NEGATIVE FIVE IN THE SHADE

A Written Creative Work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree A5

Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing

by

Christopher Yun

San Francisco, California

May 2017 Copyright by Christopher Yun 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Negative Five in the Shade by Christopher Yun, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at San

Francisco State University.

Assistant Professor NEGATIVE FIVE IN THE SHADE

Christopher Yun San Francisco, California 2017

A short story collection comprised of works of fiction, both realist and speculative, engaging with themes of inadequacy, idealized love, and squalor, all threatening to crush the protagonists. These are stories with cold people in cold places seeking the purification of fire, realizing too late their mistake.

I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

Date TABLE OF CONTENTS

Recurse...... 1

The Usurper...... 25

Kick Down the Door...... 40

Kamikaze...... 51

Grounded...... 67

Poison Queen...... 79

Family Matters...... 99

Negative Five in the Shade...... 121

The Future Queen...... 136

9/11, the Military-Industrial Complex, and M e ...... 139

The Lion of N-Judah...... 143

A Koan...... 164 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am forever grateful to the faculty and fellow students at the MFA program at San

Francisco State University, especially Andrew Joron, Chanan Tigay, Junse Kim, Nona

Caspers, and the Fairmount crew. Also to Anna Keesey for her much needed encouragement ten years ago.

v 1

Recurse

Echo off.

You return home from the two month trip you’d begged your boss to take.

You open the front door and step inside. It is very dark. Someone is sobbing in a chair in the furthest corner.

Turn on light OK

The light above the kitchen table flicks on. Your wife of ten years is covering her face with massive, swollen hands. She removes her hands and you see she has somehow gotten uglier, her features coarse and iron. She is going on about her everlasting headache and how awful it has been while you were gone.

Say right thing You can't do that now.

Embrace wife You don’t have anything to do that with.

Talk wife OK

“Yeah, I bet,” you say. “Stop brushing your hair and see how depressing you get. Jesus, you look in the mirror lately?” 2

Your wife asks, “Can you take me to the doctor tomorrow?” Then, as apology: “I can’t see well enough to drive.”

The next morning you take her to the doctor’s office. You hold her purse while the doctor examines her on the table. Both of you are perplexed when the doctor asks if she has any old photos.

Look The doctor is examining the peculiar

way your wife’s forehead hangs like

a shelf over her eye sockets. He is

taking longer to diagnose psycho­

somatic headaches than you’d

thought. You are sitting in an

uncomfortable chair by the door.

You are holding your wife’s purse in

your lap.

Look purse The purse contains: a bottle of

ibuprofen that contains two types of

pills, several crumpled bus transfers,

a pair of bifocals even though your

wife is only forty, and a burgeoning 3

clutch.

Ask wife pills She avoids your gaze and says they

are for her headaches.

Look bifocals They are a pair of bifocals. As far as

you knew, she had never had vision

problems before. The doctor notes

them and writes something down.

Open clutch Inside is cash and many photo­

graphs. You withdraw one that you

shot, from a hiking trip to Alaska

while you were dating.

Look photo She is standing on a steep glacier in

a fur parka and smiling. Her cheeks

and nose are flushed and raw from

the wind. You remember how young

and energetic she had once been.

You wonder if she always carries

this picture in her purse.

Give photo doctor OK 4

The doctor looks at the photo, then back at your wife. It seems to decide something for him. He orders a head scan and sends you to a surgeon. The surgeon holds to the light the slices of your wife’s brain and points out a bright acorn in their deepest shadows.

“That’s an adenoma of the pituitary,” she says. “Making way too much growth hormone. This is why the changes in the skull and hands.”

Self You think the surgeon has just said that

your wife has a brain tumor but you’re not

sure.

Look wife She is trembling.

Say right thing wife You can't do that now.

Ask surgeon adenoma OK

In that dangerous two-second gap between hearing and understanding, you shoot off a question. “And it turns you into a whiny mess?” you ask.

You realize immediately this is a question to either ask the doctor in private, or to never ask at all. Your wife looks at you and just as quickly looks down. Her face is red. The surgeon, bless her, pretends not to notice. The surgeon schedules the surgery for two weeks from today. 5

At home, your wife goes into the bathroom and is pulling her hair down to make bangs to cover her Lurched mug. She says, “I’m medically ugly.”

Self OK

You wish her problem instead was a kidney, or liver, or cornea; something you could donate that would surely erase your debt and probably get the both of you on the news. At the next appointment you pull the surgeon aside to make sure she knows that if your wife needs blood that you are willing to roll up your sleeve.

The surgeon assures you that it will not be a bloody surgery, and that the hospital’s blood bank has plenty in case. “Just be there for her when she goes in, and be there when she comes back out,” she says, patting your arm.

At home, your wife goes into the bathroom and is pulling her hair down to make bangs to cover her Lurched mug. She says, “I’m medically ugly.”

Say right thing wife You can't do that now.

Help You can: go, talk, throw, eat, drink, fight,

use, look, or Inventory. But use your

imagination and see what happens!

Look wife Your wife is failing to obscure her 6

Neanderthal brow. Take-out Indian food is

congealing on the table.

Inventory You have: the business card to a cancer

psychiatrist that the surgeon gave you, a

one-hitter, your car keys, and a looming

despair that if you don’t find something

amazing to say, and let your wife get

wheeled away and gassed, alone, sur­

rounded by masks, irrevocable harm will

be done. Not just to your marriage but to

the reckoning you believe is waiting for

you.

Use one-hitter You inhale deeply. Nothing else happens.

Use despair On what?

Use despair to say right thing You can’t do that now. wife

Use despair on wife OK

You tell your wife that you don’t trust her surgeon and that you want a second opinion. She ignores you. You turn the light off so she can’t use the mirror.

She turns it back on. You slam the door, open it again, and yank her out of the 7

bathroom to listen to you. Your wife says that insurance won’t cover a second opinion and you cry out that money doesn’t matter! Yelling and manhandling her makes you feel a little better.

Here you realize that you’re missing a parallel subplot designed to illustrate and reinforce the main plot.

You can: suffer from chronic lower back pain, have a stray fox arrive in your backyard, or try and confront your mounting struggles against racism, or

| more |.

Back pain OK

Every morning for the past year you’ve been waking up with a terrible ache down around your right kidney. You tell your chiropractor you tweaked it while raking leaves out front, but really it happened during love-making acrobatics in an airport Ramada.

He kneads and kneads it. “It’s really bad today,” he notes. After your half- hour session it feels worse, somehow. Hotter, angrier. The chiropractor refers you to an acupuncturist in Chinatown.

The acupuncturist thoroughly aerates your back, then lays his palms on it.

He frowns at you for a while, and then consults his colleague next door, who arrives with an armload of suction cups and candles. By the time they’re done, you 8

have a new limp and have to push your car seat back three notches to accommodate the swelling.

Even worse, you get home to find your wife has dragged herself to the store and bought a hot water bottle with a strap for you, and fills it every thirty minutes with new water from the kettle. It doesn’t help. The next morning you are suplexed by pain. You can’t get out of bed—can’t even wiggle your toes—for twenty minutes, and your wife wants to call an ambulance. She helps you down the stairs.

The old forgotten tenderness for her further cripples you.

Say thank you You groan out “Thanks” and your

wife says “Don’t mention it.”

Say thank you, really You say “Seriously, I—” but your

wife deposits you on the couch and

you seize up with fresh pain. You

overhear her mutter, “Motherfucker”

while she dials the phone. Laid up

with your nice excuse and in

constant agony, you berate your wife

even more in the days leading up to

her surgery and never realize anything.

You Lose! Do you want to try again?

Yes OK

Here you realize that you’re missing a parallel subplot designed to illustrate and reinforce the main plot.

You can: suffer from chronic lower back pain, have a stray fox arrive in your backyard, or recall your lifelong struggles against racism.

Racism OK

Growing up, your family restaurant was in the red all the time, and you still blame the All-American city you lived in. You blame them for your ratty shirts and for each career door that slammed shut with every test you failed. You blame them for the infirm way your mother lowered herself down the tall bus steps, four transfers a day. One night 10

Skip forward OK

Dad loved cooking and he did it well. He made better food for the customers than he made for you, your Mom or your Granddad. When he took the order, he unwrapped the chicken breasts

Skip OK

You remember you stared at the white customer through the porthole in the double doors. You hate his calm invincibility, here in your place, eating your food.

If you had asked to see the wine list at the brasserie downtown, dressed like him, they’d hit the silent alarm

Skip OK

You pick up the dish, pressed a finger over the side of my nose, unloaded a loogie onto the food, and

Skip OK 11

Dad nodded or shook his head obediently at each insult, hands folded on his apronfront, and when the man leaves Dad sweeps into his hand the thirty cents left on a $14.70 check. All this you watch through the door. You follow Dad all the way to the till and watch him deposit each coin into its drawer.

“Dad,” you finally burst. “Dad. Are you

Redo OK

Here you realize that you’re missing a parallel

more OK

You can also: have an important contract at your job go sour, your neighbor can be pissed about your tree that keeps dropping crabapples on his lawn, secretly be a werewolf, see on the news that there is a serial killer in the city, get a girl pregnant.

more Those are the only choices.

Fox OK 12

You are kicking over rocks in your backyard and crushing worms and

beetles with your heel when you notice two alert eyes staring at you from the pile

of garbage in the side alley. You’ve never seen a fox before.

Shoo away fox You lob a stone at it but it ignores you.

Feed fox OK

You run back inside and fix a bowl of milk and a plate of cube steak your wife had marinating with Diet Coke, lemon, and rosemary. The fox steps in the milk getting to the bloody steak. It tears it apart and trots away without even

looking at you.

It comes back a week later and sinks its teeth into your calf while you are bringing the mail back to the house. The pain is quite more than you can handle.

Remove fox You try to pry its jaws open but it will not

budge. Blood has drenched your sock and

the skin immediately around the wounds

is turning white. You are getting dizzy.

Hit fox OK 13

You slam your fist down on its head until it lets go, then spend the rest of the evening in the emergency room getting eight stitches. As soon as you get home, your wife calls Animal Control and the next day they send over a burly man with a cage and a shotgun. Sometimes you glimpse of the fox watching you from the underbrush.

Turn fox into symbol You need to specify, “Turn [subject]

into symbol of [object] with [amount of

literary heavy-handedness.]”

Turn fox into symbol of

fatherhood with high OK

Every garbage day you spy the fox in the alley nuzzling at something putrid. It is incredibly cute. You want a dog but your wife wants to pay down the credit cards. You want a baby but never bully your wife all the way into it.

Something holds you back. What role model of fatherhood do you have? Certainly nothing from your own childhood. I mean, what kind of father takes his son

Skip OK 14

But this elegant, sleek creature is complete and self-reliant. Nothing you could do to it would hurt its feelings or complicate its worldview.

You are currently: regarding the Animal Control guy holding a shotgun and cage in your driveway.

Argue man OK

You remonstrate with the man but he has hangman eyes and he sets the trap, fuels it with chicken scraps, and squats twenty feet away flicking the safety on and off until five o’clock. He comes back to replace the chicken every three days but as soon as he leaves you sprinkle paprika over it, which you read foxes hate.

You are currently: standing on one leg in the living room, the other leg propped on the couch so your wife can change the gauze.

“I still don’t get why they didn’t give you the rabies shot,” she says.

You don’t know but you almost wish you did have rabies. To go out of your mind would be a joy. A poetic conclusion to you.

Inventory You have: the business card to a cancer

psychiatrist that the surgeon gave you, the

bill from the ER, and a high deductible.

Go therapy Are you sure? This is cliche. 15

Go therapy OK

Your wife has been to three sessions with Dr. Bracco but this is the first time you have met her. Your wife is not there. Dr. Bracco is a beautiful and intelligent woman. You don’t appreciate this.

Talk therapist OK

Right as you both sit down you say, “Must be tough for men to talk about their whores and their hard-ons with a pretty girl like you.”

She gestures to her wastebasket which is overflowing with ten-dollar cardboard hearts filled with chocolate. “I don’t know where my patients find them, three months before Valentine’s Day. So. Why don’t you tell me about your whore and your hard-on?”

Think whore There have been some, none memorable.

You don’t think they are the root of your

problem.

Think wife She is at the pharmacist, picking up anti­

nausea medicine that the surgeon

prescribed. There is something there.

OK 16

Talk wife therapist

“I’m having trouble with my wife,” you say.

“Go on,” Dr. Bracco says.

Tell truth therapist To tell the truth, you need to specify what

amount of truth, and how personally

damaging it should be.

Tell half truth no damage OK

You tell Dr. Bracco the truth. That you feel an anticipatory survivor’s guilt.

That it should be you with the cancer, since your wife has made all the correct lifestyle choices—never smoked, rarely drank, exercised. Whereas you . . . but you trail off.

Dr. Bracco doesn’t write any of this down. She looks bored, in fact.

Tell full truth half damage OK

You tell Dr. Bracco the truth. You haven’t fucked her in two years and kissed her in five. You tell her that your wife married you despite the objections of

her parents and you hate all three of them for it. When her sumbitch father died you made her drive herself to the airport. That you fear you’d wielded your 17

resentment like a steady beam of radiation and given her the cancer. Dr. Bracco corrects you that a pituitary adenoma is not that type of cancer, but that just makes you feel stupid without alleviating your guilt.

Dr. Bracco doesn’t write any of this down. She looks bored, in fact.

Tell full truth full damage OK

You tell Dr. Bracco about the time you were seven and saw the Boris

Carloff Frankenstein and he gave you dismemberment nightmares. This is the

Frankenstein with the metal pegs coming out of the neck. Dr. Bracco frowns at you, waiting for this to go somewhere.

You keep describing him. He had a big, high forehead, a broad nose, and crooked, spaced teeth that look hammered into his gums. His shuffling huge feet and hands, all knuckles and squares. You dreamt he chased you through a swamp and ripped your belly button out.

Still not believing, Dr. Bracco asks, “Your wife looks like Frankenstein?”

You say, “It’s all I can think about.”

Dr. Bracco recoils from you. You know what she is thinking. If you were in the history books you would rank even below Henry VIII. He wanted a son.

You’re too scared to even want that.

Finally she takes out her notebook and writes down what you’ve said.

“Now we know what we’re dealing with,” she says. 18

Talk therapist You talk more but nothing comes of it.

Talk dream therapist You talk more but nothing comes of it.

Talk wife therapist You talk more but nothing comes of it.

Self You are sitting in a comfortable chair and

feel very vulnerable before Dr. Bracco.

You feel that after your revelation there

should be some maturation or resolution

but you just feel like a bug.

Leave OK

It is the day of the surgery. Your wife changes slowly in the small curtained room with a sliding glass door. You sit watching her yank off her extra-wide, laceless shoes, and her flipper-like hands disappear into her sleeves and peel the sweater off her head.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

Tie gown OK

You help her tie her gown. The nurse peeks in, asks about allergies, and then the anesthesiologist comes in, looks in your wife’s mouth with a light, and leaves. It is almost time. 19

Your wife lies on the pillow, her wet greying hair like kelp on a dirty beach. She insisted on washing her hair this morning so the surgeon’s gloves wouldn’t get greasy. Her hand is very close.

Hold hand OK

You take her hand in both of yours. Surprised, she turns to you. “Honey?” she says.

It would be nothing at all to say, “I’m sorry.” Or “I’ll be good to you again.” Or a million other things would do the job, the moment is so ripe.

Say right thing You know you have to specify.

Say I’m sorry What are you apologizing for? The tumor?

Her unhappiness? None of those have

your prints on them. We are all in the end

responsible for our own feelings. Plus,

doing so would admit to cheating, the

inattention, the cruelty, the apathy. Your

wife would correctly infer that only the

external event of the tumor has brought

you to this point. You’re not sorry, you’re 20

just guilty.

Say I’ll be good to you again No; because even if you meant it and she

accepted, eventually you would resent

being cornered into reforming your ways

just because of some unlucky neural

mitosis, and she would resent having a

prisoner instead of a husband.

Kiss wife You lean in and kiss her for the first time

in five years. Her mouth is dry and musty

from not having eaten anything since eight

hours pre-op. Afterwards her eyes gleam

but she still looks expectant.

Say I love you OK

You say the magic words. Your wife beams. After the surgery you rent a new place uptown, bigger, with more sunlight. Both of you insist on three bedrooms because you guys are trying, now. You both are clean, sober, and have good credit this time. You still get annoyed with her and she still gets seized by the occasional fear that she’s wasted her life with you—but you stick to your maintenance sex schedule and sometimes smoke and overeat and watch TV. It’s not perfect but it’s sustainable. 21

You wake up from this dream. It is the day of the surgery. Your ugly wife lies beside you. Your chest feels like reverse popcorn: tough, small, and inert.

You both go to the hospital.

Your wife changes slowly in the small curtained room with a sliding glass door. You sit watching her yank off her extra-wide, laceless shoes, and her flipper­ like hands disappear into her sleeves and peel the sweater off her head.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

Tie gown OK

You help her tie her gown. The nurse peeks in, asks about allergies, and then the anesthesiologist comes in, looks in your wife’s mouth with a light, and leaves. It is almost time.

Your wife lies on the pillow, her old grey hair like tangled kelp. She insisted on washing her hair this morning so the surgeon’s gloves wouldn’t get greasy. Her hand is very close.

Hold hand OK

You take her hand in both of yours. Surprised, she turns to you. “Honey?” she says. It would be nothing at all to say, “I’m sorry.” Or “I’ll be good to you again.” Or a million other things would do the job, the moment is so ripe.

Say right thing You know you have to specify.

Say I love you You can’t do that because you don’t.

Say I’m leaving you OK

“I’m leaving you,” you say.

Leave You are still holding her hand.

Drop hand OK

Leave OK

You stand up, slide open the door, and shut it behind you. You step outside into that silent part of the morning. It is warm and bright and you feel a reprisal of your subplot coming on before the big finish. Where will it come from?

Go home OK 23

You drive home to pack. You hear a clanging from the backyard and see the fox trapped in the cage, successfully baited. The Animal Control man isn’t there but his van is, and so is his shotgun, resting against the house. The fox sees you and stops jumping about.

Feed fox There is no food in the house.

Pet fox You bring your fingers close to the cage

and it nearly bites them off.

Pick up gun You heft the gun in your hands and flick

off the safety.

Shoot gun The fox pants happily until you blow its

head off for the crime of lazy symbolism.

You Win! Not a great ending though—see the others?

Yes OK

You let go your wife’s hand and clutching your aching back, limp through the parking lot to retrieve your cigarettes. A pickup truck collides with you, neatly severing your spinal cord. Before you go comatose you smile, since your back no 24

longer hurts. You go into surgery the next room over from your wife. You wake up

at night. There is a chair next to your bed containing a large form but it is too dark to discern any features.

Say wife’s name OK

You try to form the word but you’ve long lost your right to say it. Only a pitiful blubbering comes out. The noise stirs the thing in the chair. It unwinds its

long arms and huge hands, each large enough to strangle you. You bring the sheets

over your head and wait.

Wait for it OK 25

The Usurper

“See, it’s not as hopeless as you think,” Bertie said, hauling the sled over another dune. They had finally arrived at the caravan road.

“Aauuuaooohh,” Alajin said. The wet rot had gotten past his knees, where Bertie had lashed him down after the crash, and when Bertie stopped and peeked under the blanket, he could see that his co-pilot’s thighs and khakis were sort of melting together into a green ooze, and the ropes were more inside him than out. Bertie tucked the foul blanket back in. Alajin moaned that it was unbearable. That the smell was unbearable.

“Think of your unborn daughter,” Bertie said, knowing this was the best way to keep his spirits up. Alajin’s whining was getting annoying—Bertie had dragged him a long way clear of enemy lines, and hadn’t yet even gotten a “thank you”.

But it hardly looked any different here than the miles of desert they had just crossed. There was a dusty wooden sign that read, “Beer — Beds — 10 miles” and the sand was dotted with a few road shaped shards of asphalt but there were no shacks or cities in sight. So Bertie heaved the rope back over his raw shoulder and pressed on westward. The sled at least moved easier over the road than the sand.

At one point Bertie peeked behind him to make sure Alajin was still alive, and saw several silhouettes duck behind the crest of a dune. The natives were still tracking them. Bertie glimpsed them four days ago but they had never come into the open. Every night he heard the shifting of sand beneath softly clad feet and whispers in the dark. 26

Bertie squinted and waited but they did not reappear and he pushed on.

By noon Bertie had to rest. His palms were bloody and swollen and his back ached worse than they ever did at Fort Hazel. He paddled a little crater into the sand underneath a jutting piece of road and shoved the sled and himself into the crescent of shade. He dozed a little, although Alajin now was hollering as loud as he could, taking a deep breath, and letting loose again. It was untoward, unsoldierly, how loud he was. He’d been wounded before by ground fire, and awarded the Bloody Heart, but he hadn’t carried on like this. The smart thing would be to shut him up. Slide the knife into his heart, or bury him in the sand-but Bertie didn’t want to think about doing that to his friend. Better to just leave him. It would be like Alajin’s final gift, actually, to be a screaming decoy while Bertie slipped safely into the hinterlands. But to come back without him would be worse. What would people say?

* * *

Alajin’s screaming suddenly shut off. Bertie opened his eyes and saw what turned out to be a Mercenary Doctor kneeling over Alajin, withdrawing a large syringe from his neck, into which he’d just squeezed some liquid. Alajin’s eyes were closed and although his mouth was still shaped in a scream, only bubbles came out. He was really asleep, for the first time since the crash landing had driven both of his femurs out of his knees.

The MD introduced himself by telling Bertie that his friend would surely die, and that he was only prolonging needless suffering by dragging him along. He offered to inject a second syringeful to finish it, and he held out his palm. 27

“Does it look like I have any money?” Bertie asked.

“I will accept his corpse as payment.”

Even though it was tempting to give up his heavy load, Bertie slapped the syringe out of his hand and the MD scooped it up, trying to preserve its precious contents. “I would never leave him behind,” Bertie said. He explained the bonds between soldiers that exceeded those of kinship and even those of romantic love. They had crashed before in oceans and forests, and had once flown five hundred miles with two engines stalled and their console sparking into flames. After they opened the hatch and stepped onto the tarmac, their eyes red from the smoke, they collapsed into each other’s arms and from then on they trusted each other with their lives. They had felt the jolt of anti-gravity in their loins at take-off and the power of tilting the fifty-thousand pound steel bird perpendicular to the earth. These feelings Bertie was already crafting into a personal statement for his university application when his service was up.

The MD did not seem to care. He withdrew his palm, said again that there was nothing to be done, and went away. Bertie yelled after him, “In my country we don’t give up!” But he knew they did, they did all the time.

Still, he was glad to see Alajin wake up both quiet and lucid for the first time in days.

“Where are we?” he croaked, pushing up on his elbows.

Bertie said he had brought him to the caravan road. He figured they were only about fifty miles from the forward bases. 28

“Thank the Great Pomeranz,” Alajin said. He sank back down onto his back. Even the small exertion had got him looking green.

That was one of the things Alajin did differently—although he was born in the

Capital and went to school the next district over from Bertie—he invoked Pomeranz instead of God and ate his food with a small, flat spade that he carried in his front pocket.

It seemed a hilariously inefficient way to eat, but Bertie had eaten thousands of meals with Alajin and had come to the decision that he could eat any old way he wanted.

Yes, Bertie was one of the enlightened pilots in the division. He was the only one that had picked a co-pilot like Alajin—someone whose parents were from East Chinchilla, the country they were warring with. Jimbo Yorke said darkly that he (Bertie) had better double check the parachutes and Captain Beane informed him he’d marked the code box on his rig for weekly encryption changes instead of monthly. Bertie had said they were being paranoid.

Bertie was so enlightened, he didn’t mind still not hearing that “thank you.” But he felt strange as he gazed on his dying, sleepy co-pilot, sweat pooling in the rim of his ear and dripping into the sand. There was something else that needed to be done but he couldn’t quite figure how to say it. So he just said it.

“You forgot to show me your wife’s photo.”

Alajin’s eyes snapped open. “My wife?” 29

“That’s right,” Bertie said. “That’s what we do, right? We show each other the photos of the girls waiting for us back home.” Now, Bertie had no girlfriend, but he’d stolen a snapshot of a cute cousin of his for such an occasion.

“My wife?” he repeated.

“Come on, it’ll do you good to show her off. It’s what best friends do.”

Alajin looked at him with a curious expression. “Just let me sleep.”

He was making this more awkward than it had to be. So Bertie pretended to drop it, and when Alajin relaxed and closed his eyes, he scrambled over, thrust his hand into his musty lapel and withdrew a small rectangle.

Alajin’s hands vainly fluttered, trying to pry it free. “Give it,” he whispered.

“I’m carrying all your dead weight anyway,” Bertie said. “Whether it’s in my pocket or yours doesn’t matter.”

“Give it,” Alajin said, but he was wracked with a coughing fit that brought up blood. Eventually the effort laid him out and there was silence.

Bertie was left alone with the photograph. Alajin’s wife was standing in a rowboat out in a small lake, fishing. Her pregnancy only a comely curve. She was wearing a T- shirt with green paint stains and a pair of baggy shorts that Bertie recognized as the ones they all had gotten for drills. She was hauling back on a fishing rod bent by the weight of the fish, and her bare legs were not planted but rather straight together, and she arched backwards, her body and the rod like two opposing petals on a bloom, precariously 30

balanced in the rocking boat. On the back she had written: Making you nervous enough to quit and come home early?

Alajin’s wife’s mouth was slightly open and her jaw set, captured in the flicker of fear that comes after surprise. Like it might be a shark to pull her under. By themselves they were naturally afraid—they scanned faces for violence and wore pink sneakers to be found easier in the marsh. They weren’t fragile, but they thought they were. It was not condescending to point out how many women were attracted to men in uniforms?

Another perk that Bertie anticipated.

* * *

The natives attacked that night. Bertie had bivouacked at the outskirts of a trade outpost, hoping to find another MD to trim away Alajin’s dead flesh and give him enough medicine to hold back the infection. As he began to fall asleep, he heard or imagined a sound like small rocks tumbling down a slope. Then he heard it again a minute later, and by then he was fully awake. He strained to listen. After a moment there began a different sound, like sugar being poured out into many, many cups. Then they stopped. Bertie had recovered his sidearm from the crash but only had a few rounds—he had wasted the rest trying to hunt the small rodent-bears that burrowed in the sand.

He crawled to the lip of their foxhole and peered into the darkness. There were about a dozen figures arrayed before him. He clicked off the safety.

“Get up,” one of them called, and shone a light down into their hole, illuminating them both. 31

“Ooh,” another one said. “What a brave little guy we got!”

Bertie got to his feet, holding the pistol behind his back.

“Please,” he said. “I’m not looking for violence.”

“We’ve been hauling these rocks for miles—don’t tell us we can’t use ‘em!”

“Who’s your buddy?” asked the second one. “He don’t even wake up for us?”

As his eyes sharpened in the darkness Bertie could see they were all carrying head-sized stones and striding closer.

“I’m not looking for trouble,” he repeated. He brought the pistol out but pointed it down towards the sand.

“That doesn’t scare us,” the first one said, but they stopped and conferred. Bertie felt very small as they looked down at him at the bottom of his hole.

“You don’t have to bother us,” Bertie insisted.

But now there came a distant humming sound from the dark sky. It grew louder and louder, and the natives grew nervous. The first native said, “We’ll be back.”

Suddenly he shone the light down into Bertie’s face, blinding him, and all of them loosed their stones before running away.

Bertie cowered and covered his head with his arms as the rocks thudded into the sand. He unfurled his arms to see that none of them had hit him—none even came close.

He slid down the foxhole. Alajin had woken up and was screaming at the top of his lungs again. 32

“Shut up,” Bertie hissed. “Shut up!” But he wouldn’t stop. Bertie grabbed

Alajin’s lapels and started to shake him when something rolled off his chest. It was one of the stones. Bertie let his co-pilot down to the ground slowly and felt around his chest and felt a boggy area, the ribs floating, smashed. The medicine had long worn off and

Alajin was in some serious hurt.

“Please,” he cried. “Kill me!” He reached for Bertie’s gun, weakly. Bertie slapped his hands away.

The humming sound was right above them now. He looked up into the night sky and saw the winglights of five warplanes on their way home. Bertie scrambled up, looking for something for which to start a signal fire, and was blown off his feet by a blast. It was followed by several more which proceeded away from them. When his head stopped ringing he sat up, wondering why on earth they were bombing this empty stretch of desert. Only the next morning, when he surveyed the meandering course of the smoking craters did he remember Command’s instructions to jettison any remaining ordinance to lower weight and save fuel.

* * *

They reached the concrete ruins of a trade outpost the next morning, the road choked with ten thousand refugees moving westward. Rubble held down the corners of tarp mounds in which exhausted families lay prone—they had given up and lived here now. Crates intermittently crashed into the sand, spilling cans of sweet peppers in juice, jars of sundried tomatoes, expired bags of chocolate chips. The food drive bounty of 33

church and state. What they craved was something bloody. Bertie passed bonfires of coffee beans and herb-charged vinegars, their fragrance reminding him of Christmas.

Some families had found intact crates, and through artful use of small boulders and desert scrub, converted them into cute studios. The rest of them dragged their burgeoning luggage down the road.

There was a minivan driving here and there with a photographer hanging out the passenger window, taking shots of the handsomest refugees. The driver was holding a clipboard, yell-asking if anyone’s human rights were being violated.

Behind the international observers hurried two mule-powered rickshaws ferrying a team of nurses and medical students with a steamer trunk of supplies. They took one look at Alajin and recommended lethal palliation.

“I have to bring him home,” Bertie said.

“You can ease his pain and then bring him back home,” the student said. Alajin screamed his assent to this wonderful idea.

Bertie shook his head sadly and reminded them he had a duty. How would it look, for his commendation to read, “Mercy killed his comrade, then came back with his body”? Much better to have “singlehandedly carried his wounded comrade home, where he succumbed to his injuries.”

He instead cajoled a small musette of antibiotics to prolong Alajin’s life a few more days until they could get an airlift to a decent hospital. Alajin began wailing again for Bertie to shoot him or strangle him or even bury him alive. Refugees with yawning 34

head wounds and toddlers with broken arms turned their heads to stare at the ungodly noise.

The human rights van circled around and the clipboard woman stepped out, peering from a safe distance at the mess happening below Alajin’s waist, as a comer of the blanket had gotten free and was flapping in the dusty breeze. He was slapping fiercely at the blowflies landing on his melting half. His head wrenched side to side in agony, and the smell of his liquid shits was starting to compete with the smell of the rot. Bertie had helped the medical students wash and trim the green flesh away but he couldn’t bring himself to wipe his friend clean of the constant awful dribble from between his asscheeks, which would demean them both.

The human rights woman asked if this was some . . . performance piece?

The photographer leaned over to take a look.

Bertie asked if they could give him a lift home. His shoulders had locked up, his wrists gnarled down from gripping the rope. He was doubting he’d reach home by himself.

The human rights woman said that would violate their observer status. “Can’t bring anything in or out of the warzone.” she explained. “Keep the habitat untouched. So no hitchhikers.”

The photographer tapped her on the shoulder and they drove off towards a growing, worrisome scrum that had formed in the shadow of a falling crate marked

“LIME SELTZER.” 35

* * *

Now on the horizon Bertie could see minarets and smog. Soon he could brush his teeth—and shower!

Bertie’s legs were shaking and he collapsed at a little oasis. He shoved the sled into a patch of sedges. Alajin had long stopped screaming, and was making little crackling sounds when he breathed. It was close now. A little breeze ruffled the palm fronds and Bertie scooted upwind, massaged his thighs, and enjoyed his first stench-free moment in days. Alajin crackled and the dirty stream bubbled. He put some water onto his partner’s face. “I’ll miss you,” Bertie mumbled. Maybe that was why he’d kept him alive. Even delirious screaming is company.

Bertie took out again the photo of Alajin’s wife, propped it in the sand, and lay on his forearms looking at her.

Suddenly it occurred to him he’d forgotten his other important duty. There must be a letter to deliver—he couldn’t appear before Melissa empty-handed. He pinched his nose, dove into Alajin’s decaying jacket, and fished out several folded sheets. They were macerated with sweat and something green, and Bertie laid them carefully on the sand to dry. The ink was difficult to discern, but still legible. It was apparently incomplete. Bertie read:

“#16. The look on your face whenever you burst a cherry tomato with your left molars, surprised and happy as if you’d never had one before. 36

#17. The way you put the heaviest groceries first in line, so they’ll be at the bottom of the bag and won’t crush the eggs.

#18. How you’re the only one who doesn’t carry a purse.”

There was a gap of several inches with #19 and #20 blank, and at the bottom a new paragraph started: “Yesterday someone painted my Bloody Heart medal with yellow nail polish. All I could wonder was: who keeps nail polish here? But I think you were right after all. Why did I join up if not for guilt? I wouldn’t die for anyone here. I’d rather be with you.”

Bertie hadn’t even been mentioned. He couldn’t fathom why not. It would be embarrassing if he’d need to explain to Melissa who he was. It was supposed to go like this: she’d spot him walking gravely up the drive, and they’d meet at the door, staring at each other through the screen, which he’d fling open to catch her as she swooned.

The peaceful moment was gone. Alajin had twenty declarations of love for his wife and Bertie’s beneficiary was his mother. Even Bertie had to admit the wrong person was lying bottomless in the sand. But he would make things right. He put the letter in his pocket.

Suddenly Alajin howled all the breath from his lungs. He thrashed against his bindings and screamed for someone, anyone, to chop off his head, or to drive a stake through his heart. He screamed a prayer for The Great Pomeranz to eternally pierce

Bertie with his ten mattocks and awls in his pitch-black afterlife. Then he screamed for

Bertie to give back Melissa’s photo. 37

Alajin howled for a full minute, and then died.

From behind him, a voice suddenly spoke. “Finally he shuts up!”

Bertie turned. The natives were back with new rocks.

A second one, with bad acne scars, said, “Screamed like a baby over a spit.”

A third one with glasses came up, prodded Alajin’s body with a toe, and mused,

“Anyone that screams like must have deserved it.”

The first one said, “Now, it’s your turn.”

Bertie tried to stand but his thighs still would not work. He showed his pistol

again and the native snorted, knowing he was too chickenshit to use it.

Glasses asked, “Who was he to you, that you drag him all the way here?”

Bertie said, “You wouldn’t understand.”

The first one said, “That’s for you to know, I guess.” He shifted the rock to his

shoulder and Bertie squirmed.

Acne scars said, “This is good for me, just scaring him like this. I never thought

I’d get the chance!”

Glasses explained, “All we see of you are planes and helicopters.”

The first one said, “Well, we can’t kill you here; you’d poison the groundwater.

And I really do not want to carry you. So I guess you’re free to go. But let us do you a

favor and lighten your load a little?” With a two handed grip on his rock, the native

crushed Alajin’s face into a pulpy crater. They moved in and expertly pulverized his joints, leaving just a torso. 38

The first one said, “So you can still say you brought some back.”

* * *

When the war began, Bertie had watched a news segment where a scientist said that in during times of war rationing, the most important thing was to keep the women fed well for the sake of the next two generations. Because ninety-nine percent of a child is made from the mother’s egg, and all a mother’s eggs are formed when she is still inside the womb of the grandmother.

And so had Bertie’s little Nan been starved and ribby when Grandpa in his olive drab carried her under the lintel, Bertie’s mom and all her eggs would have formed under duress; and Bertie himself would come out starved and ribby too—no matter how well fed

Bertie’s mom had been in peacetime.

Bertie thought the same thing must apply not just to hunger but to all the evils a woman might suffer. Jealousy, wrath, ingratitude, fear—all of these could be passed on. A woman’s body and mind a time capsule fifty years into the past. And so the pregnant had to be protected from all cruel things.

Melissa standing in her doorway, her hand going to her mouth, then to her swollen belly, as he held out to her a folded flag. That would be the first awful shock

Alajin’s unborn daughter would sense secondhand. No avoiding that. But Bertie had made his co-pilot a promise. The torso in the coffin next to him bumped happily up and down as the truck went along into the sunset. Bertie held Alajin’s Bloody Heart medal, which he felt belonged to both of them now, and picked off the bits of yellow that 39

remained. He’d make it clean before long. And he wouldn’t tell her about Alajin’s last delirious minute—it would just cause confusion. Bertie swelled with pride and goodness as he thought how he would accept her offer of tea, loosen his tie, step inside Alajin’s house, and get to the serious business of saving his grandchildren. 40

Kick Down the Door

Gerald regarded the chocolate-chip fur of Reindeer, his third dead Therapy

Bunny. He stood in front of the hutch with his sister Paula and a length of rope.

“What are you going to do with that?” she asked. “Stage a bunny suicide? Be the man you’ve never been and hunt it down, wolf or whatever it is.”

He was horrified. “We don’t need to kill it.”

Paula sighed and pinched the scar where her nose had been. She reminded Gerald that Therapy Animals had been his idea, and if even one sixth-grader on her field trip stepped in bunny guts and freaked in front of her chaperone who commanded twenty envelopes stuffed with fivers, Gerald would be the one who took the telephonic berating from the principal and the one who took a pay cut commensurate with the loss of that middle school contract. Paula was already giving him a cabin rent-free and she’d made it clear that Gerald and his menagerie were fat, useless leeches on the ashram’s already withering tit.

Paula told him to either get it done or get rid of his pets. “And fix Laney’s Hot

Massage Stone. It’s been malfunctioning for weeks.” Then she disappeared into the

Group Meditation yurt, where her acolytes were pacing impatiently. If she didn’t get the mantra going they were liable to unleash their modem stress on the lentils and flatbreads in the canteen and it was no accident there were no endomorphs on the ashram.

Gerald watched the rabbits tremble, their ears flat. To keep the Branch Davidians awake, the FBI at Waco had blasted all night the sound of rabbits being slaughtered. 41

Gerald had slept right through Reindeer’s death, though the hutch was right up against his cabin.

Gerald felt awful. He’d thought keeping animals would soften the ashram’s brutal teachings, and he had grown maternal towards them. He’d made sure he was the first thing the bunnies, ducklings, goats, horses, and tadpoles had seen at birth, so all the animals were Disney-level devoted to him except for the frogs, which didn’t quite follow him around. Still, whatever forest creature was tearing apart his friends—Gerald didn’t feel right killing it for the venal sin of hunger.

Gerald knotted and pulled the rope, fruitlessly trying to devise a snare, but only nooses emerged.

Inside the yurt, the chanting reached its apex. Paula screamed the ashram’s mantra and then came the dull thuds of landing fists.

Gerald hadn’t been to Group Meditation in a while. He needed to go—he was stuck at four measly Certificates of Minor Wounds. But Paula’s gleaming noseless face in the hellish light from the oculus unnerved him. Plus, last time he’d been caught in the eye with a nasty backhand and had double vision for a month. A blow that severe usually earned a Badge of Meritorious Injury but Paula had only given him a Certificate. Five

Certificates earned a Badge; Ten Badges earned the ashram’s highest honor, the Titanium

Skull Plate, and then you graduated.

But compared to the others he felt unworthy. The women here had all suffered in the real world: one had been engaged to a sociopath that used to laugh at her naked body; 42

one had preserved twenty of her eggs and lost them all when the motor in the freezer burned out; one had been principal oboe in a Metropolitan Orchestra until something like

Lou Gehrig’s had crippled her lungs at the age of thirty-four.

But Gerald was asking nothing and getting nothing from life. He had followed

Paula since their mother died. He had triumphed over nothing more impressive than an

Updike novel, which he had not understood at all. He was beginning to realize the magnitude of his wasted forty years. He had nothing to confront in Group Talk, and they all knew it.

So instead he did his out by the pond, whispering “Sadhu! Sadhu! Sadhu!” as frogs dipped in and out of the water. Sadhu meant Peace, and Gerald never screamed it, even though Paula said you had to. “Because sometimes peace needs to kick down your door!” Paula cried, banging her little fist on her palm.

* * *

Meditation ended and Gerald served the bruised, hardened women lunch. He placed a tough circle of carbohydrate on a tin tray and a dome of garbanzo studded mush next to it. This he handed to each woman.

He tried to catch their eyes and smile but Blessa and Adora and Atossa and the rest of the women ignored him, as usual. Some days they wondered loudly how he managed to pack on so many pounds on the ashram’s meager rations; other times they said Paula must have gotten all the genes and Gerald all the filler. 43

They worshipped Paula. She had made her terrifying scars the basis of her philosophy. As a child in the High Plains, Paula had been disfigured by a coyote. It had knocked her down and gone for her cheeks, the most prized bits of any animal’s flesh.

Now she could no longer fully close her mouth and so saliva ran down the gutters of her gums and cascaded out unless she threw her head back and swallowed every minute.

Paula taught that only suffering has the power to transfigure. She had many examples of why this was true:

1. The best dance music comes from cold places, because chilled palms

produce the crispest snaps.

2. The best psychiatrists come from Texas, because the eternal plains drive

so many insane.

3. The tenderest meat comes from animals beaten to death. This explained

the pinata they made for every graduate, shaped like the spirit animal they

all decided fit the person best. Inside Paula placed a Titanium Skull Plate,

a copy of Frantz Fanon, and a bus ticket to Lubbock.

In her telling, Paula made her coyote out to be a beast, with finger-sized fangs.

She said nobody could have saved her, but she said it in a way that utterly condemned

Gerald’s cowardice. He’d been with her, when the coyote stepped out from the brush.

When Gerald held the pinata’s rope, the women invariably “missed” their target and caught him hard in the side. Gerald wanted to protest, “I was only a boy, then!” But

Gerald wasn’t sure the women were wrong to detest him. Why couldn’t he have been 44

lanky, iron, and funnel-chested like the other Texan boys? He was scared something was missing from him, or hadn’t formed right. Before civilization, weak men like him would have died out, just like men with uneven gaits or astigmatism. So he considered it a privilege to live with Paula and take out the garbage and serve food that the women wanted to throw back in his face. In a way he seemed to focus their vengeful energy: it was as if a Bible camp hired Judas Iscariot as lifeguard.

* * *

Then it was time for the Wyandottes to hatch. Chickens needed several weeks to imprint so he stole the eight silvery chicks from their clucking mama and set them up by his bed in a nest of newspaper and throw pillows. Three times a day he diced earthworms into wriggling cylinders and put them on a salad of shredded romaine. On this diet they grew quickly.

He fell asleep only after they did, all nestled into each other like furry Olympic rings. He used to lay them on the empty half of his bed and curl himself around them, but one morning he’d awoken from a nightmare to find them smashed underneath him; their tiny eyes bugged out and matchstick legs broken in acute angles.

After they were robust he paired up the males and females and secluded them in private crates until their adolescence. Any couples that refused to mate went into the hutch as egg-layers or into the pot. But Gerald’s “Blue Lagoon” breeding strategy so far had a 100% success rate. They had so many extra chickens that wouldn’t fit in the coop, and he had set up an overflow pen in the Meadow of Clean Living, which was really 45

more of an outdoor storage space for the rusting stationary bikes and treadmills from the previous fitness-oriented iteration of the ashram, back when Paula hid her face behind a pink balaclava, before she’d discovered the liberating philosophy of pain.

Gerald had since lost track of how many chickens there were, and of what sort.

Recently in the Meadow he’d found feathers the size of palm fronds and broken claws that suggested a bird the size of a panther. He reminded himself to add a few feet to the height of the enclosure.

* * *

That night was the winter solstice and they gathered in the rec room. Paula brought out white wine. Later Gerald and Paula were in a quiet comer of the porch, both pleasantly drunk. Gerald was filled with sudden memories of their pre-coyote childhood; when their mother lived with them in a Subaru parked in the far comer of a Wal-Mart lot; both of them lying on their bellies on the backseat, their knees touching and feet in the air, Gerald hanging out the left door, Paula out the right, doing homework on the asphalt, pencils in the grooves of the running boards. When one of them needed the eraser they’d kick the other’s shoes. Only now did Gerald realize how unhappy their mother had been.

Gerald said it might be nice to give their mother an honorary Titanium Skull

Plate. “We haven’t even been to her grave in twenty years,” he said.

Paula was silent a long time, her face expressionless, as usual.

Finally she said, “Listen, I’ve got enough to deal with in the present day. I’m not going to start validating your expired shit, too.” 46

* * *

The next evening Laney, the new, pretty massage therapist, came by Gerald’s cabin with her defective Hot Massage Stone that she held heavily level with her womb.

“It’s just this one that keeps overheating,” she said. She had put it in her Hot

Stone Pot like the others but after five minutes it had exploded free, cracking the pot’s lid. Since then it had been getting hotter and hotter by itself.

Laney said, “Mrs. Longo’s back is real blistered. It looks like a jellyfish latched on. If Paula hadn’t given her a Badge I think she would’ve sued.”

Gerald took it inside under the light, but couldn’t find a serial number. It was made of volcanic rock, black and smooth, the size of two fists together. “Where’d this come from? It looks different than the normal ones.”

“Paula got it secondhand somewhere,” Laney said.

“I’ll take a look,” Gerald said. He thought the Stone might be one of the new self­ heating ones that had gotten mixed up with the old inert stones. Before he could inspect it any more the light changed. He looked up.

Laney was winded after carrying the stone from the dormitory, and she stretched her arms on the doorframe. Backlit in the sodium lamp, her body made a neon cursive K.

That was interesting.

Gerald groaned and grabbed his back. He asked if she might help him out. Laney sized him up, and said it would cost him two Certificates. Gerald dug them out of his drawer and handed them over. She pocketed them and guided him to the couch. 47

She moved her hands over his doughy shoulders. Her nails sowed down heat. She

rubbed him with the bottoms of her fists and plowed circles with her thumbs. “You’re not

breathing right,” she said, and he let it out. She got up from the couch and stood behind

him, using all of her weight to knead down his awful flesh. The couch springs twisted and whined. In the comer, the chicks peeped. Her hair hopped up and down over his face as

she worked. “Is this pressure okay?” she asked.

Gerald’s eyelids fluttered and his tongue unhinged. She dug with her fingers all

up and down, searching, and her thumb found a spot on his neck just to the left of his

spine. She pushed. He couldn’t exhale. She pushed deeper and deeper, separating his brittle and tortured fibers.

In middle school they used to play a game: arranged in Boy-Girl pairs in Allen

Lerner’s basement, the Girl squatted and hyperventilated, then stood up quick and held her breath while the Boy gave her a bear hug. This caused a moment of blackout euphoria followed by ten seconds of a jittery coma. She’d wake up on the cold basement floor.

They’d ask how it was, and then all swap partners. But the Boys were terrified of Paula, so Gerald was the only one who caught her by her armpits as she fell, even though he wanted to catch Rachel Turner. At home, Paula knocked shyly at his bedroom, where he lay reading on his bed, and asked him if he thought she would ever get married. Gerald stared harder into his comic book, away from Paula’s deleted face, trying to conjure forth

Rachel’s instead. He had said, “If you never take off your veil.” 48

After Laney left, Gerald was definitely unable to sleep. He jacked off into the toilet, paced around his cabin, then sat down at the table and looked all over the faulty

Hot Massage Stone. It was certainly hot—he had to handle it with gardener’s gloves. He couldn’t find a way to access it. It didn’t have an off switch or a battery panel. Eventually he left it on the table, trembling from the secret motor it contained.

* * *

Gerald attended Bottle the Pony’s delivery, and wiped the slime off her foal, which he named Ship-in-a. He held its head between his hands until it opened its eyes and blinked at him. He already had a bottle of mare’s milk supplemented with molasses, which it gulped down--after a few days of this sweeter milk, Ship wouldn’t nurse even if

Gerald let it anywhere near Bottle again.

The next morning Paula banged on his door. She was holding a bottomless Froyo by his ears, dripping blood clots and torn fur onto his front step. In her other hand she held a box of #8 birdshot and under her arm, a shotgun. She handed them to Gerald. “Get it done,” she said. “Or else you’re gone.”

Then she noticed Ship inside, wobbling around; the nest of chicks had also woken up and were collectively chirping loudly.

“You’re baby snatching, now?” she asked.

“They don’t know the difference.”

“It’s not right to raise them motherless.”

Gerald said, “Then give them all Certificates!” That made her leave. 49

As he got dressed, he saw the Hot Massage Stone had scorched a circle into his wooden table. It was rocking back and forth. What was going on? He covered it with a towel and put it in the bathtub—he might have to douse it later. Then he put Froyo’s merle remains into a shoebox, which he put into his backpack along with the birdshot. He tucked the gun under his arm and headed into the forest.

By the time he got hungry the sun was just reaching the top of the sky. He hadn’t found anything larger than squirrels. The uneven ground and his uncushioned sandals delivered all the impact to his swollen knees. The gun was so heavy it made his forearm numb where it rested. He stopped in a small dell, and leaned the shotgun against a tree.

He was beat. He sank onto the ground and rested his aching back against a sun-warmed rock.

Out here the rotten parts of him didn’t matter. Nobody was getting at him about pine cones cluttering the front walk or excluding him from massage circles. Out here he didn’t much miss the things he’d never have—education, friends, contentment.

He dug a hole and placed Froyo’s coffin inside. He whispered a hope that Froyo bask in endless fields of clover with Reindeer and Dunaway, whole again, with their entire afterlives in front of them.

When he returned to the ashram, he smelled barbeque. All the women were gathered around his cabin fire, their hands in their pockets. He could hear inside the bleating of Ship and the frantic chirping of the baby Wyandottes. Both the coop and the hutch were also aflame. 50

Gerald cried out and rushed in, but was forced back by the incredible heat.

“Do something!” he screamed.

Blessa said, “You see any fire hydrants?”

Adora said, “There is some Badge-worthy suffering going on in there.”

Atossa said, “What a fuck-up this is.”

The animals stopped making sounds.

Paula said, “Thank you for fixing the animal problem.”

Gerald sank to his knees, his face in his hands, and he cried for a long time. When he opened his eyes, it was dusk. The cabin and its inhabitants were gone. The women were gone. The bathtub was there, and from it came a furious clanging. On the grass in front of him lay a pinata chicken.

He tore it open with his hands. It contained a single sheet of paper. It was a typed form message that began: “The Ashram invites you to continue your journey Elsewhere.”

With a loud crack the Hot Massage Stone hatched in the embers. A long feathered neck snaked out. That year women and children started to go missing. 51

Kamikaze

On the flight out of Honolulu, window must be thinking, “Get a load of aisle.

Such well-rehearsed poor. Flannel unbuttoned over white Hanes still creased from the plastic 6-pack they come in. How his eyes went when they announced complimentary red or white wine with dinner—and how embarrassing when he actually said ‘I’ll take the complimentary red?’ And earlier, snatching the snack mix and five-finger pincering it to his beetle mouth with a feral quickness, the only thing restraining him from inverting the bag and licking the powder a faint imprint of decorum from Fancy Feast commercials.

But those kids of his. I see them during boarding. Behaved only until they are crossed— because discipline the first thing that lapses when money is tight. And that’s what it does, really, being poor. Keeps you childlike. But not in any of the magical ways. Just in the untempered need for more and better distractions. The distractions change with age . . . dolls and pop into gin and sex. Then the accidental offspring. And all of it mindless, mindless.”

The beverage trolley smashes my elbow, interrupting my reverie. My daughter

Adelaide asks if I’m okay. Rubbing my arm, I look over at window. He’s smirking. I’m no mind reader but I don’t have to be.

As I gulp down the wine I browse the in-flight, which features a story on the famous Kamikaze Agency. Interviews with upper management, and several posthumous 52

testimonials from the Pilots. They are kept anonymous but I recognize their stories. I knew them.

* * *

Cassandra takes off her Kevlar glove, reaches into the bucket, and shoves a steak into the lion’s nose. It bites off three of her knuckles, too. With her other hand she picks up the bucket and douses herself like Carrie. Dripping with gore she jumps into the lion’s arms.

* * *

Samuel washes the highest windows of the Carbide and Carbon Building. A gust jostles the planks. He pumps his legs until his scaffold is swangin It capsizes, and he achieves a pretty decent pike position into the concrete below, which splits his thighs like microwaved hot dogs. They never find his underwear.

* * *

I remember the first commercial they put out. American pastoral B-roll with voiceover:

Sweet rainwater runs into the ocean. Megawatts of loose wind power destroys mobile homes. People kill, hang, jump and poison themselves. That’s just a fact.

What is said at all their eulogies? What a waste. All that potential. I f only w e’d done something.

Now you CAN do something. You can harness that potential. 53

Kamikaze contracts with the most hazardous jobs in the world and provides them with a workforce already suicidally depressed.

In war zones, sad men and women become designated grenade smotherers, sniper distractors, and sappers.

In the Rust Belt, they become molten steel stirrers, ore miners, and teamster union leaders.

Kamikaze Pilots cut down three-ton firs for you. They nail shingles on sixty- degree slant roofs for you. They charge into warehouse fires for you. They interrupt armed robberies for you. They would be crucified for you if it would help.

They die with meaning. They die so you might live. They die as American heroes.

Then, discreetly at the bottom, their 1-800 number.

* * *

Only a fraction of the suicidal signed up at first. It’s precious few that can hurdle the blanket, their underwear, their rent, and get all the way out the door each morning.

Even fewer believe there’s purpose out there. The first Kamikaze Pilots were stage-4 sarcoma, overwhelmed college grads rejected from the Peace Corps, golden-hearted middle-aged virgins too poor to be black-tie philanthropists, and the occasional confused nipponophile (they thought they would be teaching English in Sendai or something). But a few hundred saturnine weren’t enough.

Then Congress delivered. With rare foresight they subsidized Kamikaze with some of their projected savings from Social Security and Medicaid. Then the Board 54

passed down that windfall to the Pilot’s families, with double hazard pay and generous term life. That captured all the unhappy with debt and dependents. I joined with that first massive surge. Ice road truckers and Mid-Atlantic lobstermen gladly gave us the wheel.

Kamikaze’s (KAKA) IPO was so coveted, the NYSE delayed the opening bell three hours so the whole country would be awake to trade. It wasn’t the front page of

Financial; it was all the pages. Then came the magazine covers: Economist, Wall Street

Journal, the in-flight I’m holding. I read on.

* * *

Niall was scrubbing the maintenance corridor when the ancient submarine passed through a frigid current and popped a valve. At the time, the engineers were gossiping about the war.

“You hear about Calcutta?” one said.

The other engineer grunted.

“They’re walloping us, yes indeed,” the first one continued. “Won’t be long now.”

“If they had asked me before, I could’ve told them we’d never win this damn thing,” the second one said. “It’s just madness.”

“That's how I read it,” the first one said.

A third one said, “You know, in Roman times, it was the consuls had to lead the attack.”

“That’s right,” the first one said. 55

Suddenly the pipe burst and icy brine vomited over the engineers, who fled out the hatch, but there was an ensign all the way back underneath a console that would not have time to escape.

Niall stood at the threshold and waved four, five, six men through, then sealed himself and the too-slow ensign into the compartment, to contain the flooding and save the sub. As the ensign banged hopelessly on the hatch, wailing the names of his comrades, Niall sat down in the water and closed his eyes. This was his job.

The Kamikaze handlers waited at the dock while the sailors disembarked, bearing their drowned comrade to a bugle threnody. Later, during refueling and barnacle scouring, they retrieved Niall’s coffin from the hold and hustled down the pier: swift, underdressed pallbearers. The three unused Pilots emerged last, cowering from the sun.

Wives and mothers embraced them and kissed their cheeks, and pressed cigarettes and liquor into their hands. More than their admirals and generals, more than their prayers, more than their God, the Pilots kept their men safe.

“Thank you for giving up,” they cried.

* * *

The agency had difficulty breaking into foreign markets. They had tried to contract with the ethnic cleansers in Subsahara and the steppes but the death squads had recoiled from the deal: That would be murder! They didn’t want to kill Americans! They were only killing animals. 56

In Colombia there was one strange battalion of rebels led by a captain enthralled with the Comanche, who paid his men pesos for scalps; but after a private presented him with a dozen withered Floridian octagenarian scalps, he announced all scalps must be accompanied by a valid driver’s license.

* * *

Noticing a trend, Sub Pop deployed Pilots to Seattle. They set them in studios with session musicians and veteran producers, funded two LPs and two tours, then waited. Afterwards, they’d recollect profits on posthumous reissues. Every few years they’d pretend to unearth a few lo-fi demos and outtakes and release them as new albums, glued together with greatest hits. In this way the music industry remained healthy.

Simon and Schuster attempted the same with novelists. They asked Kamikaze to send over Southerners, alcoholics, outcasts, academics, the abused, indigo children—but couldn’t get manuscripts out of any of them. They put them up in suites, in garrets, in basements, in SROs; they engaged amanuenses, line editors, personal assistants, librarians; they plied them with laptops, typewriters, fountain pens, ergonomic chairs and

LSD, all to coax out something publishable. But they couldn’t figure the recipe.

One of the Pilots named Zoe (who I’d known slightly) once sent her editor several dozen pages in a tattered envelope. Zoe tended towards melancholy and so they were hoping for a morose Dorothy Parker, or a succinct Charlotte Bronte. Her roommates were an ex-con who riddled his writing samples with fresh, engaging jailhouse vernacular, and a traumatized cult escapee who really preferred 35 mm over prose. 57

The editor opened the envelope and discovered that it was not a work of fiction but rather a long, rambling manifesto listing all the injustices with which Zoe had had to contend, directed at several nameless antagonists. This was one excerpt:

"By

English Rose

Blonde Bombshell

hell, Brunette, Redhead, Raven-haired

This is code for ‘don’t worry, she’s white.

A few pages later was:

“Drop me off like you did

at the bottom o f the Pacific and I ’ll

find some new fucking mountains for you.

And name them after your mama,

her ass so fat. I still

know where you live. ”

* * *

The survivor benefits invited fraud. The actuaries performed a review and noticed one overrepresented demographic: Working Impoverished Mothers, which they called

WIMPs. They were the red convertible, the house beyond the levee, the uncleaned lint trap. 58

The fraud investigator, armed with a polygraph and personal questions, interviewed a large sample of WIMPs. He found indeed that they were not suicidal at all, but pragmatic. They spent the daylight at occupations that calloused the parts of their hands and feet meant to be soft, and squinted their eyes into glaucoma. They were either missing the boy’s Kodak moments or too surly and exhausted to take pictures. They knew his school performance was tanking. They knew the boy had given up tracing Ds into As or Bs. They knew the water polo brats were coasting on waves carrying them all the way to Harvard, to Princeton.

The boy’s dad was still around, and an aunt or two that could step up with

Wednesday casserole and Saturday pints of mint chocolate chip. So what would do him better in the long run, a no bullshit assessment: a wicked crone of a mommy or a certified check for six hundred grand? With the cessation of just her one crumpled heart, she would give him that appellation he’d never earn on his own, those three syllables, each platinum-cast: TRUST FUND KID. And young orphans get all the girls, and a killer college personal statement to boot. Hard to argue for life, facing those facts.

The investigator stopped the recorder, thanked them, sat in his car and sobbed big regretful tears. He composed himself on the up elevator. He explained to the Board that

Kamikaze was contract killing these women. They had set the price of a mother’s life, and the price was good.

“Yeah, we’d expected side markets to evolve,” the CFO said.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” the CEO asked. “Allergies or something?” 59

* * *

Richard got a tip to look for his wife on the Capitol Building steps.

Before Kamikaze, hunger strikes had been the rarest, most hagiographic of all forms of protest. To waste away in public, to grow too weak to wipe your ass, the reek of your flesh seasoned with sweat and slow-braised in piss, when even your acolytes would cover their noses—it used to take a true believer in a true cause.

But now that anyone could outsource for martyrs, the legislative steps became a swamp of ribby prone forms. Banners advertised their sundry causes: Legalize Pistol

Silencers; Fellows Fighting Fox Fur Coats; Jews For Genizot Which Recycle; Maximum

Wage Equality. But they forgot Stalin’s Law about death and multitudes. Now the

Capitol Building Steps were the #2 Trip Advisor activity. Somewhere among these was

Richard’s wife, starving for a cause to which she’d been assigned.

He passed through Stop West Bank Settlements and Blue Cheese is the Only

Acceptable Wing Sauce before someone in Bring Back Direct Current raised his head.

“You want Clarissa?” the striker said.

“Yes!” Richard said. “I’ve come from Omaha, she didn’t even leave a note, we have a child . ..”

The dying man fumbled with his sandwich bag of valium.

Richard knelt down and fed him a half handful.

The dying man pointed westward. “She won the lottery, man. I’d kill for her assignment.” He fell back asleep. 60

Richard found her on Embassy Row. Here the sidewalk looked like a long line of dominos, pocked with dozens of scorched circles. It was lively and distracted as a carnival. Sawhorses blocked the street from Iceland to New Zealand. There was a large scrum in front of the Spanish Embassy. Richard pushed his way through to where two

Kamikaze handlers in neon vests had cleared a scythe circle. In the middle of the circle was a small kneeled form in saffron robes, facing the embassy. Richard couldn’t recognize her at first because her head was shaved and nodded forward. But he recognized the soft triangles where shoulders met neck.

“Clarissa?” Richard moved around to get a look at her face, but one of the handlers pushed him back.

“For your safety, sir.”

“She’s my wife!”

The woman was surprised, but recited her scripted line: “Please respect her sacrifice.”

“For what cause?” Richard cried.

The woman checked her binder. “To demand the national elimination of the

Castilian lisp.” Only then did Richard notice the combatants wearing red “Ceceo” or blue

“Seseo” shirts, one side hissing, the other blowing raspberries.

“How is that worth this? CLARISSA!”

“She can’t hear you, sir.” She explained that his wife, for her protection, had been chemically deprived of her senses. All she felt now was warmth deep inside, the gentle 61

afterglow of morphine. She wouldn’t register what happened next except as a whispered

whoosh, like a skybound tube escaping the damp mailroom.

The other handler was pumping gasoline onto his wife until her robes were dark.

Then he picked up the Bardo Thodol and began to chant.

Richard broke through and knelt in front of Clarissa, shaking her shoulders.

“I’m sorry!” he yelled into her face. “I won’t stop until you’re happy again, just don’t don’t don’t leave me! I love you!” Even the telenovela-hardened protesters averted their eyes from his poorly rehearsed, embarrassing plea.

The handlers hauled him away. As the female handler lowered the match, Clarissa lifted her sleepy head, and said, “What do you mean, ‘again’?”

* * *

Applevale was a tough fiscal quarter. Tucked in a comer of Idaho, the priest

Herman Santeca Santecas preached revolution. His followers called him acharya and practiced segmented sleep, waking for orgies when Saturn appeared nightly in the southern starfield. Each morning they gathered around the well to garrote the most

Baphomet looking of the goat herd, and Santeca Santecas blasted himself with angel dust and dictated his prophesies, which synthesized the dissatisfaction of communism with the hipness of pessimism, all pierced through with fearful, powerful aspects of the Left Hand

Path. He told them about the twenty-one grams and about la petite mort. That they were living in the demon kali age. He said the Olympic gods had envied man’s mortality and 62

that the moment of death was the moment of apotheosis for all eukaryotes. Everything preceding that was the realm of the damned.

Nearby Pilots at the leaking Hanford nuclear vault caught wind of his fervor.

They wandered over with their rotting gums and asymmetrical balding. They declined the orgies but trembled as he Jerichoed down their rusted walls. Countless man-hours were lost, transfixed in that orchard. When the Geminids flickered by they took up their strychnine milk with the rest.

Afterwards, Kamikaze released a statement that denied any denominational association besides Benthamism.

* * *

Zoe woke to another stupid morning. She lay in bed until the light intruded through the blinds and lay hot across her eyes. She opened the notebook on her nightstand where she was supposed to write her 3 a.m. epiphanies. The only thing written inside was, “Legs make access to the genitals inconvenient. This is why torso killers remove them.” She began to sweat down her neck. She didn’t remember writing this. Zoe shut the notebook and shoved it under her mattress.

There’s nothing genius about any of this, she thought.

Zoe put on a puffy down jacket and went out into the cold morning. She kept her head down until she reached the store with the bars over the fiberglass doors. She shuffled through the aisles and ran her fingers over tiny bottles of premixed daiquiris and flavored liqueurs. 63

She stepped up to the counter and said, “Give me whatever’s on sale.”

“They’re all on sale,” the clerk said, indicating with a sweep of his arm the hundreds of bottles behind him. “Always a good day to blackout.”

“If they’re all on sale,” Zoe said, “None of them are.” She took off her mittens, put them on the counter, and replaced her hands in her pockets. The clerk watched this.

“Whatever. What do you want?”

“Give me something you need a ladder to reach. From the top shelf.”

The clerk looked at Zoe’s unhappy face, her hands in the deep pockets of her jacket. She was waiting for him to turn his back. There were no other customers. It was obvious. There was a loaded shotgun at his feet but if her finger was already on the trigger it was useless.

“No, pick it up. I’ll make it fair,” Zoe said.

“Okay,” the clerk said, but keeping his hands on the counter.

“I might not even have a gun,” Zoe said. “I might just be goofing.”

“Right,” the clerk said.

“I bet this happens to you all the time,” Zoe said.

The clerk opened the till and rotated the register towards her so she could take what she wanted. Zoe didn’t move.

“You got the wrong idea,” said Zoe. “It’s not really money that I need.”

At last the clerk recognized some recklessness in her misery. He put his hands up and said, “But, miss, I’m a Pilot, too.” 64

Zoe’s face collapsed and clotted with tears. Nobody had called her “miss” since her fourth grade teacher. It had made her feel worthy. She was still vulnerable to nostalgia. But if her childhood had taught her anything, it had been this: she would rather be divested than abandoned. She tried to scream for strength but only whimpered. She whipped her hand out of her pocket, and received God’s decision into her breast.

* * *

There were bigger flaws than fraud. NASA staffed their trillion-dollar intergalactic expeditionary ships with desultory Pilots that flew right into asteroids.

Vaccine testers denied and denied their terrible symptoms and let the doctors’ calls go to the machine until they choked on bloody vomit and decomposed beyond autopsy, throwing off all the results.

But the in-flight only mentioned the “success stories.” Men and women that rediscovered their survival instinct on the precipice. First was Nathaniel, who was painting the underside of a bridge when his trapeze snapped. Instead of plummeting he found himself scrambling back up the line into the arms of his Co-Pilot Rachel, with whom he’d fallen insidiously in love. There was a wedding photo.

Adelaide says that if horniness could cure them, they weren’t committed in the first place.

I say that minds can change.

She looks at the photo, where Nathaniel and Rachel wear the smiles of the condemned. She says they should totally have a kid. 65

I read the next one. Theresa (a pseudonym), who ferried cocaine over the Andes, staying low to avoid radar, clipped the side of a mountain and crash-landed in a coffee plantation. While she recovered, she baby-sat the mestizo children until cartel fixers arrived with machine guns and gasoline. Instead of submitting to a double tapped forehead, she cowered in a gulch with an infant and escaped down the mountain at night.

She adopted the orphan and they now live in Denver.

Adelaide says, “Like they won’t find her eventually?”

To distract her from the cynicism already blooming within her, I say happy endings do exist.

“Of course!” she says. “If you can pay for it.” And she stretches out her legs across me into the aisle.

I won’t tell her that I’m an ex-Pilot, too. I was assigned to the nether parts of

Manhattan in the 1970s, in the soup of syringes, bare mattress fucks, and demon dogs, where death dangled from the moon. They didn’t even tell us what we were supposed to do. Some of us were Pilots and some of us were just poor. All of us were dying. We were dying from knifes through our ribcages, service weapons discharged through our prone hearts or through our windshields, retroviruses, overdoses, consumption, hard frost. We read our Wright and Korematsu and the Gita and Galatians and were demanded to transcend our own denial and depression and preach nonviolence and achieve all of us moral nirvana in the face of pure hate. We were dying on park benches and on emergency room gurneys, our chests cracked open to give trainees practice at manipulating our 66

insides. We were dying on our backs, staring up at the penthouse, until one day I got to my feet and decided that someone would pay for this. 67

Grounded

1

They summon me to my station four hours early and when I arrive, a Paper Suit leads Hawkins away.

“A near miss,” the Paper Suit says, gesturing to the bits of pulverized black dust on Hawkins’ jumpsuit.

“What a show!” Hawkins says. “I haven’t seen fireworks in.. .when was that?” He turns his inky face to me for help.

“Here you go,” the Paper Suit says, tearing off a cerulean sheet and handing it to

Hawkins with a pair of safety scissors.

Hawkins shuts up, takes them and sits cross-legged on the grass as the decontamination team flamethrows the stained grass. At the first crisp snap of the metal jaws through the stiff bright page he closes his eyes and sways for a moment. It’s a good one and I too reach down and run the pads of my fingers over the paper’s felty grain.

“I’m not supposed to give these out, but you can take one for your shift,” the

Paper Suit says. The dusk breeze ruffles the hundreds of colored sheets he wears like samurai shingles. I pluck one the color of almonds and press it between my palms.

“They’ve finished moving your battery. I hope they don’t have you zeroed.”

“Right,” I say. 68

The battery is modeled after the old flak guns. It gleams white in the meadow.

Hawkins’ sensory sack lunch sits just outside, unused. Vegemite on blue cheese crumbles. I bring oyster halfshells and Grapenuts, my usual, which tears up the insides of my cheeks but otherwise I’ll drift.

The shells come in single, lazy arcs. The first comes an hour into my shift and I send up a white flare, track the shell through fifteen degrees and blast it out of the sky.

Ink showers down high above me in dozens of squidy streamers.

It does remind me of fireworks, like Hawkins says. Of course now they’re banned but I’ve seen them, real ones. A high school summer was the last time, when weekly over

Lake Michigan the city launched a twenty-minute show of rockets, and concussions, and the ones that fizzled out, to repercuss a heartbeat later like the clatter of walnuts on my roof every time the wind swayed the branch too close, until a storm twisted the branch off crushing the picket fence and the next morning Mom came in with bloody splinters in her palms from trying to pick—

“Come back, Kit,” a voice says, in my headset.

I swear and snap my goggles back on. They’ve turned on the floodlights that grill the sky. Ricardo, a mile away, lights up two pods that drift through my sector and into his, already plummeting. We destroy them and I lean back against my seat. On the back of my trembling hand is an angry blotch of ink, already soaking. I wipe it clean and bum the rag, wasting four matches in the process. 69

I fumble for the wooden brush strapped to the small of my back and release the catch of my barrette, only relaxing once the grippy bristles tug and roughly smooth through my tangled hair. Even after the ends spring back curly I keep pushing it down and down through my hair until my breaths come slower than the flashing light of the mothership which had hovered in the same spot five miles up for the last three months.

* * *

After a month Hawkins can accept visitors and I walk with him through the mock- up department store racks. Festive Paper Suits stand respectfully at the door in case he relapses. The walls are covered with analog clocks all set loyally to the second. Strict yellow letters read: “Keep all conversation with the patient limited to concrete tense conjugations.”

We don’t speak until we reach the discount coats, which hang at shoulder level.

Hawkins kneels a little and parts them like curtains. I follow him inside and we are in a dark nest, with a stool tucked underneath a pair of charcoal grey slacks. I’ve brought my own chair from the waiting room.

It’s strange, being here. At the academy we’d traded our coping memories and

Hawkins had described this, where we are right now—the heavy taps of the wooden hangers against each other, all other sounds muffled by the phalanx of wool, which through invisible atomic forces tug the hairs on my arm and emanate warmth like a thick book. From the ventilation system they pipe in fresh pencil shavings, which smell 70

wonderful. A nice touch. Even though this isn’t my memory all my body is reveling in

the moment.

“I bet you never thought you’d see this place again,” I say, removing my shirt.

“For one good night’s sleep,” he says, unbuckling his belt. “I’d give back the

Purple Heart and this whole damn place in a second.”

I sit in his lap, both of us now naked. In the month of sense therapy he’s gained weight in his arms and his gut, which against my scrubbed skin is clammy and coarse.

But I soothe his. He lowers his head into the hollow of my neck and sobs, and his cold tears down my breasts raise twin ranges of gooseflesh, the Rockies and Appalachians of my warm unbroken body.

“You’re not sleeping? What’s in there,” I ask, tapping his forehead with my nose.

Hawkins sniffles. “Dunno. A mess. For hours it feels like I’m still waking up, my eyes sore and my mind trying to corral the memory of what I’d dreamed—or imagined—or

‘membered. I’m either exhausted or nauseated.”

We lie down in the darkness. I say, “Do you remember mine?”

“Better than my own,” he says, guiding my hand to his chest. “A dining room on the top level of a rambler in a summer evening. Your mother had turned off the lights because she thought it’d be cooler in the dark. You sit at the dinner table covered in a clear tarp that squeaks when your sweaty arm rubs against it. The TV is on across the room, over the back of the couch, and you are watching reruns. There might be a buzz, you’re not sure, but without even taking your eyes off the TV you wave your hand over 71

your plate of ravioli. Then your mother starts crying. Because she presides over a home in which her daughter assumes there will always be flies on her dinner.”

“That’s it,” I say.

“If you ever ended up in therapy like me, why would you want to live in that?”

I sit up and put on my clothes. “But I already do.”

* * *

Not a week later a pod eludes the grid during a pirated broadcast of Blade Runner and I approach on foot. Above me, the mothership ejects thousands more in every direction, and our pitiful defenses flash and puff a few times.

The red alert, booming up from the city behind me, is the sound of a record scratch.

The pod is a sheer black rock, sitting in a foot-deep crater. It is featureless, but now a thin mouth of light appears around its waist.

I approach-

And am hit with a wave of nausea. I fell to my knees and clenched the grass in my

hands which are soon stained with my salmon-colored vomit.

The pod cracked open and its top half swung back. The alien bounded out, a formless dark ooze, reaching for me, prone on the grass.

I stand—retch. The ooze crawls onto my face and into my pores, and whispers,

“Nice to meet you. Let us simplify your lives.” 72

For a moment after the ink obscures my sight a memory of Marco Polo buoys up.

Me skulking around the edge of the pool, dripping. Waist deep in the shallow end, eyes closed, Sam strains to hear my wet feet slapping against the cement. “Fish out of water,” she says, and opens her eyes to catch me.

Try again. I stood. I will stand. Twenty years ago I used to stand. I would stand. I should stand. There!

I should stand, unsteady. The alien should vanish. If I stand my earpiece will crackle with Ricardo’s voice: “Run!”

If the earpiece should turn to static I run away but if so I would most definitely fall again with a head erupting.

2

English speakers would be hit hardest, deprived of that magical tense of Spanish or Finnish. El mundo gire pero hoy rebote. Gibberish before the aliens, but afterwards, the motto for humanity. In these languages the fluid mood of verbs can lubricate the mind against the new, invasive, un-American reality: the irrealis.

With the dissolution of the present and past we may struggle to subvocalize our thoughts. For some time I supposed I ground coffee in the morning and supposed I visited

Hawkins who supposed himself more comfortable now that we supposed to live in his nightmare with him, even the Paper Suits that supposed to flutter around with lost expressions, tearing their sheets habitually without effect. But the repetitive headache would return and once, I may pass out from the pain. 73

Then I supposed without verbs at all, a loophole past the sprawling desiderative into the past perfect and that now verboten word which to speak or even to think would collapse me in a heap for the remainder of the day. That word which could represent, in three letters, H-A-D, the entirety of our past, even beyond history into the cosmic facts of stardust and expanding galaxies. That word which for the inky aliens never exists and through our contact hoped to erase it from our language. Again, the Spanish speakers should suffer this better because their verbs—self-contained rocks without any spaces, only an appended imperfect “aba” or a subjunctive “ria” to indicate the speaker’s invocation of the passage of all time or the uncertainty of the maybe infinite future, not needing recourse to the words that in one moment would course like an epidemic through

English, killing in their sleep H-A-D, W-I-L-L, H-A-V-E. Now may, would, should, could, if. These should lead every verb now. The Senate should already pass a bill for the calendar to be recast into one eternal month of May, the First to the Three Hundred Sixty-

Fifth. But even so none of us could keep track of the date any more.

* * *

Obsidian pods all along the highways and coastlines, our city laid over Easter island.

“Thanks for driving,” Hawkins should leave the hospital, and the daylight on his withered pasty face, a white basking lizard. 74

“Anytime.” Speaking (a gerund! A noun! I should protest, and the nausea may subside) a difficult thing. Especially while driving (another gerund! Please please please don’t.)

“Finally outside.”

“A different place now.”

“Like how?”

Where do I start? Vanishing of street signs and bumper stickers incompatible with the current language: Slow children ******* (participle). Jesus ***** (present). Don’t blame me, I ***** for Kerry (simple past. “Blame” a prohibitive and not prohibited).

“Stop” and “Yield” signs still in place, not indicatives but imperatives. Herbert

Walker would have been a good President for these times, a man of terse commands and nouns. No new taxes. Weekend Prison Passes: Dukakis On Crime.

Downtown Michigan Avenue now; Hawkins’ face an imprint of horror at the vista from my car window. I should explain to him why sequoias may overlap the thirty-story

Carbide and Carbon building, not with broken windows and branches cracking up through granite floors, but just there together, elevator shafts within ten-foot trunks.

Could I explain that time was a series of iron cell doors, normally only open for one prisoner at a time but now all swinging free?

Further down the boulevard, the traffic lights: red, yellow, green all at once. On our left, in the commemorative field by the lake, could lie the remains of the thousands who, unable to square their new circumstances, may have died from untreatable brain 75

fever. Did I bury my mother there, too? After a weekish decade spent by her gumey at

Cook County? Does it eat at me, that even in my thoughts, I can’t even put a period after the words, ‘My mother is dead?’ If I don’t hide declaratives inside interrogatives all the clauses fall apart like Challenger and I lose my lunch.

“This could be how the aliens exist: without language to denote time, they ignore it, and it ignores them. And they could be doing it to us.”

“‘Could be?’ Or obviously are?”’ Hawkins, a quick study. “Doing what, exactly?”

“Projectile vomiting. Strokey Migraines. Epilepsy.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“You might be feeling much better after your nervous breakdown to have forgotten all of your old symptoms.”

“Just the opposite. It’s that I doubt anything could be worse. But tell me how.”

“Our prolonged contact with the aliens may erase time from our language so it matches theirs.”

“Until we live in a fully subjunctive state.” On the Calumet Skyway, now, high above receding Ice Age glaciers and Potawatomi skirmishers. “Simultaneously discovering fire and rocketing to Europa. How can we forget time, though?”

“Not forgetting. Out of reach. Like trying to imagine what comes after line, square, cube.”

“Doesn’t that shape exist?”

“Yes. But can you describe it?” 76

In front of us now, the Field Museum and its new coterie of grazing stegosaurids.

“I suppose not.”

“It won’t be long before that happens. When memories and fantasies are—”

“It won’t be worse.” Does Hawkins bravely take the declarative hit and convulse?

I would like to stop the car and hold him close to me. I should do it.

3

The part that isn’t worse is when the alien ink finally covers the earth and abolishes time, I can think and speak again with indicatives. But the worst part is that it doesn’t matter. We send rockets to Europa, yes. And to distant galaxies as well with ships powered with cold fusion, colonizing our first planet. Einstein holds the press conference.

“I never intended with relativity to go quite this far,” he says, stroking his white mustache with decomposing fingers.

There are no days, or months to mark the time. The sun continues to rise and set but is both eclipsed and full. The calendar on the wall says May fifty-third, and also KVII

Kal. Sextilis with a cameo of Marius. Our Oldsmobile is covered in ten inches of snow and I paddle a war canoe full of chanting braves down Lake Michigan under fleets of deafening silver zeppelins disembarking from Navy Pier. Everybody reads Barthelme to their children.

Einstein says, “Don’t think of it as all time compressed into one moment, but a cloud of all possibilities interchanging.” And the nation from our sickbed screams, “What about our pensions??” 77

And eventually we forget what time felt like. We regress from cubes into points.

I live in the split level with Hawkins and my mother. She cooks for us, and I attend her funeral. “Ravioli?” she asks us, picking at the rust on our can opener. Hawkins rests his arms on the squeaky clear tarp, staring at me in the dark room like he’s got the worst case of deja vu. So do I. Sometimes there is a fly on my food and I don’t dare wave my hand but I do anyway since I already have done it. “I don’t want to be poor,” my mother sobs, no matter how many times I get up and soothe her.

My battery shifts continue and in my secluded field I blast the same alien pods out of the sky as others squish by and wave hello. The mothership never once flickers. It sits in the sky, a reminder that we are an occupied species. I line it up in my sights but it’s way out of range. I know there’s no future uprising because there is no uprising. So there is no point anymore.

We’ve lost the war but if I could just clear the cluttered past and future memories away I would remember what was at stake. I remember my old sensory training and find in my pocket the twice-folded square of stiff cream-colored paper, hold it up to my ear and tear it down the creases as slowly as I can. When the paper is tom into dust I unholster my brush and tug it through my hair. I can still close my eyes.

I sign up for one of the exploratory ships to the Andromeda Galaxy. It doesn’t matter how far I run—the sickness is in my blood. But maybe, if I find a new planet, inhabited or inert, or like Earth, somewhere in between; without solids or gases but maybe instead pure energy or intention or love; without lifeforms but one pulsing 78

awareness brimming every horizon; God, different colors, even, with red-orange-green only one edge of the sphere; maybe—for a second, I could—maybe maybe maybe. 79

Poison Queen

Pocolo showed up to Seasight Lounge with two jars, one with her name and one with mine, and declared that we’d be competing for that month's tips.

“What the hell?” I asked. Not that I’d lose—here, my generous pours endeared me more than her young breasts. But our run-down place housed a family. Me and Pocolo served, Julio ran barback, Franco grilled and kept the books. We were happy and tan. Too irradiated by Gulf sun to exert ourselves.

Everything was great until Creepy Benjy turned her on to chaos magic.

“I sense you want to get out of your head and focus on the future,” he said, and she nodded.

In between sips of his iced Fernet (what the fuck), his goatee dipping behind the murk, he told how chaos magic saved him from his marriage, from his job. He had been a narc in Jacksonville, pulling over teenagers in smoky Chevys, dodging rancid spit from meth mouths. Poke leaned close to listen, hands under her chin, elbows slipping on the bar.

“I couldn’t take it anymore. I was yelling at my wife, my daughter. I hated who

I’d become. I had to leave.”

I let my first question sail away, and only asked the second.

“So what great new job lets you both drink every day at two in the afternoon and send child support?” I was already a little pissed. Whenever Pocolo spaced, I had to run the dishes back and slice up the limes. Also Creepy Benjy was a malevolent loser that 80

offered coke hookups from his old beat if anyone was interested and I didn’t want Pocolo fluffing him up with her pretty attentions.

Benjy said he played bass on the Costa Fortuna, which cruised to Jamaica and San

Juan. I noted that the Costa Fortuna disembarked three days ago. He replied that he was first alternate bassist.

He shrugged. “The reality of the gig economy. But it suits me more—nothing fixed in place. And bartenders really shouldn’t judge those that drink.”

Pocolo said, “Don’t be such a straight edge, Tosa.” Which was just rich, someone saying that to me, since I'd cut my teeth (and lost one) in the Portland thrash scene. I squeezed too hard and got lime in my eye, and I hollered at Julio to do his own damn job.

He was off shimmying to tinny bachata in his headphones. He lifted one ear. “What d’you want, lady?” he called, and flashed a brilliant and infuriating smile. I couldn’t stay mad at him, mostly because he was Franco’s kid.

Benjy scribbled a reading list and said, “Once you get the hang of it, and you’re patient, people will bend to you.”

From then on whenever we were caught up, drunks all pacified, she took out her library books and read to me the parts that excited her.

From one with a cover of a shelf holding many varied hats: “Any belief system should be temporary, if you wish to exert your will upon your premises. Decide which system will accomplish your goal, and adopt it. Whether it be a Catholic system, a

Rastafari system, a system of a terrorist, of a rice farmer, of Frasier Crane, of Mister 81

Sinister. All can be useful to you. But swap them out promptly if you have no success. A life that can be navigated without constant adjustments to its rudder is not a life but a program. For this reason discount anyone who presses upon you a fixed dogma.”

I rolled my eyes. “I bet whoever wrote that loves Halloween.”

“Picasso—he kept changing all the time. He never stayed in one place.”

“Oh yeah, Picasso. The guy compelled to draw all possible nostrils.”

“Fuck off if you don’t like it,” she said, shocking me, and I knew her first system was going to be ‘bitch.’

* * *

I didn’t want her to change. She’d first appeared one afternoon during Tropical

Storm Abraham, which had wandered through and left us powerless. The dark made no difference to us that moved through intuition. I looked up from my ministrations of bourbon to the bright open door, where she stood bathed in the thrown sea.

“Can I come in?” she’d asked. I think I knew, then.

Franco hired her on the spot, and I’d distilled her story from smoke breaks. She’d fled from a step-dad situation in Atlanta. Like me, she’d tried college just to get out of the house, but dropped out within weeks. She said, “College was guys trying to put their hands on my thigh, and after class asking if I wanted to join their bible study.” She spent time on a horse ranch until an Appaloosa kick snapped her humerus. She got let go from her waitress gig when she discovered she could not balance a plate with a casted arm. “Or grab dollars from the stage,” she’d said. Then she landed here with me. 82

She was so new and so bad at everything, my sex drive and expired mother

hormones and profound boredom all suddenly harmonized. I knew it was absolutely

moronic, two backwater bartenders, utterly unskilled (in the demeaning CNN way),

suffocating in a county waterboarded with recession, somehow blessed with actual steady jobs—why not fuck up a good thing, har har? But I wanted her naked.

So I put the moves on her too, and none of them from the Bible Belt School of

Mating. I chewed her out when she dropped a glass or foamed a beer, insulting

everything from her discount jeans to her discount genetics, then at the extremity of her

insecurity told her I was proud of her for remembering the components of a Harvey

Wallbanger or mastering the fluid mechanics of a pony pour. This seemed to work—she

wavered when I insisted no woman was completely heterosexual—until she turned me

into target practice.

From one with a cover of a fractal lightning bolt: “Recite your desires constantly.

Specify for what purpose you desire the services of chaos magic. When starting out, keep

your desires small and local. With these modest successes, you will then be ready for the

important challenges.”

That’s when she showed up with the jars. “I desire that chaos magic helps me

defeat Tosa in tips. For a month.”

I guessed I was small and local. What the more important things were, I had some

idea. When I squeezed behind her, grazing her hip with my fingers, she tensed. And when 83

I dismissed chaos magic as just “rolling with the punches,” she threw up her arms to protect her face.

But tips were not trivial, not to me. I didn’t spend them on Vidal Sassoon or three- ply. Tips determined how firm I could squeeze at Sunoco, and if my underwear needed detergent or just real hot, free water. They determined if Teresita would feed my father too or just wipe his ass.

So I’d play along for just a little while. Even though I was curious to see what she’d do after she won, I wasn’t going back to ketchup soup and soy sauce macaroni.

Never ever.

* * *

About a week in, Pocolo showed up with a red neckerchief, violet eyeliner,

Suspiria lips, black vinyl pants, and a ten-gallon hat that fell to her eyebrows. I asked what the hell sort of witch she was trying to be.

She said chaos magic was not witchy, and it had no fashion. It was about picking the persona that helped you the most that moment.

“So I’ll be a sexpot cowgirl for these panhandle hicks.”

But instead of dropping dollars into her jar, they flipped bottle caps onto her brim.

She endured this, mistaking it for chummy acceptance. She balanced her walk like a tightrope, making sure none of the caps spilled off. By the end of the night, her mouth a tense slash, she was even catching them midair like a dog. But after we locked up she saw that both jars were completely empty. She reached up, gathered the caps into a fist, 84

and dropped them into the trash. Then she grabbed a handful of napkins, a bottle of white whiskey, and disappeared into the bathroom for a long time. When she came out her makeup was gone and she looked like her old sad self.

Franco called us into the back office.

“Are we selling popsicles from a bicycle? Are we selling Girl Scout cookies on the sidewalk? Are we a theme bar? No? Then why the jars, ladies?”

Without her makeup, staring at the floor, Pocolo looked like an orphan. We didn’t have a good answer.

I said it was just a joke. But we could get rid of the jars if he wanted, even though it would really complicate local regulations governing tip credit and pooling . . .

Franco grimaced. “At least lose the hat,” he said.

Outside me and Pocolo smoked. I said that we’d both lost the tip battle and offered my hand in truce. She didn’t take it.

“The ‘H’ in chaos stands for ‘honor.’ I promised to beat you, and I will.”

I gaped. “We’re not even the biggest town in the county. Why are you talking like

Lancelot?”

“If I’m Lancelot, that makes you the ugly beast.” And she flicked ash like a duchess.

* * *

Franco didn’t like new Poke, either. 85

When I first showed up, Franco rented me the apartment above the bar, intending to start a small college fund for Julio, who was then nine and absorbent. Franco took him every Sunday to the racetrack, wads of dollars in hand, garish neon visor, and screamed and hopped up and down like a child, splattering mustard all down his front. He did this until Julio said he didn’t like it anymore. Then Franco started taking him to the casino with the foulest cigarettes he could find, and exhaled in his son’s unhappy face all night.

Pavlov in action. But instead, right out of high school, Julio took ajob at the women’s prison in Hernando County, and during his first mess hall riot had his fibula broken against an inmate’s head, and the fund got used up. Now Julio was here full-time, mopping and dancing, and Franco sometimes got this ache in his eyes.

But when Poke showed up, Franco found new motivation. He would pretend to overcook burgers or make too many fries, and put the extra food in a bag for her to take home at close. He would “accidentally” leave Julio’s old SAT prep books on a prominent corner of his desk. Pocolo, after hearing he was Dominican, found a dusty recipe for a girly drink called a coquito, and brought one to his desk. And even though he hated tropical drinks, and even though coquitos have nothing to do with the DR, he sipped at the foot-long straw, closed his eyes at the awful sweetness, and said it was maravilloso.

But now that she was magical, only cigarettes and red wine sustained her. Even though she grew so lean that Franco started adding bacon and cheese to his mistake burgers, she left them all untouched on the prep table. Long gone were her nights off that she’d come in anyway and watch my fingers pour. 86

One of Creepy Benjy’s books was historical: about the son of a poisoned king who spent his fugitive youth in the wilderness dosing himself to build up an immunity.

When the prince grew up he repaid all his enemies in full.

“Is that supposed to be a metaphor?” I asked her.

She said, “Just leisure reading.” She was hard and mean now.

* * *

Teresita called and said my father got rushed to ICU. Three days later, ICU called, asking for guidance. I said what sort of guidance? ICU said the same things they’ve been saying these past ten years. I said call me back in a week when it gets really serious. A month later I called home and Teresita picked up. She said, One of these times you’ll be sorry.

* * *

Poke decided she needed to understand them before they would tip her. She saw how many of the customers kept a stopwatch next to their drinks, performing the complex blood algebra of booze, liver, medications. How they protected drinks from their tremors in the treacherous arc from bar to lips, by ducking their heads down, by securing glass against teeth. She had to wager her body. The more she looked and spoke like a girl, the less they’d respect her.

She listened to nascent Bikini Kill and read Kathy Acker and got the wrong idea.

She asked Benjy for a line on oxycontin that thankfully went nowhere. She stenciled on the back of her hand “change” then “endure” then “$life$” and asked me which to tattoo 87

(I suggested “$rent$”). She switched to unfiltered and all night belted a throaty “Ball and

Chain” to scar her voice.

“Who sings that song?” Julio asked.

“Janis Joplin,” Pocolo said.

“Let’s keep it that way,” Julio said, putting his headphones back on.

Later, the phone rang; Pocolo picked it up and handed it to me. It was Teresita. “I had to turn up his oxygen,” she said. “Do you want to meet us at the hospital?” I had had some gin with my staff meal, so I was a little limber and a little bitter, and I stood there holding the phone, wishing that instead of the stroke and decades of infirmity, he’d been flung out a car windshield, or hung himself from the eaves, something decisive so that I could have been an orphan back when I was young enough to spin it into sexy backstory.

Pocolo was spilling drinks, sneering, and resting her thumbs on the chains that hung from her leather jacket-another ridiculous thing she’d unearthed. She absorbed rudeness and despair and manufactured something diamantine. But even if she was faking it, I wanted her to show me. Was there something actually useful in those silly books? What I wanted .. . What I wanted was to tell Teresita to take a month off, starting right this second.

Pocolo looked over at me. “You should go,” she said, and reached for our jars, to put them away, to put our contest on hold.

“No, I shouldn’t,” I said. “Teresita can handle things.”

“That’s not the reason you should go,” she said. 88

I didn’t respond, I just took the jars and pushed them away from her, staging them

under the lights.

* * *

Poke took her act even further. On breaks, she would lift up her shirt, aim at one of the dark, heaped circles on her stomach, and stub her cigarette on them. Two packs

later she had overwritten all the old burns with new, weepy ones. “Now they’re mine,”

she said. For ten nights straight she took home a succession of random men and showed up the next morning with a rictus and a limp of pelvic catastrophe. “Now it’s everyone’s,” she said.

In the bathroom mirror she gathered her shirt under her bra and very carefully rubbed aloe on her open wounds. I watched from the door and offered to lend a hand.

Keeping her eyes fixed on her reflection, she said, “You’re worse than the Jesus freaks.”

I leaned against the wall and said, “Self-harm is not a persona. It’s a mental illness.”

“I’ll take it over the mental illness I already have,” she said.

Seeing I didn’t accept that, she explained, “The map is not the territory.”

“It’s all riddles with you,” I said.

She took a slow breath—she was being patient with me. “If I act or dress like a samurai or a clown or a cop, it doesn’t mean I am one. The persona assists only to create 89

a temporary belief system.” She closed her eyes as pain rippled across her abdomen.

“There is no identity except the one I make new every day.”

“But you can’t do this forever. Once you get to my age you can’t keep playing dress-up.”

She laughed. “Why not? Has age fixed all your problems?”

* * *

Things got worse when the twelve-stepper came in. Franco had done his best to make them feel unwelcome. He considered them hypocrites powered by bullet points. He posted signs behind the bar that said “If it isn’t flammable, we won’t serve it” and “The only higher power is a Double.”

This one, a man whose immaculate, off-brand sneakers shouted “deserving poor,” ordered a ginger ale no ice, and sat at the bar looking up at the Marlins game.

I refilled him between innings, cautiously attentive, since the man sitting not drinking is the most dangerous one, the sanctimonious time bomb.

He ordered a burger well done and Franco cooked it and I brought it out to him.

He took a bite, looked at the cross-section, and showed it to Tony Thibault, who was sitting next to him. “That’s not well done. I’m not a whiner but that’s not well done.”

Then, even though Tony was already moving his drink two stools down, the nondrinker asked if he’d ever tried one of these Korean girlfriends before.

“Thirteen” was playing on the radio and Pocolo was singing along. She sang,

“Won’t you tell your dad, get off my back / Tell him what we said ‘bout paying him 90

baaaack.” The nondrinker lunged at her and slapped the bar, hard. I jumped, Pocolo

cowered. Julio turned down his bachata.

“Hey. Those aren’t the lyrics.”

Pocolo was too surprised to answer, so he went on: “He’s saying, ‘Paint It Black.’

Tell him what we said about ‘Paint It Black.’”

“The hell does that mean?” she asked.

“You’re too young to know,” he said. “Too young and too pretty to know.”

“I recommend you leave her alone,” Franco said. I’d already brought him after the

Korean girlfriend comment.

“Free country. Free speech.”

“Free country, not a free bar.”

The nondrinker said to Pocolo, “See what alcohol does to you? Makes you tetchy”

“What was that? Say that one more time?” Julio said, mistaking the unusual word

for something racial. Father and son advanced on him.

The nondrinker got up and said, "I can carry the message but I cannot make them

listen.” He left a pamphlet, drained his soda, and exited. Franco followed him out the

door to make sure he was gone.

“‘Paying him back’ sounds better to me,” Pocolo said. “‘Payback’ is one of those perfect words, isn’t it?”

Franco said, “You can’t let men talk to you like that. Don’t you know that?” 91

Pocolo said, “What am I supposed to do? Ask them to be different? Ask them to

be nice to me?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

She said, “They either want to fuck you or help you. That’s all.”

Julio said, “Some of us just want to dance with you.” He playfully reached for her

waist. She sidestepped it and knifehanded him in the throat.

I ran over and pulled her away. “Jesus! What are you thinking?”

I got her to apologize, and Julio laughed it off, but Franco told her not to come

back until she dropped the bullshit.

After she limped out the door, Franco asked what was going on with her.

I said just young person stuff.

“So how would you know?” he asked. He had such elegant ways in pissing me

off.

“You wanted a prettier one, now you’re complaining?” I said.

“I never said that.”

“I could tell anyway. I see how you spoil her. I know what you’re up to.”

“I'm not like you,” Franco said, and deployed his concerned face on me.

“You might be playing the long game,” I said. “But you’re playing.”

I had thrown away the twelve-stepper’s pamphlet but as I was cleaning up I found

it smoothed on the bar. Next to “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves” she had written, “It is my will that MAGDNTOYIEVLHS.” 92

* * *

Pocolo called me one night and we went drinking at Holy Rollers, which had frozen margaritas. She was taking a few weeks off from magic, to recover, and she was loose and cheerful again. I carefully tried some of my old lines on her, scouted her calves with my toes. I ended up back at her place.

We got inside. She tilted towards the kitchen and I followed her. There were some papers on the table. One was an invoice for a power drill, piano wire, lead weights, and twine. Another was a map of western Georgia, with all the campgrounds highlighted green and a red circle somewhere near Atlanta. She put a bowl down and got out a box of

Apple Jacks.

“You want to sleep here?” she asked.

“Don’t play around,” I said.

“I’m not. You don’t want me any more?”

Some stray Jacks clattered to the floor and when she bent down to pick them up I stared at her ass. My good sense clawed with visions of her undressed body. Then I noticed a dozen more old burns along her spine, original ones.

Pocolo noticed my gaze and said, “I couldn’t reach those even with a mirror. You still want to lend a hand?” She pulled off her shirt, shrugged off her bra, and stood there showing me. I recoiled but she shrugged and got the milk. I watched her eyes quicken with the childish alchemy of cereal. It was some third, nameless thing, not wisdom nor glands, that shoved me out her door and down the stairs, all the way into my lonely bed, 93

where I dreamed of her standing on an overpass, dropping colorful pieces of chalk onto the highway. In the dream I went to the rail and looked down. Thousands of cars and trucks had crushed the chalk into pastel detonations, all part of something big, some vague figure. I was going to ask her what it was supposed to be, when I woke up.

* * *

She came back, softer, kinder, and Franco let her back. She never got close to beating me, no matter what she tried. She practiced Irish coffees and how to float turds of cream on top. She trepanned coconuts and exenterated pineapples, and impregnated them with spiced rum. She let her bra strap come down her shoulder, wore boots up to her thighs to direct their thoughts. She engaged them in conversation. She asked to see pictures of their children, their weekend plans, their Christmas presents. She still did not get what sort of men these were.

Gary called out, “Coma, make this bitch shut up?”

Again I offered a truce. And again Pocolo told me what the H stood for.

* * *

Only once did someone call Seasight for her. Franco had taken Julio and Pocolo fishing so I picked up. A woman calling from a Georgia area code.

“Hey. Hello? Hellooo?” Yelling at drive-thru volume over arrhythmic thuds that could have been subwoofer or sledgehammer on carpet. Already I smelled meth.

“I know she’s been workin’ there,” the woman said.

“Is that right,” I said. 94

“You wanna put her on the line?”

“Not really. In fact, I never heard of her,” I said.

“Well, I think you’re lyin’,” she said.

“Obviously,” I said. That would have been the moment to hang up, but I didn’t. I kept my ear to the receiver, our breaths crossing through space like bullsnorting prizefighters. I wanted this woman’s secrets, this woman who had known Pocolo well enough to break her. Because—mules, oxen, women, girls—that’s what domesticating is: we won’t leave you even though you whip us, brand us.

“If you want her, come and get her,” I said, and felt silly—it was a line from one of Pocolo’s books.

The woman sighed and said, “I wouldn’t come to Florida for all of the Jew dollars at Disneyworld.” That’s when I hung up. I could have taken a message. I could have told

Pocolo someone called for her. But even then, I think I knew the score, knew that Pocolo wasn’t waiting for anyone to come to her.

* * *

One day Pocolo came in with an armful of twigs, candles, matches, and bundled sage. Then she made a second trip to her car and carried in a bottle of amaretto and a paper sign. Then she set up her station. With the twigs, she composed a dreamcatcher on the bar, and placed in the center a shot glass, a beer stein, and a piece of paper with the same strange letters-MAGDNTOYIEVLHS. She tacked the sign above the register. It said, “Flaming Dr. Peppers: Free With Tip.” Then she set up our jars. 95

“That’s not fair!” I said.

“Don’t hate, innovate,” she said.

Julio waltzed in, saw the mess, and said, “Finally she’s going to cast a spell or something.”

“It’s not a spell,” she said. “I’m firing my sigil.”

Julio said he wasn’t chipping in for her eventual exorcism.

“Aren’t you supposed to refill the ice?” she asked, and Julio went away.

The first customer didn’t even notice the sign. The second looked at the sign for a while, then ordered tequila. The third looked at the sign, then got up and left.

Franco came out to check on things. He put his hands on his hips and said don’t you remember what I said about jars and theme bars?

Pocolo pled with him. She said she would work a week for free, would give over all her tips for the next month, would stop serving neon blue drinks, if he just please please gave her one night.

Franco frowned and went back into the office. Even if she lost the tip war, she had already succeeded in winning him over. But she didn’t care about that.

The first one to order the Flaming Dr. Pepper was a morose graduate student. He dropped a dollar into Pocolo’s jar and she pumped her fist. She filled the shot glass with amaretto and rum. In her excitement, she spilled the whole thing onto the bar. I cringed, like when a figure skater falls on her ass. But she just mopped it up with her sleeve and poured another one. She struck a match. Her mouth moved silently: “It is my will that.. 96

and she tenderly applied the flame to the surface of the rum. The rising fireball surprised both of them, and the student looked giddy as Pocolo sunk the flaming glass into the beer.

Everyone watched as the student brought the drink to his lips and sipped. Pocolo’s fingers were sticky with rum but she fretted through her hair. Julio stopped whirling. I stopped slicing limes. The drunks’ fists quivered midair. Did it taste any good? Did she finally do something right? Would this be the day Pocolo battered down the walls of our hearts and rebuilt them around her?

At first I thought the gimmick wasn’t over. Like a rocket’s second stage, a fresh bum. The smoldering match had caught again. It was the student that reacted first, by spitting out the drink and falling backwards off the stool. Fire snaked up Pocolo’s arm and underlit her face. It reached her shoulder and vaulted up onto her hair. The smell of roasted almonds.

Goddamn me, Julio was her hero. He stabbed his arms into the ice bin, armoring himself with zero degrees. Then he tackled her to the sticky mats behind the bar, rolling and swatting her. The flames held fast to her long hair, slurping it up like pasta, and while

I sprayed her ineffectually with Diet Coke from the soda gun, Julio grabbed the ten gallon hat from the shelf and smothered her scalp.

We stayed like that, Julio wrapping Pocolo in his arms, me all Charlie’s Angels with the soda gun, all the drunks leaning on their elbows over the bar to see the damage.

Franco was already dialing the ambulance. 97

I rushed to her and helped her up, peeking under the hat. The flames had scraped the skin from her scalp, revealing reds and yellows, bright as wildflowers. Her eyes were maniacal with pain. She fought when I hauled her to the bathroom. She clawed my neck,

she slammed her feral heels down on my toes—all of this I wanted. I was proud of her for

fighting so hard. How many lifeguards drown, dragged under by a thrashing, beautiful will to live? She’d need this later, once the bandages came off and the bullshit came on.

As we rushed through the bar, we passed Franco, spelling our address to the dispatcher, his other arm holding Julio tight, both of them exuberant; we passed all the customers, who were strangely silent. Any moment they’d break the spell and laugh from their loveless throats so hard their tumorous bladders squirted. But before I disappeared into the bathroom, I looked back and saw that they had lined up and had begun to drop quarters into her jar.

She ran into the stall and shut the door. Then a sound I hadn’t heard since I was six years old: hot, quick inhalations, like a dog panting in reverse. The same as when I broke my hand in the car door, when my hand was broken in the car door.

“I’m right here,” I said to the stall. “You should let it out.”

She let out such a scream that I even yelled a little in surprise. It was a scream like you’d hear at childbirth, a scream that demanded the pain be worth it. I composed myself.

“Don’t,” I said. “It doesn’t need to say anything. It doesn’t need to go anywhere.”

As I waited, I listened to the ambulance pop its siren through the bathroom window, followed by a pregnant breeze, the start of another bad storm. 98

The map is not the territory. The territory is all wild. 99

Family Matters

On a certain fall evening I was fifteen and helpless. It was the usual racket going on. The lady in 14C wrangling her six kids, the layabouts below in 13D playing video games so loud my pencil bounced off my book with each digital explosion. I was studying at the kitchen table, but barely.

The sun was going down fighting. I got up, went to the streaked window that looked over our squalor and let myself be blinded by the orange glow. I tried to have an

inspirational thought. One of these days . . . what? What could stop this nosedive? The ground was rushing up at me.

Then the door banged open and Mom charged in.

“Richard,” she called. “Richard.”

I informed her that Dad wasn’t home yet.

She ignored me and checked the entire apartment. Then she interrogated me. I didn’t know where he was—the place was empty when I got back from school, which was normal. He hadn’t called either—in fact I couldn’t remember him ever calling.

“He’s probably still at the store,” I said. “Why the fuss?”

Mom went to the phone and called Uncle Herman, and told him to come over double quick. Then she went to her bedroom and started to pack. Just curious at first, not worried, I watched her. Underwear and dresses. Packages of hair color. She dug around in the dresser and came up with a road and campground map of Ontario and Manitoba. 100

She considered a turtleneck that was too bulky for the duffel bag and, after some thought, put it on over her shirt, even though it was quite warm.

The fuss, she explained, was that she had stopped at the store on her way home.

There was nobody manning the register. A steady stream of looters were swiping liquor and food, but scattered once Mom bluffed a cop call. She picked her way to the back offices, between exploded bags of chips and arterial sprays from tumbled six-packs of

Bud. The safe had been emptied and the security cam footage deleted. Dad was nowhere.

After a short panic, she gathered herself, lowered the metal shutters, locked them, and came home.

Mom was sweating just in the retelling. Then my hands began to tremble. Even though we lived in a bad neighborhood south of the city—where nightly I woke to shrieking on the street and had to convince myself it was laughter—violence hadn’t yet touched our little family. But it got everyone eventually.

I said maybe he had gone to the police station because of the robbery?

She sneered. “I guess I haven’t raised you smart,” she finally said. There was not much room left in her bag, and she took down a framed photo of her and Dad on their wedding day, removed the photo, and tucked it neatly into an inner pocket. She had once been beautiful. In fact, she had been handpicked to stand behind Bill Clinton for the televised broadcast of the Democratic Convention. She’d told all her friends to watch, and I remember she got compliments at church for weeks afterwards. But the years since then had done something melty to her face. I’m ashamed to say I used to be a wild kid, 101

and caused her a lot of trouble. Sometimes I caught her staring at me with an odd expression on her face.

“Are we going somewhere?” I asked.

She was looking at a small box on the high shelf in the closet, chewing her lip. At length she stood on her toes, took down the box, and placed its contents into the bag. It was Uncle Herman’s Detective Special. He had given it to Mom not long after taking his disability. “For home invaders,” he had said, and looked at Dad, who didn’t like the idea of a gun in the house. Mom had stashed it in the closet and had never taken it down.

Sometimes I did, though. I mean, guns are fucking cool. I loved messing with the speedloader—fitting the cartridges in and dumping them out. But I never took the safety off. I had made an oath to my girl, hysterical after her older brother got drug out of the

Calumet, leaking water out of seventeen holes. He had tried to cut into the snow ring, which sold uncut to the rich kids in the North and counted money by the briefcase and got their cars right from the dealership. “They make you think you can win,” she had said, her thigh warm next to mine. “But you won’t. Not here.”

Mom zipped the duffel bag and checked the front door for the third time, to make sure it was locked. As soon as she stepped back there was a loud knock and she yelped.

But it was Uncle Herman.

They embraced and he looked at her. “You don’t look so good,” he said.

“How would you expect me to look when Richard is missing?” Mom asked. “You got here fast, all the way from Uptown.” 102

“Anything for my little sis.” Uncle Herman turned to me. “How about you, kid?

You surviving in this madhouse?”

I said kind of. Mom boxed me on the ear, hard. She suggested to her brother that he try raising a child in this city.

Then she filled him in on the situation—Dad’s store ransacked and no trace of him.

He took this in. He sat down at the table to finish taking it in, and leaned his cane on the wall. When I was small I used to swing it around like I was fending off dragons, until Mom told me to stop being a pansy.

“Do you know exactly what was missing from the store safe?” Uncle Herman said.

“Like an inventory? N o ...” Mom said, trailing off.

“Was it cash? Or jewels? Both?”

“I don’t know! I don’t even have the combination.”

“So you don't know what the jewels looked like?”

“I told you I don’t look in the safe.”

“And he doesn’t stash any of it here?”

“There’s nothing here. You usually get upset when someone brings up the business. Why are you so interested in the specifics all of a sudden?”

Uncle Herman shrugged. “Things were stolen. Seems logical that they were after something.” He looked at me. “Is that right? No safes here or anywhere else?” 103

I said that no, there were no safes in our place.

He said to me, “Do you ever help out at the store?”

I said, “Sometimes I ring customers up if Dad is really busy in back.”

Uncle Herman shot his sister a look. “What did I tell you about keeping him clean?”

Mom snorted. “Mind your own business.”

Uncle Herman fumed silently. “Your father shouldn’t make you an accessory to a crime,” he said to me. “That’s goddamned moronic.”

Before Mom could get defensive again, he got to his feet and said, “Let me look around here.”

“Go ahead, waste time! Nothing unusual happening here.”

He noticed the packed bag and asked where were we going. Mom said if someone was after Richard, we might be next and in that case maybe she didn't want to tell him where we were going.

“You make it sound like the mafia is after you. Nothing heavy as that around here.”

Uncle Herman peeked around the kitchen, checking cabinets. He opened the refrigerator, and the dishwasher. He even looked in the microwave. Then he moved to the living room. He removed the cushions from the couch and Dad’s armchair, shoving his hands into the spaces and exploring with his fingers. He picked up the potted ferns and checked the floor underneath. It was after he went to the bathroom, took off the toilet lid 104

and spent some time examining the pull-chain inside that I asked, “Are you looking for something in particular?”

“What? No... just anything interesting.” He washed his hands, went to my bedroom for a few minutes, and emerged holding my copy of Encyclopedia Brown Saves the Day. “A little too old for these, aren’t we?” he said. Then he went into Mom and

Dad’s room, and spent a while in there. I heard him lifting up the heavy mattress and dragging the furniture around. At length he came back out.

“Satisfied?” Mom asked. “He doesn’t keep anything at the house. I could have told you that.”

Uncle Herman sat back down, panting from the exertion. “I had to check.”

Mom said, “The answer to where Richard is isn’t in the house. Go to the store and look for clues or something.”

Uncle Herman said, “I’m still asking questions. Did Richard get ahold of anything particularly valuable recently? That he might’ve been shooting his mouth off about?”

Mom exploded. “It wasn’t a robbery! Get that straight. If it was a robbery why bother taking Richard away?”

Mom was right. Nobody around here would be dumb enough to rob Dad. You couldn’t stickup a fence and then stick around. It would be like invading Belgium. Dad was a neutral player that provided the same services to both sides. He was the only one in the southside, so anything you took from the safe—it would all be hot, and who could you sell it to? And I was sure Dad wasn’t involved in anything worse, so why would anyone 105

want him? It’s not as if we had any money lying around for ransom. It all made zero sense.

Uncle Herman said, with a strange smile on his face, “Maybe they just didn’t want to leave a body to be found.”

Mom sucked in air. “He’s not dead. I’m not going to tolerate morbidness like that.”

“Just exploring all the possibilities. Homicide is one of them.”

“Don’t act all lo-gi-cal,” Mom said. “You weren’t never no detective. Running a fence means he has a bullseye on his forehead? Try this on, then: he pays every single bill. We can go to restaurants that have glasses with stems. I can buy new clothes whenever I want. I’ve never stood in the market, wondering if dishwasher soap could double as deodorant. But you have. Are you still reusing your coffee grounds? Ha! Look at yourself. I can hear your stomach from here. Don’t pretend like part of the reason you came wasn’t to get some dinner.”

Uncle Herman sat there. “I actually have some good money coming to me soon.

But I did come, all right, didn’t I?”

Mom said “Ha!” again. She notified him that she was leaving in the next hour. I hovered nearby in the living room. I was glad Uncle Herman was on the case. He was not a cop anymore, but ran a security office that mostly handled crowd control at events.

Some of the dingier music venues in the warehouses contracted with him but in general, business was pretty bad. Once in a blue moon he’d get hired to keep out gate crashers at 106

North Side bar mitzvahs and ballroom proms, and those cush jobs sustained him for a month or two. Poverty weighed on him. His shoulders and neck slumped forwards, and the skin around his eyes had lost all its posture too. He was always exhausted and shuffled around. He needed a cane for his knee, which had caught a ricochet while he was on the force, but even standing still for too long swelled it up. He’d kicked his painkiller addiction for good five years ago, but that had taken something vital out of him.

He and Dad hated each other. Did Mom not know what would happen when you took a low-level criminal and an ex-cop, and made them brothers-in-law? They never got into an actual fight—Dad would solemnly put his hand on his heart and say, “I would never hit a cripple.” Still, the constant sniping wore us out and I hoped maybe helping find Dad would get Uncle Herman excited for once, and even soften their feelings towards each other.

Uncle Herman said, “Fine. So let me straighten it out. You left for work before

Richard this morning. Was he acting strange at all? Anxious? Paranoid?”

“No. Mad, if anything. That stupid rich girl was on the TV and he wouldn’t stop complaining about it.”

“Right. I think I heard about that. Vandenberg. Aren’t they on your circuit?”

“No—they’re rich enough not to have to share a gardener with anyone. They have a rose person, a begonia person, and a hedge person. Or so I hear—nobody can see over the compound walls.” 107

The Vandenbergs were distantly rich, both old and new money, with their name on the new medical school going up. “That stupid rich girl” was twenty-two year old

Penny Vandenberg, who had gotten lost driving from the City Museum late at night after her cousin’s cotillion. There is only one safe route out of the Museum district at night. All others lead to neighborhoods like mine. She never made it back to her apartment. The next morning she appeared, missing some clothes and all her heirloom jewelry, at a precinct five miles away from where her ravaged SUV. Rape was implied. They had knocked out several of her teeth against the steering wheel, and had choked her so hard she would make a faint wheezing sound for the rest of her life. The news said the stolen items amounted to nearly ten thousand dollars, including one sort of diamond-pendant thing that had belonged to Great-Grandma Cornelia Vandenberg, who had been born in the aughts. Penny’s father Elliot Vandenberg had wept in front of microphones, asking what kind of world contained people that could do such things? “News to you,” Dad had scoffed. Then there was a segment on “the project problem in the city” and a helicopter shot of our building.

I felt bad for Penny Vandenberg. She was a homely girl but she used to organize toy and clothing drives for kids even worse off than me. I saw her once in my neighborhood, in the shade of the elevated subway station. It was a small, pitiful affair- two or three folding tables laden with ripped T-shirts and disco pants—but that made her goodness real. She could have brought all her family’s power and connections to bear, rented out the Civic Center, and upgraded her little rummage sale to black tie, tax- 108

deductible Philanthropy. But she didn’t, and stood there in the dust smiling and accepting each donation herself.

She would never come down here again. Not without dynamite and a fire truck full of bleach. She’d be wearing a cape and a mask as well. A new demon, fueled by the city’s ingratitude.

“And then what?” Uncle Herman asked.

“And then I went to work and did it. Then I stopped at the store on the way home and noticed there was some sort of commotion. I went inside and shooed everyone out.”

“Wait a sec.” He leaned forward intently. “Did you notice anyone strange on the street? Any familiar cars?”

Mom thought. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t think so.”

Uncle Herman nodded, satisfied.

I said, “You think the person who did it was still there, watching?”

He looked quickly at me, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s possible.”

The air in the apartment suddenly felt like it had cooled ten degrees. I wrapped my arms around myself and as casually as I could, checked that all the blinds were closed, and then kept my eyes fixed on the bar of light under the front door, terrified that a shadow might noiselessly appear there.

Uncle Herman asked if anyone had a personal issue with Dad. 109

Mom’s shoulders went up but she contained herself this time. “Apart from you?

Nobody.”

“The more you keep back from me, the less I’ll be able to help you,” he said.

“Anyone threaten him? About anything?”

“Not threaten. But sometimes I hear grumbling that Richard is turning more profit than they think is fair.”

“From who?” Uncle Herman put his hands on the table.

“Ju st.. . some people around here. Like that one kid who seems to run things—the one that wears the bulletproof vest. He’s always bringing in gold and things and throwing a tantrum when he leaves.”

“You just told me you didn’t think it had anything to do with the business.”

“Well. You give teenagers guns, and see what kind of businessmen you get. They can’t afford a new video game, they shoot people until they have enough money for it.”

Uncle Herman asked if Dad had ever associated with either of the two gangs.

Mom said no.

Uncle Herman said, “Everyone has to pick a side down here.”

“‘Down here?”’ Mom flared up again. “Is that what you learned after fifteen years on the gang unit? How to sum us up like that? You change your zipcode and all of a sudden you’re Confucius? Do you write all these golden sayings down on Post-Its to try and pay for your drinks?” 110

He threw up his hands. “I don’t even know why I came.” He got up and hobbled to the door.

Mom followed him. “Herman, Herman. Just admit to me that you’re jealous of

Richard and the money he makes and then you can ask me all the questions you want. It sounds like I’m being cruel but you’re the one who’s being unreasonable.”

“So much money, and yet he can’t move his family out of the hood.”

“Home is home,” she said. “Can’t expect you to understand that.”

Uncle Herman stopped at the door, turned, and took his sister’s hands.

“Lise, I wish to God I knew why. Why you defend a man who should be in jail.”

She said that it was obvious why, and shook her hands free.

He threw the door open, said to me, “And you, kid. You deserve better than this.”

He left and slammed the door. His cane clicked rapidly in the hall.

I said, “You know he was helping.”

“I know,” Mom said. “I just forgot how arrogant he can be about things like this.”

She started to cry. “Oh Richard,” she wailed. “Oh Richard. Oh Richard,” she wailed. I put my arm around her for a second but the puddle between her elbows kept growing. It was clear I couldn’t console her sufficiently. I was powerless to stop my mother’s tears, find my father, or help Uncle Herman. I went to the window again. The sun finally choked out. Uncle Herman’s parting words bugged me. It felt as if he’d set fire to the place but opened the window for me. I decided to go visit my girl in the next building over. As I left I turned on the lights for Mom and locked the door. Ill

I got into the elevator and went down to the ground floor. It was pretty busy.

Tired women in nurse’s scrubs coming home from the swing shift and children laden with sacks of groceries. A few loiterers, as always: the mental case over by the mailboxes, who glared at me and spat something incomprehensible, as his shoulders and hips jerked up and down; and the baby-faced dope peddlers just outside. I’m comforted by their eternal presence. If things ever look irretrievably bleak, I know I can shamble up to them and they will guide me gently to a warm mattress, massage the soft blue creek in my arm, and leave me in a perfect blankness. They would even give me the first one on the house, knowing that nobody ever takes a test drive and then walks away. Not yet.

The courtyard was always dark and chilly, surrounded by tenements on four sides.

They were identical, thirty story concrete faces, bullet-pocked and tagged with names, crews, obscenities, remembrances of dead friends. In a thousand years they would be unearthed and studied like steles in the desert. The rivals each claimed two of the buildings, and if you didn’t want any trouble you had to walk briskly around the circumference of the central courtyard, your hands firmly in your pockets and your eyes on your feet. Rarely did they kick up dust anymore, though. Too many of them lived here on these few acres, and any incursion would be bringing war to their own homes. They preferred instead to fight it out on the numbered blocks, and be able to map out their incremental gains and losses. Here was where they ate and fucked and slept and raised their children. 112

Two men in neon vests and hard hats were maneuvering surveying equipment into place, and I felt indignant at the prospect of someone tearing down these tenements.

There was a little relief there, too, then shame. Who was I to say I hated my home? That I was better than all my two-job neighbors who got five hours of sleep a night and praised

God?

I went up to the twenty-second floor of Building C and she opened the door for me. Her father squeezed my shoulder in solidarity as he put on his uniform. He told his daughter that he would bring breakfast tomorrow and that he loved her, and then left for his overnight. She moved aside her finished homework, pulled me onto the couch with her and we kissed for a while. I felt guilty while Dad was missing, smelling her clean body and moving my hands in and out of her hair. But I didn’t see what I could do about it right this minute. And I hadn’t seen her in almost a week, and I missed the comfort of their apartment. Even though the layout was identical to ours, they had purchased modest but matching furniture and kept it tidy. She would laugh at me staring at their things: sheets of Forever stamps stored neatly in envelopes, pots and pans hanging from wooden pegs over the sink. All our money went into Mom’s Mercedes payments and Dad’s elaborate NFL parlays, so our apartment was furnished with sidewalk cast-offs. But coming over here was like opening one of those HUD pamphlets: “This is what’s possible, if you take pride in your home!” Dad called them “uppity” and Mom said that they could waste their time winning “Best Apartment in the Ghetto Warzone” if they wanted. What was most impressive was how they did this without a mother in the picture. 113

My girl had come home from school one day to find the Christmas presents jar emptied of its coins and small bills, the good luggage gone and one side of the closet cleaned out.

When my girl had climbed on top of me and turned off the light, something occurred to me. A looted store and a vanished Dad? Maybe the answer was simpler than I thought.

She could tell my mind was elsewhere. She turned on the light and took my hands, asking what was wrong. I told her the story and she pulled me to my feet roughly.

“So you leave your mom to come over here? How vile you boys are. Go back home.

Don’t make me feel like this.”

I thought about what Uncle Herman might say. “I just don’t want to leave my girl alone at night,” I said.

She threw my shirt at me and crossed her arms as I put it back on. “Nobody buys that fake macho shit anymore. Go home.”

One of the armed thugs, the one that liked to walk with his thumbs hooked into the shoulders of a Kevlar vest, stopped me roughly on my way back across the spotlit courtyard. “Hey, it’s little Valois Junior. Tell your pops that instead of paying me less for distinctive items, he should fence them out of state. That’s part of his job description, am

I right? Can you deliver that message?”

Him calling me “Junior” got me angry, which never happened before. “Tell him yourself,” I said. “If you can find him.” He looked confused at that, enough for me to hurry home before he remembered to thrash me. 114

The head case was still hanging around the building lobby, but he’d calmed down and was whispering at a bush. The surveyors were gone.

I went up and opened our door. “Hey.” Mom snapped at me. “Where have you been? How can you leave your poor mother alone at a time like this? Over at your little girlfriend’s place? I hope you said your goodbyes to each other. We’re leaving—we’re not safe here any more.” I hadn’t even packed but Mom was eyes deep in her paranoia and had long since abandoned reason.

Someone knocked on the door. Mom shrieked a little and ran around the corner, motioning for me to answer it. I didn’t move from where I stood until a voice called from behind the door. It was Uncle Herman. I let him in.

It turned out his car battery had died, so he had to use the phone to call somebody.

Mom, her mortal fear forgotten, began to berate him again as he dialed.

Mom yelled, “This is just like you. You could just admit you need help, and ask me for jumper cables, but instead you want to use our phone to call to tow your jalopy away. What a misguided self-reliance kick you’re on! Not even mentioning the pity you seem to expect.” She had brought the packed duffel bag into the kitchen where it sat on the table.

Uncle Herman apologized to the phone for the noise on his end, and then gave the address and hung up. He turned to her, looking older than I’d ever seen him. Then he spoke the thought that had occurred to me at my girl’s place. 115

“Lise. Lise. Since you couldn’t possibly get any angrier, I’ll say it now: maybe he went under his own power.”

Mom slapped him. After twenty years of wielding spades and gardening forks on lawns in the North Side, her palms were armored, and Uncle Herman’s flesh was as pliant as tar. The sound echoed off our cheap walls and I staggered back from the force of it.

Uncle Herman looked down, his cheek blood red. A strange smile spread across his mouth.

“Just means you know I’m right.”

“It sounds like you want me to slap you again.” She brought her hand back like a tennis racquet.

“It fits everything you saw at the store. Think about it.”

“No. I don’t have to think about it.” She told me to pick up the bag.

Uncle Herman looked so tired. “Lise—one last time. You don’t know where it is?”

“Don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Mom opened the door and stepped into the hall.

Uncle Herman sank down in a chair, finally worn out. He put his cane against the wall and rubbed his temples. I followed Mom out. I didn’t think we should be leaving. I didn’t think Uncle Herman was quite right-Dad wouldn’t just leave us-but maybe something had scared him away. Maybe he’d seen something in the street, taken all the money he could, and bolted. 116

Something bubbled in the dark lake of my mind. Our hallway was shaped like an

“H,” with one filthy elevator in the crossbar. We lived at the base of one of the legs. It was lit poorly from a few fixtures above every other door, and it was oddly quiet.

Normally there was a dim roar at all hours, the sounds of cooking and friendly yelling.

Mom moved swiftly down the hall and I was still trying to figure out what was bothering me. “Keep up, Junior,” she screeched. We rounded the corner and Mom hit the call button.

I asked her if it was really a good idea to be leaving, since Dad might call.

“He’s not calling anybody. We’re on our own, now.” She wiped away a tear.

Then my thought surfaced: Uncle Herman, when giving the address to the tow truck over the phone, had also given the apartment number. But why would they need to know that?

The elevator arrived and the door opened. Two men in hard hats and neon vests were inside already, and they stepped back to give us room. The same men from the courtyard. They were not looking at us but both looking vaguely at their feet. Something was screaming at me that this was wrong, something was wrong. My palms turned clammy and the hallway suddenly seemed very dark and empty.

Mom stepped forward and I grabbed her hand without thinking.

“Wait,” I said, thinking furiously. “I left my wallet in the apartment.”

“Wallet? You don’t have any money worth a damn.” One of the men folded his burly arms in front of his chest.

“Just—let’s just go back for a second, okay?” 117

I pulled and heaved at Mom’s arms until the elevator doors closed, and I strained to listen to it over Mom’s complaints. It was not moving in either direction. The men had not pushed a button. It was still waiting for us. I dragged Mom back in the direction of the apartment. We rounded the comer again and Uncle Herman was standing in front of our door. He had the same blank expression on his face as the surveyors in the elevator.

He seemed to be standing very straight, and all his exhaustion had vanished. My nagging feeling of danger still had not passed.

“Something occurred to me,” Uncle Herman said, taking slow steps towards us. “I guess my thinking was completely off about this diamond thing.”

“What? What? What diamond thing?” Mom asked. She had become quite still, too, finally sensing the same thing I did. I put the bag down and sort of positioned myself a little in front of Mom.

“I mean the Richard thing. It wasn’t in the safe, it wasn’t on Richard. And I know it was too distinctive to find a buyer. So I thought it had to be at your place. But it wasn’t.

So then I started to doubt my theory altogether.”

“Uncle Herman?” I said. “I think you should stop right there.” I had no clue what was going on but his dazed expression was scaring me.

Uncle Herman looked at me. “But then my assistants overheard what Mr. Kevlar said to you outside just now, and took him aside and . . . confirmed the story. So Richard lied to me when he said he'd never seen the thing. And that leaves one place I never checked. See, of course Richard could provide for the family. But to go out to nice 118

restaurants, his woman would need to wear jewels that were up to the occasion, right?

The things in your jewelry box were all crap—fake opals and chains that would rust if you breathed on them. So I have one final question for you, my sweet, sweet sister. Where’s the diamond he gave you last week?”

“The diamond?” Mom breathed, her hand instinctively going to her neck, hidden by her sweater.

“Ahh,” Uncle Herman said, his voice barely above a whisper. “It was perfect, really. No need to fence a gift. And the engraved initials—too perfect! LV—Lise Valois. If old lady Elizabeth had gone by her full name, she would have saved my time and

Richard’s blood and I’d have found the damn thing in the safe. Well, that’s okay. I’m charging them by the day, and this is overtime we’re in right now. And taking Mr. Kevlar off the streets is another thousand bucks in my pocket.” He was close now, and was holding out his hands to his sister.

“Give it to me,” he croaked. “There were two things that poor girl lost that night, and I can at least restore one of them to her.”

Mom was backing away but slowly, too slowly, not believing what was happening. Her brother’s hands landed on her shoulders, and began slowly peeling down her turtleneck. When I could see in the dirty light the faintest glint of pure silver against her wrinkled neck, Uncle Herman’s face contorted and he hooked his fingers into it and pulled. Mom shrieked and yelled for help. Then his other hand came up and his thumb nestled into the hollow of her throat, cutting off her voice. 119

“Lise,” he spat. “This is how I make my money.”

I dove for the bag, opened it, and in five seconds I had the gun free and loaded.

Mom was making a gurgling sound and she was going limp in his hands. I scampered around and pointed the gun at Uncle Herman’s good knee. I was two feet away.

There was the sound of a balloon popping and my face felt wet. Two heavy forms fell on the ground beside me.

“Oh son,” Uncle Herman cried. “Oh son.” When he reached for me I put another one in his shoulder. After that he pushed himself back to sit against the wall and started making a wet rattling noise from his chest.

I dropped the gun and got Mom to her feet. The blue was clearing out of her face but her eyes were not focusing correctly. The elevator door dinged and the two surveyors stepped out. When they saw the scene both of their hands dropped to their hips.

“No,” Uncle Herman cried. “Don’t!” Then, to me: “Good job, kid. The diamond, though. You can do that for me, can’t you? These two men don’t have to make a mess here.”

I unlatched it from Mom’s heaving neck and threw it in his lap. It was so dim in the hall I couldn’t even tell it was a diamond. “Dad,” I said. “What did you do to him?”

Uncle Herman was breathing raggedly, and the two surveyors were helping him to his feet. Mom had regained herself and she fell against him, slapping and hitting him, weeping and asking what he had done to her husband, what had he done to her love? 120

Uncle Herman, with his one good arm, tucked the pendant safely in his pocket,

and then pushed his sister away before answering my question. “Nothing you want filling

in the empty spaces of your dreams. But he got everything he deserved. I saved your

lives, you know.” And then they left.

Later I would understand Uncle Herman was right. He had saved our lives. The

Vandenbergs had put out a massive reward on the pendant, in addition to hiring Uncle

Herman. If he hadn’t found it first around Mom’s neck, someone would have figured out where it had to be and we’d all be clubbed to death in a home invasion. Dad would’ve been dead either way. His fate was sealed the moment those thugs pawned off on him that girl’s jewelry like a live grenade. I try to tell Mom this but she still won’t get out of bed, won’t stop crying, asking God what had she done, what had she done to deserve a

family like the one she had? 121

Negative Five in the Shade

The week before Christmas, Shannon Triplett Real Estate plants a sign in the

Minasian’s overgrown yard and Talia’s Honda reappears in the driveway. Years on

Broadway have paid off, and she got the call-up to Hollywood. So she came back upstate to sell the empty house.

First, I call Halloran to meet me in the park. While I wait, I practice what I’ll say to her. Something like: I’m good enough for you now.

I have much more but even the rehearsal paralyzes me and I keel over behind some bushes. As my cheek hits the snow, I ponder love cliches. They’re meaningless now, sure, but what if we all at once agreed to reset them? If one could again say to his gal, “I’ll love you forever” or “I’d die without you” and her corsage would tremble and she’d go pale and ask, “Really? You really mean it?” as her ovaries fired off everything they got? I wish simple lines still worked. These days it seems you need a foreign language and a birthstone ring just to get a date.

Halloran finds me prone. I see him coming a long way off. Years ago he contracted hepatitis and a valve infection and now wears a bright yellow jacket so his jaundice blends. He props me up and I fill him in on the situation.

“Um, congrats?” he says. “I hope you find happiness together?” He rummages in his deep pockets, kneels down, and gives me twenty reds. There’s a slim hesitation before his fingers open but they do. Just in time, too-my thighs are seizing as if trying to retract 122

into my hips. I guide a capsule through my throat, then open wide my grinning mouth to show him. Halloran watches my body slowly relax and respond to commands again.

“You should see a doctor,” he says. “There’s nothing recreational about how you do it.”

I shake my head no, but that centrifugal force knocks some nerves loose and I vomit, at length, into the shrubbery. When I’m finished, I wipe my mouth with some grass. A joke occurs to me, and I ask if he wants to hear it. It’s a good one, about a clown and a bloody teddy bear.

“Jesus Christ,” Halloran says. “Jesus Christ. You need help. Like real help. I hope you know that.”

“Thank you,” I say. And I mean it—out of everyone I know, only Halloran ever looks me in the eyes.

The best place for my love confession would be a Beach, or a Rooftop Garden.

But the closest thing we have is the Flat Spot behind the Regional Airport, which consists of two paved runways and a glass spotter hut. Sitting in my car I can see for miles in every direction. Nothing to interrupt the view of nothing. Empty fields. Snow covered for two months on both sides of Christmas. I’m aware that beyond them are things like cities and riots and foreigners. There’s a deep solace in knowing I won’t be called upon to figure those out. Tiny planes take off and land but they’re like house flies: they just circle and come home. This is the place I’ll bring her. 123

But Talia doesn’t stop by, doesn’t even call. Although I’m in the same house, haven’t moved since eighth grade, the same return address on the letters I’ve sent her.

Mom says she’d love to see Talia again. I say she’ll stop by for sure. She says I’d better run a wet comb through my hair first. I say she’d better take a bleach bath to get out that smell. She says I’d better get a job and fix that lazy eye. I say I’m the only thing keeping her from dying alone. She says that street goes two ways. She says I’ll never get laid and that Talia has no clue the crazy that has gotten into me these past ten years.

Times like this I open up the real estate section and loudly narrate my search for rentals. Not that I have the income to back this bluff. But the aspirational aspect is still healthy for me. This little performance calms Mom, too—I’ll admit I’m not the easiest person to put up with, rent-free.

Then I come across the Minasian house on R3. It’s listed far, far below its value.

Talia wants to get rid of it fast. It won’t last long; that house is the finest one in that white-haired zip code, the part of town that votes down school taxes, where passing cop cars roll up their windows out of respect. Their holiday lights are better, too: instead of neon yellow, red, and blue numbers, blown up candy canes and hollow yard Rudolphs, each arbor vitae is wrapped with soft white orbs in perfect Fibonacci spirals.

The last time I was allowed in was first grade. At that age it was normal to be dirty so I eluded Mr. Minasian’s sterile gaze. But he soon caught on that the source of my filth was not athletic, but economic. After school, in the middle of homework, I 124

understood when he grabbed his daughter’s arm, brought her into the other room, and they emerged united against me.

Talia at least had shame in her cheeks.

I could go up and knock on her door. I should do it. But even after death Mr.

Minasian terrifies me. I know him at his bedroom window, forbidding me to ride my bike an inch onto his driveway. Revenant malice leaks from the transoms and cascades over the eaves.

So I wait for her, chomping on Halloran’s red capsules. She deserves a man as heroic as her father had been. I patrol neighborhoods in the bluest, starchiest shirt I own, looking to help people in need. I look for cats in trees or baseballs stuck in haunted yards, but every child becomes sullen when I approach. They look like they haven’t been told enough jokes in their lives. At supermarket parking lots I watch for the overburdened. On a corner porch an old mute lady sits and watches me walk my rounds. Eventually she catches my eye and points furiously at a sign that says We Watch Our Neighborhood; she means my freelancing is noble but unnecessary. I call out that you can’t be too safe these days. She retrieves a phone from inside and holds it out meaningfully. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I say. “I’m here to help.”

Sometimes parked behind Talia’s Honda is a BMW that I don’t recognize. It’s certainly not anything Talia’s father would’ve been caught dead driving—it’s bright and flashy with a vanity plate that reads PMPNDRT. There’s no way I can scan that into decency. 125

Late one night I watch two figures get out of the BMW. I can’t see well from where I am, but one of them might be Talia; the other one a stranger to me. They stumble into the house. Lights turn on, then off. Upstairs, they turn on, then off.

* * *

One thing about those “reds,” as I so suspiciously call them. Don’t worry; I don’t truck with felonious substances. It’s something you’ve all heard of; it doesn’t have a cryptic nickname or a quotable street price. It is harmless and old-fashioned. As illegal as a pay phone or Ford tailfms.

It would benefit from rebranding. I can see the TV spots: a young man, beset in a lurid cityscape by grotesque, garbled co-workers and family. He lifts up his gaze to a softly lit billboard of a baby fast asleep in a cradle.

And then, a slow cataract of red capsules, with feminine soothing voiceover: “It’s not just for housewives and neurotics. Everybody needs escape.” Cut back to the man, now at a crowded birthday party for an infant. Adults and children careen about the screen, holding cake and presents, trying to wrangle each other into order. The medicated man sits, in perfect repose, with a bemused smile. He looks down, where the birthday boy lies sleeping in a bassinet. The sound fades until all you can hear is the baby’s breathing.

In, and out, like purring. “Ask your doctor about. ..”

* * *

In my years of fantasizing about Talia I was always careful not to idealize her. I know she can’t solve my problems. I just like thinking about her. I think about her like 126

this: she rips up her ticket to Burbank, calls Shannon Triplett, tells her to get bent. Then she slides her hands behind and around me, under my coat, and pushes her face up to mine. Afterwards, she asks me to move in with her, into her dead father’s house, with all its fireplaces.

“What about the movies? What about your dreams?” I’d ask, since I was sensitive to her needs.

She opens her mouth with a romantic and self-empowering response but I haven’t figured out those words yet.

* * *

Sunday there’s an open house. Talia and her companion are gone for the weekend. At dawn they lash their skis onto the roof of the BMW and drive off. Then

Shannon arrives and spends the morning ferrying inside pebble-filled vases and coordinating the maids’ assault on the house, armed with vacuums and Febreze.

I can think of many ways to sabotage the day, all of them beneath me: uproot the sign or scratch out Shannon Triplett’s cardboard eyes. Set off cherry bombs with a semi­ automatic cadence. Phone the house with shrieking obscenities for anyone who picks up.

Scatter syringes in the grass. Puncture the gas line with a nail and kink the dryer vent hose. Dig cadaver-sized mounds under the porch and scent them with compost. But these are just crazy.

“Have you been standing here all day?” Halloran asks me. 127

“Huh?” I’d forgotten I’d called him. I look down at the discus-circle I’ve worn into the grass in the shade of the big elm across from Talia’s house. My body realizes the cold. My feet throb and my ears feel sliced open. I’ve run out of the reds that loop my nerves into lassoes that select what I feel. Without them, everything is rushing in at once.

A creeping premonition that loneliness would not be the end, but only the first rung down.

“I don’t think I should give you any more,” Halloran says. “Maybe it’s time for a holiday.”

Sober, I am quick and full of wrath. My hands are around his throat like a reflex.

Halloran’s eyes go wide with surprise, and we tussle for a bit. Before we can resolve our transaction, a cop car approaches and slows. Halloran breaks loose, dashes his hands back into his pockets and strolls off.

“Sir. Hey, sir. Want to tell me what you’re doing out here?” A neighbor has called me in for loitering.

Over the cop’s shoulder, I see Shannon Triplett prop open the door and tie blue and white balloons around the doorknob. The open house is starting, and I don’t have time to pick up firecrackers. As I verbally spar with the officer, couples arrive for the open house, wearing competitive slacks and silver jewelry. They are curiously peering back at us.

Finally, I give the cop a genial shove, to let him know I have important things to do. That causes him to slam me to the ground, pin my neck with his knee, and speak into 128

his radio. The next three cars arrive in a hurry, their silent lights tripled in the bay

windows netted with Christmas bulbs.

I decide to struggle a little, and do a dolphin kick against the pavement. That gets

all the cops very excited and their voices become both panicked and strict. The ruckus

lures the couples out of the house, and Shannon Triplett is on the front step, watching me with an open mouth. I lock eyes with her and kick, and kick, and kick.

* * *

Whenever Mr. Minasian glared at me from his second-floor window I could not

see his legs. So when I passed that day, I’d only thought somehow he’d gotten a little

taller—thicker-soled shoes, or maybe a belt cinched higher. I looked up at his face. His

scowl was gone. At first I thought he had softened towards me, tempered his prejudices,

accepted that I was Talia’s one true love. But I was wrong.

He wasn’t really looking at me; or his eyes only happened on me. They were tensed and quivering, like alarm clocks primed. He made a motion like putting on a necktie.

I didn’t know. It was nothing any boy should have to know. But then, if I really had no clue, why would I look up and down the road, hoping to see anyone, a uniform, if not a cop a mailman would do, if not a garbageman would do? I could have run to the next house, used their phone. But I didn’t.

His mouth was moving too: his lower lip falling, then shutting, then falling. It looked as though he were saying “keep, keep, keep.” 129

My aunt once told me that a few minutes before the heart attack that killed my uncle, he got up from the breakfast table, went down into the basement, and turned off the light. They found him curled in the darkest corner. Some hindbrain impulse to keep the dead from the living.

He never wanted me in his house. I was not to intrude. “Keep out,” I decided he meant. So I kept out. Even after his body stopped flopping and resigned itself to the gentle pendulum. I wonder if he waited to do it until I came by, to fuck with me.

They stick me in a cell not unlike my uncle’s basement. The old familiar agony is flexing down my feet, cramping my fingers gray. Seasick though I’ve never been on water. Talia would know, though. She spent her girlhood summers captive on Lake

Placid, cresting swells on her father’s powerboat, and she came back thin, showing the snouts of her spine.

“If you’re always green,” he asked her. “How come he keeps taking you out there?”

“Because it makes him happy. And because I figured out the trick to the waves,” she said. She unwrapped a five dollar granola bar, and its turpentine sheen turned my stomach. “All I gotta do is think about something that makes me either cry or laugh. That takes my mind off the sick.”

So, not at the funeral or afterwards, I didn’t tell her. It would have ruined her clarity of feeling. Dad, suicide, sad. Just end the story there. We wouldn’t need poems or 130

novels if things were this blessedly simple. I lay curled on the cell bench and my stomach heaves up and down all night.

* * *

My starved synapses, upon realizing Halloran’s adjuncts are not forthcoming, revert to their native state. My scapula strain to meet each other. My feet lock downwards en pointe and my mother tries to release them by massaging my heel cords with her arthritic and gnarled fingers. She soaks my frostbitten toes in a baking pan filled with lukewarm Michelob, one of Grandma’s hick remedies. She rubs Crisco on my wrists, torn by the handcuffs.

All the while she begs me to stop. To please do something else. “She doesn’t want you.”

Delirious with pain, I say, “ Because this isn’t love. Not yet.”

* * *

A miracle: a small stash of reds, inside my pillowcase. Enough to mobilize me out the door one night. I make it to Talia’s just in time to see the two figures pull up and enter the house.

I’m lucky that in their drunkenness they forget to lock the door. In the dark I bump into a chair, then a small table that rattles. Then the stairs. By the third step I can hear the rhythmic rasp of bedsprings. By the eighth I hear syncopated mm’s and oo’s. At the bedroom door I hear the panting. I knock. The panting stops. 131

Someone wearing Mr. Minasian’s bathrobe flings open the door. He is slickly

erect.

“Who the fuck are you?” he says. “How did you get in here?”

Before I can answer he gets me in a chokehold and we rush down the stairs and

out the front door. He hurls me out into the snow. My head hits a patch of ice and I get so

dizzy I throw up. I moan Talia’s name.

Mr. Minasian, or his strapping reanimation, pauses. He calls into the house.

“Who is it?” And from inside, is that her voice like a landing seaplane? And is

she, herself, approaching, like warm atomic fallout?

I am still supine in the snow. I grab a handful of it to clean my lips and try to get

to my feet, but I am too concussed to stand, and woozy from the long expired reds, and

wholly unprepared to meet her. I swoon like a dame.

I wake to Mr. Minasian slapping me awake. Talia is standing behind him, her

arms crossed.

Even out of makeup and in her baggiest NYU sweatshirt with her hair tied up

she’s the sort of beautiful that baffles you, like a detective with a bloodless body in a

room locked from the inside. I try to piece together exactly how she had come into being,

in a frozen place like this.

I fully intend to get up and hug her but all I manage is a violent flop on her living room rug.

She recoils. “Why are you here?” 132

I don’t trust my mouth to form the words quite yet. Mr. Minasian props me against the fireplace.

Talia asks me again why I am in her house. It is not how I pictured it would go, paraplegic and leaking snow from my waistband like piss, but I admit it: I heard she was selling the house and I want to follow her wherever she goes.

Mr. Minasian laughs. “He’s adorable,” he says.

I keep going. I, who have never stood up for anything in my life, tell her I would die fulfilled as her fridge-opener, meter-feeder, Tylenol-counter, DVD-ejector, ice cube tray-flexer, battery-tester, bottle-recycler—

She cuts me off, levitating with rage and revulsion. “Love me? Look at yourself,”

Talia cries. She yells at me about many things—my addictions, my filth, my fulfillment of all her father’s dire predictions. To my surprise and mortification, she brings up the time I said “Excedrin” instead of “et cetera.” That I still live with my mother and sleep in my pubertal bed. Molly Paulsen told her so. As she talks, she paces back and forth, really using the space, showing off all she’s learned on Broadway. In one of her interviews she talks about the difference between stage and screen, and how in front of a camera you need to do less, less, less; but on stage you have to always be pulling faces and speaking from your core. That’s what she’s doing now. She speaks so forcefully her spit lands on my cheek, and my fingers go up and save the spot. She’s very wonderful at acting—I would love her to show me her reel.

“I don’t think he’s listening,” Mr. Minasian says. 133

“Get him out,” she says.

Mr. Minasian opines that I’d freeze to death outside.

“Then he should move somewhere warm,” she says. Mr. Minasian deposits me once more in the snow and I reflect on her invitation.

* * *

Sold Christmas Eve. A cute couple, with two dogs. I see them with Talia, shaking hands in the yard.

I run into her father behind the curtain at Blockbuster. He looks up from Bikini

Beach Apocalypse III: Bombshells. “Hey, it’s the retard,” he says, breaking into a wide smile.

“Hello, Mr. Minasian,” I say.

His smile flattens into displeasure. “Buddy, you gotta stop calling me that. We just fool around sometimes. Plus, why would I take her name?”

I ask if Talia has mentioned me at all.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “You’re not getting anywhere by acting like a creep. But I can tell you’re not going to give up. I get it—you two go way back. And who knows? Maybe you’re what she really wants. She’s only slumming it with me, you dig? Like she’s researching a role. Like she’s gonna play some broad who gets slapped around every night, and thinks if she makes fun of me enough, calls me dumb enough, I’ll give her the guided tour. She thinks I’m some lowlife.” He takes his hand off 134

my shoulder and looks down at the porn in his hand. Then he nods his head to some

question I hadn’t asked. “Maybe I am. But I would never.”

He grips my shoulder again, squeezes it warmly. He takes from the shelf the

sequel to Bombshells, which is called Repopulation, and goes to the register.

* * *

I miss Halloran. One time early on, he had offered me Vitamin D tablets, on the

house. “There’s no sun here,” he said. Then, under his breath: “I hate this place.”

* * *

I encounter Mr. Minasian again real quick. He strolls out Talia’s door and aims

himself at me. The last of my stash goes down my throat. I feel equal to him.

“Buddy, it isn’t adorable any more,” he says, striding through the tall grass. As he

raises his hands to throttle me, he stumbles a little, and yelps in pain. He looks down and

yanks a syringe from his foot.

We both stare at it. Other things occur to me—I dig in my pockets and find a

handful of cherry bombs. A thin trail of smoke rises from a side window, the laundry

room. For a few unbelieving seconds, we watch as the smoke infects the bedroom above.

Inside the house Talia started to scream. Now, screams can have the nuance of

consommes, gins, or farts. This one, from a woman trapped in a room with fire—well. It’s

a scream that claws the throat. A screeching mic curbstomped against the amp, tripling feedback banshees. It’s a sound that incites every muscle you got—bowel, bladder, iris, gullet. 135

Me and Mr. Minasian look at each other. The front door belched forth flame so we dash around to the back. I stick my foot before his ankle and he tumbles face first into the snow. I follow up with the People’s Elbow and in this way attain the servant’s door first. Before I burst through, I see two shallow graves underneath the porch. Have I been this productive?

The fire has not yet claimed the kitchen but I halt at the foot of the stairs. The smoke obscures everything above the fifth step. Move, I say. But I balk, all open to the heat. The hairs on my cheeks fold. Certain death up there.

I have knelt down and offered up in both hands the cheap shards of my life to her.

I am polystyrene, I am packing peanut, and she is pure blown glass. But I can’t die here. I try to call her name but emit only a clicking sound.

Mr. Minasian appears beside me. True blue, he covers his nose with his sleeve and charges up the stairs, leaving me at the bannister. He disappears into the wilderness. I hear him kicking open doors and yelling her name. With a swell, I recognize myself in him. My role here is not actor, but progenitor, witness.

I retreat through the kitchen, where the ceiling bows down and blackens. The old sickness is coming back, but for good this time. I step out into the snow, which is creeping back from the hot house, revealing young grass, a premature spring. 136

The Future Queen

Allie’s nine-year old sister took judo biweekly at the mall but since their mother got Lasiked she was immobilized by night haloes and headaches, so Allie and her learner’s permit ferried Cassidy. And for an hour, as Cassidy tossed down boys twice her weight, Allie circumnavigated the sleepy mall alone.

Southern Hills was a long tunnel of ailing coat factories, CD stores, and candy shops, anchored on one end by a three dollar cinema and on the other a place called

“Frozen Ropes Academy,” from which came the sound of an icy blacksmith forge, some

Nordic hell. The ticket asshole would not sell her R-rated, so she drifted towards the center food court, dinnerless.

It was getting on eight pm and most of the stores were shut. In the drugstore, she pocketed two lipsticks and asked the cashier’s opinion on the third. She smoked in a coin­ operated spaceship, waiting for a reprimand. She eyed two solo shoppers hustling out of the dollar store.

Only the food court made money, and with good reason. There was a Burger

King, an Orange Julius, an unnamed but great kebab stall, and her favorite Baskin

Robbins.

Allie walked up and Edgar Vreeland said hi and pulled a mint chocolate chip for her, which he always did. He was half French and a year older than Allie, and after graduation was enlisting in the Navy. Before him she ate as if she weren’t starving.

“I guess I won’t see you ever again,” Allie said. 137

“You could join up,” Edgar said.

Allie laughed and said, “No girls allowed.”

“That’s not true.”

She changed the subject; they talked about all the stuff he’d have to leave behind, all the places he’d see. About Malta, about Japan, places that to Allie seemed covered in mist. Real but locked away.

“They send you all those places?”

“Most of them,” Edgar said. “You want to see them? You’d cut it. We want a woman like you, that can scrap.”

He was dead wrong, of course. Allie got seasick, and didn’t believe in war. But she liked that he called her ‘woman,’ and she let this boy parlez-vous and innovate and channel her life down romantic, idiotic paths. Her mother hadn’t even asked her what she wanted to do after high school.

Edgar folded his arms on the glass and rested his chin on them, appraising her, seeing what she thought. Cold green meltwater snaked over her knuckles, but she didn’t dare move.

“I’d go,” she said, not even meaning it until his face clamored with joy. She imagined a dress white ceremony off Gibraltar with a cannon salute.

Edgar said, “That’s—that’s great! Wow! You won’t regret it. So, technically only I get the referral bonus, not the recruit, but since we’re kind of friends, does twenty percent sound fair? Two hundred bucks?” 138

Once, at a restaurant, Allie had taken a wrong turn to the bathroom and burst into the kitchen, where three brawny chefs were horsing around with a slab of beef. “Get out, you little brat,” one had yelled.

Another customer arrived at Edgar’s counter and she made her escape, but he called after her, “Twenty-five percent?”

On the opposite end of the food court, in front of the Burger King, an ancient woman sat with a plain hamburger and kid size fries. $1.59, a meal that could be paid reasonably in coins. The woman was old, very old. Her sturdy handbag nested in her lap.

No shopping bags around her—she had come here alone, to the second-rate mall, for her dinner. The food wrappers neatly crimped and folded. A plastic cup of cold water. She pressed French fries one by one into her mouth, staring at closed and locked storefront grates.

Allie looked at her until she could not. At the far end of the concourse, the doors to Frozen Ropes banged open and a troop of buzz cutted sophomore Gruppenfuhrer emerged with aluminum bats and predatory jaws. She wavered in the recirculating air.

Behind her stalked a small girl in a gi, her hands out in claws, to show her all the moves she'd learned, going for the throat and the weak places. 139

9/11, the Military-Industrial Complex, and Me

But why gussy it up? This is what really happened: no edited conversation, no clever gender switch.

When I was sixteen, that age so fucking magical I wanted to cast invisibility spells on everyone else, I fell in love for the first and best time.

She lived two towns north. She hated her real name E— and went by J— . She was promised to the Navy after graduation.

J— was very pretty. Even when not long ago I Facebook stalked her, I still marveled at how pretty she was. When I showed other people these images I asked,

“Right? Right?”

I had a photo of her. This was not a foxhole photo she gave me before shipping out. I’d got it from my friend, who went to the same school as her, who had it for some innocent reason. I knew a kid once who went to the bathroom the same period every day so he could walk by a certain classroom, peek through the window in the door, and glimpse a certain girl for exactly two seconds a day. That was his church. But me and J—

- went to different schools and all I had was this photo. In it she is wearing jeans and a white shirt. She is leaning forward to get her face into the group. I loved her so truly I did not dare to defile her with even my imagination. I just held the photo. In this way she purified me. 140

Don’t misunderstand—we went on actual dates. I drove an hour to treat her to a sundae at a place called Holy Cow. When she was in my car I tried to impress her by showing how I could stop at a light without the car rocking back. “Oh . . . cool,” she’d said. I remember exactly what I wore, fourteen years ago. I wore a bright salmon pink button-down and sharp corduroys, despite the upstate heat. These were my aspirational clothes, clothes that in my mind a confident guy would wear. Because we went to different schools she didn't know the truth.

I made her a mix CD. The only song she said she liked was “Muffin Man” by

Frank Zappa (“Girl, you thought he was a man / but he was a muffin”). I loved her more for that: instead of all the weepy ballads popular back then, she picked one where Zappa just slays. We talked on the phone for hours at a time. My mom would get mad that a girl was distracting me from school, and my dad would get mad that he couldn’t use the modem.

One of our dates was at the Naval Recruitment Office, where she had to report once a week. They didn’t do much: a little PT to ease her into the groupthink, pushups and marching and salutes. J— could do one hundred pushups in a row but her bust was still petite. I just stood there and watched her bandy around with the other recruits. I thought her inviting me to watch her do Navy stuff indicated how much she wanted to just be near me. Like if we’d gone grocery shopping or to the gas station together.

There’s romance in that. 141

She even asked me, her eyes sheepish and hopeful, if I wanted to enlist with her.

From a person who can do one hundred pushups, this was a high compliment. From the person I loved, this was tantamount to proposal.

I was going to college in Illinois, though. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life yet. The military scared me with its term requirements, its insistence on discipline, and the guns. But—but! There was a big Navy base on Lake Michigan, not far from where I’d be. She would be stationed there for at least a year. We could reenact the baby boomer years: she’d take the train down on a weekend pass to see me, I’d be studying English or Writing in my dormitory, and we’d neck or canoodle and she’d get me pregnant and I’d stand at the pier, waving and weeping as the battleship steamed off.

It was 2003. The War in Afghanistan was chugging along, and the War in Iraq was getting hyped. Reserves were getting called up. Troops surged. Army and Navy commercials interrupted every Mets game. There was a hefty bonus for any recruit who brought someone else to enlist. A bouncer might not let one hot girl cut the line, but he definitely would let four. The bonus was some thousands of dollars. There’s money to be had in the armed forces—a real gravy train.

Right before our last summer she asked me again if I wanted to join up. She asked me with some urgency.

I said no. As much as it killed me, I couldn’t join the friggin’ Navy. But I’d looked up how to write her: I needed to know her ship and her division number. Would she go by J— or E— Was she an ensign, or a seaman, or a seawoman? I’d like to meet 142

her parents, too; I’d bring them pies and cookies and we’d assemble care packages together. I was going to ask for a photo, to make it official.

Instead, she gave a big sigh and said something along the lines of, if you weren’t going to join up, why did you lead me on like that? Soon after I found out about the referral bonus. I did feel guilty that she could’ve spent our time more profitably with someone else. These days you can get referral credit with Uber, with Lyft, with Caviar.

Caviar gives you fifteen dollars for every new customer that uses your code. People post their codes on coupons.com for strangers and accumulate bonuses very quickly. In San

Francisco, pints of black sesame or taro ice cream can be delivered to your door. On the

Caviar website there is an option to tip the courier beforehand, but what if the ice cream comes all melted and you’ve already tipped the guy four dollars? How much of a pathetic idiot does that make you? 143

The Lion of N-Judah

“The medium is the message. ” -Marshall McLuhan

“With all due respect. . . that idea ain ’t worth a velvet painting o f a whale and a dolphin gettin ’ it on. ” -Ricky Bobby

“I read epigraphs and think, ‘Well, now you ’re just showing off how well read you are. -Roxane Gay

Brandon was only on page ten of my spec script and he had already depleted two

red pens. I nervously polished his name placard. Next to a picture of his wife and

daughter there was one of John Larroquette. On page eleven he looked up and kneaded

his temples with his thumbs.

I asked him what he thought.

Brandon asked, “Didn’t the scriptwriting software I bought you come with a style

manual?”

I had forgotten all about his Christmas present. I admitted that I had used a free

word processor and hit Tab a lot.

“Okay.” His eye twitched. He held up two fingers. “First, don’t put yourself in your own pilot.” He rotated my script and pushed it towards me over his desk. He circled

a block of text. “Second, this part made me very incredibly furious. Can you guess why?”

What I had written:

INT. GAS STATION CONVENIENCE STORE - PRE-DAWN. 144

BOSTANAI walks down aisles of junk food in a daze. He looks both exhausted and wired, as if he had been up all night sequentially bumping fat gorilla fingers. Behind the register, the ATTENDANT is watching, on a mounted television, an infomercial about a BowFlex-like device, and taking copious notes. BOSTANAI grabs a package of gummy worms and opens the cold case door and reaches for a Snapple.

It’s Peach Iced Tea. The teacher’s lounge fridge had been well stocked of it, and as BOSTANAI stands in front of the open cooler, his fingers tracing the Snapple’s contours, he reflects on the last year. What had gone so wrong, that he would never again stand in front of his classroom’s open window in late afternoon, sipping the sweet drink, smelling the carbon off the hot asphalt, or listening to the war-whoops of sirens from the speed trap a block away? Surely the Board of Education would see his mistake for what it was—well, what was it? He hadn’t ruined permanently anyone’s life. Yes. That’s what he would say during the hearing. ‘I haven’t ruined anyone’s life—but if you overreact to this, you will ruin mine.’

If he were teaching thirty years ago—hell, five years ago—BOSTANAI would not have gotten any heat. School was school and teachers were teachers—they were not expected to be psychologists or social workers or surrogate parents or supportive big brothers. But now a teacher who insinuated himself in the student body was admired for his “initiative and compassion.” Who won the Escalante Award year after year? Mr.

Sykes, who not only brought in cupcakes during quiz days but sat out on his porch hosting trigonometry study sessions that were always well attended. Once he brought his 145

class out to the kickball field to teach them about right angles and Pythagoras. And the one time BOSTANAI tried to get involved, he gets slapped with a formal complaint from not one but four parents.

All he was trying to do was teach them the secret they needed to hear before they entered the hoary netherworld of adulthood. The secret that

BRANDON sets fire to the top margin with his lighter and the flames overtake

BOSTANAI’s spot on the page.

BRANDON

Do you see what’s wrong with trying to put THAT script...

BRANDON points at the smoking ashes on his fine oak desk.

BRANDON (CONT’D)

. . . on the SCREEN.

BOSTANAI

Hmm. Tits before the inciting incident, not after?

BRANDON stares agog for a moment, then pushes a button under his desk. The seat of

BOSTANAI’s armchair swings open like a trapdoor, sending him down a chute that deposits him—

EXT. MANHATTAN - AFTERNOON 146

—onto the sidewalk in the shadows of 30 Rockefeller. There are sounds of car

horns and distant jackhammers—a noisy jolt from BRANDON’s silent, padded office.

Pedestrians flow around him like he is a fire hydrant, or a bum. BOSTANAI lies for a moment, staring up into the dirty sky.

BOSTANAI

I forgot—it’s a network show. No tits allowed!

BOSTANAI gets to his feet and the chute in the side of the building opens again and he is hit in the groin by a package. CUE: O.S., a tuba blare. He coughs and coughs, then picks up the package and reads the note affixed to the twine. It reads: “I nearly forgot. This is for your mother’s birthday, from her favorite nephew (or favorite kin, period).”

BOSTANAI

Shit, that’s right. Mom’s birthday.

BOSTANAI consults a nearby newspaper rack, wiping the grime from the window with his sleeve to peer at the date on the paper.

BOSTANAI

It’s in three days. Not even enough time to ride the rails to San Francisco. Unless .

INT. LIBRARY - AFTERNOON 147

The library is a vault of polished wood, marble stairs, and cloth bindings. It is mostly empty—a few women are resting their heads on a table, and an old white man pushes a cart filled with books in and out of the stacks. BOSTANAI stands on the second floor balcony, in the History/Fiction section, reading book titles by their spines. He selects one and opens it. It reads:

If I could I’d start a story with some half fact that sounds profound and spin on from there. I’d go: Once, “to read” meant “to guess.” And it’s not wrong—for what is the act of reading a book but a succession of quick stabs through a dark screen, to reveal the truth it hides? A short walk from my childhood home leads you past a small farm, then the tall iron fences of the College, and into the outskirts of the old city. The houses here have both crawl spaces and attics. There is enough space between neighbors that the smell of a skunk in one yard does not carry to the next. In 1998 a bruised woman ran past a gas station on Hooker Avenue in some distress. Two detectives in an unmarked car, who were handing out flyers with the picture of a woman who had disappeared the month before, stopped this woman and asked what had happened. She directed them towards the house of a man who had solicited her for sex, and once inside tried to strangle her. Luckily her fingernail connected with his eye and she was able to escape. As they approached the house, a heavyset man burst out of the door and made it fifty yards down the sidewalk before he was caught, handcuffed, and placed in the back seat as they searched the house. After some time they came back out and took him to the station. On the way, he said, “Some smell in there, isn’t it?” Neither of the detectives dared to even look at him. See, when they had entered the house and shone a light in the dark places . ..

Or,

Some Vedic Aryan people called themselves the Sindhu after the great river on which they lived. Alexander the Great clawed his way from Macedonia and arrayed his hoplite against their elephant. His Persians dropped the “S” and called them the Hindu. Hazy reports of these people 148

filtered even further west into Europe who dropped the “H” and called them the Ind, which became Indians, which is not what they call themselves but which is the word on all the maps. Even further west the Duke softened the “D” and a completely unrelated people became Injuns, which they are to this day, because some Vedic Aryan people lived by a river they called the Sindh. On a foggy quay in Gravesend stood a saffron-robed sannyasi awaiting his turn to board the steamer Marietta bound for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He had only the night before arrived on a Cape-rounded ship, having endured its tumultuous currents, and he felt as if he had emptied starboard everything he had ever eaten, meagre as his village diet had been. He wavered and stumbled over a plank into the shoulder of the man in front of him, who turned and shoved him roughly. “Gerroff, ya savage; I aim not to catch wot various ailments spill verily from your person.” The sannyasi threw out a withered arm to again prevent his fall. He recovered himself, and glared upward at his assailant. He made an occult mudra with his fingers and invoked the astra . . .

Yes, I can see that turning into a good old-fashioned racist story on Queen Victoria’s nightstand. But the medium of the day is radio, not books. Only radio can convey the rapidity of current conversation and even include a soundtrack. For example:

(as Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune plays) BRANDON: Have you heard about that new Dead Sea scroll?

BOSTANAI: You mean that old Dead Sea scroll.

BRANDON: No, the new one—the one that nobody can unroll for fear it would crumble.

It was too scorched and carbonized.

BOSTANAI: Right, right. Like Han Solo.

BRANDON: Han Solo was frozen, not burned.

BOSTANAI: I think you’re wrong about that.

BRANDON: Han Solo was encased in carbonite. Not carbonized. 149

BOSTANAI: My mistake—I’m thinking of what they do to soda pop. So this scroll turned into bubbles is what you’re saying?

BRANDON: That’s carbonated.

BOSTANAI (triumphantly): Now you’re the one who’s confused. Carbon-dated is a whole different thing. Even I know that.

BRANDON (patiently): No. The scroll was neither carbonated nor carbon-dated.

BOSTANAI: Don’t step up here with your “Nor!” You are not dictating a research paper to me! You are not addressing Parliament!

BRANDON: I’m j ust trying to explain something.

BOSTANAI: You don’t know shit. You couldn’t even point out carbon to me on the street.

BRANDON: W ell-

BOSTANAI: Yeah, yeah, what bullshit you have for me.

BRANDON: —pencil lead is carbon.

BOSTANAI: Ha! Ha! (He snorts out all his pent-up resentment from years of inferiority before his accomplished cousin.) You don’t know how stupid you sound. Lead is carbon?

BRANDON: Let me just get to my point about the scroll. (Aside) God—you really got all the garbage genes of the Tartikoff family, didn’t you! (To BOSTANAI) It was so burnt they couldn’t unroll it—so they used an X-ray machine to read it! 150

BOSTANAI: They . . . didn’t . . . whoa. I think I need to sit down. They read it even though it was rolled up? That’s like... that’s like flying over Russia and landing drunk, or watching porn and becoming a daddy.

BRANDON: Your capacity for metaphor-

BOSTANAI: My capacity for your smartassedness overflows. Just leave me alone to work on my script.

BRANDON: Let me see that. (Pages turning) The market is already saturated with Bible movies and castaway movies. I want something original!

Draft Two: The Book of Exile

Afterwards, Bostanai descended from the heights, looking for his mother. He went on to the wasteland of the town called Barbary, in the territory of the tribe of

Sydney, but he still did not find her.

As they were going up to the town, they met a woman at the watering-hole and

Bostanai asked her, “Is my mother here?”

The girl said, “She is; she’s up ahead. But hurry through, lord, this is not a place for you.”

But Bostanai was thirsty and he said, “First bring me some water for I thirst.”

She said again, “Master, brigands roam this land and may do you harm.”

He said to his servants, “Who is this girl who thus denies me?”

His servants said, “My Lord, she is a woman of ill repute. Come away with us.” 151

But Bostanai was taken with the woman and advanced towards her. However, several Sydney men appeared over the ridge and surrounded them as the woman fled.

One of them said, “Oo’s this dreamer?”

Another said, “Ee’s just a facking seppo.”

The Sydney men killed Bostanai’s servants and took him prisoner. Then they sold him for three double-eagles to pirates, who took him onto a galley bound for Macau.

Now Bostanai was in the Southpacific. He was chained to an oar and made to row all day and night. At length, finding the pirates to be Kilmallock men, he challenged them to a contest of limericks to win his freedom.

They consulted the ship’s oracle, slaughtered a bullock, and the mate was designated to recite first. His limerick ran thus:

A white man took banned books to Tehran But none took them off his hands At last he screamed, “Does nobody read?” They responded, “We’re not Cheever fans.”

This was well received, and all present thought it unbeatable. Bostanai was urged up onto the plank, but the captain, a fair man, bade them desist until his own turn.

Bostanai, still fettered, but bravely standing on the cantilever over the circling sharks, spoke thus:

There once lived an old fish Merchant That one day would not shut up Cursin’ See he’d swallowed a Louse And got an itch down South 152

Then he stopped. The pirates were all silent, waiting for the culmination. The captain roared, “Give it!” But Bostanai refused to go on. Even the tropical wind had quieted itself to hear. The crew began to riot and threatened to rip him limb from limb until he revealed the line. Then, seeing Bostanai’s mouth about to speak again, they listened.

Bostanai spoke the last words very slowly. “So . . . next. . . he . . . ate...” And he stopped again. The pirates were trembling to hear the final rhyme. Their feet stomped out the feet: ^^^^^^^^^—! But he would not provide the final pesky anapest.

Suddenly, in the rear, there was a sharp explosion and all present were showered with gore. One of the pirates had detonated from unresolved meter. A dozen more sailors followed in a chain reaction, including the captain. Panic was general. In the melee,

Bostanai jumped into the whale-boat and lowered it down to the water. With him in the small craft were two others: a deaf pirate who had been immune to the lethal limerick, and a Puritan prude from Boston, who had clapped his hands over his ears the entire contest, knowing that the Irish tend to skew blue. The pirate ship was rocking violently now from the combustions, and blood and cracked ribs formed several cataracts over the port side, drenching Bostanai and his two companions.

Under their combined power, the boat made it to a desolate atoll. For some days they survived on coconuts and roasted scorpions but on the third day the food was exhausted. On the seventh day Bostanai and Randy (for that was the deaf pirate’s name) 153

bloodlet and flayed the Puritan and turned him into chicharron and tripe when he woke them up at daybreak, insisting it was Sunday and time to worship. The following day a freighter passed within hailing distance and rescued them. Bostanai and Randy brought on board several coconut shells filled with leftover Puritan meat and ate this on their voyage, even though the revolted crew offered the full pantry to them. The ship continued to Vladivostok. Bostanai, having heard stories about the Trans-Siberian Railway, bought a sleeper car ticket.

In Moscow he ran out of money. He squatted in Gorky Park, hitting modern rhythms on two coconut shells, with a third overturned for coins. After the coconuts wore down he acquired plates of steel and rock hammers and continued his piston-like performance. Nights he composed a third draft of his script and sent it off. Brandon mailed back his notes which read as follows:

Andante assai? Very walking speed? How is that different than just plain andante? Lose the assai, unless you ’re talking about an antioxidant Hawaiian snack.

Also, what the fuck is this??? What am I supposed to tell the casting director??

This is what Bostanai had sent:

Draft Three

BOSTANAI: Allegro pesante, 4/4. Accented downbeat with left hand. Each upbeat, lighter. This continues throughout the section. On the second measure introduce the theme with the right hand: eighth-and-a-half notes each linked to a sixteenth. Repeat this six times, then an eighth note, an eighth rest, and an accented upbeat quarter note tied 154

into the first of the next six paired notes. Then an accented downbeat half note, tied into two more pairs, followed by two accented quarter notes. The following measure begins with another pair, then four sixteenths, two more accented quarter notes that tie into five pairs this time, a half note, a quarter note culmination of the phrase, then a quarter note pickup into the repetition of the next phrase. This continues again until the introduction of the horns in measure thirty-three, which play first three heavy quarter notes, then staccato ascending eighth notes.. .ritard. the final two notes of the measure, then the tempo changes to—

Andante assai, remains 4/4. The piccolo plays a plaintive, pastoral solo on top of sprightly pizzicato beneath in a marked contrast from the pendulous first theme. It is as if the listener, feeling the close air, has opened a window to listen to the nightingales in the courtyard. But even still, the clarinet plays a counter-melody that lurks under the surface, maintaining something sinister.. .(Editor’s note. This continues in the same vein for fifty- two pages.) . . . the trombones grind out the final triumphant notes of the march and the violins double the notes with two swift downbows. Keep your hands elevated until the applause reaches its climax. Turn and bow, then gesture towards the concertmistress, who will bow in her turn.

For your encore play R’s prelude that he now hates. Some of the educated in the crowd know you did not compose this but it is a fine crowd-pleaser. And what American can tell apart a Sergei P from a Sergei R anyhow? 155

Lento, 4/4. Left hand plays octaved As, accented, the right third finger an A an octave above, quarter notes. All three notes move downward to a G#, accented, the same length. Immediately resolve the tension with a whole note tied to a half a perfect fifth down, accented. Retreat to pianissimo for the theme: left hand plays eighth notes a tick less sticky than legato: E G# E then G# B G# then F## A F## then staccato quarter octave A naturals while the right hand plays C# G# C#, E B E, D#, A#, D# then quarter

A natural an octave above the left.

No, no, this is still too coded; Brandon will hate this: I do not compose music, I draw the blueprints to a machine. The notes should be in Hertz: 55, 110, 220 for 2200 microseconds. 51.91, 103.83, 207.65 for 2200 microseconds, 34.65, 69.30, 138.59 for

8500 microseconds.

164.81/207.65/329.63/277.18/415.30/554.37 for 760 microseconds,

207.65/246/94/415.30/659.25/987.77/1318.51 for 760 microseconds,

196/220/392/622.25/932.33/1244.51 for 760 microseconds, silence for 760 microseconds.

Can you put this on the screen, Brandon? The frequency of the jet engine out my window is 16750.58 Hz. Its duration is 1.8ui ms. The in-flight menu that Mira and I read together:

Aeroflot Offerings (Draft Four)

Fruit Cocktail: Space-age plastic, tapered to an agreeable soft curl of open lips, burgeoning with a collection of pears and halved strawberries from Crimea, harvested from that farm near the Sevastopol resort at which you honeymooned. The pears have a 156

pleasantly round taste, with a mild tartness and a generous sweetness from the syrup. The

strawberries are a few days overripe, and ooze from their flesh a dark, sensual juice.

Weed Salad: Unwashed dandelion and purslane gathered from the fertile area by the Chez Panisse Dumpster, just down Route 101 from Sebastopol (for the menus in first- class, those whores to proper nouns, rename these: Kennebec Dandelion Greens and

Kumamoto Purslane Fronds). They are crisp with a mild peppery flavor and remind you of the elemental earth that you have long forgotten—if your last symphony is any indication. Drenched in the overpowering Modena vinegar that is getting dusty in the pantry.

L ’oiseau de feu: Roast chicken, (for the domestic flights between Huntsville and

Plano, rename this Firebird as it will remind the hicks of their favorite car and their favorite song. Do not worry about the plane crash it implies, since it was Skynrd’s early demise that secured their canonization. Do worry about the overt reference to Igor S., your arch-nemesis, for you suffer in comparison. Has anyone in your audience, watching your ballet, ever stood up from their chair and lost their mind?)

Mystery Flavor Dum-Dum: Some say it is all the leftover flavors in the vat; others say it is defective butterscotch. The company’s literature is very coy on the subject. It tastes like upside-down honey, kettle-cooked granite, plasma-charged sand, evolved glass. Am I coming through clear, Brandon?

I put down the menu and look up and down the aisle but none meet my gaze. I flag down an air hostess and demand from her the name of the menu’s composer. 157

“Why, sir, they are written by a computer.”

I suddenly feel inebriated and rush to the lavatory. Inside it is moist and awful. I look down and see a summation of my attempts at art. The liquid dynamics of the public urinal: a man’s dick-drips and splashbacks create a floor radius of stickiness, and each successive man, reluctant to soil the bottom of his shoes, stands further back from the alabaster than the man before, until by the seventh attack the trajectory must need be parabolic and as much hits its target as falls short or goes foul. Just step up and piss right in it as Igor has done!

When I land I realize I am drunk although I had not touched a drop.

Brandon meets me at the gate. He is anxiously working down the rumpled button- flap of his shirt and does not see me until I am directly in front of him.

I say, “Try hanging it up and spritzing gasoline on it. The weight of the hydrocarbons smooths it without needing an iron.”

“Is that right? I’ll give it a try ..

San Francisco is just how I remember it. On the comer of L** and B*** a swarthy man in an orange toga hands out communiques in Sanskrit.

Brandon hisses, “You can’t think ‘swarthy’ out here! Are you insane?”

“Why?” I take one of the slips and read it.

Draft Five: The mistaken belief is that nirvana represents the attainment of admission to heaven or some other exalted state when it in fact represents eternal suicide. It means literally “to snuff out” or “to extinguish” as regards to the flame of one’s life. Has not modern science borne this out: that each cell in our bodies is simply a bread- fueled piston in a bipedal combustion engine? That birth is no more than the lighting of a full taper from one dwindled down? Ignore the Four Noble Truths that lead to an 158

Eightfold Path that leads to a Sweet Sixteen Maze and a fmeprint Sixtyfour Exceptions to the Truths. Debate and philosophy lead to no conclusions. There is not a man whose opinion is infallible. This world is merely a pan stoked by the sun and stirred by time. A man’s conscience and his judgement the same. His life brutish and solitary. Charity always achieves the opposite intent, as the more you condescend they will fear you less but hate you more. Humility will only pass for weakness. Any deviation from self- interest will scorch you. No, first one must “extinguish” the

On the back of the slip was an unrelated text, apparently the obverse of the original sheet on which the message had first been printed.

The most steel and true words move but once through the mouth— Kill Nyet Gott Merde Win Win Win The words worth most prop up the rest Bat bet bit bot but Mall mell mill moll mull Pan pin pen pon(s) pun Crap crepe crip crop croup From words like these real life is forged:

A young boss and his old hench on the fogged pier in pitched night, as the men trot from the docked Cork ship to their trucks, each with two pails full of scotch from the stowed casks. Not a sound but the swish of the brown but the old man still hems and frowns.

“What’s off, here?” the boss asks at last.

“You mean, what’s off with bent tin pails brim with good scotch from aught- one?” the hench asks back.

“Yes,” the boss says, at once both proud of his scheme and het up ‘fore his dead pa’s old mate.

The old man pulls at his chin, yen for the right word. He thinks there must be ten crowns worth per pail, and ten men there, with ten trips each. 159

“Well,” he says. “It’s gauche.”

“G-ghosts?” the boss says, and jumps into the loch.

He is banned from crime then. He makes his way to the States, and lands a gig in the North. He steps down and pats his hoarse neck.

His new boss sends him to the Great Stone Face, which hangs off the mount but aches and creaks from the weight of snow and ice. He is sent armed with glue and tape.

“Cleave it to the cliff,” his boss says, over the phone.

“Cleave it from the cliff,” our man says, stunned at the bad talk of these Yanks, and with a push from his own heel, sends the old rocks down the hill. Straight to hell with you, old man—now wipe that off your state coin, thinks he.

The boys and girls are shocked. As soon as our man doffs his cap to wipe his brow he is put in chains and hauled off to the gaol for ten years.

“And what charge is this!” he asks the judge.

“Must I say?” the judge says.

“Yes,” our man said. “Its clear to me your being a loose-tounged rogue.”

All there groan. “Oh, my God,” the judge says. “This man must die.”

And he banged it down.

The town builds a pyre and walks him to it. Hung round his neck a sign: “Can’t spell.” But tied to the stake, the doomed man had one last trick up his sleeve. It weren’t no bomb-poem but it was close. 160

“Wait!” he says. “If I’ve done a crime, a crime of wrong words, then teach me!

Spell me. Spell me from this fire!”

They laugh. “As you wish—while you bum, we shall spell for you.” And they spell the words so oft wronged: gauge, gouge, whoa, coarse, aisle, loose.

“No, ‘spell me,’” he says. “Say it like that.”

“Fine, you lout. We shall ‘spell you.’”

He smiles for he has won. He looks down at the crowd he’s just fooled, finds the judge, and nods at him. “I pick him to spell me.”

The crowd is stunned. For a sec none move. Then as if by some cruel will not his own, the judge’s legs rise and fall and bring him to the stake. His hands come up and loose the ropes. Freed, our man steps down as the judge cuffs his own arms round the stake. Our man asks for the lit torch and sets it soft by the logs which catch. He leaves town ere the robes burn.

He’s missed Mom’s day of birth. Sick of it and still far from her, he rips o’en the box he’s held to this whole time. It is a book. A poor gift. It is Strunk and White. He reads:

Draft Seven

Never utilize a comma to separate two independent clauses, but a semicolon.

Incorrect: Brandon’s shirts had never been smoother, his cousin’s tip about

gasoline had been helpful. 161

Correct: He was constantly lightheaded though; the fumes fouled his sinuses.

A participial phrase should refer to the subject o f a sentence.

Incorrect: More a son to her than a nephew, Bostanai’s mother opened her front

door to find Brandon with several of her close friends. He had organized a

surprise party!

Correct: Invisible behind the shrubs, Bostanai waited until all had retired to the kitchen.

Avoid monotonous prosody and the passive voice.

Incorrect: There was a chipped wooden table in the kitchen. Also, there were

five chairs around the table. On the table was the cake and a knife. The knife was

handed to Bostanai’s mother by Brandon.

Brandon carried a satchel filled with all the pilot scripts he intended to

read even though he was on vacation.

There were many other people at the party, including an orange-robed

Buddhist that Brandon had met in the Haight. Brandon lit the candles on the cake.

The lights were turned off. They started to sing.

Correct: Out back, Bostanai cut the phone and power lines; nobody inside noticed.

He quietly propped the lawnmower against the front door, tiptoed to the back, and

listened. They were on the last line of the song. He put his hand on the doorknob.

Mock your reader. 162

Correct: His hands trembled with anticipation.

Correct: He remembered, when they had been children, Brandon had written a three-act dramatic radio play that would later become Punky Brewster. Brandon had cast every neighborhood kid but Bostanai, who during the class reading of

Johnny Tremain had pronounced the word “union” as “onion.” The class laughed and laughed. The teacher said with thumbscrew kindness that it did kind of look right to say “onion,” Bostanai had been left out. and the local paper had picked up the story.They had performed it on WKGB and Brandon won an internship to

NBC.

Correct: He was close, now, to finding out the secret he’d been searching for.

Whether it burst from the lips of the man he was about to kill, or revealed itself to him like Aeschylus’s pain—he would soon know.

Like fusion, a good ending should be cold.

Incorrect: Bostanai opened the kitchen door just as Brandon flicked the useless light switch, but before his mother blew out the candles. In two steps Bostanai was at the table. He plucked one of the candles up before his astonished mother, turned to his cousin in the dark, and touched the flame to his chest.

Correct: The guests and the mother fled at the sight of the immolating man, who with the flame was as tall as the ceiling. Dozens of burning pages leapt off him and vanished into ash before they even touched the tile. 163

The only one who remained was the monk. The thrashing man screamed,

“Under the sink! Under the sink! For the love of God!”

The monk reached in and withdrew a heavy red cylinder. In the firelight he read the words “Fire Extinguisher.” He propped it in the middle of the floor, got to his knees, and worshipped. 164

A Koan

When she had closed her eyes, I quizzed her: “So, Eugenia Vandenberg. Looking for love. Here it is: who is the person you want to be holding your hand when you die?” I secretly thought she would pick Aaron, who had been the briefest but most ardent lover she’d had.

There was a pause of two while she thought of her answer. And I could tell when she came up with it because the corners of her eyes sank and the skin between her eyebrows heaped up into a quaking, Himalayan grief. “Ah shit,” she said.

She kept her eyes closed until I said, hey hey, what is it? She pressed her lips together and shook her head. I reached over and took her hand and then she opened her eyes. In the sudden interim they had transformed. Her amber irises were like rusty rivets of a foggy bridge, glittering and dripping. My wife Ashley, who plays soap opera villains, had told me once that if only one tear falls, it comes down the side of the nose. If there are many, only then do they overflow down the cheeks. This, she told me, is how you can spot fake tears, from an eyedropper. There is never just one tear going down the cheek.

But here was Gen, clenching her teeth and succeeding for a brief sweet moment in damming up the water behind her feline violet eyeliner before one finally slid down her reddening, perfect cheek.

“I’m so tired,” she said, and when her voice stuck on the last word she sank her teeth into her lower lip and drove her palms into her eyes, as if driving those rivets deeper into her head. “Ah, shit,” she said again, and this time she looked at me. I had seen her 165

trembling like this only once: when we were twelve, I dared her to leap with me off a

Cape Cod cliff and she broke her ankle on a submerged rock. She had limped onto the beach and kneeled there, silent and shaking, looking up at me with the same expression she had right now that said this: you are responsible for my pain.