps along the roadside. At sixty beats per minute and roughly one-half pint per beat, the heart pumped about three-hundred pints (or one-hundred-fifty quarts) of blood over the course of the thirty-minute drive to the Sizemores’ house; with a forty-eight- quart cooler, that meant three stops. But during the final third of her trip, April hit a series of potholes and heard splashes of blood hit the pavement. In the rearview mirror, between glances of the bobbing trunk lid, she saw what she guessed to be ten quarts of blood splattered on the road, a number that made a third stop unnecessary. She sought out a few more potholes, however, just to be safe.

The ad had appeared in the Found section of the Sunday paper. Found. One beating human heart. Delivered in EcoHealth2K mail order box, heart was on top of packing peanuts, ruined box. Mostly red/pink with blue veins, yellow stuff on one side.

Pumps well. Call April after 3 p.m. The listing appeared between an ad for a turtle with a painted shell found near a gas station and a flip-flop found on a roof—Looks to be a size

7. Call Nate to negotiate return. That afternoon, April received a call from Velma

Sizemore, whose husband, Roy, had worked at the EcoHealth2K distribution warehouse until his heart had absconded earlier that week. April promised to deliver the heart that next morning despite the thirty-minute drive.

The Sizemores’ neighborhood was full of houses with combinations of brick and vinyl siding, many with FOR SALE signs in their front yards. The morning sunlight threw the slanted shadows of short trees across the lawns. April parked along the curb in front of the Sizemore house, a one-story ranch with a front bay window from which a plug of pink insulation burst. The lawn had a diagonal mow pattern and there was bright red mulch and knee-high shrubs along the front of the house. All of them looked well- tended, in need of a slight trimming at most.

April turned off the ignition and the engine ticked. April is a youthful name, implying spring and newborn colors, and on the phone her voice had a teenage raspiness that suggested a freckled redhead with endless energy. When people met her in person—for example, the owner of the dance studio on Main from whom April was still awaiting a call—they often looked over her shoulder to see if the real April was about to emerge from behind this graying, broad-hipped thirty-seven-year-old dressed in a maxi skirt and a flowing, plus-size tunic. In person, April reminded people of a carnival fortune-teller from a movie, not a woman who had studied dance for a year in college before getting pregnant and dropping out.

She walked up the steps to the Sizemores’ front door and rang the bell. The breeze was slight and rustled the shoots of the boxwoods that flanked the door. A

woman with a short gray perm answered, looked at April and then beyond her. Behind the screen door, the woman raised an eyebrow.

“So.” The woman’s voice was gruff. “You’re April?”

“Yeah. You’re Velma?”

“Yeah.” Velma chuckled. “The Velma. Do you need help bringing it in?”

They each took a handle of the heavy cooler and lifted it out of the trunk, the blood sloshing over the cooler’s lip. Behind the trunk there was a trail of blood that led down to the stop sign at the end of the street and then turned back in the direction from which April had come.

“A trail of bread crumbs,” Velma said.

“We should empty this first,” April said, “before we take it inside.”

“Let’s do it into the sewer.” Velma pointed to the storm drain along the curb.

“Roy’s particular about the lawn, if you know what I mean. Or if you don’t. Ha.”

They dumped forty quarts of blood into the storm drain, careful to prevent the heart from falling out with it. April picked up the now much lighter cooler and followed

Velma into the house. She placed the cooler in the tub, and Velma stood over it and looked at the beating heart. The heart clutched and spouted every second, the ventricles taking in air, the aorta expelling blood. The inside of the cooler was stained along the sides, and, though they just emptied it, the bottom was already covered in a sheet of new blood. The heart pumped and pumped.

“I put it on ice at first, when it first came in the mail,” April said, “but the blood just melted the ice. Didn’t make it beat slower or anything.”

Velma’s eyes began to water. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket, picked up a lighter from the bathroom counter, and lit a cigarette.

“Seems like there should be more to a heart than that,” she said. “Nothing’s going in but—then all that blood. Could you hit the fan, dear?”

April flipped the switch to turn on the bathroom’s overhead exhaust but despite the fan the smoke collected and hovered in a cloud near the ceiling.

“I should thank you for putting the ad in the paper,” Velma said. “This is the first week I thought to check. I hope you didn’t have to pay to keeping it running the past couple weeks.”

“No,” April said, “the ad only ran yesterday.”

“Good, good,” Velma said. “At first I called the insurance company, but you know how they are. It took an afternoon just to report what happened, and they can’t tell you anything right away. I’m still waiting to hear back from them.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing yet. I called them that first day, and they asked—”

“I mean to your husband.”

“Oh. Roy. But I told you that. It was at work. He’s been eligible for retirement since last year, but we can’t afford it. The pension there isn’t enough to keep the house, which I wouldn’t mind moving out of, but we need it on account of the grandkids. But that’s a whole ’nother story, dear.” She exhaled smoke through her nostrils. “We need to have a place for the kids to stay in case our son’s on the outs with his wife. So Roy’s kept working. He’s a shipping supervisor but he has to pitch in on most days because people don’t show up or there’s backorders. It was on Tuesday, this week. Roy was

down at work, and they called me here at the house and said there’d been some kind of accident. The way Everett tells it—Everett’s one of the guys works with him at the delivery center—Roy didn’t come back from afternoon break. So Everett goes outside to check, and he sees Roy lying facedown on the concrete by the dumpster, propped up on one side. They figured it fell into one of those boxes Roy was packing. Though it must have happened in the morning, right before the first truck comes, because they should have been able to spot the box if it got all bloody. He was probably in such shock that he didn’t know what to do, just kept filling orders after it happened. ‘Lead by example’ is his thing.”

“The box was disgusting.”

Velma smiled. “Must have been. Roy looks a mess, even when he’s healthy. I’m sorry, I didn’t even—” She extended the pack of cigarettes.

“No, thanks,” April said. “I quit.”

“Probably a good idea. I will if I have to, I guess. If I run out. Ha. My sister quit, and she gave up coffee too, and now she says she has more energy now, though I’m not sure about that.” She smiled. “‘What does a man really need? Just a smoke and a cup of coffee.’ You probably haven’t seen that one, have you?”

April shook her head. “I’m not really—”

“It’s all right. It’s an old one.” Velma waved away the smoke in front of her. “We can head into the living room. Take a seat, it’s the least I can do. I’ll get us both a

Sprite.”

The living room and kitchen were next to each other, separated by a narrow dining area with a small table. While Velma went into the kitchen for the Sprites, April

sat in a plush recliner across from the white couch, which had an afghan draped over it.

From where she sat she could see through the sliding doors into the backyard.

Velma returned with two Sprite cans, plastic straws sticking out the tops. When she placed a can on the coffee table in front of April, the bubbles hissed. Velma sat on the couch and tossed a coaster across the coffee table to April.

“This week…” Velma shook her head. “Back when Roy and I’d only been married for a little over twelve years—so this was late sixties—I left him for a few days, went to stay with my sister. I won’t tell you the reason, you wouldn’t believe it. But the way it was then, a few days without Roy, that’s how it’s been this week. Like when the power goes out. You never jump up and down about turning on the lights and having the toaster work, but when the power’s off, you don’t know what to do. And I’m so used to having Roy’s schedule in the back of my mind—when he has to leave for work, when he’s on lunch, when he’ll be getting home.”

“I know the feeling.”

“So what is it your husband does?”

“He works for the city. He does maintenance, snow removal—but we’re getting divorced.”

“Was that before or after Roy mailed you his heart?” She smiled, looked toward the bedroom. “You’re a homewrecker, Roy.”

“No, no, definitely before. I moved out, me and my daughter, Shelly, we moved into our own apartment last month. Shelly’s about to be a senior when school starts in a few weeks. She’s not happy about it. I don’t mean school, I mean about having to move out of the house. I keep telling her that things will get better after the house sells. But

she’s seventeen and she’s asking about, ‘Where are we going to take our pictures before homecoming now?’ because we had a nice yard with some crape myrtles along the back fence. But I couldn’t stay there.”

“So your husband’s out of the house?”

“Kenny’s with his girlfriend. His fiancée now, I guess—he met her at some county-wide conference. But I couldn’t stay in that house. I mean, the last few years…I’m sorry, I feel like this might take a while.”

“Roy ain’t going anywhere.”

They both smiled. The house was warm, and April hadn’t had a cold Sprite or any other soda for weeks, because of the calories. The bubbles seemed bigger today.

“With Kenny recently—and I mean years—it’s like everything I did was ruining his life, just his manners and how he reacted to whatever I said, he’d do”—April tilted her head back and tried to give a haughty, thoughtful nod—“like that, like he’s doing his best to tolerate how stupid I am. He’d deny it—‘What? This is my normal face’—but it was obvious, and after years of that, the thought of staying there? Here’s what would happen. I could cut the grass and do the smoke-alarm batteries, stuff like that, but what if our heat goes out again in the winter? Or the garbage disposal, it’s always acting up.

It would be me and Shelly and I’d have to tell her that we’d be fine by ourselves, but then I’d have to keep calling Kenny for help, after how he’s treated me these past few years? And I think about that, he comes over like he’s a saint and Shelly’s happy to see him—because I try to keep her out of this, I try. So I said, I’m not letting him do that to me, I’m not letting him make me feel worthless and stupid even after he’s left. If someone’s ruining my life, they should have to deal with the consequences of ruining

my life, like he has the past few years. Because I didn’t just put up with it, I let him know about what he was doing to me.”

Velma grabbed an ashtray from the coffee table and stubbed out her cigarette.

She stared down into the puff of smoke, not looking at April.

“I know the ideal thing would’ve been to try and stay there for this year at least, for Shelly,” April said. “But I couldn’t—I just couldn’t do it. I would have lost it, living in that house we had before I even had Shelly. I would’ve broken down before we ever got to those homecoming and prom weekends that she needs me for. I know how I deal with this kind of stuff. I couldn’t have done it. As it is, I don’t know if I can deal with this.

Shelly’s with her dad right now.”

Velma looked up. “A long weekend?”

“Last—it was a rough week, last week. And it started off…it wasn’t anything major, it was just a chain of things and finally I just fell apart. I couldn’t stop crying. For hours. And it was for stupid, stupid reasons.”

“It’s stress, dear. You should’ve seen me this week.”

“I’d just talked to a divorce attorney—Kenny hasn’t been giving me the money he’s supposed to, so I’m late on the phone and cable—and then I had to fill out the mail order for the weight-loss pills, and I kept remembering all these times when I’d, well, when Kenny had kind of ignored me. Recently, that is. Because when I was younger, he couldn’t keep his hands off, even if we were passing in the hallway. So later that night

Shelly was mad because one of her shows didn’t record on the VCR, something about the new cable and how it’s set up, and she—” April held her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Honey, that’s not your fault.” Velma pushed the tissue box across the coffee table.

April wiped her eyes. “She was just saying, ‘Our cable sucks here,’ and I felt like,

I’m broke and I’m so fat my husband left me and my daughter can’t even watch TV because our cable is terrible and soon she won’t even have that unless her dad sends me the money he owes me. If you’d told me, when Kenny and I got married, that things would end up like this? That’s why it’s still such a shock. When we got married, I knew

Kenny and me were it. They way you know you’re awake after you’ve been dreaming.

You know for sure, even if you can’t share the proof with other people. This was the man I was supposed to be with and the family I was supposed to start. I’m sorry. I’m here to help you out and all I’m doing is complaining. It’s just so strange, you know, when things don’t go the way—in the direction you absolutely know they’re going to go.”

“Don’t I know it.” Velma’s eyes came alive. “Wait right there.”

She disappeared down the hall. There was the sound of a stubborn drawer being pulled open and then shut. After a few minutes she returned to the living room and place a silver picture frame on April’s lap. The silver had no luster and seemed to be covered in water stains, and the glass over the picture shifted when April brought the frame closer to her eyes. The frame held a black-and-white photo of a young man with dark hair slicked over to one side. He wore light pants that went up to his stomach and a white dress shirt. He stood in front of a tree sapling that was not much taller than him.

“It’s Roy,” Velma said. “You wouldn’t know it to look at him now, but that’s how he looked back when I first met him. The girls who worked—do you know the actor Sterling

Hayden?”

April shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Before your time. Oh, 9 to 5! He was the chairman at the end of the movie, with the white suit and the beard, and he likes all the changes Lily Tomlin made to the office.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“You’ve never seen 9 to 5? You have to rent it, those three women together, they’re a riot. Sterling Hayden was in that, but only at the end, and it doesn’t really do justice to how he looked when he was young, and the young version is the version I mean. Sterling Hayden had slick blonde hair combed to the side. He was so tall and he looked like he could do about anything you asked. When I was seventeen—so it was

1954—I got a job at a paper mill in the summer. I worked in the payroll office as a clerk, and we’d switch each week who would collect the timecards at the end of the week, because it meant you’d have to stay an extra hour on a Friday night. Well, all the girls in payroll used to say there was this boy in the bindery who looked just like Sterling

Hayden. So the first time that it’s my turn to collect all the timecards, I see him—it’s Roy, of course—and he’s tall and his hair, it’s not blonde, but it’s light and parted like Sterling

Hayden’s, and Roy has this look where you can tell he knows that if he smiles at you just right, that’ll be it. So he comes up to me—and there are still men behind him waiting, full-grown men, wanting to get home to their wives and children—and Roy says,

‘Look, kid, I don’t like the idea of you staying home alone tonight. It’s not good for you.’

He hadn’t even asked my name yet. And I gave it right back to him. I said, ‘Well, then, you better take me to a movie so I can see if all this Sterling Hayden talk is true.’ That next day, we went to a drive-in and saw a double feature, and the second movie was

Johnny Guitar. Joan Crawford was in it, and Sterling Hayden was Johnny Guitar, but even though it was called Johnny Guitar, it was really Joan Crawford’s movie. She was this tough-as-nails woman, tougher than any man, and the whole town’s against her. All the men are terrified of Joan Crawford, except for Sterling Hayden. He appreciates how tough she is. There’s a scene where a mob comes to drive Joan Crawford away, and she’s standing at the top of the stairs, holding a gun on the mob, but Sterling Hayden just stays in the kitchen and keeps eating his dinner. Because he knows she can handle things all by herself.”

“He didn’t even get up?”

“He didn’t need to. He understood how tough she was, and it didn’t bother him.

And that’s when I knew—like you were saying earlier, it’s like waking up—I knew what would happen with Roy and me. We were just like Sterling and Joan in Johnny Guitar.

Because when I was young…” She smiled. “I was a fireball. A lot of those boys in the mill clammed up when I was around, like I was their mom and they were about to get scolded. But Roy, that didn’t bother him. It was so obvious when we were watching

Johnny Guitar—that was our story. In fact, I was a little embarrassed because I just knew that after everybody saw the movie, it would be ‘Hey, it’s Joan and Sterling’ whenever they saw us together. Nothing I could do to prevent that. A few days later, though, I wasn’t embarrassed. I could see us together when we were older, in our thirties—that was old to me then—and maybe we’d have some other couples over for a dinner party or to play cards and have drinks, and inevitably someone would blurt out

‘Sterling and Joan,’ and we’d have to explain the story to anyone who hadn’t heard it. I’d try to wave it away, but then Roy would sidle up next to me with a highball glass in his

hand, put his arm around me, and he’d tell the story for the whole group. It’d be silly, having people call us that after we’d been together so long, but still, it’d be nice. A nice thing for us to remember, to remind us how great we were together. That’s how I knew it would be.”

April waited. “And?”

“Well, like you said…”

“But you’re still together, after this long.”

“Obviously, we’re together. I love Roy more than anything, and I wouldn’t give up my grandbabies, or even our son, despite all the drama, not for anything. And he wouldn’t either, but, well, when your heart jumps out of your chest and mails itself across town, you can’t be that happy.”

“What does he expect, though,” April said, “besides what he has?”

“Roy’s no romantic, wasn’t when we were young. But I think when that goes missing, when it isn’t important to either of you any more, it would be great if there were another important thing to replace it, instead of just being an absence that you have to fill in with whatever’s lying around. Honestly, that’s why part of this last week was—not nice, but energizing. Feeling like I can’t function without Roy. That hasn’t happened in a long time. That’s not all bad, though. Would you believe—it truly bothered me, early on, after a few of the girls in the payroll department, and even my own sister, they saw that movie, Johnny Guitar, and none of them said a thing to me. Not one single thing. And they knew us both well enough. They had to have seen how much Joan and Sterling were like me and Roy. I just wondered, why? When there’s something you can say to

your friend or your sister, something nice and true, why would you never bother to say it to her?”

April drank the last of her Sprite through the straw. “Did you ever ask them about it?”

“Once, I brought it up. Roy was there. We’d been married for five or ten years at this point. I told the story about how the girls in the shop thought Roy looked like

Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar, and Roy—he’s always getting people to laugh—he starts doing this thing where he wiggles his hips and glares at everybody like he’s some big star, and he goes, ‘Johnny Guitar, watch out!’ Of course, that cracked them up, and I tried to tell him, that’s not Johnny Guitar, you’re thinking of Elvis, that’s not Sterling

Hayden. And then after everybody stopped laughing, they changed the subject. Even then, they wouldn’t say it. Years later, there were a few times where Roy would do that hip wiggle again and say ‘Watch out!’ and then he’d ask me what movie it was from. It made me so mad, once I threw a punch bowl at him. The bowl didn’t break, it was

Tupperware, but at least it made Roy stop doing it.” Velma removed her glasses and wiped the lenses with her shirt. “I feel terrible talking like this. All this week I’ve been on my last legs, praying every night until I fall asleep. It’s such a blessing that you put that ad in the paper, dear.” She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. “But would it have killed them to say ‘Sterling and Joan’ just once? To give us a really nice thing to remember?”

Velma and April went back into the bathroom and opened the cooler. Blood quivered an inch from the lip. Velma plunged her hands into the cooler until blood coated her arms up to her elbows. She stood with the beating heart in her hands, the

blood trickling off her fingers and off the atria, the aorta spurting against the tub near the drain.

April dumped the blood from the cooler into the bathtub, wiped the bottom of the cooler with a wad of toilet paper (“Not the towel,” Velma had said), and then flushed the bloody wad down the toilet. Velma put the heart back into the cooler. April, carrying the cooler and the heart, followed Velma through the living room and the hallway and into the bedroom.

Roy lay on the bed, an orange and brown quilt covering his legs. Sheer drapes covered the windows, yet Roy’s eyes were clenched shut as if he were staring into a spotlight. His breath erupted in bursts from his nostrils, but his chest did not move.

A few of his ribs poked up like talons against his white shirt, the cotton stretched so taut that April saw his ribs through the gauze of the fabric. Beneath the angled-up ribs was a hole dark enough to give April a tingling in her feet. Roy never turned his head while they spoke, even when Velma said his name. His swollen mouth hung slack.

Roy let out a cough that misted blood into the air, and April dropped the cooler onto the floor. There was a fine blood spatter on Roy’s shirt and on the sheets around him.

Velma went into the hallway and opened a closet door. Roy’s choppy breathing continued.

Velma came back with a towel and a folded-up plaid shirt. She dabbed the blood from Roy’s mouth and then touched at a few spots on the sheets.

“I’ll have to change these,” she said. “This happens every couple hours. I’ll have to change his shirt again, too. Not right now, of course.”

After Roy’s face was free of blood from his latest cough, Velma rolled up the towel and then laid it across Roy’s feet. She pulled the cooler up beside the bed and looked at April.

“Call if you need me,” April said, then closed the door behind her and waited in the hallway. From behind the door she could hear Velma’s cigarette-coarsened voice explaining to Roy that she was taking off his shirt, that she was putting his heart back inside his body, and, after Roy started groaning, that she was trying to close his ribs but they wouldn’t budge. April went into the living room and picked up the Sprite cans from the coasters and set them in the kitchen sink. She wiped the drops of water from the coasters. She went into the bathroom, turned on the bath, and splashed water around the tub to remove the blood drops along the sides. She used a tissue to wipe the blood streaks from the bathroom tile and then flushed the bloody tissue down the toilet.

Years later, when she was living with Shelly and the kids, April finally watched the movie Johnny Guitar. For the first few minutes, she wondered if she’d remembered the title correctly or if the woman who’d told her about the movie years ago had got it mixed up with something else. But this was it. The Sterling Hayden/Joan Crawford dynamic wasn’t what April had expected. Joan Crawford seemed more than tough, nearly overbearing. In their first scene together, when Sterling Hayden was confronted by one of Joan Crawford’s former suitors, she did the legwork to end the dispute by shouting down her ex-lover. Sterling Hayden didn’t back down and he didn’t appear scared, but his passive resistance would have ended with him getting killed if not for

Joan Crawford’s intervention. In later scenes, when she cried or clutched Sterling

Hayden, she seemed to be faking it, not acting in the way such a hardened woman would express her vulnerability. In the bank robbery scene, Joan Crawford saves the banker’s life while Sterling Hayden waits for her outside with the carriage. In the film’s climax, she was the one who saved their lives and shot the villain, not him. Though she got along better with him than with the rest of the men in the movie, Sterling and Joan didn’t, to April, seem like an especially good fit. In theory they were—a tough, elegant woman, a tall, confident man—but April didn’t think they looked like a couple who would be together six months later, unless there was a pregnancy to keep them together.

Being compared to those two, in her opinion, would have been an insult.

When April emerged from the blood-free bathroom, Velma was standing in the living room by the sliding doors.

“I thought you’d left,” Velma said.

“The cooler,” April said. “Is everything all right?”

Velma held her bloodstained hands to her chest, her shirt caked in dark clots.

“Oh, Roy’s fine,” she said. “Got right up. He said his legs are sore. He went to look at the bushes out front. Everything’s back to normal, almost. I told him he needs a shower, but he just had to survey the lawn first. I’m not sure he realizes what this past week has been like.”

She went into the bedroom and came back with the cooler.

“No, he certainly doesn’t know what it’s been like,” she went on. “But I appreciate all you did for us. I would hug you, but…” She looked at her hands and the blood on her shirt.

“Don’t worry.” April touched Velma’s shoulder. “It was nice talking to you. Thanks for the Sprite and the hospitality.”

“It’s what we do.” Velma held the screen door open for her. “You take care of that girl of yours. Make sure she knows everything will work out just how she wants.”

April walked down the front steps and heard the front door close behind her. She stuffed the cooler in the back seat of her car and shut the door. The trail of blood that she’d left along the road on her drive here had dried on the hot pavement, only a thin line visible. She unlocked the driver’s side door and was ready to get inside.

“You bring all this sunshine with you?” a low voice asked.

Roy stood on the curb, looking over the top of the car at April.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. “I think Velma was worried.”

“Ah, Velma’s the one keeps me in line. I’m the worrier. Probably does her some good to talk, though. I think she gets sick of me sometimes.”

“I’m sure she’s glad you’re back to your old self.”

“Well. Maybe we’ll sit out on the lawn later, after it cools down. Velma always liked a good lawn. Her father had his own business, you know, before he died.”

On April’s drive back to her apartment, she had to reach into the backseat twice to move the cooler and keep it from rattling against the seatbelts. She thought of Roy standing there on the curb and how it had felt holding the slick muscle of his heart, which tickled her fingers like a wet tongue. At a stoplight she dialed her daughter’s phone and left a message. April would make sure Shelly was fine. Not that she could assure herself there would be no more sobbing fits or nights of paralyzing sadness, but now at least April would know what was happening and would know that eventually the

crying would end. She would make sure that Shelly heard the words and enjoyed the moments she needed to hear and needed to enjoy before everything else in her life revealed itself to be a disappointment.

The sunlight outside was blazing, reflecting off windshields and mailboxes, and

April squinted and saw spots in front of her eyes. She felt her heart jump behind her ribs, but she knew she was fine. Her heart would stay right where it was. She would begin teaching dance again soon. She could still grand plié and sauté. The fat-blocking and appetite-suppressing pills would help her lose enough weight so that parents of her students, when they heard she hadn’t been teaching dance for nearly fifteen years, would ask how she managed to stay in such great shape. She would decorate her apartment with a more contemporary flair than she had their house—perhaps a tripod floor lamp and reclaimed-wood end tables—and Shelly would invite friends over, and have the ideal homecoming and prom and graduation-ceremony pictures, and fun parties where nobody got hurt, and feel the full joy of every accomplishment she’d earned these past twelve years. April merged onto the highway and headed home.

A PROMISED LAND IN THE CENTRAL PACIFIC

After my wife Ava got the call that my TransPacific Airways flight from Honolulu to Pago Pago had crashed, she dropped herself on the sofa and watched the rest of

Family Feud. Then she watched all of The Wendy Williams Show, which I never knew she liked. After the Wendy Williams Show closing credits, Ava called her sister Tessa and her father, both of whom drove from out of state to our house in Pittsburgh. Tessa huddled next to her during the day, slept next to her at night, and bathed her on a few of the mornings. Ava’s father handled all the telephone calls to and from relatives and occasionally barked reproaches at representatives from TransPacific, my employer,

Ava’s employer, and the life insurance companies.

“These guys,” he said. “They’ve never seen the things they’re paid to deal with.”

Ava stayed on the couch most of the weekend, wrapped in a gray fleece blanket that we kept on the armrest of the couch during the winters. Her sister forced Ava to drink a fruit smoothie after she didn’t eat for two days. On the day of my memorial service, Ava vomited twice in the morning then felt better.

My wife never told me these things. I read about them. A week before I returned to Pittsburgh—twenty-nine months later—as a plane-crash survivor and desert-island exile, my wife had published a reminiscence of her experience of my disappearance in the anthology Chicken Soup for the Under-40 Tragically Widowed Single-Mother’s Soul.

She wrote about the days after her sister left to go back to work, about how Ava herself tried to enter the workforce, how she couldn’t handle the job and quit, how she would only wake up to watch Wendy Williams every morning and then go back to sleep, how when she woke up later, she would usually cry because it wasn’t morning and it wasn’t time to watch Wendy Williams again and she couldn’t think of what she was supposed

to do. This particular Chicken Soup volume was not a critical success, but her friends— our friends—knew about the memoir, and those friends all felt relieved that Ava had been able to confront her devastation in such a non-self-destructive way.

I couldn’t be as supportive. Her memoir had been included in the Chicken Soup collection despite three glaring ineligibilities:

1. Ava was not a widow at the time of publication.

2. Ava was not single at the time of publication, having already married a man named Garrett, identified in the memoir itself as a widower/friend-of-a-friend who told her that “sitting still only allows us to be swept under by the riptide of guilt over the disappeared.”

3. Ava was not a mother at the time of publication, though she was seven months pregnant with Garrett’s child.

In her defense, Ava did qualify for the under-40 requirement. She was 32 years old. I was 41, but the Chicken Soup editors had no age restrictions for the dead husband.

My trip had been from Pittsburgh to Pago Pago with connecting flights in Los

Angeles and Honolulu. My employer—ClassiCom, an electronics repair company that services telecom equipment that is no longer supported by the manufacturer—sent me on the trip in order to deliver additional training to our repair technicians and shipping personnel, who had been responsible for a high product-loss rate (nearly 35%) due to handling errors and damage during routine repairs. Even with the staff of minimum- wage technicians, the Samoan branch was at risk of being closed if there was no improvement within the year.

Ava drove me to the airport. Gray and white snow stood piled high along the curbs and streaks of brown slush littered the road.

“At least you get to have an exciting week,” she said.

“It’s not that great,” I said. “I won’t have time to leave the airport in L.A. or

Honolulu. And I’ll be stuck in the Pago warehouse for the rest of the week.”

“Still…I don’t know what I’m going to be doing here. We’re supposed to get freezing rain.”

I didn’t have to travel often, but there were fifty-hour weeks and a decent amount of overtime on top of that. Out-of-date telecom equipment needs to be repaired and replaced a lot. Because the new IT kids aren’t familiar with 56K modems and Windows

95, it’s always an emergency when that stuff breaks.

Ava hated it. Not the work, but the time and the focus it required. Once she almost cried during an episode of The Voice because I was tired after work and she didn’t feel that we were watching TV “together.” When she was thirteen, Ava’s parents split up after a years-long stretch where her mother worked late every evening and her father warmed up frozen dinners for the kids before he left for his third-shift job at a truck plant. Her mother lit up when telling stories about her coworkers. Neither parent ever seemed relieved to be home. That was part of the reason why Ava didn’t work, even though we weren’t rich. As a result, our house was the best decorated and cleanest place I’d ever lived. Sometimes, though, I wondered if Ava would be more understanding if she spent a few days of the week working at the mall or volunteering at an animal shelter, anything to extend her focus beyond our house.

She pulled alongside the curb at the airport terminal. The warm exhaust from our car formed a cloud around the trunk. I yanked my suitcase out of the backseat and kissed Ava through the driver-side window.

“I think it would be good,” she said, “if we had a weekend away, after you get back. In the next month or so. That would be nice for us both, I think.”

Before I stepped through the airports automatic-door entrance, I waved at Ava.

She waved a mittened hand back at me and I think she made a face at me, but I can’t say for certain. The car was nearly enveloped in its own exhaust cloud.

Todd and I knew where we were because of the salt-stained, guano-streaked sign: “Baker Island—National Wildlife Refuge—US Fish and Wildlife Services.” He had dragged me out of the water and up onto the beach. The island had an airstrip that had been used until 1946, but was now covered in grass. A few wooden radio towers

(without the radios) stood on the east end of the island. The P-40 wreckage of a few crash landings still littered the place, and there were some knee-high concrete remnants from the walls of military buildings that had been bulldozed decades ago. There were no trees on the island, only grass and brush, so the day beacon on the west end was our only source of shade. Todd and I lived inside that beacon, a round structure that was five feet in diameter on the inside.

Todd had been flying to American Samoa to climb both Mount Aliva and

Rainmaker Mountain.

“I’ve climbed all the mountains in the States,” he said, “at least all of them that interest me. I was meant to move, boy. This was going to be it, my last mountains.

Nowadays when my body protests, I’m old enough that I have to listen.”

Todd put himself in charge of fire and water, which left me responsible for food.

Todd said he could fish but wasn’t really a hunter. I wasn’t a hunter either, I told him, but

I would figure it out.

We ate nothing but hermit crabs for the first week. Todd didn’t seem to mind.

During our dinners, he sat next to me and watched the foam slide up the sand and then slip back into the ocean. He acted as if he were seeing exactly what he expected to see.

At the end of that first week, when I was determined never to eat another hermit crab, I told him about Ava and her concerns regarding my overattention to work and what I thought she needed to do.

“Why didn’t you tell her that?” he asked. “See what she says. You wouldn’t be making her get a job or work at a soup kitchen.”

“It won’t help. Telling her it’s not my responsibility to give her life purpose, that won’t do anything.”

“I don’t think you have to say it like that. Just ask her if she’s happy when she’s working around the house, if she ever wants to get out and do other things.”

“She’ll get more upset.”

“At least you wouldn’t be pandering. You make it sadder when you pander.”

Todd nodded toward the bright sky in front of us, a blue so bare and immense that it could have crushed us. On the east end of the island, near the radio towers, swarms of birds circled and squawked at each other.

The next day I caught my first bird, a three-foot-long great frigatebird, a slender black seabird with a red pouch that puffed up like a balloon below its bill. I tried to break its neck by twisting its head sideways and the bird screeched and flew away

cartwheeling through the air and splashed down in the shallow tide. It had drowned by the time I reached it.

I saved that bird’s hooked bill and used it a few times as a blade to cut through the feathers of other birds, all of which tasted much better than the best hermit crab. By the time the bill broke, I’d found a metal scrap elsewhere on the island, and that worked much better.

Early on during our time on the island, we realized we could make biblical references to each other and be understood. Before a storm hit the island, I’d made a comment under my breath about fleeing to the mountains, and Todd responded with a joke about the men of Gomorrah trying to rape angels. Todd was a King James enthusiast, the language being an elevated (though inauthentic, he conceded) translation befitting the words of an almighty deity. I’d read modern translations during my childhood and adolescence, so I couldn’t always recognize the verse when Todd quoted one with all the thous and heareths. Still, it was nice to be around someone who wouldn’t look at me as if I were an alien whenever I made a reference to the Old

Testament.

On the day after the storm winds had washed away most of the camp we’d constructed, Todd and I were trying to rebuild with the materials we’d salvaged. My frigatebird beak and metal shard were both gone. I scoured the island again for anything usable. I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t getting more plane wreckage washing up on shore. So far I’d retrieved a seat cushion and a burned fragment of a tail rudder or

maybe part of a wing—it was only a few feet wide, but it was hard enough to decapitate birds and fish and crabs.

I was scooping sand out of our storm-ravaged fire pit, and Todd was nearby trying to repair our spit. Neither of us wanted to eat raw birds again.

“You ever hear of The Ten Commandments?” Todd asked.

The sand fell through my fingers. “You’re serious?” I asked.

“No, I mean the movie.”

“Come on.”

“Well, not everyone your age knows. I always like it until the scene where

Pharaoh lived.” He pointed the spit toward the water. “I understand that it’s a movie and

Yul Brynner’s a star and you don’t want to drown a star, but that was a pretty big derivation from the source material.”

“Moses got some breaks. Heston was probably more impressive than the actual

Moses.”

By the evening, our fire pit was emptied of excess sand and seaweed and charred hermit crabs. Todd managed to fix the spit by using fragments of bird bones as braces around the stick and then tying it together with feathers. We ended up eating sooty terns that were scorched after the repaired spit broke and the plucked birds dropped into the fire and it took us what must’ve been ten minutes to notice. After putting out the fire, we had to finish our dinner with only light from a quarter moon.

According to our count, we’d been on the island for ninety-three days. I imagined

Ava every day and what she looked like, three months older, if there would be any lines or grayed hair or weakening of disposition because of my absence. Something else that

I imagined—it was torture, but the thoughts invaded my mind every night—was how Ava would feel if she’d finally become pregnant after our years of trying. What if, a week after I disappeared and was presumed dead, Ava found out she was two months pregnant? The first time I imagined that, I ran out into the ocean in the middle of the night and Todd had to wrestle me back onto land. The next morning his knee was swollen, and he couldn’t walk for another few days. Now when I imagined Ava pregnant,

I sometimes cried and prayed that God get me back to the continental United States so that I could see my wife round and happy and feel my child tossing inside her belly.

Sometimes Todd would start praying for me, out loud, and I couldn’t always understand what he was saying because of his insistence on the thous and thees, but I think he was basically on track.

I understood Todd’s complaint about The Ten Commandments: the entire

Egyptian army drowned in the Red Sea in Exodus (including the Pharaoh), so the movie should have had Yul Brynner’s Pharaoh receive that same comeuppance. The way

Cecil B. DeMille did it may have been crueler, though. Pharaoh having to watch his entire army die, having to make the trek back to Egypt on his own, walking back to

Memphis without anything that made him who he was—a quick death may have been better.

Following my return twenty-nine months later, Ava and Garrett were interviewed by a few cable news networks—afternoon interviews, nothing primetime. They talked about how unfortunate the whole ordeal had been for them but how everything had a way of working out for the best.

For the most part, the attention was on me and Todd. We often ended up answering the questions asked of the other—me explaining how Todd saved us initially and kept me in good enough spirits to keep working, Todd explaining how I killed so many birds and fish and searched for ocean trash that we could use to fuel our fire or to hunt. We made jokes to each other (though never on-camera) about how the other was always acting as an Aaron to our Moses, as a speaker for a guy who didn’t know what to say. Regardless of the interviewer, there were three questions we always heard:

1. What was going through your mind during the crash?

It took me a few days to recall it, but I have one memory from the crash, basically a two- or three-second snippet. I knew the plane was going to hit the water and I didn’t yell because my voice wouldn’t be loud enough to be heard above the rest of the noise.

That’s it. Then Todd was standing on the beach of Baker Island and yelling to me that I wasn’t dead.

That wasn’t how Todd told it, though. He said he found himself in the water, separated from the plane but still buckled to his seat. The water above him was on fire because of the oil and gasoline. He held his breath as long as he could and swam under the fire and when he came up for air he found me treading water with my eyes closed. After keeping ourselves afloat throughout the night by using our pants as makeshift flotation devices (i.e., tying the legs together, filling the pants with air), we crawled onto the shore of Baker Island the next morning.

I’m not sure how much of Todd’s story was true and how much he made up to keep me from feeling like deadweight on national television.

2. Were you relieved that your desert island was an American territory, at least?

During our Today Show interview, Todd told Matt Lauer that we were both glad to be stranded on an American desert island because we wouldn’t have survived if we’d had to use the metric system.

3. What did you miss the most?

I usually let Todd take this one. He would talk about his sister and her family who lived in Winchester, Kansas, a city whose biggest employer was a meat-processing plant. According to him, all of Winchester smelled like a combination of fresh and rotting meat, and he could never separate one smell completely from the other. I nodded along when he said that on the island he’d actually started to crave that smell because it would mean he was back with his sister and brother-in-law and nephews.

I only answered the question once. After The Wendy Williams Show got back from summer hiatus, Todd and I were her second guests, following the “Hot Topics” segment and Debra Messing.

I’m not sure if Ava bothered to watch because she was in the hospital around then (she had her baby five weeks early), but at the time I was sure she would watch.

She would watch and hear me tell everyone that I missed her more than Todd missed the good meat/bad meat smell of Winchester, Kansas. She would hear me tell everyone that I walked across the length of Baker Island to the radio towers every evening and told the towers everything I had done that day and prayed that somehow she would pick up a signal from those towers and know that I would have quit my job and lived with her forever inside our exhaust-spouting car at the airport if I’d known things would turn out this way. Ava would hear that and see the reaction of the audience and the reaction of

Wendy Williams and Garrett would be gone. Ava would see she had made a mistake.

Todd and I sat next to Wendy on the pastel couch, and when she moved her legs

I heard the whisk of her skirt against her thighs. Todd complimented her shoes and the producer immediately cut to the Shoe Cam to show off Wendy’s pointy-toe stilettos and the soft top of her foot appeared on every monitor in the building. She leaned forward to adjust the ankle strap on her shoe, and I smelled the coconut scent of her wig. I told her that Todd had saved my life by not leaving me alone in the ocean and then kept us alive by desalinating the saltwater. Then I told her how much I’d missed Ava, told her about the radio towers, told her how I wish I’d never left. But I kept going. Now that I was back and Ava wasn’t here with me, I missed the radio towers because at least with the radio towers I had the promise of Ava and the promise of a chance to make everything better.

I felt like Pharaoh but not the real Pharaoh, the Yul Brynner version of Pharaoh. I didn’t have anything left. After I finished, Wendy clutched my wrist with her moisturized and manicured hand.

I had thought about Ava every day for twenty-nine months and missed her more than anything, but I realized that if Wendy Williams had shown up on Baker Island after my first few weeks there, I would have at least considered killing Todd so I could have her to myself. Todd had saved my life and then kept me alive for years and I loved him for it. And maybe Wendy would have preferred Todd, but I wouldn’t have been able to watch them together while I was alone. I would killed myself or Todd, more likely Todd, without hesitation, without worrying about Ava. I know what that should have meant—I should have realized that Ava was in a situation as desperate as my Wendy-Williams- on-the-island scenario, and my hypothetical willingness to probably kill Todd should’ve

led me to be understanding and forgiving of Ava’s situation in which my absence drove her to someone else. But I couldn’t convince myself to feel any differently than I did.

“So during ‘Hot Topics’ I was talking about these kids in Newport Beach who are getting these lavish celebration parties after finishing elementary school,” Wendy said.

“And I just want to get your perspective, from someone who didn’t have any of this—this noise—around you for two years, more than two years. Do you come back and hear this and just say, ‘What?’”

I haven’t watched the show, but I think I said that I was happy to see bars of soap again. Then Todd chimed in to pick up the slack, and I lost it. When I heard his voice, my head dropped onto my knees. I tried not to cry but when Wendy reached over and put her arm around me and I felt her breasts against my back, I started bawling and I couldn’t stop. Wendy’s voice was quavering. I would have killed Todd, my savior, right then to get Wendy to stay there with me.

They stopped the interview and waited until I stopped crying. Wendy went offstage to address her tear-stained makeup. A producer kneeled in front of the couch and assured me I wasn’t on an island any longer.

“You’re here with everybody else,” she said. “You’re on dry land, and you’re not going to die. Nobody wants to hurt you.”

I’m going to let my ex-wife tell you about the last time we spoke, post-exile. I tried to summarize it, but I didn’t do it justice. So I’ll give you the following excerpt that was taken from her unpublished memoir “The Clock-Hand Falls Back,” which she posted on various social-media pages after it was rejected by the editor of Chicken Soup for the

PTSD-Survivor’s Loved One’s Soul due to a variety of trigger-warning concerns. (Full disclosure: I redacted every mention of Garrett from this passage. I can’t handle him yet, not right here.)

I told my ex-husband that we’d named our daughter Clara after my mother. He nodded at the table top, sipped his coffee. Sometimes he would look at me between sentences, but not when I said [my husband’s name. He smiled when I mentioned Clara, but there was no joy behind it. I told him that I was writing more memoirs.

“I’m glad you found a hobby,” he said.

He told me that his former employer had closed its American Samoan warehouse and repair center a few months after his disappearance. They hadn’t sent anybody else in his place. The company cut most of his department but he didn’t want to go back anyway, that’s what he told me. After years of me telling him to give up this job that consumed most of his life, he decided on his own that there were more important things. Because in my current relationship, I had a happiness that far exceeded this former marriage. Garrett and I were each other’s priority, not relish, not like celery on so many hot-wing dishes.

There seemed to be more space between us than there actually was. It looked like I could stick my foot out and nudge his newly bought loafers, but I was sure that would be impossible. I would take a giant step and remain a short space away. I would leap at him and tell him how happy and how sad I had been when I saw him again. I would tell him that Garrett reminded me of a more optimistic version of him. But nothing would have changed. Apologies mean little to someone you loved who has gone away and, despite indications to the contrary, never come back.

I should mention that she took some liberty with the setting. I don’t drink coffee.

The encounter actually happened in a parking lot outside the DMV and auto-title office.

My license had expired months before I was presumed dead, so I had to go through a lot of paperwork to get it renewed.

The worst times on Baker Island were those mornings—maybe eight or nine, total—when I had to help Todd take care of the water-desalinating duty because he just

sat around dead-eyed after breakfast. He had one of those mornings two days before we were rescued. He was sitting against the day beacon and wouldn’t look at me when he talked.

“Ever heard of Moses?” he asked.

“You didn’t see him,” I said, “did you?”

He shook his head. “I hope to God,” he said, “that this is Egypt and not the wilderness.”

“Somebody will come,” I said.

“It’s been two-and-a-half years,” Todd said. “Both of us, we might die before anybody comes.”

“The rest of them already died. At least we’ve had time to figure out what was happening.”

In the afternoon I recited to him a list of all the good things about our life. We were alive. We’d survived a catastrophic airplane crash. We’d found an island without active volcanoes or deadly predators. We got to live with another person. We were both lucky not to be stuck on Baker Island with an unskilled city-dweller who would freak out and try to kill one of us for food. I was lucky to have someone who understood my anxiety about Ava’s fixation on our home, and Todd was lucky to have someone who understood his Moses references. We had been surrounded by birds for over two years and never contracted a deadly strain of flu. We got to live on the beach. We’d made it more than two years without any typhoons, tsunamis, or other island-leveling phenomena. It didn’t rain as often as you’d think.

Todd got up and walked with me that evening. A flock of sanderlings waded into and out of the water as the waves came in. When we reached the radio towers, I showed Todd how I talked to Ava every evening. After I finished, he stayed and told the radio towers about the smell of dead cattle in Kansas. I scooped up an armful of sanderlings from the shallow tide and snapped their necks.

THE SEXUAL IDENTITY OF JAMES DEAN AS A MODEL FOR THE MULTIVERSE

I kept telling my father that his apartment at the assisted-living community in

Shepherdsville, Kentucky, looked just like a regular apartment—a living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, no roommate, an outside entrance with a ramp that led down to the sidewalk, the whole deal. There was even a pond with a wide concrete path around it, accessible enough for him to get right to it in his wheelchair.

“They’re just counting down the days, Troy,” he told me. “All these people, they look at me like I’m a beagle about to get put down.”

We sat by the pond—me on a wooden, weather-damaged bench, him in his wheelchair—and watched a team of ducks glide across the water and leave a series of rippled Vs in their wake.

“I’m meeting with the network,” I said. “I’m pitching them a pilot.”

Dad quacked at the ducks. “When is this?” he asked.

“Two months. I need you to tell me what you think.”

“You have the script?”

“Not yet.”

“Better hurry.”

I explained the concept to him. The main character, Scott Drakemen, works for a private tech company that has the ability to transfer a person back to their original universe, if they’ve become misplaced. For example, a wife may notice that her husband wakes up one morning with a mustache and a different accent. The tech company, after the appropriate testing to determine the validity of the claim, could send the man back to his appropriate place in the multiverse. The protagonist, who works in the Verification department for this company, meets someone who claims to be a

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misplaced person and answers all the exam questions correctly, but the protagonist has a hunch that something is wrong.

The ducks were gone from the pond. Dad was looking at me now.

“How does he know this guy is lying?” Dad asked.

“Because of the James Dean question,” I said. “There’s a question on the exam about James Dean’s sexual orientation. If a claimant answers the same as anyone else’s, if the wording or overall assessment is identical, the person is clearly lying.”

Dad didn’t quite smile, but his eyebrows rose and fell in a quick movement.

“Are you sure you want to use Dean?” he asked. “Listen to me. He wasn’t going to be Brando or Olivier. He just wasn’t. He wasn’t even going to be Daniel Day-Lewis or

Sean Penn. Hell, I’m not positive he would’ve been a DeNiro or DiCaprio.”

“Dad,” I said, “come on.”

“I’m serious, son. He didn’t do anything to warrant that, not until Giant, but even that was a smaller role. I don’t think he was ready to do what Rock Hudson did in that movie. Not then.”

When he was in high school, my father was accepted in the theater program at

Wake Forest. He went there for two years, appearing as Konstantin Treplev in The

Seagull and Wally Loman in Death of a Salesman. Between his freshman and sophomore years, he appeared at the Stratford Festival in Henry IV, Part II, where he was the understudy for Hal but also went on stage every night as Ned Poins.

He met my mother at Stratford and took the next year off from Wake Forest to live with her in Ontario. Before he was scheduled to return to Wake Forest and—he hoped—play Hickey in the fall production of The Iceman Cometh, he was drafted and

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sent to Vietnam. When he returned, my mother had given birth to my older sister and my father was using crutches and had two below-knee prosthetic legs.

After my mother died, I returned from college and lived with my father. I wasn’t sure it would last, considering the fights we got into when I was younger, but he’d become calmer with age and I’d become too big to fight. Right before I turned thirty, I got hired as a writer for Devin Erwin’s production company Supertrough, which produces a show called The Hit List, a show about a dying father who passes on to his son a list of people who need to be assassinated.

“Like David and Solomon,” Devin had said. “I think this could really resonate with the middle of the country.”

I couldn’t take Dad with me to LA, so he moved into the assisted-living community, where he was doing well until recently. His sciatica had worsened and there were complications from his rectal prolapse surgeries. Now he couldn’t walk at all.

“The Dean thing is clever,” Dad said. “But people are going to start asking how it works. Pretty quick.”

“I’ll figure it out,” I said.

“Better do it quick.”

“It’s very funny. If you get four or five people around who knew Jim, everyone has a story to tell that they remember, or everyone has something to say about it, but if you put them all together it almost sounds as if you’re talking about four or five different people, save for a point here or a point there.”

—Sammy Davis, Jr.

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The multiverse can be envisioned as a file cabinet. Think of a universe as an individual file. In addition to that one file, there are many other files within that cabinet.

But what if two universe brushed up against each other? Or what if something cut a hole straight through several of those files and the contents of those files could move back and forth?

That’s what our protagonist, Scott Drakeman, is dealing with.

Carol Donaghy’s husband left at 9 a.m. on the morning of the Appleton Fall

Parade, of which he was to be the marshal, and never came back. The man who returned to the house that evening bore a resemblance to Brad Donaghy—same rim of red hair, same gray eyes—but there was a stiffness in his posture and voice that Carol had never witnessed before, and she had seen all of Brad’s incarnations: tired Brad, horny Brad, angry over football officiating Brad, stressed about money Brad, coming out of anesthesia Brad, every Brad that had appeared over the past twenty-eight years.

This was a different person. Her body recoiled when he touched her forearm. She didn’t recognize his smell. Brad had been replaced with a stranger.

Manny Guttierez was eating with his fiancé Elisa on the patio of a downtown biergarten. They were sharing a pair of Bavarian pretzels and each had a liter mug of light German beer in front of them. There was a polka band playing inside the restaurant, and the loud white people were drunk enough to dance. A waiter approached their table and asked if they were ready to order. This waiter was a tall man with slim, tattooed forearms and a metal bracelet on his writing hand. He smiled at

Manny as Manny ordered. After the waiter left, Elisa kept asking Manny to repeat

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things, kept staring at the table and then apologizing for being so distracted. “The week must be catching up with me,” she said. During the rest of the weekend, Manny would catch Elisa staring at him with the narrowed eyes of a woman trying to figure out what someone is up to.

Scott Drakeman heard stories like these every day in the Verification department.

A husband or wife who disappears, a parent who is convinced a child has been transformed overnight, a grandmother who begins to ask about children and grandchildren with names no one in the family recognizes, an employee who drives to work and sees that his office building has been replaced by a parking garage. David’s job as part of the Verification team was to check the stories for truthfulness.

“Help me send you home,” David would say at the beginning of the verification interviews.

A week later my sister, Kristen, was talking to me on her cellphone while driving.

I was on speakerphone and could barely hear her.

“You can’t let yourself feel bad. He needs to stay there,” she said. “He can’t expect you to take care of him, not if he can’t get to the bathroom in time.”

I was sitting in the writers’ room. Everyone was on lunch and I had the conference table to myself. That day we were mapping out episodes seven to ten of our second season, though I’d been focused on my pilot mostly. Right before our meeting began that morning, a nurse from the assisted-living community called and told me that

Dad had been shitting himself and needed to be moved to a monitored room with 24- hour on-call care.

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“Production starts back up in two weeks,” I said to Kristen. “We’ll be done filming in March. But if we film the pilot, that’ll keep me here until June. Then if we get picked up…I don’t know.”

“So you’ll be the creator?”

“Yeah. Me and Devin will be EPs. It’s his production company.”

“That’s so—” The reception crackled, but her voice was excited. “Executive producer: Troy Wiley. You can’t pass that up. Dad understands. You know how he is.

He’d complain just as much if he lived with us.”

Kristen and I were close as children. We had a plastic playhouse in the back yard that liked to play “tornado” or “flash flood” with, detaching the roof and overturning the house and then screaming about all of our things being gone. Our yard was big enough that the neighbors never complained, but Dad would tell us to shut up if we did it when he was home. (“I can’t believe your mom bought that thing,” he’d say. “Should’ve let me build you a wood one.”) Kristen got mono in seventh grade and missed eight weeks of school. Not only would she not come out and play tornado, she didn’t want me to come in her room. She would never smile when I told her about something funny at school.

She’d just tell me to leave in a low voice, or she wouldn’t say anything and she’d start crying until I left.

Kristen lives in Seattle with her boyfriend and their six dogs. She hasn’t been back to Kentucky to see Dad in two years.

“He’s always hated it at that place,” I said. “If the pilot doesn’t get picked up and I have the spring free, maybe I could do it.”

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Kristen didn’t say anything. I heard the sound of the car stereo through the receiver.

“But who know what can happen in a few months.” I stood from the chair. “I’ll let you know. I have to get lunch before everyone is back.”

“Okay, love you, baby brother.”

“What’s so fascinating about Dean is that he could be so many things to so many different people. Almost as if uncertain about who he was, he experimented with different identities.”

—Peter Lawford

Dad and I were sitting in his new room. It was a linoleum-floored room with a TV mounted on the wall and a door that led into the hallway that led to the nurses’ station.

There was a second, empty bed in the room. It cost more, but I made sure Dad got a room to himself. He looked paler and thinner, though, so I’m not it helped.

“So it’s like an old noir detective bit?” Dad asked. “A Spade or Marlowe type of guy?”

“He’s not as hard-boiled as a noir guy,” I said. “He’s more of an analyst. A smart guy who’s drawn into this mystery. He has to be smart enough to get to the truth, but the hard-boiled thing won’t work. Devin said he can’t be that tough. Can’t be calling people wops and spicks like Marlowe.”

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“Well…” He closed his eyes and appeared to fall asleep for a few seconds. “Don’t go too big with the conspiracy. Spade never had a conspiracy that led to the president.

The little people can kill you just as well.”

When my mother died, my father became fixated on his early acting career and what he missed out on. He was the same age as Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, so he re-watched The Conversation and The French Connection and Marathon Man and Kramer v. Kramer and would tell me exactly which parts he could have played, how his career path could have led there, and what creative decisions he would have made differently. (At the end of The Conversation, Dad would have stopped playing the saxophone, put it in his lap, and hugged it.) I was twenty-three and just starting to write spec scripts that I hoped would eventually get me a job as a television writer. I encouraged my father to try out for a stage role—something small, something local—to get back into it. He could still walk with a pronounced limp, but that was perfect for some roles. There was a dinner theater and several community theaters nearby, so I told him to audition for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol and for Willy Loman in Death of a

Salesman, a role he’d already played. But Dad would have none of it. The Tiny Tim suggestion made him so mad that he tackled me and bloodied his nose against the coffee table as we fell to the floor. At the emergency room, he cited the TV version of

Rear Window that starred a paralyzed Christopher Reeve and what a travesty that production had been. Dad didn’t want to be an actor now; he wanted to be an actor back when he was young.

Later in the evening, Dad’s doctor came to the room and discussed his options.

After the doctor left, I couldn’t get Dad to listen to me.

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“I told you before,” he said. “I’m not doing it. That’s not living.”

“Tons of people have colostomy bags,” I said. “Young people, and they live for decades and they’re totally fine.”

“Yeah. Young people.”

Whenever anyone used to mention Gone with the Wind, Dad would talk about the death scene of Scarlett O’Hara’s father, Gerald O’Hara, who has dementia. Gerald hops onto a horse and rides at full gallop after a man who has tried to get him to pledge his allegiance to the Union. As Gerald tries to jump the fence, he is thrown from his horse and killed. “That’s the way to go,” Dad would end the story. “Full speed.”

Devin’s production company passed on my pilot script. Instead, he promoted me to head writer on The Hit List. I tried to focus on the father and son of The Hit List, tried to focus on the assassinations, but I kept getting pulled back to James Dean. Raymond

Massey, his on-screen father in East of Eden, hated Dean in real life because Dean kept antagonizing him. A composer friend of Dean’s once said that he couldn’t give

Dean what he really wanted out of the relationship, which was a father figure. And this son in The Hit List who was perpetually by what his father had really been, a completely different version than what the son knew—I kept returning to my James Dean multiverse.

After filming the first half of season two, I told Devin I couldn’t continue working on The Hit List. A month later I sold the multiverse pilot to a rival production company, and by the end of the year it had been turned down by every network I respected.

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I flew back to Shepherdsville because the medical staff alerted me that my father was refusing to eat. He was exhausted but still conscious, so forcing a feeding tube into him would be physically difficult, as well as a moral quandary. I didn’t agree with his

Gerald O’Hara outlook, but I couldn’t force him to do anything.

Kristen called me at the airport.

“I went ahead and got a ticket for the weekend,” she said. “It’s just too hectic now.”

I groaned loud enough for a DHS worker to glare at me. “For Christ’s sake, leave the dogs in a kennel,” I said.

“You know, not everyone’s life is as perfect as yours, we have obligat—”

I hung up. She didn’t like seeing Dad in this condition, she didn’t like seeing Dad without Mom, she didn’t like going back to Shepherdsville because her emotionally abusive ex-husband’s car dealership is right off the interstate exit and she can’t avoid driving past it on the way to see Dad. I was sympathetic. But I didn’t think this was too big of a favor.

My father was in a critical care room, not a room that was even intended to look like anything besides a hospital room, none of the false homeyness of the standard rooms—fake plants, framed photos on the cheap wood nightstand, holiday decorations on the door. The skin of my dad’s face hung past his jaw, the layer of fat no longer holding it in place. I could see the veins beneath his scalp. The small hairs on his crooked nose were white. He didn’t look like my father. He looked like a dead body.

I crossed my arms and stood at the foot of the bed. His eyes were closed.

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“What the hell are you doing, Dad?” I clamped my teeth together. “You’re too—if you’d just stay with—”

I left the room and walked down a few hallways and past two nurses stations and out into a courtyard with picnic tables that surrounded a two-tiered stone fountain. I thought I’d been headed back to the parking lot. I sat on the edge of the fountain and my knees were higher than my hips.

When I was in tenth grade and missed school for a week after my volleyball- captain girlfriend dumped me—soon thereafter she went to prom with a libero teammate—my dad convinced me, eventually, that I was only looking at one section of a vast world. “It’s like if you had a ’67 Stingray,” he said, “and you totaled the thing. The frame’s bent to hell, the engine’s in pieces, you wouldn’t think about bothering with a salvage title. You could spend a year, two years imagining that car and what you used to have. But think about it—you evidently had enough money to get a Stingray, or enough know-how to fix one up. What’s stopping you from ending up with maybe a ’67

Shelby?”

Fecal incontinence is not the same as totaling a car or a getting dumped by a high-school girlfriend who turns out to be a lesbian, especially considering that the fecal incontinence comes after decades of dealing with prosthetic legs and phantom limb pain and chronic back pain and years after my mother dying and then having to live with his son because he can’t take care of himself and then his son leaving him to go write for a network drama that earns respectable ratings for its timeslot but never cracks the top

50.

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I went back inside and had to ask someone at a nurses station how to get back to my father’s room. I sat next to him for the rest of the evening and left just after midnight. The next morning I was only in the room for twenty minutes before he died.

Someone came quickly, but I didn’t know what to say to them, what I was supposed to ask them. The room felt empty, even with my father and the staff workers near me.

The problem that Scott Drakeman has in the Verification department is that he’s convinced of two realistic possibilities: (1) a change in circumstance, personality, luck, emotion, etc., could be an indication of a universe displacement, or (2) a change could be a result of complex people or the complexity of their loved ones, an indication of naïveté or just not paying attention—i.e., it could have nothing to do with displacement.

Things may just be going badly for someone.

This view, accepting the two possibilities, puts the protagonist in conflict with his coworkers who ascribe everything to universe displacement and with those who believe the tech company is a vast conspiracy that involves brainwashing clients to believe they’re special, multiverse travelers. He is always at odds with one side or the other.

At the end of the pilot, Scott Drakeman sees no other choice than to help a man who is trying to fleece the Verification department. The fleecer, a former employee who feels compelled to test the promises that he gave to numerous clients, is a man with understandable goals and views to which Scott Drakeman objects. Dishonesty is never the right path to truth, but Scott Drakeman is not one to impede free will.

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I didn’t know where the show was headed beyond the first season, but I think something important would have happened. I think Scott Drakeman would have learned something life-changing.

Kristen scheduled the funeral arrangements over the phone before she arrived in

Shepherdsville that weekend. She picked out the casket and the tiny programs for the service and the eulogist. She wrote the obituary that appeared in the local papers. I paid for everything, but at least I didn’t have to arrange it. The funeral was scheduled for

Tuesday, so we had Sunday and Monday free. We avoided the car dealership as much as possible while driving around to see our old school and our old house and the park where our mother used to take us for picnics and to ride the see-saws, which Kristen and I were good at but which she and Mom could ride so well that I once started crying.

At an ice cream stand downtown, Kristen and I sat on the hood of my rental car and ate chocolate-vanilla cones.

“I can’t believe this is the same place,” she said. “When it was the four of us, I thought this was the only place in the world. Not this place, but Shepherdsville. You know what I mean? Like, I didn’t even think about there being other places. We loved each other so much.”

Kristen began to cry and the ice cream was dripping down her cone. I put my arm around her rounded shoulders.

There is a universe where Jim Kelly went 2-2 in the Super Bowl. A universe where Apollo 17 landed on Mars. A universe where the Wright brothers never moved

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past the bike shop and onto flight. A universe where Christopher Columbus was eaten by a whale in the Atlantic. A universe where Steve McQueen died in a car crash instead of a Mexican operating table. A universe where Carol Donaghy waves to her husband as he moves down Main Street as the marshal of the Appleton Fall Parade. A universe where Manny’s fiancé Elisa look up from their biergarten table and see a portly waiter with no wrist tattoos or bracelets. A universe where my father lives long enough to see me accomplish the things I should have accomplished decades ago. A universe where

James Dean is exactly what I am, a universe where James Dean is exactly what I need to be to feel loved and to feel worth the molecules I’m made from.

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LOVE AS AN EIGHT-POUND CALICO OR TABBY

Sunday

At the apartment complex where Sarah and I have a two-bedroom apartment, there are six-hundred other units with six-hundred other couples, all of whom have cats.

The cats come in two varieties, calico and tabby, and all weigh eight pounds. Those six- hundred eight-pound calicos and tabbies sit in the complex’s six-hundred windows and lick their twelve-hundred paws and sleep on the sunlit carpet. After they sleep, the cats arch their backs and return to their spot by the window. All of the six-hundred windows are uncovered, except for ours.

Everybody understands that love is a docile, eight-pound cat.

In the complex there are couples married for decades, couples married for months, couples who met weeks ago. Some of the old eight-pound calicos and tabbies are so old that they appear surprised to be alive, staring at their reflections in water bowls or running away at the sound of their own meows. Some of the young eight- pound calicos and tabbies tumble around the apartments in a state of what the older cats must view as a hormone-induced mania. The calico and tabby kittens, endearing and sickening with their wide-eyed meow-squeaks, inevitably grow into the eight-pound cats that we all recognize. Living surrounded by six-hundred couples with six-hundred cats, we quickly learned what a cat is supposed to look like.

After three years of dating, Sarah and I got married earlier this year. My brother and his wife were our best man and maid of honor. They were the only couple that

Sarah and I both loved. All four of us got along—same tastes in Chinese restaurants, gastropubs, bingeable TV shows. We once got kicked out of a P.F. Chang’s, after

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several warnings, for talking too loudly about the second season of Westworld. Because

Sarah had been traveling for work recently and the four of us only got together every month or two, it was hard to keep the noise down.

Sarah is a district sales manager for Shoes4Less. We’ve been married for seven months, and for five of those months Sarah has been out of town—in a hotel for three weeks and then home for a weekend and then away again. The discount-shoe business is booming, at least for her company, and Sarah has helped open a dozen stores this year. Shortly after our honeymoon her regional manager sent her on a three-week assignment to train employees at a store near Louisville. This training was so effective that she was later sent to Bentonville, Youngstown, Albany, and some smaller cities.

But before leaving for Harrisburg (where she is right now), Sarah told her employer that this trip would be her last, that she would do no more traveling after this new store opened, because we couldn’t handle the separation any more, not as a married couple.

She’ll be a store manager in Montgomery from now on, a lower position with a lower salary, but at least we’ll get to see each other.

She gets home on Friday night, five days from now, and we’ll have to talk about our cat, Pudge. Maybe not early in the weekend, but soon. Sarah’s been gone for so many three-week periods that present-day Pudge doesn’t even appear to be a relative of three-years-ago Pudge. He has ballooned into a sixteen-pound, white-haired sphere with a knob head. Pudge’s legs are stubs too short to be of any use to him, more like prehensile nipples than feet. His tail is somewhere in there, lost in the furry fatness.

Recently his anus has been excreting a gritty pink sludge that tears the paper towels I

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use to try to clean the stuff off the kitchen tiles. When I get out of bed at night and go into the kitchen, I can see the sludge remnants glowing , like semen under a black light.

Before Sarah began traveling for work, Pudge was an eight-pound calico. Now I keep the blinds closed so that the neighbors won’t see him rolling and bouncing around the apartment like a mishit volleyball.

Monday

Sarah and I used to hang out with my brother Andy and his wife Madeline all the time before they separated. We would go to their house on Saturdays for college football games, see movies together and pick them apart afterwards over drinks, even go on weekend scuba-diving trips as a foursome. The arrangement was so convenient that we didn’t really work on other couple-to-couple friendships; in fact, our other friendships fizzled out. But now Andy and Madeline are not an option, and Sarah and I don’t have a clearcut second option, so I’m a little panicked. We’ll have to adjust to being alone together again and we’ll have to adjust our social life, too—more than adjust, build a new one. I have to scour the Internet for a restaurant or an art event or something for this weekend, something that will prevent our first weekend back together from feeling like a poorly attended luncheon.

Two months ago was when it happened—Andy euthanized their cat before it could die of starvation. Madeline called Sarah at her hotel and cried and recounted a litany of simple things that Andy was unwilling to do, small things that would have made staying together a realistic option, things that would have made their eight-pound cat endure. But one person trying isn’t enough. Now Andy doesn’t like to visit our apartment because he’d have to see the six-hundred couples with their six-hundred cats sitting in their six-hundred windows. He prefers to linger among thirty- and forty-year-old singles,

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the perpetually divorced and the widowed—avoiding any place where there are more eight-pound tabbies and calicos than he could count.

A few mornings each week, I meet Andy for breakfast at McDonald’s. During the week, from Sunday to Thursday, I work nights at the hospital, where I run the backups and nightly maintenance on the servers and alert the on-call IT specialists when there are problems with the backups and maintenance, which is at least once a week. Some of the programs never run the way they should.

Across from me, Andy smoothes out his Sausage McMuffin wrapper and sets his drink on its corner. I’m still unnerved by the dissolution of his marriage, which Andy and the rest of my family seem to have seen coming. The only hint I had was at our wedding reception. Andy and Madeline were sitting at the head table during the bride-and-groom dance. The lights were low in the reception hall and a disco ball shimmered above us.

As I dipped Sarah and received a round of applause, I noticed Madeline leaving the table. Then I saw Andy pick her chair up off the floor, glance around, and join in on the applause. I asked Sarah about it later—not that night, but after I heard about the separation—and she said, “They’ve had a rough time recently.” Evidently their cat had withered into a husk with patches of fur on its pink skin. Even when healthy, the cat would bite them so relentlessly that Madeline would often go stay with her parents.

“She just didn’t care,” Andy says to me over breakfast. “It was obvious. She didn’t want to do anything to be a sustaining force. She didn’t want to keep anything alive.”

I don’t ask Andy about the biting, which he never told me about. I ask Andy if he ever thought of feeding the cat himself and seeing if that would inspire his wife to exert some effort. Kindness begetting kindness, etc.

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“Just to prolong the misery?” A clump of sausage falls off his biscuit. “Once you get to that stage, nothing can do any good. Nothing would have made her try.”

I look away from the table. The sunrise lights the clouds orange and violet and the finger smudges on the McDonald’s windows glow like ghosts. It’s the last day of my work week; Sarah will return home later today. I should be elated, but I’m melancholic from this conversation with my brother. I don’t know how much he ever loved his wife, or what he meant when he said he did. Cats don’t starve to death overnight, and Andy and his wife both knew what eight-pound calicos and tabbies look like. Everybody knows what they look like. So how could they see their cat dwindling down to an airless husk of fur and still refuse to fill its bowl?

In the apartment below mine, there is a couple in their early thirties sitting on the couch, their backs to me, his arm around her. They are watching a movie they waited to see until it was streaming, because they don’t like the hassle of going to the theater.

During the end credits, their heads perk up. They look at each other and smile. The husband stands and extends his hand. The wife covers her face as she laughs. Then she rises and joins him and they begin to dance to the end-credits song, executing an awkward waltz that only becomes more endearing and love-strengthening when they make mistakes.

I look into another window, and then another. In every living-room window, every couple dances a cutely terrible waltz to a song they reluctantly but irresistibly love. Six- hundred waltzes. On the backs of their couches, the six-hundred eight-pound calicos or

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tabbies wash their faces with the backs of paws. It kills you not to have a camera at that moment.

After rolling around the apartment all day, Pudge sometimes cackles and vomits a string of bubbles onto the carpet. I think he only throws up because he’s dizzy. Sarah never mentions it. I don’t think about it, either, most of the time. Pudge seems fine when

Sarah and I are both here. Even when it’s just me in the apartment, he eats enough, smacks around the cord to the blinds, chases my shadow when I walk through the living room, leaves white fur all over the place.

I do wonder, though, why Pudge is the only cat that looks like this. I mean, what’s so wrong with me and Sarah that we should have a gravity-defying ballcat?

When I talk to my dad in the afternoon, I tell him how terrified I am. Everyone knew Andy’s marriage was doomed a long time ago except for me. Am I that bad a judge? Dad dismisses my question with a grunt. According to him, Andy’s cat would still be alive if he’d put as much effort into feeding it as he puts into convincing everybody that the cat’s death wasn’t his fault.

“It’s embarrassing to hear that ridiculous spiel of his,” Dad says. “He thinks people can’t figure out he’s an idiot. Just because a person never admits to being an idiot doesn’t mean we don’t know he’s an idiot.”

My father’s name is Chad. He’s the oldest Chad I’ve ever met. My parents, Chad and Deb. Their names sound wrong together, but they’ve been married for forty years.

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When I first mentioned my parents’ names to Sarah, she asked if Chad got along well with my real dad.

The first time my parents ever saw a tabby kitten was forty-one years ago, the day they met and the day they found Scruffy in a garbage disposal. My parents both worked at a hotel—my mother in housekeeping and my father in the kitchen of the hotel restaurant. Every day when my mother’s shift was over, she would walk through the kitchen on her way out to her car. Mom says it was a shortcut to the parking lot, but my dad insists that she was going out of her way to size him up as he washed the salad bowls.

On that day, my father called her over to the sink and introduced himself. Then they found a balled-up kitten in the sink, its legs dangling down inside the drain. The kitten’s eyes were unopened and its fur was coated in marinara sauce, flecked with bits of steak fat, and full of cowlicks that made it tough for anyone to take the kitten seriously. How could this cute and silly tangle of fur grow into an eight-pound stalwart of respectability? My mother made very little money from changing sheets on the hotel’s stained mattresses, and my father made even less as a part-time employee who, according to the other kitchen workers, already acted as if he ran the place.

That first meeting in the hotel happened eight years before I was born. Scruffy turned forty-one last week. He only has sight in one eye now, but he’ll still bite your fingers if you let them dangle over the couch armrest in my parents’ living room.

I’m concerned, though. Andy and Madeline must have tried, at some point, and believed it would work. Andy must have seen what was happening and thought everything would work itself out, because good marriages bounce back, and his would

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be a good marriage. They must have entered into at least one conversation with the expectation that by the time the conversation was over the problem would seem surmountable. Even after the final divisive arguments or revelations, they must have woken up one day and thought, No, this isn’t right, and then tried all over again in a more hopeful and desperate way to talk their way to a truce. If it still didn’t work for them, why am I so sure about me and Sarah?

Tuesday

I call Sarah at the hotel every night and we talk for fifteen minutes before I leave for work at nine p.m. She has assured me that her rooms are never as bad as the motel room I stayed at with my dad when I was a kid.

Sarah tells me that she spilled ice in the hallway of her hotel. She was trying to carry the bucket on her head like an African women in a documentary we’d watched together.

“I seriously had it, right until I pulled out the key card,” Sarah says. “Some of the ice went under the door next to mine.”

I tell her about my conversation with Dad and about how disarmed I feel that I didn’t suspect anything about Andy’s marriage. “Really,” she says. It sounds as if she’s surprised that I am surprised.

We don’t talk about Pudge, not directly. I tell her about some of the new restaurants I’ve found online and about a comedy show with VIP tickets still available.

Sarah says, “Can’t we just stay home? I won’t feel like getting out. Work exhausts me.

By the end of the week, I’m spent.”

Pudge rolls over my feet while I talk on the phone. He hovers over the coffee table like a German dirigible on the brinking of being engulfed by hydrogen flames. The

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carpet and the wood floors are an abstract-expressionist maze of anal sludge.

Sometimes Pudge bounces up onto the couch and I hold him for a few minutes and he warms my lap before I say goodbye to Sarah and leave for work.

When I was twelve, my dad and I stayed at a motel that reminded me of the motel where the murder happens in every movie. At night the room was black and I lay with the blanket pulled up only to my chest so that the frayed stitching wouldn’t scratch my face. My corner of the room smelled like chlorine, though the motel didn’t have a pool.

That first night, Dad yelled at someone on the phone and it woke me up. He told me not to worry and then he went outside. Later, he carried Scruffy inside and let him sleep on the bed with him.

Dad would walk to the truck stop across the street where I’d call Mom in the afternoons.

“How long are we going to stay here?” I’d ask. “When are you coming back?”

“I really miss you, too,” she’d say. “Soon, baby. Soon.”

At the motel, I rarely saw Scruffy. Dad only brought him into our room at night.

Dad would open the door and the light from the parking lot would make the ceiling glow above my bed and I could see the patch of new paint intended to disguise an old stain.

During our last week at the motel, I woke up in the middle of the night and found

Scruffy in the bathtub. I could see his outline through the foggy shower curtain. I peeked around the curtain. Scruffy’s fur was crimson, a toucan bill had grown where his mouth used to be, and a pair of rose-fleshed tails wrapped and unwrapped themselves behind

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him. Something yellow oozed from his paws. There was dirt and piss beneath him in the tub. He raised his head a few times and exposed his neck, which he did whenever he needed us to pet him. I knelt by the tub and eased back the shower curtain so that I could sit on the edge of the tub and talk to him and see if he would come up onto my lap. Scruffy shrieked and hissed at me through his bill. Electric sparks shot from his fur and knocked me back onto the bathroom tile.

I cried enough that my dad woke up and came and sat with me in the bathroom.

We talked about Mom until the morning.

Wednesday morning

One of Sarah’s closest coworkers from her early days at Shoes4Less, Crissy, lives in a nearby town with her husband of four years. I remember Sarah mentioning the wedding on one of our first dates and saying how many of Crissy’s relatives were grandparents who didn’t look old enough to be grandparents and how many face tattoos there were in the wedding party. Crissy and her husband were nice enough—I met them, years later, at our wedding—so I called them in the hope that we could get together briefly this coming weekend or that they would invite us over to their apartment.

(The sludge has eaten away some of the baseboards at this point.)

I left a message and Crissy quickly called me back.

“You guys should definitely come over,” she said. “It would be great to catch up.

You’d love our pictures from Tahoe, we just got back. And, oh, Sarah’s promotion— regional manager. You guys, congratulations! New York—that’s so exciting.”

My jaw shook from nervousness, but I finished the conversation with a promise that we’d call and confirm our weekend plans in the next day or two.

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Wednesday evening

Right after she picks up the phone and says hello, I ask Sarah about the promotion.

“It’s just an offer,” she says. “I haven’t taken—why were you talking to Crissy, anyway?”

“I was trying to plan something for your big weekend back,” I say.

“I told you, I need to stay home.” She says home as if it’s a multi-syllable word.

“I’m so tired.”

“But you could have told me.”

“I was going to talk to you about it this weekend, after I’d had a chance to recover. Look, it’s an offer, and we’d be able to stay in one place.”

“But we can stay in one place now, here,” I say. “After you get back.”

She lets out a deep breath. “I’m sorry but you know I’ll only get like two-thirds of my salary and that won’t be enough, not unless we want to move to a cheaper and smaller place.”

I can’t make any more money than I do now, not until I have more seniority in a few years. She knows that.

“You don’t even want to try it here?” I ask. “We haven’t tried it yet, not since we’ve been married. We haven’t.”

We both breathe into the phone, not speaking. New York would mean leaving my parents, and my brother and Madeline right in the middle of their divorce. and starting over at another job, trying to find something else to make myself feel as if I’m contributing financially to the marriage. And what if it doesn’t work in New York? I’d

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rather go through conjugal strife near my family, not in an expensive city where I don’t know anyone.

I can hear Pudge in the kitchen. He’s opened the drawer below the oven and is bonking himself on the head with a skillet.

Sarah’s voice wavers. “Can we just talk about this after I get back?” she asks.

For the rest of the afternoon, I can’t sleep. The sun leaks through the edges of the blinds and Pudge sounds as if he is ripping the drywall off the studs in the living room, but it isn’t that. I keep picturing Sarah when we were dating, an evening when I visited her after not seeing her in person for a week. It was a Friday, late enough to be dark. I parked in front of her apartment and she bounded down the stairs and ran to me and jumped onto me and I held her with her arms around my shoulders and her legs on my hips. I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy in my life. So now I can’t sleep.

Thursday

At McDonald’s, Andy tells me about a newlywed coworker whose wife left and moved to Flagler Beach to live with the owner of a limo service. Just a year before,

Andy’s coworker had hired this limo service to transport the wedding party from the ceremony on the beach back to the reception at the Hilton Garden Inn. Each table at the reception had a glass centerpiece full of calico and tabby kittens, beautiful kittens that were predestined to become eight-pound inspirations. By the time the music started and the bar had been open for an hour, the kittens were tumbling together across the linoleum floor, chewing up everyone’s shoelaces and hopping into and out of the cake.

The grandparents danced until they had to use their Life Alert button. A bridesmaid and groomsman had sex under the head table. The limo driver caught both the garter and the bouquet. The wedding video, Andy says, was amazing.

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I ask Andy about his coworker’s divorce, if those kittens, such promising signs of eight-pound calicos and tabbies, were all dead now or if they survived the disillusionment. Andy starts shaking his head and, for a full minute, he doesn’t stop.

“That’s it exactly,” Andy says. “Now the guy wonders if there was anything there to begin with.”

On the way home from McDonald’s, I see my neighbors Ron and Tara sitting outside our apartment building. He and Tara (his latest girlfriend) have been together for three weeks and they look like they’ve been alive for two hundred years. They sit out in the sun most days, Ron in a beach chair and Tara in a lounge chair. Both of their bodies are hickory-smoked and shiny.

Tara raises a hand to wave at me, and her armpit is the broken-in pocket of a baseball glove. She puts on headphones when Ron and I start talking about sports.

I mention his new cat, a tiny calico, that lies in the shade behind Tara’s knees. I mention Pudge and how he grew a rhinoceros tusk that morning and destroyed the wiring in our bathroom.

“Make it new, brother,” Ron says. “You can’t just sit around and cry about what was never meant to last forever.”

After that time in my childhood when my father and I lived in a motel for a while, we moved into a rental house. Mom and Andy came back to live with us a few weeks later. Mom yanked the toucan bill off Scruffy’s face and crushed it in her hand. And I didn’t see her do it, but she must have used the scissors to cut off his extra rat tails. Or

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maybe my dad did it. I could still see the scar on Scruffy’s face from where the toucan bill had once been, but overall Scruffy looked fine and he never hissed at me again.

A month ago, when Sarah was last home, she told me all the hotel stories that she hadn’t had time to cover in our fifteen-minute phone conversations. She’d had to switch rooms twice in three days—once because of a loud party in the room above her room, once because the showerhead in the bathroom fell off and landed on her foot.

The hotel was so cheap the blankets were no thicker than the sheets. She had to go to reception to ask for thicker blankets. She had to yell at the girls she was training at work because they wouldn’t talk to customers when they came into the store.

“They are called salespeople,” Sarah said. “Sales. They have to talk to customers so that we can make sales. Otherwise they’d just be called people. How do they not see that?”

I slept through the afternoon and then, in the evening, watched television with

Sarah. Pudge bounced between the TV stand and the wall for a while and then got lodged beneath the couch and fell asleep. Sarah and I binge-watched a British show about a butler who is abnormally invested in his job. It wasn’t great. We stayed on the couch together until Sarah fell asleep, and I carried her to our bedroom.

Friday morning

I talk to Dad on the phone and he reminds me that Andy is an idiot who shouldn’t be allowed to have a cat. Dad reminds me that he and my mom pulled a kitten out of a industrial sink and kept it alive for forty-one years, even though Scruffy did go through a period of questionable health. Dad reminds me that a rolling, bouncing, sixteen-pound

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white cat with vestigial legs is about as much as you can hope for in this life. He reminds me that it’s not my job to make people admire Pudge.

“You can’t worry about convincing other people to approve of you, son,” Dad says. “Nobody knows what they’re doing.”

I call Sarah’s hotel to talk to her before she leaves for work. She’s been gone for sixteen hours, and I don’t want to go back to work if she won’t be here when I get home.

I tell her that Pudge looks like nothing I’ve ever seen and I don’t want him to die or to kill me and that living in our apartment by myself is the worst thing ever and that everything is the worst thing ever.

“I know it is,” she says. “I love you, and I hate it here, too. I, um—I pretty much hate everything.”

She has to get off the phone and I need to sleep. I know my eyes need to shut because the apartment walls are getting very bright and starting to pulse. I hang a blanket over the blinds in the bedroom and close the bedroom door. I go into the bathroom and run some water over my face. I go back into the bedroom and sit on the bed for a minute. Then I go back into the living room and open the blinds halfway so that Pudge can sleep in the sun.

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GRIEF AS AN EVENING OF RECOLLECTIONS ABOUT BREAKING AND ENTERING

They watched the third quarter recap of the Bulls–Nets game on different televisions. Nearby, a group of families had too many chairs pulled up to a cluster of mismatched tables, two of which were full of children who wore jerseys with a dry- cleaning logo on them. Next to their table was a door to the patio, and the door’s glass reflected, from inside the restaurant, a reverse image of the red Newcastle neon sign.

Darren couldn’t hear any sounds from the patio, and he wondered if the patio people heard anything, any sounds from the dining room slipping out through the space between the door and the frame, the noise from the car commercial or the voices of the servers near the door. He tapped the rough underside of the table and did not hear the tapping.

“So your brother isn’t doing that hot?” Rob asked.

“He’s not coming,” Darren said, “but he’s fine. He’ll be fine.”

“I saw him at the funeral. I was hoping he’d be here and I could see if things were going—even if it wasn’t better, to know he wasn’t any worse.”

On the phone earlier that afternoon, Darren had heard his brother Alex explain why everything was worse, why it was impossible to get in the car, open the garage door, back the car out of the driveway onto the street. He had heard Alex tell him why being picked up by Darren and driven to the restaurant to meet the guys was even worse, because if he were being picked up and driven he would spend the evening remembering how he had needed to be picked up and driven and this would be even more depressing than watching the game alone on their parents’ old set. Darren had tried to lighten the conversation by reminding his brother of what their father would have said at that moment and how their father’s words likely would have been less comforting

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than his death itself: “Holy Christ, what’s wrong with you two?” After that, Darren had run out of ideas. His own experience in the days following their father’s funeral hadn’t been that bad, he told Rob. He’d stayed home a lot but made trips to work, to gas stations, and to gas-station convenience stores to pick up the few items—corn chips, toilet paper, cold medicine—that he needed to supplement the deli trays and cases of soda cans with which the family had loaded his refrigerator.

“I was only asking, you know, because I had—”

“It’s fine,” Darren said.

“When I had all that happen with my sister’s kid”—Rob lifted an elbow onto the table and the beer lilted in the glasses—“during that thing, there were times when I seemed all right…”

The server stopped at their table. The girl’s face was a pleasant relief, and

Darren paid attention to everything she said: quick inquiries about appetizers, recitation of the happy-hour menu (during which her eyes moved away only once), and a rundown of the new on-tap draughts. Her big hoop earrings rested on her shoulders, so close that Darren could have reached out and touched them, if he was quick enough. She turned to Rob and remembered his drink order without writing down anything, without repeating the order to herself, without biting the edge of her lip until it flashed white.

Both men watched her leave.

“I never told you this,” Rob said. “Maybe one of the guys did, but I didn’t, I didn’t even tell your brother. Which is why I wanted him to be here. I thought if he was— anyway, I don’t know if you’ve heard this before. About the baby mice.”

“What?” Darren asked.

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When the server returned with their drinks, Rob downed half of his beer straight through the foam in a single tilt.

“All right,” Rob said. “Okay, so once—after the thing with my nephew, about three or four days after the funeral, because I was still getting up late and not making it into the shower until the afternoon—all right. I get out of the shower this one afternoon and I walk out into the hallway, with the towel around my waist, and I hear this shriek. This high-pitched shriek. But it was this really big sound, too, not like you hear from those tiny whistles they used to use on ships—you know the whistles?”

“The ones—” Darren held his fingers a few inches apart.

“Yeah, those. This was high-pitched, like those whistles, but it was also like a boom, but full of those whistle sounds. Anyway, I look down and there are baby mice under my feet. I don’t know how old exactly, a couple days, I guess. All these pink wrinkled things. Their eyes were still shut, their eyelids looked bruised. And, just automatically, I jump away. But then I land on others, and they all start to shriek. The first ones, the mice I stepped on at first, a couple are still wiggling and some of them have twisted-up legs and a couple of them, like, exploded, out through their mouths onto the other mice. And now the new ones I was stepping on, they’re all doing the same thing. I started to jump again, but I didn’t. Because I knew they were everywhere.

They were everywhere in the house. I could see into the living room and the kitchen.

They were all over the floor and on the couch and rolling off the endtables. And it was impossible, but they were all there, and they were in the bathroom, too. The shower was full of them. A few fell out of the exhaust fan. There wasn’t anything I could do. I kicked a few of them away from underneath me, and then I sat down there and covered my

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ears but I could still hear them shrieking and crying or whatever it was, the noise they made, and I sat there and waited.”

Darren raised his glass to his mouth. The Bulls game was in the middle of a timeout, the players still circling the coach in the timeout huddle. Darren didn’t catch the score at the bottom of the screen. On the table, the shadow of his hands and the glass formed—not a single shadow, but a series of shadows that overlapped at the center to form a slender umbra.

“How did you get out?” he asked.

“Well, a few of my cousins, they came over later. One of them, he went home and got his power washer and cleared them out, I think. I stayed over at my other cousin’s place for a couple weeks. I don’t really remember leaving my house, if I walked out on my own or what. I don’t have, like, a real point or—hang on, here’s Gil.”

A red-haired man wearing a baseball cap with a frayed bill sat down next to Rob and pushed the salt and pepper shakers and menus to the edge of the table. Gil’s face had freckles nearly the same color as the hair that curled across his scalp. He removed his canvas jacket and reached across the table to smack Darren on the shoulder.

“Good to see you, brother,” he said. “Rob try to roofie you yet?”

Darren nodded. “It didn’t take.”

“Steve coming?” Rob asked.

“He had to run home and get his phone.”

“He had it.”

“I know, he left it when we went back.”

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Gil spent a minute getting acclimated to the televisions, which game was where, and then ordered his first and second drinks concurrently. After the server returned with the drinks, they all ordered wings with varying degrees of hot sauce. Rob worked on his fourth Guinness. Gil finished his first drink, a straight gin, and then asked about Alex.

“He didn’t want to come,” Darren said. “But he’s not—it’s not like he’s in horrible shape.”

“Did he say anything? About why he’s not coming?”

“Not really.”

“I need to call him, I guess. Or go see him.”

Rob massaged a vertebra on the back of his neck. “I called him yesterday. He didn’t pick up.”

They both waited for Darren to answer, then looked away.

Gil said, “I remember, back when Jenna and I were dating, one day she called— well, let me start off by saying all this happened after her grandma died, the one with all the money. I get that it’s not the same as a parent, but Jenna used to go over there all the time, for whole weekends when she was a kid, and they would do all kinds of stuff and play music, because her grandma’s the one who taught her how to play the piano.”

“The piano?” Rob stared into his beer.

Gil’s shoulders slumped. “Dude, you’ve heard her play. You’ve asked her to play.”

“Right. I remember.”

“So, after her grandma died, Jenna called me a couple days later and said there was a fat guy in her kitchen, this really—just enormous fat guy. She said he must have

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broken in during the night, and now he wouldn’t leave.” Gil started on his second drink, something brown in a short glass. “I was expecting more of a reaction to that.”

“I told him the baby mice story,” Rob said.

Gil’s face took on an expression somewhere between a dog baring its teeth and a baby about to smile.

“I’m not sure if I can follow the baby mice story,” he said, “but I already started.

Here goes—I get over to Jenna’s house, and the entrances to her kitchen look like they’re filled with an inflatable—you know those inflatable bouncy houses people rent for kids’ parties, castles where you can jump in them? It looked like somebody had blown up one of those in her kitchen. But it wasn’t the right fabric. It was shirt fabric. I told Jenna to go to her bedroom, that she needed to rest. So then I go to the kitchen and tear the fabric open and I can see skin, a few hairs in spots. I try to get around it, to move between the fat guy and the cabinets, so that I cab get through and reach the

Pop-Tarts because Jenna still hadn’t eaten that morning, but I couldn’t do it. He filled the entire kitchen.”

Rob spoke into his nearly-empty glass. “The guy deflated.”

“Well, sort of. That was the point of the story.” Gil turned back to Darren. “After a few weeks, Jenna got to where she could climb up onto the counters and get out whatever she needed to. Some afternoons she was fine and others she’d be so tired she’d have to sleep. The guy got smaller, but he didn’t deflate. He actually shrank.

That’s how she could eventually crawl onto the counters to get stuff out of the cabinets and after a few months open the refrigerator partway and pull out the expired food and

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throw it away. But as she was crawling around him, she still had to look at the place where his head was supposed to be.”

“He didn’t have a head?”

“Didn’t have a head?”

“You left that part out,” Rob said.

“All right, the fat guy didn’t have a head,” Gil said. “I should have said that. When he got small enough that Jenna could climb onto the counters, she saw like this giant bellybutton crater where his neck should have been. It had cobwebs and dead bugs and drywall dust from the ceiling in it. It was gross. So that takes care of the part about the head.” Gil finished the rest of his drink. “What I was getting at was, finally she called me—it might have been two years after it all started—and she was screaming and crying. I won’t go into all of it, but the reason was that she had accidentally kicked him behind the trash can and completely forgotten about him for a few days. And she was so, so upset by it. Like, she felt really guilty about not taking care of this guy, this fat guy without a head who kept her from eating breakfast for six weeks and kept her from eating dinner in her apartment for a year.”

Their server brought two baskets of wings to the table and a large container of nachos, stacked the empty glasses inside each other, and carried them away, pressed to the side of her hip.

The Bulls–Nets game was in the final seconds. By now the Nets had overtaken the Bulls and now led by one point. Chicago inbounded the ball and a shot bounced off the side of the rim as the red outline flashed behind the transparent backboard.

“The Bulls suck,” Gil said. “Ever since Jordan left, they suck.”

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“They’ve been in the conference finals,” Rob said. “They’re in the playoffs every year.”

“And they lose. Nobody’s been good since Jordan left.”

“Butler’s good.” Darren talked through a half-chewed nacho. “Rose won MVP before he got hurt.”

“But still.”

Noises floated around the room. Everything in the room looked the way it should have looked. Darren’s friends across from him. The swaths of condensation on the table around the glasses. The ping of forks and knives striking each other. The engravings of winged buffalos on the chairbacks and the backrests in the booths. The beer and hot- sauce bottles lined up over the draught taps. The lights flashing in the entryway from the claw crane machine. The hostess stand and its table map under the plastic. Everything made sense.

The television across from Darren switched from the Bulls–Nets postgame report to college hockey.

“I’ll be back,” Darren said.

In the restroom a drunk man wavered in front of a urinal, his mouth agape, his head thrown back as he looked up toward the water-stained ceiling tiles. Urine was hiss-ringing against the porcelain and the sound echoed throughout the room. Darren opened a stall door and stepped inside. A strip of wet tissue stuck to the beads of urine on the toilet seat and a small puddle surrounded the flush valve. A giant shadow of

Darren’s head hovered on the wall above the toilet.

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A person who made sense, a person in order, would have fallen onto the tile floor and vomited nachos into the toilet water. Darren coughed once and nothing happened.

He spit a few times into the water, and a string of brown saliva bubbles curled and elongated toward the front rim of the bowl. He felt worse than he had in the afternoon.

Hearing Rob and Gil talk about their times of grief and how that grief made sense was fine, but then seeing how they waited on him, waited for him to tell his story that was no doubt similar and made the same degree of sense their stories did, waited for him to tell a story that might even be worse than theirs—that was more than he could tolerate.

But all that had happened was his wheelbarrow went missing.

That was his story. The morning after the funeral, Darren had the day off work and nothing to do, so he cleaned out the shed. Cobwebs stretched between the spokes of the bike wheels, the rakes were somehow rusted beyond redemption, and an empty robin’s nest sat in the rafters, the nest being the reason Darren hadn’t opened the shed doors since the previous spring. After he pulled out his bike and the rakes and the ladders and the backup lawnmower, he looked for the hedge trimmers and trowels and the gardening tool that look like a giant fork and found them in a pile on the plywood floor, not inside the wheelbarrow where they had been since he’d bought the house and stocked the shed with his father’s secondhand tools. The wheelbarrow was gone.

The next day Darren cut the grass for the first time of the year. The weather was cool enough that he could have waited another week and not forced his neighbors to hustle outside and pretend like they’ d planned to cut the grass that afternoon also, to pretend that it was their plan all along, but he needed to stay off the couch. He cut the grass and used the weedeater to trim the tall grass along the foundation. While he

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cleared out the weeds in the overgrown garden, he pictured a few tomato plants in there, maybe a cluster of something else around the edges, onions or watermelons. The garden would need those wire fences around the plants so animals didn’t eat them, or he could just let the animals eat them, because why did he need to harvest a garden with so few plants? The soil was as hard as when he’d bought the place, though, so he would need to bring in new top soil for anything to grow. And when he pictured himself using his old wheelbarrow to bring the soil around from the front of the house to the garden in the back, he knew he would never plant the garden. The absence of the wheelbarrow would ruin the garden. Of course, Darren could drive his truck into the backyard or slice open the bags of topsoil and spill them directly onto the garden, but that would only remind him of the wheelbarrow. Digging the topsoil out of the wheelbarrow with a shovel and then spreading it over the tilled ground, and having the wheelbarrow’s green tray and punctured tire waiting nearby throughout the morning and afternoon, however long it took—that was the only way. And the thought of needing to purchase two wheelbarrows in a lifetime made no sense. In fact, one might have been more than he deserved.

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THE LEGACY ASSESSMENT

Pre-Session Questionnaire—Form A

Your session is scheduled for 1:45 PM on JANUARY 20, 1987 .

Thank you for scheduling a legacy assessment with the Sturgess Compendious Algebra of Hamilton County, Inc., where “your life is our business”! As part of your personalized pre-session assessment, you are required to fill out Forms A,B,G, R, R-3 and return them a week prior to your scheduled assessment.

Remember: Accuracy is of the utmost importance. Without accurate responses from you about “your life,” “our business” of determining the duration of your post-death legacy will be inaccurate. For instance, an inaccurate response to a single question has been known to throw off the assessment by more than 200 years. That would mean your assessment may indicate that your life will remain in the memory of others until, say, 2291 when, in fact, you will only be remembered until 2091! What kind of person would be interested in such a dishonest assessment, as temporarily soothing as it may sound? You can trust us here at SCAHC, Inc.—no one loves a liar!

Complete this questionnaire before proceeding to Form B . The entire pre-session paperwork package must be completed and returned to Mr. Oswald Sturgess, the founder of Sturgess Holistic Algebra, Inc., no later than JANUARY 13, 1987 .

1. Which of the following was your primary motivation for purchasing a legacy assessment?

a) A mostly personal curiosity about how long your life/work will remain in the collective and/or individual memories of humans—your descendants, descendants of friends/family/neighbors, government records, mug-shot websites, department store mailing lists, etc.

b) A mostly competitive curiosity, driven by a desire to compare your own legacy assessment with the legacy assessment of a neighbor, workmate, romantic partner, etc.

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c) A combination of A and B.

d) Curiosity about the Mt. Adams, Cincinnati riots of 1985.

e) A religious obligation.

2. When did you first learn about the work and accomplishments of Oswald Sturgess, ABD?

a) 1970—the Jacques Cousteau film La mer vivante (The Water Planet)—Sturgess discussed his trillion-variable equation to determine the precise height of every ocean wave at a specific moment in time.

b) 1974—the 60 Minutes interview with Roger Mudd—Sturgess discussed his “death of disco” equations and announced the dates of the genre’s creative (1979) and commercial (1981) demise.

c) 1976—various local news segments—reports on Sturgess’s hospitalization following the death of his mother Claudia.

d) 1985—the 20/20 segment “Mt. Adams, Cincinnati: A Global Tragedy”—Sylvia Chase narrated a report on the Mt. Adams riots, though she never mentioned Sturgess’s house fire, the vandalism and destruction of Sturgess’s relatively new Pontiac Fiero SE, and Sturgess’s forced seclusion in his subterranean bunker (which was barely big enough to accommodate a bed and a single wooden chair!). NOTE: See Figure 1 below.

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Figure 1. The Sturgess subterranean bunker

3. How many of your immediate family members have undergone legacy assessments?

a) 0 (If you select 0, skip to question 7.)

b) 1–2

c) 3 or more

4. How many of your immediate family members have undergone MULTIPLE legacy assessments?

a) 0

b) 1 or more

5. How many of your immediate family members were BOTH (i) injured (e.g., burned, electrocuted, partially drowned, bitten, sunburned) during the Mt. Adams riots and (ii) interviewed by 20/20 for the segment “Mt. Adams, Cincinnati: A Global Tragedy”?

a) 0 (If you selected 0, skip to question 7)

b) 1 or more

6. Was your immediate family member the man who spoke at length about Sturgess’s deceased mother, Claudia, and claimed to have been pursued romantically by Claudia to such a degree that this interviewee—this “man”—supposedly had to flee

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the Mount Adams neighborhood prior to Valentine’s Day 1971 out of fear for his life (although this was clearly, clearly not true, as Sturgess could explain to you AT LENGTH if you required such an explanation)?

a) Yes (If you selected Yes, please contact Sturgess Compendious Algebra of Hamilton County, Inc., immediately.)

b) No

7. What will you do if you assessment result is the year 2301, generally accepted by Sturgess as the maximum legacy date for terrestrial humans?

a) Nothing unusual. I will be satisfied with the result of 2301.

b) Other

8. If your assessment result were to be a year beyond 2301, would you immediately destroy the assessment result (as required by the Pre-Assessment Civic Well-Being Agreement) and report to Sturgess headquarters for a follow-up?

a) Yes

b) No (If you selected No, please read the accompanying documentation about the details of the Mt. Adams riots and the assessment result that allegedly instigated those riots.) NOTE: If you have read the accompanying documentation about the Mt. Adams riots and are fascinated/interested or are desirous of obtaining an assessment result similar to the year 46712 obtained by Lamar Jennings, Jr., prior to the Mt. Adams riots, please contact Sturgess Compendious Algebra of Hamilton County, Inc., immediately to cancel your legacy assessment and receive a refund (minus the non-refundable pre-assessment preparation fee).

9. Did you know that Sturgess lived in his subterranean bunker for twelve days during the Mt. Adams riots?

a) Yes

b) No

10. Would it surprise you to hear that Sturgess and Mr. Lamar Jennings, Jr., both fully understood that the legacy-assessment result of 46712 was due to a computer error caused by a fluctuation in the Sturgess Compendious Algebra of Hamilton County, Inc., power supply during a lightning storm but that neither man could quell the outrage (or jealousy, whatever it was) of the townsfolk, couldn’t even get those people to stop and listen for just a second?

a) Yes

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b) No

11. Would it surprise you to hear that Sturgess—concerned for the rioters/clients, uncertain over the whereabouts of his pet turtle Melvin, and unable to phone his mother Claudia (recently deceased) and ask her what to do or even just talk to her for a while and let her voice calm him down so that he could think (an inability that had, of course, plagued him in the months since Claudia’s death but that became a truly immense obstacle on around the third day of Sturgess’s stay in the subterranean bunker)—stayed awake in the bunker for eighty-four hours straight and then slept for thirty-one hours straight and then woke up covered in urine, most of which was recent but some of which had dried, suggesting that the urine was between eight and thirty-one hours old?

a) Yes

b) No

c) Yes to the staying-awake part but No to the urine part.

12. If you were Oswald Sturgess and had the chance to do 1974 all over again, knowing what you know now, what would you do?

a) Take the same action—begin working on preliminary legacy-assessment plans.

b) Go back to Purdue and finish the dissertation. It seems as if there would be a tenured position available for you somewhere (remember, you are Sturgess), especially after the “death of disco” equations proved true. Upon obtaining such a position, you could pursue other pop culture–related equations—the Nielsen- ratings decline of Norman Lear sitcoms, the emergence of line dancing, the increasing fatness of Orson Welles.

c) Travel back to your hometown of Cincinnati and to the Mt. Adams neighborhood—remember, this is pre-riot Mt. Adams, in 1974—and watch your 60 Minutes interview with your mother, sitting together on the floral couch with the crocheted afghan thrown over the back, the crocheted afghan that inevitably slips down over your shoulders, sometimes during a pivotal scene of Mannix or Kojak, sometimes during a fourth-and-goal in the Bengals game. After you watch the 60 Minutes interview and your mother seems happy (she’s not smiling like a crazy person but she’s, like, clearly happy), ask her if there’s anything she was never able to tell you, anything she needs to tell you, anything she could tell you, because although you’re not going to kill yourself in the bunker in 1985, you’re going to come close so many times that you’ll feel like a empty shell after you leave the bunker—yes, you’ll be glad that Lamar Jennings, Jr., wasn’t killed during the riots and you’ll be glad to find your pet turtle Melvin alive and hiding under your destroyed Fiero SE, but nothing will be good—and the only thing that might jar you back into being your old self again will be talking to your mother and you’re really really going to need her and she’s not going to be there and you’re not going to know what to do so please please tell me something.

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d) Capitalize on the “death of disco” press and try to meet Van McCoy before he dies.

13. Would it surprise you to know that Sturgess has performed the legacy assessment on himself a dozen times (most recently in July 1985 ) and has never received a result other than the year 2027?

a) Yes

b) No

14. Can you imagine how he must feel?

--End of Pre-Session Questionnaire Form A—

Please proceed to FORM B —

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Neal Hammons earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Florida. His focus was fiction writing. He is originally from Franklin, Ohio.

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