Just Look at All of You

By Christine Pinella

A creative project submitted to Sonoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF THE ARTS in ENGLISH

(Creative Writing)

Committee Members

Stefan Kiesbye, Thesis Chair, First Reader Anne Goldman, Second Reader

May 1st, 2017

Copyright 2016 By Christine Pinella

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Authorization for Reproduction of Master’s Project

Permission to reproduce this thesis [project] in its entirety must be obtained from me.

Permission to reproduce parts of this thesis [project] must be obtained from me.

Date: May 1st, 2017 Christine Pinella

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Just Look at All of You Creative Project by Christine Pinella

ABSTRACT

Just Look at All of You is a creative project containing a collection of short fiction stories. Thematically, the pieces as a unified whole aim to explore the intricacies of human relationships, trauma and recovery, and loss and grief. The collection title is a nod to the complex nature of human existence, the chapters of memory which make us who we are as people, how we relate to each other, and how we navigate through the world.

MA Program: English Sonoma State University May 1st, 2016

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Stefan Kiesbye, for your insight, your humor, and your willingness to be patient with me as I realized my own potential. Thank you for your friendship, and of course, for the beers.

Thank you to Anne Goldman, for your positivity and for being so generous with your time. Thank you for your direction, your selfless dedication to the program, and your confidence in me as a growing writer.

Thank you to all of my friends who have read my work, and continue to trust and believe in my voice.

Thank you to N.W. for showing me how it easy it can and should be, to really love someone. Two grains of salt.

Thank you to Great Aunt Jessie Blackwell, whose generosity made it possible for me to pursue higher education in the arts.

Just Look at All of You is dedicated to my parents – to my mother who taught me how to trust myself, my intuition, and my capabilities. And especially to my father - an original journalist - whose life-work was spent telling stories which were true, insightful, and honest. Without you I would not have picked up a pen in the first place. You passed your love for story-telling down to me, and for that I will be forever grateful.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

WORK

Unmitigated Lunacy: A Critical Introduction VII

Just Look at All of You 1

Hemlock 8

Ink 18

Funhouse 32

Jenner 35

Toad 53

Shanghai 59

Buffalo 62

Paradise 82

Scraps 87

Sugar 92

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Unmitigated Lunacy

A Critical Introduction to Just Look at All of You

Last year I went to Lisbon in July to participate in the DisQuiet Literary Workshop. I was

placed in the group of Padgett Powell – a literary veteran, first known for his 1982 debut novel,

Edisto. He is a self-proclaimed narcissist, asshole, and pit-bull rescuer. He lives with his puppy,

who he refers to as his “adopted black child”, and a woman who remains unnamed and he

remains “untethered” to, in a house on wheels somewhere amid the swamps in Gainesville,

Florida. He has a shed full of guns and has been sober for twenty years. He told me this over lunch at a restaurant in Baixia-Chiado. The restaurant was a sign-less sparse room, with folding chairs and folding tables with red checkered table cloths. The woman who owned it was short and round, and she showed us a glass case with fish on ice and said, “Which you want?” I picked a long silver one, he did too, and we sat at the table by the front door. There was a blue, metal fan attached to the wall and a rail-thin, ancient-looking woman sat at the table under the fan, and chain-smoked Marlboros and drank Coca-Cola out of the bottle. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I talked to you like that. It’s not you, it’s just

something sparked me and I couldn’t let go. I get that way from my dog, I think,” he said to me.

The waitress brought a plate of olives and hard cheese. I took a sip from my beer and sat

back in my chair. It was quiet, save for the hum of the fan, and as I studied his face for some sign

of a lie, a twitch of his eyebrow or a blink of his sagging eye, I realized that I believed him.

vii An hour ago, I was in the classroom with him and twelve other writers. He had read

“Jenner” and “Hemlock”, and was meant to give me constructive feedback. I went there for constructive criticism, and to listen to what successful writers had to say about my own style and craft and composition. I went there to hear what my twelve other classmates had to say about it

too. Instead of that, he barked at me.

“Miss Pinella, Miss Pinella, Miss Pinella…,” he started from the front of the classroom,

while shaking his head, “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you have no place calling yourself a writer with this mediocre bullshit. This is bullshit and I’m betting you know it. For example, in “Hemlock” you go on and on for six pages before you tell us what is wrong with this narrator! It’s not until page six that you reveal, oh, ah-ha! She has cancer! That’s why she’s such a narcissistic bitch. If I knew this woman in real life, I would slap her across the face. Don’t play coy with me, Miss Pinella. Look, you can all learn from Miss Pinella’s oversight here. Repeat after me: DO NOT PLAY COY. Tell me what is going on and I’ll trust you, but don’t drag me along through this whining slop for six goddamn pages before you tell me. Because by the end of page one I was already bored. Now I’m just pissed. You’ve lost me completely.”

“But her problem isn’t that she had cancer, her problem is that- “

“Miss Pinella. It doesn’t matter what her problem is. It matters that I don’t care. That should bother you. You should want me to care.”

He kept pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his large nose and taking long, sniffling drags of air through his nostrils, the sound of which reminded me of a dog just before it lunges for the first bite of something it should not be biting.

“Do you have any last words, Miss Pinella?” he asked me.

I shook my head – hell, no.

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I don’t think we can talk about writing without talking about embarrassment. There’s a shoebox under my bed which includes every overdone, overthought, drippy, syrupy-sweet, thing

I wrote during middle school and high school. It should be taken out back and burned until it’s nothing but the ashes of teenage angst gone awry. I’ve embarrassed myself with my writing almost daily since I started. There’s a problem I’m guilty of, that I think many young writers are, which is trying way too hard to get your feelings out on a page. We think, if we can just force the reader to feel the same way this character does, then I’ve done my job. This kind of blatant desperation is nauseating and entirely obvious to the reader, most of the time. But, there’s no such thing as a first draft that isn’t embarrassing. This art we’ve chosen to pursue makes us vulnerable by it’s very nature. It’s like having your chest open and your head split apart for all to see.

We get used to it, though. As I’ve become more confident in my voice, my writing has become less insecure and less desperate for readers to love me. Or so I thought. Because there’s a different kind of embarrassment I’ve felt now that I’m older. It’s the kind of embarrassment that turns you back into that little kid, after all this work to grow up. It’s that embarrassment which comes from asking for advice, and getting a response that is nothing more than, you shouldn’t be doing this in the first place. How was I supposed to handle the truth that I was nowhere near where I thought I was? And not only was I hearing this for the first time, but I was hearing it from someone I respected, and in front of twelve other established, working writers.

After the session with Padgett, I didn’t hesitate to leave. There was a phone both just outside the front door, and I leaned against it and tried to catch my breath. I spent two thousand dollars to come here and listen to a man tell me I wasn’t good enough.

ix Padgett found me. He looked legitimately concerned as he told me he was sorry and he

didn’t know what happened and could he take me to lunch, please? Could he buy me a beer, or

some ice cream or a soda, whatever I wanted?

I let him. I don’t know why.

“You’re an asshole,” I said to him at lunch. “That wasn’t helpful at all.”

“I know. I hate myself, if it’s any consolation. You know,” he said, and leaned in a little bit, “if I was twenty years younger, I would try to kiss you right now.”

This is the part when I smiled because I’m a woman and that is what we are trained to do when a man of more power and age and influence than you, makes you feel uncomfortable. We smile because it makes things easier in the moment, and we love to make things easier, because that means they aren’t harder, and if things are harder, they’re more erratic, which means they’re more dangerous. If you don’t smile, if you put up a fight, a real one, you can never be too sure of safety. So yes, there is fear in language. There is violence in language that does not exist anywhere else. It surprised me how quickly this situation had become so confusing. In an instant, we were no longer talking about writing – we were talking about age and we were talking about gender.

I started writing because my life was peaceful and predictable. I grew up in a white house, with a white picket fence, and a golden retriever. My parents were hard-working people.

We were never rich, but I never wanted for anything. I didn’t have to struggle, people liked me and it was easy for me. I sound ungrateful when I say I was bored, but that’s not true. I was looking for something else because everywhere I looked, it seemed that outside of my bubble, people were so complicated. They were strange and irrational and emotional and surprising.

x Now, I was thirty years old, and this sixty-something year old man, sat across from me at

that checkered table. It occurred to me that we weren’t talking about my writing anymore. We

were talking about him. Admittedly, in a lot of ways, he was right about my work. It was messy

and unaware of itself, and it needed work and confidence. I needed to work and be confident. But

what I also imagined, was that this person was broken. In that moment, he seemed unsure of

himself, as if his critiques of my work had confused him. The more he spoke, the more I started

to realize that he didn’t know who or what he was really angry about.

The trip didn’t turn out to be the dramatic, life-changing experience I had originally

pictured. Better than that, it was simply a learning experience. I came to realize a lot about

myself as a writer, particularly as a young(ish), female writer. I always knew this to some extent, but the workshop further proved to me that I’m not a writer for anybody else. If I didn’t care about it, if I didn’t believe in what I had to say and the stories I told, then nobody else would because they don’t have to. The truth I learned is that we can only save ourselves when it comes to the art we make. At best a few people will believe in us, maybe we’ll win an award or get published and a few pats on the back here and there, but if you don’t work and if you don’t trust in what you’re saying, then all of it, no matter how perfect the craft, will fall flat.

As far as being a woman writer, there are things I could never learn in the classroom,

things my experience with Padgett brought to light. As a female writer, it is nearly impossible to

write without talking about trauma – and that is the difference between Padgett and I. We do not

share the same world view, and we never will. The logistics, or the craft, of my pieces might not

have been up to par, but he missed the bigger picture, and he made no effort to see where I was

coming from. Perhaps, it is my fault for not focusing more or having the authority I needed over

these stories. It’s possible that in that moment I didn’t know what the story was that I was trying

xi to tell. While I had written all of these stories years before I ever met Padgett, it was him, in that

moment in the restaurant, when I discovered what I was really writing about.

The stories in, Just look at all of you, revolve around characters who have suffered from

trauma and their subsequent actions taken to regain their sense of identity and purpose. Each

character in the collection is a piece of me, and the very real events I have experienced. Yes, it’s

fiction. But it’s fiction rooted in reality. It took me a long time to grapple with this. Earlier on, I

felt like I just had a bad imagination – the fact that I couldn’t write anything from just blank space was a hindrance to my style. I got over that thought when I realized that it didn’t matter.

That is what I needed to write, these stories which I believed in, and when all is said and done,

what’s true and what’s imaginary doesn’t really matter. If I can convey the true feeling or

emotion, then how fictional could it ever really be?

There are tricky things that can make a plot more interesting to a reader, like add a death

or a murder or a car crash at the end. I’m not convinced that a death or murder is always

imperative, but I have come to the conclusion that to be a good writer, you should be a good liar,

or at least on paper.

Over the course of this program, I’ve read pieces of my thesis in a handful of Professor

Goldman’s classes. The students always ask the same question afterward: “Is this true?”

I never really know how to answer that question. Yes, it’s true in that what I wrote

reflects how I truly felt. No, it’s not true in that every detail actually happened. Yes, this

character is a real person in my real life. No, I never watched him stalk his neighbor from his

living room window. Yes, it is true that cancer survivors can experience PTSD, ongoing

hallucinations, and paranoia. No, you cannot empty your organs out in the front yard, and ear

drums do not play hopscotch. So, in order to write a story, we have to embellish the truth of

xii every day, because in reality, most days are fairly boring. Therefore, we write and hopefully, we

read.

While many of these pieces have been in the works for years (I started writing

“Hemlock” when I was sixteen, and “Buffalo” started as a piece of flash-fiction from an undergraduate course), all of them have been reworked, or broken down completely, since the start of this program at Sonoma State University. The program has allowed me space and time to cultivate the confidence I needed for my work to be self-aware without being self-conscious. As a result, I’ve developed a more mature writing process. What once was a spattering of emotional description and characters untethered to any sort of thought-process, is now a combination of real self-reflection and outside research.

Reading non-fiction for fiction writing can be essential to the success of a story. I began taking this seriously over the last two years. It started with the first seminar I took with Professor

Kunat, where reading European history and various historical documents on Queen Elizabeth, helped shape the female characters in my own stories such as “Jenner” and “Hemlock”. While reading the Faerie Queene, I simultaneously discovered Mary Gaitskill. The combination of reading Gaitskill, while studying Elizabeth, opened up something in me that paved the way to how I view female character development.

Gaitskill said in an interview with the Atlantic, “I find it strange that the moment these

characters seem most like themselves, are in the moments when they’re behaving in ways we’ve

never before seen. I don’t fully understand how this could be, but it’s wonderful that it works.”

She was talking about Anna and Karenin in Anna Karenina. This feels like the ultimate goal in

character development. To allow your characters to act in a very surprising way, and yet still

xiii remain believable and deserving of the readers’ trust, is really a difficult thing to achieve but one

that I will continue to strive to do.

The second time I read parts of The Faerie Queene, it was accompanied by the King

James Bible and Titus Andronicus. Completely disgusted and tortured by Titus Andronicus, I

began reading more about trauma theory and the science behind revenge, the redemption of self,

and survival. In particular, I read Judth L. Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, along with Jean Paul

Satre’s Being and Nothingness. Each of these texts, along with reading Gaitskill’s fiction, helped

me finalize the character development and plot lines of the stories which make up my creative

project.

To summarize Being and Nothingness as best I can, Jean Paul Sartre discusses the

concept of self and consciousness, where the three dimensions of Being include in-itself (the

unconscious being), for-itself (the conscious being), and for-others. While being is objective,

existence takes being and places it in a three-dimensional space, allowing for the individual to

become self-aware through his or her position within the world, and interactions with others. We

are born into these material bodies, within this physical world, and can only obtain self-

awareness, through consciousness of the others and the world around us. Man as in-itself is stable, he is what he is, much like a tree is a tree without the ability to change its material being.

Man for-itself, on the other hand, has the ability to become who he is through his experiences within the world. Man for-itself can actuate his existence through action. Sartre explains that it is the nothingness which gives way to consciousness. Man cannot achieve what Sartre describes as pure beauty (being and consciousness), but he can gain consciousness by understanding what is lacking.

xiv This was interesting to me as I worked on these stories about characters who were

dealing with trauma. The pivotal moment for many of them, comes when they realize what they

are missing. For example, in “Hemlock”, Annie is attempting to gain authority over her body and life after surviving brain cancer. As she says in the piece (referring to her brain tumor), “The problem isn’t that it’s gone, it’s that it ever was in the first place.” Similarly, in “Sugar”, the narrator is propelled towards action when she realizes that she never loved her live-in boyfriend,

and was really only there for comfort and stability. What was lacking was a sense of purpose. In

“Jenner”, Sam thinks she understands the world she lives in. She believes that her husband,

although he has a serious drinking problem, is still an inherently lovable and peaceful person

until she finds out he was involved in the murder of two strangers. While her assumptive world is

ruined, she is able to gain consciousness of her reality and her self. When she learns about this

one specific event, she is able to see the whole picture more clearly. She thought she had been

sacrificing things in her life out of love for him, but the truth was that he had been sucking the

life out of her. It’s not until she figures out what is lacking, that she can decide what to do next.

It’s not until she discovers her strength, that she is able to view her world as the second one, the one of faith, instead of dealing with the hand she was dealt. And although she doesn’t make some epic grand move in the end of the story, her small steps towards independence, I believe, make her a more relatable and believable character.

Those who have experienced a traumatic event afterwards feel as though something was taken from them. Trauma theorists often talk about one’s “assumptive world”. This is the world we think we know for however long we’ve been living. These are things like, people are inherently good, or most will do the right thing, or if I walk down this street late at night but

xv mind my own business, it will be okay. But when confronted with trauma, our assumptive worlds get dismantled, leaving us in the wake of disbelief and confusion.

Studying the King James Bible, I was struck by the amount of traumatic stories told. In my reading, it became apparent to me that the reader is presented with two worlds. The world we live in is not all that we have, there is another world, the unseen world of faith, which can’t be held or viewed, but instead, lives in our commitment to the word of God and our faith in his plan for us. I always thought of this as the world of our imagination, although I suppose I was meant to think of it as truth. This can allow us to dig deeper, below the surface of what is physically experienced, and reach for what else may live there in the secondary, world of faith.

Setting and place are particularly important in this collection to mirror the characters’ emotional states. For example, in “Jenner”, the unfinished house is a reflection of Sam and

Nick’s uneasy foundation as a couple, and their tendency to start projects they have no intention of ever finishing. Neither of them are able to make a commitment to positive change, and seem stuck in this space between letting go and moving forward. The loudness of the ocean, the density of the redwood forest, and the thickness of the fog is meant to evoke feelings of claustrophobia and loss of direction – a reflection of how Sam unconsciously feels about her relationship with Nick.

There’s a passage from Alice Monroe’s story, “Face”, which I read during this program and it stuck with me with its poignancy in respect to place.

“Something had happened here. In your life, there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are other places, which are just other places.”

xvi That quote, “Something had happened here,” resonates with me so much. Aside from it being just a lovely, simple, sentence, it makes me consider how permanently attached we are to place and consequently, how important place is in the process of story telling.

While my reading of non-fiction has helped greatly in my process of plot and character development, this program has also helped me come into my own in way of style. I’ve had a natural tendency towards subtle emotion in my writing since my undergraduate studies at San

Francisco State University. There was a professor there who told me once that I needed to hold back, emotionally. I’m not sure now if that was good advice, but it shaped the way I approached style in fiction writing. This program at Sonoma State University, however, gave me more conviction in developing a purpose for my style, and the confidence to explore different ways of approaching it. I felt as though I was able to take risks in my writing this last year because I had come to a point where I was sure of my ability to gain the reader’s trust.

An example of a risk in style is the story, “Buffalo”. I wanted to write from the perspective of someone I knew nothing about, and I wanted to explore this idea that sometimes there is no reason why someone is the way they are. I wanted to experiment with form and voice, so I chose for the first time, to write from a male perspective, and even further, from the point of view of someone who is very sick. The character of Buffalo makes decisions that make little or no sense to the average person. I think it’s easy to feel uneasy with him, but at the same time, there is a humanizing aspect to Buffalo in that he is lonely and he is alone. He can’t really help himself, and although he is absolutely to blame for his dangerous and violent actions, my intent was to leave the reader wondering how much they can relate to his struggle to find meaning. The challenge with Buffalo, is that he is a character who has no real reason for his depression or violence – at least, not one he can determine. He tells the reader, “You want to know what

xvii happened to me? Nothing.” I think that the reader is going to be able to trust Buffalo because of his blunt and unapologetic consciousness, while at the same time, we’re apprehensive of him.

Mary acts as a foil to Buffalo. While he isn’t capable of trusting or loving anyone, she is too trusting and too quick to love everyone. She’s naïve in her belief that most are inherently good. She believes that human connection is what makes life worth living and this belief allows her to stay away from being nothing but a victim. Buffalo sees this and it enrages him. He’s simultaneously obsessed with and despising of her.

Writing Buffalo allowed me to take other risks in character development and point of view. I found I was fascinated by writing from these different perspectives, and getting as far away from my own self as I could. It led the way to two other pieces in the collection, “Scraps” and “Toad”, which tell stories of young men, who are both lost and brash.

Like the character of Buffalo, I simultaneously trusted Padgett and was apprehensive of him. After I got home, Padgett sent me an email. It included a photograph of him with his black pit-bull. Padgett was crouched over the dog, holding its collar with a closed fist. Behind him was all tropical Florida green – Spanish moss hung from the trees and the sky was blue above. The note said this:

“My dog continues to supply the warming comfort of unmitigated lunacy (I for having him; he is of course consummately sane). I learned what these are and consequently how to still get one thirty years ago when getting one was not as lunatic. It is so inane now to do it that I have TWO wives for him. This takes insanity to aprx. third power and, is in fact over masculine

(dumb). As the Life Force oozes out of a boy he does not mind being called virile, even if it is not even a true slander.”

xviii The meaning behind the project title, Just Look at All of You is twofold. It’s a comment on the enormity of our bodies and the boundless mystery which makes up the way our physical

beings mechanically work. At the same time, it’s a nod to the countless people who come in and

out of our lives while we are here on earth, and how our daily interactions with others shape the

way we see the world, and how we learn to understand that in order to truly see ourselves, we

have to see others, too.

We’re not that much different after all, Padgett and I. There’s a shared desire to

understand the “unmitigated lunacy”, as he puts it. The lunacy of our actions on a daily basis,

these things we do without knowing why, or how we even got into a position where these actions

were a choice in the first place. I would argue this is what propels a lot of us to write – we are

researchers of the human condition. I’m proud to have put this collection on paper, my first of

hopefully many, which examines our lunacy – the absurdity of it all. It is the result of travel and

courage, many long-haul flights and even longer nights and all that faith in finding those rare

slices of satisfaction – those split-second moments, when it’s all so clear.

xix Works Referenced

Fassler, Joe. “When People – and Characters – Surprise You.” The Atlantic, 2015.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: BasicBooks, 1997. Print.

Munro, Alice. Too Much Happiness: Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print.

Powell, Padgett. Edisto. T.A.: Hotsa’at Kadim, 1986. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York:

Washington Square Press, 1966. Print.

Shakespeare, William and Jonathan Bate. Titus Andronicus. London: Routeledge, 1995. Print.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene: Book three. New York, Penguin Books, 1987.

xx

Just Look at All of You Just Look at All of You

His name was Michael. He was overgrown and hairy; a beast of a teenager. Long, hairy arms could pick me up and twist me around his beast-body, all the while singing hum-hum-hum, some melody he’d made up. His parents were from Iran, and they hated my skin and hair. His mother would take a strand and wrap it around her gold-ringed fingers in their kitchen, split me in half down the middle with almond eyes, shake her head at me in pity when I told her I was going to a state college – poor pretty white girl, you are cultureless and unprincipled and you’ve touched my son now, haven’t you? I had. In their backyard, on a blanket, Michael reached underneath while staring up to the night sky, and he told me to reach too, and I did. He held me in the palm of his hand, my skin electric.

He stole money from his father and bought a guitar. He kept it hidden in the trunk of his

BMW. On cold-melon August days, he told his parents he had a shift at the hardware store, but he came to my house instead, and we stayed in my room and watched the sunlight snake its way across the walls. He played the guitar and I drew pictures in a three-ring notebook. Sometimes we kissed on the floor. When the light made it to my bed, it was time for him to go home.

His father found the guitar and gave him a bruised eye that looked wet, as if a thin layer of skin was missing now, and what was left was glittering and purple. He came to my house to show me and said he wanted to get out of here – let’s go anywhere. We got in my car and drove west – stupid kids forgot that west only went for another forty miles, and we ended up on a cliff in thick milky fog. We parked the car on a blind curve and let the cows come to our fingers at the barbed wire fence – bulging black eyes of sweet monsters, they licked our fingers and I laughed and he scooped me up in his gorilla arms and carried me back to the car, his swollen eye bleeding and shut.

He was miserable and so I think I loved him. Years later, he came to see me as an adult. I was a drunk then, and he pitied me on the floor of my studio apartment when I told him he could do what he wanted with me – no hard feelings, just make sure you stay close for a while. He’s married now and lives in Oregon. His life in pictures is sweet as honey, it coats my throat when I look at those pictures. He and his pretty brown wife, holding hands in front of their coffee shop, a carved wooden heart behind them – I choke on the syrup of it.

James was ugly as sin, and I know I loved him more. Almost seven feet of pale, freckled skin and one arm tattooed with the outlines of roses, a wild curly head of red on top and later I found, below as well. A self-proclaimed revolutionary, he sent letters to my dorm room, urging me to keep a clear head, that the institution of education was a rotten one – don’t get sucked into the lies – you’re special, you’re so, so special. In my first fall semester of college, he came to see me in the city, to tell me about corruption in the White House, thieves who run our big banks – it’s a dog-eat-dog world kid, and you’re just a pawn. We took a bus to the Mission District and he led me into an anarchist bookstore, sat me up against a wall and read from Pierre Joseph

Proudhon. Later on my dorm bed, he whispered in my ear – slavery is murder, kid. You’re one of them now. You wanna be my slave? I always said yes, without knowing what I was agreeing to.

He wound himself around me, and in me; his long, wet tongue slithered slowly over my body like a leech, until I was covered in him.

He was mad as hell, and so of course I loved him too. His wild yellow eyes like a snake, lit up like car headlights when he spoke. He filled me up with guilt – my white picket fence with the golden retriever in the white house on the white block where I grew up, was worthy of guilt. He spun around the dorm room, all seven feet of him, jumping from bed to bed,

2 words coming out of him like a broken fire hydrant, unstoppable weight of words, they pressed down on me and into me and I was so full when he’d leave. Full of him – he dripped out of me and soaked my feet. I repeated his speeches to my dorm mates, professors, cafeteria workers – anyone who would listen, but I couldn’t hear myself.

He brought me a baby-blue Olympia typewriter.

Here, kid. I found this on the street – and placed it on my desk – a dense mass of metal crumpled my homework underneath. He lifted me up and turned me around and simultaneously took off my shirt. He placed me on the bed, slowly, like I was a sick child, and stood over me –

Look at you, just look at all of you. When he left I sat at the desk, pressed the heavy keys down slowly, and then harder, too hard – they made puncture wounds in the paper and nothing spelled out anything, just babble on blank white.

Weeks later he sent me a letter, said he was going out to the woods for a while, to form a plan. He was going to build the patterns for a free society, was going to blow life into our shallowed minds, was going to turn the world upside-down with his wit and his red hair and his blow-fish lips. He had the keys to it all and when I was ready to admit to the emptiness of the institution I was enslaved to, I could come. I wanted to come. He dusted the dull corners of my days with what looked like gold. On the inside it was damp and hollow, but I didn’t know that until I heard he had moved back in with his parents and spent his hours in their garage, peddling conspiracy theories on the internet and chain smoking spliffs.

Matty was always the only one, and everyone knew it. I was far from home, in England, in a town which from the center, looked like a toy – cobbled streets that curved and stretched from each adorable pub, each pretty church, bookstores with brown ladders to reach the top shelves, restaurants with attics to sit in and watch the people below, coffee in tiny white cups,

3 cinnamon-sugar coated waffles, and in the winter: White, white, and low sky. But as we walked further and further from the city center, the charm of it all melted away. Cobbled streets turned to ones perforated with pot holes, and trailers in fields with broken furniture in front, and women bringing their babies into pubs, blowing smoke around their little ones, missing teeth, overflowing garbage bins on street corners with cigarettes free in the gutters and broken bottles haphazardly strewn about the bus stops like animal traps.

Matty and I, the first night we met, sat up on the floor of his room until it was so bright we didn’t need the lamp on anymore. We didn’t sleep for two years. Our mouths were open and ready, and we took it. He was brash and riotous. He listened to hip-hop music and tacked a black and white NWA poster to his wall, and he hid behind jokes and comedy whenever possible. He used to call me up in the middle of the night and say things like: What do you call an alligator in a vest? An investigator. Did I tell you I burned my Hawaiian pizza last night? Next time I’ll put it on aloha setting.

For two years my face was sore from laughing with him. After our trip to Poland I couldn’t hardly chew for two weeks. My jaw was bruised from the inside out, after a day-trip to the salt mine – a tourist destination that Matty found particularly funny, and when we walked into the real-sized Cathedral made entirely of salt, he burst out loud, “What the fuck?” The tour guide stood, mouth agape and eyed us like she was our disappointed mother. We hung in the back for the duration of the tour, and I buried my face in the crook of his arm to smother my laughter in the soft cotton of his sweatshirt.

But he cried often and I held him each time, on the concrete stairs outside the apartment. We rolled cigarettes and he told me about his mother who was sick with cancer, and his brother who had Down Syndrome and was obsessed with the Simpsons.

4 I went to their house for Christmas. It looked lonely and dull from the outside, but

inside was golden and warm. There were candles made of beeswax that smelled like coco butter

and from a record player, a man sang in French. His mother wore a blue scarf on her bald head,

and had blue eyes to match. When she hugged me, she smelled like licorice, and she poured red

wine into a pretty crystal glass for me while we ate curry at the great oak table in the kitchen. His

brother drew a picture of me next to the Christmas tree with a tiny mouse underneath and it said,

“Happy Christmas Mouse Loves You”, and we all curled on the worn-out couch that sagged in the middle, in the living room under a green blanket she had knitted from thick wool.

Matty and I slept upstairs in the attic and laughed about nothing before falling asleep, wrapped around each other like kittens.

In the spring we drove to London. I held my hand out the open window and let it warp up and down with the wind. Matty played Tupac loudly on the stereo and told me stories about gangsters in Los Angeles, said he wanted to go someday, wanted to come home with me to

California and live like Dr. Dre after he got famous, in a big house with marble floors and I could stay there with him and be his baby-mama. He always joked about these things, but I knew he found it all so charming. He liked these rappers and their lyrics about weed, bitches, guns.

They were all so confident, drowning in self assurance. The ones he admired, they had a struggle he envied – they came from poverty and violence, he came from poverty and sugared-love. He wanted me, but more than that, he wanted to feel like he had something to overcome, something sexier than a mother with cancer. Once he told me, “I can’t tell if I’m losing myself completely, or finally becoming who I’m supposed to be.”

We stopped on the M25 at the war memorial just after the highway changed to two lanes. He held my hand and we ran past the memorial – a massive monument, four stories tall,

5 pointed at the top, rough around the edges, something written on metal on the front but it was

scratched – and into the mustard field. Grey skies, grey like his eyelids, grey like my cuticles.

Bare birch trees melted into low hanging steel-grey sky. All around me was yellow, highlighter- yellow. Yellow like the whites of his eyes, yellow like my fingernails. Sheep, fluffy brown, dirty with the weather, with the grey skies, all huddled in a pack, slept and ate and pissed on the yellow flowers. Matty took his camera out and snapped a shot of me and the filthy sheep. Wind pushed my hair in front of my face, over my lips, only one green eye showed and the bottom of my chin, maybe forehead. Matty yelled, “Run!” Behind me was a ram with sharp horns three feet away, kicking his heels, digging up mustard flowers, steam from his nostrils and gooey grey eyes. We ran. I was running behind him, watching his camera that was slung over his shoulder bounce up and down on the back of his thigh. We were laughing as usual, our only defense against nervousness. Through the yellow, past the memorial, slam shut of car doors, hush-hush- hush until our breath slowed. We stared at each other, gasping for breath, smiling and he held my hand as we watched the ram from inside, he was kicking the car with muddy hooves.

A year later, I had to come home to California. He held my backpack on his lap on the way to the airport. We held each other in the crowded terminal, and I felt my back split in two and it was hard to walk. I cried the whole plane ride home with my head in my arms, and the old

Indian lady next to me patted me on the shoulder. She touched my hair with her slender fingers and gave me a concerned smile that felt like a hot bath.

Nine years later, I heard his mother had died and his brother moved to a farm north of

London. Matty was living in Berlin and I wrote to him there. I was coming for a work trip and we planned to meet up, to catch up. We sat in Tempelhof, and watched the sun set behind the worn-out terminals. On the other side of the tarmac, huge white tents were set up for Syrian

6 refugees. There had been protests against them living there, but they had nowhere else to go.

Matty had been spending most of his time in nightclubs, learning to D.J., experimenting with

Ketamine and cocaine, and his eyes were gooey and pale-blue when he told me. We drank from a flask, something that was syrupy and tasted of peppermint. He sucked the last nine years out of me when he pulled me close and kissed me.

“Just look at all of this,” he said. “We were never meant to have this much fun."

Matty died in a fire a month later. He was taking out the trash, and it exploded and he went up with the flames – parts of him hung from branches of the trees, other pieces melted with the sidewalk. As far as I know there was no funeral, not really anyone to even send flowers to, so

I picked some for myself and let them dry upside down under the kitchen window.

And I spend time ceiling-gazing. There’s a small crack in the corner and I swear it’s gotten longer since I first sat back here. The long, California evening spreads itself across this room, it stretches out like a sunning cat and holds me in warm yellow. I have time. It’s all we really ever had.

7 Hemlock

There is hemlock growing in the backyard. I kneel down so close my nose touches the leaves. Smells like rusted pennies. I run my index finger from the leaves to the soil, following the thick white stem all the way down through the snow to the red spots at the base of the roots. Cold, but the sun presses hot on my back like a fever. Pick a thick stem, pulling it from the roots, and brush the snow off. Peanut butter toast.

I'll cut this up and put it on some peanut butter toast; the same thing I did as a teenager when we

ate mushrooms and hiked through the woods. Hide the sewer flavor with peanut butter.

I put a piece of wheat bread in the toaster and take the jar of peanut butter out of the

cabinet. As it toasts, I place the hemlock on the cutting board and chop the leaves first. The stem

is tough and my knife isn’t sharp enough to make perfect cuts, but it breaks into chunky strips

and I figure it’ll work just fine.

The front door opens and Palmer walks into the kitchen, kisses me on the cheek. He looks

tired, his shoulders sag a little, and he leans in over my arm for a bite.

I pull the toast back and say, “No, no, get your own.”

Raising his eyebrows at me he smiles, pulls a slice of bread from the bag, and pops it in

the toaster. He sits on the stool across from me.

“So glad to have this break,” he says. “I just don’t know why I’m doing this anymore.

I’ve been thinking of calling Greg.”

“Yeah, maybe you should,” I tell him, half listening as I try to dust the leftover leaves

into the sink.

8 “How do you feel about looking for a job again? I saw Plant it Earth is looking for

someone to work the floor during winter. You think you’re ready?” he asks.

“I could try and do that,” I say with my mouth full.

Now he’s spreading peanut butter from the jar onto his toast while I’m working on the

last couple bites of mine. He stops and looks at me, puts down the knife.

“What’s going on with you? You’re all sweaty.”

With one hand on my forehead, he grabs the last bite out of my hand. His eyes catch the

wasted stems on the counter, spots of red against the white tile and parsley shaped leaves in the

sink.

“Fuck. Annie, really?” He throws the rest of the poison into the sink.

I just stand there still and keep chewing.

When I open my eyes the white walls and mounted television bring me back and I know

exactly where I am. I’ve spent a lot of time in this hospital. Palmer is asleep in the chair next to

me, head cocked sideways, mouth slightly open. I reach over and touch him. He wakes with a

jump.

“Hey, you’re awake. How do you feel?”

“Can we go home?” I ask and he nods. His eyes are swollen.

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and we’re hosting this year. Palmer’s Mom, brother,

sister in law, and their three kids are supposed to be at our house in less than twenty-four hours.

We’re supposed to sit around the oak dining-room table, hold hands and say grace, supposed to pass platters of hot food around and laugh with our mouths full of red wine and green beans.

9 He asks me to help him prep and sets me up at the island chopping celery for the stuffing. I sit on the stool and think about the hemlock. It was so pretty against the fence next to the dandelion weeds that we used to pick and blow. The red spots at the bottom of the stems, they’re the color of hummingbird food – leafy green on the top and it stuck to the back of my throat when I ate it.

Last winter was the first time I noticed it. Even in the snow, it grew heavy out there, such a tenacious plant. Hemlock grows wild here. It thrives next to fences, in ditches, on construction sites, near broken-down railroads. It grows where nothing else wants to when nothing else can. It can be easily mistaken for an edible plant, but every part of it is highly poisonous. If digested, it will kill you by paralysis, starting with the legs and working up into the respiratory system, stopping oxygen to the lungs and heart. When it blooms it grows soft, flat white flowers that look an awful lot like snowflakes, each one different, clean in color.

Palmer guts the turkey. The bare bird sits defrosted on the cutting board, wet and pink. I imagine it could just get up and walk away, hobble off the counter and waddle towards the front door, headless and amoeba-like. Palmer washes his hands and then dives into the turkey, ass first, taking out the bag with the giblets and heart.

He says, “We could boil these and give them to Charlie, he’d probably love it. Wouldn’t you, Charlie?” The cat purrs and rubs his furry head on Palmer’s calves.

He looks over his shoulder at me. “What do you think?”

“Sure,” I say, still waiting for the turkey to get up and ditch us.

"We could cancel. I could call and cancel this if it's too much," he says.

10 Without another word he’s on the phone, explaining in so many words that I am not feeling well

and no, it’s not anything serious, no, it’s not that. I continue chopping the celery into even

chunks.

Palmer has eyes the color of espresso beans. His hair is coarse and dark, fingernails are

always clean. Intelligent, tall, and he uses words I don't know the meanings of and reads books to

me in bed. He teaches human genetics at Johns Hopkins where he got his Ph.D. eight years ago. I

don't know if he's ever been happy. He takes things very seriously, almost in an effortless way.

For a long time, I was enough for him. Sometimes he paints. My favorite painting is a rainbow- colored bird. It hangs from our bedroom wall, wings flopped downwards to the floor, head cocked to the right, and black eyes stare at the carpet. I like it sometimes when Palmer is home, but often when he is away it scares me, the resemblance.

We take a bath. I fill the tub to the brink of overflow and watch the steam from the water float upwards towards the ceiling. It burns at first. Palmer gets in after me, about a cup of water spills over to the tile. I put my feet up on his shoulders and he holds my right foot. The bubbles feel nice, pressed in pops against my chest. I'm looking at his tattoo, a grizzly bear with its paws up on his left forearm. I tell him that it moved. He tells me it does that sometimes but not to be scared, it's just a bear and you can tame these things. Then he laughs and splashes a weightless handful of bubbles. He squeezes my foot a little too hard, I can feel my tendons separating under his grip, but I wince and he lets go.

We sit in the tub for a long time and Palmer falls asleep with his head tilted backward, neck outstretched, Adam's apple looks like it could cut through his thin skin.

11 I didn't know it was cancer – not at first. At first, it was just white noise behind my left eyelid. There were patches of white, small, like television static. I was scared when Palmer spoke to me, afraid I wouldn't remember the words he was saying. One day he asked me to pass him the ketchup and, staring into the refrigerator, I couldn't pick it up. I didn't know what that was.

He laughed when he saw me reading the labels on every jar.

Most days I couldn't keep my eyes open. One day I fell asleep driving home from work and opened my eyes when the tires on gravel shook me awake, missed a tree by a foot or so.

Palmer came home that day to find me unconscious in the garage, halfway hanging out the driver's side door. We went to the hospital and saw it. On the screen, it looked like a hole in my brain, but it wasn't something missing, but instead something heavy and white that had moved in.

There were dates arranged for blood work, consultations, and surgery. Palmer brought home a poster-sized calendar one evening and tacked it up in the kitchen. Green was for the hospital, blue was for the clinic, red was for surgery, and yellow was for a support group. There were emergency phone numbers and notes on medications written in the margins and a little wallet-sized picture of Charlie on the top corner.

The evening we got the results, Palmer was on the phone with his mom. In a low voice from the living room, I heard him tell her that he wasn't worried, that I was the strongest person he knew. I spent that night painting the garage. It was something to do. I sat and stared at the walls, imagining myself under fluorescent lights, my skull cut open, a stranger's gloved hands, latex fingers rummaging around. There was something growing inside of my brain. I thought, if it won't leave, then everything else should go first. I stared, concentrating on the blank, fresh paint, and eventually, I was able to empty myself completely.

12 I find a sponge deep under the bathtub water and squeeze it over my head.

"I love you, Palmer," I say to his sleeping face. Then I splash a handful of water in his

direction. He wakes up gasping for breath.

“How long was I asleep?”

I tell him long enough for his feet to look like raisins. A piece of wet, white skin is

peeling off of his big toe. I have an urge to pick it but don't because it would tickle him and I

can't stand his laugh anymore. I used to love his laugh. Used to think of what it sounded like

when I took long plane rides or waited in the dentist’s office or was bored in those minutes it

takes to fill up my gas tank.

He gets out of the tub and the bear on his arm shoots me a toothy snarl. I dip under the tepid water and stay there until my lungs press hard against my ribs and I can feel them slipping through the gaps in between bone.

Palmer is in bed when I come into the room. I unwrap the towel and we lie in silence again, for a while, under the covers, watching the moonlight make its way across the ceiling. It's

clear and cold outside. Frost clings to the window. He holds my hand under the blankets. The

bear raises one claw in an attempt to scratch my hand away. I look at Palmer and his eyes are

open, he's looking out the window at the noiseless snow. He turns his head so he is looking at

me, gives me a long kiss, and I put my hands in his hair. We have sex, both of us finish with me

on top.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks afterward.

"I need a cigarette," I say and get out of bed, put on my pajamas, rain boots, and leather

coat.

13 Outside the Baltimore air freezes my eyelashes and it's hard to blink. The smoke gets stuck in the cold and wafts, stagnant in the frost, a constant cloud in front of my eyes, but I appreciate the consistency of it. It was all pumped out of me at the hospital, but I can feel the hemlock, sitting in a chunky mass in the pit of my stomach. I think it's stuck somewhere behind my gallbladder. I can taste it in the back of my throat, the taste of raw meat and sugar. I need to get it out so I walk to the yard, sit in the snow, and think about nothing but oxygen.

By dawn, I'm still in the yard. I can see my femur bone, camouflaged like a stick of petrified wood in the snow. My ear drum bounces off the sidewalk, playing hopscotch with my esophagus.

Palmer comes out screaming, holding my liver in his palm, it’s dripping sticky red and he throws it at me. He tells me I’m crazy and grabs me up by the jacket collar, frozen leather cracks under his grip. Today I am so light. I stand when he pulls me up but I can’t feel my feet and he’s shouting about not knowing where I was, hypothermia, act-your-age. He holds me and he’s shaking.

“Annie, just tell me what to do for you,” he’s begging.

“You have to get my ear drum, it’s almost down the block,” I say, watching the thing bounce through the slush in the gutter.

“What?” he says with eyes wide.

We met at college. Or maybe I should say we met at work. I worked for the landscaping company that mowed the lawn and trimmed back the ivy on the old brick buildings of the university where he teaches. The job meant being outside all day, independent and slow-paced work, but important nonetheless, and I loved it. In spring I turned mounds of brown dirt into

14 colors and in winter, before the snow suffocated them all in freezer burn, I saved what I could and brought them in big pots to the school offices. It seemed to make the staff happy, to have a living thing inside their dusty cubicles after the city had gone gray.

For six months we smiled and nodded as strangers do, until one day I stuck the note in his mailbox, giving him three choices: azalea, rhododendron, yellow daisy. He marked the box for yellow daisies and I planted three bushes outside his office window.

We were married three years ago in the spring on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The reception on the sand, candles and flowers and our friends played music and I sang Bring it on home to me while wearing a white dress and who knew that in the midst of the loveliest evening, there was something else, white and glowing in the back of my skull.

I’m lying on the carpet in the bedroom. The rainbow-painted bird is glaring at me. I watch the bird blink and lick its beak. The bear is anxious, wiggling on his arm. Palmer lies down next to me and holds my hand, looking into the backyard. He tells me he loves me but hates me in the mornings when I’m like this – empty.

“What should we do?” I ask him.

“The hemlock has to go,” he says. Rolling over on his side, he props himself up off the carpet and I hear him run to the garage. I smile and wink at the bird and as I jump up off of the carpet she winks back. I yell to him not to run with the saw.

He stops and pulls the chain; it clicks twice and then roars. The leafy tops are tossed up and float down like bizarre green snowflakes. When he’s finished and the chainsaw is turned off, he turns around and sees me watching on the back porch. He’s standing in the snow, sweat

15 dripping, green and red pieces of the plant scattered all across the lawn, stuck in his hair and on

his clothes.

Palmer comes out of the shower, naked, and stands in front of me in the living room. I

see the bear, dancing on his forearm, and it makes me smile.

He smacks his tattoo with his right hand and shouts, “Damnit, Annie! It’s like we should

have just let you die.”

Now he’s worked himself up to tears and takes a breath. Then he tells me I have to let it

go. He tells me that it’s gone now, that I can’t still be scared of the tumor that has been gone for

a year and a half.

But it’s not that it’s gone; it’s that it ever was in the first place. My eyes, like marbles.

There was someone inside of my brain. Something gray and sticky dropped from my

head onto the surgeon's covered shoe. He stopped and cursed and the nurses laughed. The room

was white. Their scrubs were mint green. I saw it. They say it is impossible, I was unconscious,

but I know I saw it. On the north side of the room, the wall was glass. Medical students sat and

watched the procedure, scribbling in spiral notebooks, fascinated. I am not human anymore, I'm

something else, a science experiment. I want to tell Palmer this. I want to tell him how satisfying

it is to feel absolutely nothing.

I go into the bathroom to wash my face. When I look in the mirror I notice the length of

my hair. In a year and a half it has grown back to the exact length it was in middle school – just

above the shoulders, but now instead of shiny red, it falls in flat chunks of mousy-ginger. The mirror doesn't shatter when my fist hits it, but splits into thick streams, glowing against the overhead light. It is disappointing and I am left with bloody knuckles.

16 I spend the night in the garage and when he sees me in the morning with glass eyes and a bloody fist he only has to shake his head for me to know that he is whole, and I am not.

Palmer gets the tweezers and sits me on the stool in the kitchen. He pulls out tiny shards of shiny glass and puts them in a paper Dixie cup. He gets a large bowl from the cupboard and fills it with warm water and soap, comes back to where I’m sitting and places my hand in the water. When it’s clean he wraps it tightly in an Ace bandage and tells me I’ll need to go to the

ER later, he thinks it’s broken and he’s probably right. My fist is swollen and lovely purple. He points to the window facing the yard.

“See? It’s all gone now.”

The yard and our backs are framed by the edges of the window. The yard is white with snow and rimmed with the dark brown wooden fence. The sky is gray and low and tiny petals of snow flurry and fall. On the left side, pressed against the fence, I can see the hemlock starting to grow back.

When he leaves I ask him to take the bird. The bear and the bird each mouth “goodbye” but I don’t wave back. I stand in the doorway and watch him struggle through the snow with his suitcase and his bags to the taxi that is waiting at the curb. He comes back and puts his hands on my face. Then he hugs me, kisses my left temple, and says nothing.

I left when the tumor did. And that’s what they told me when it was finally out. The nurse, leaning over the railing of my hospital bed, her voice liquid, the smell of her coconut shampoo.

“It’s all gone; congratulations. Now you can get on with your life,” she said, smiling, her blue eyes blinked once and, grabbing my file with one slender hand, she left, a wave of blond hair floating behind her.

17 Ink

The phone rings late, a woman’s voice. “Is this the bitch who slept with my husband? Hello? Hello?”

“Hello,” I say, “maybe, probably. What’s your husband’s name?”

“Jack,” says the voice.

“Jack…Jack, Jack. What is Jack’s last name?” I ask although I know exactly who Jack is.

“Gorski. Jack Gorski, my husband,” she says and pauses, “the writer? Did you sleep with him? I knew he was having an affair. I knew it. I should have listened to my father,” she says.

“Jack and I didn’t have an affair,” I say.

“Well, did you fuck him?” She asks.

“Sure, once or twice,” I lie. And then I hear Jack’s voice in the background – “Sarah, who are you talking to? Give me the phone Sarah!”

I stay seated at my kitchen table and rub my finger up the stem of this red wine glass.

“Kate?” He says.

“Mm, hi Jack,” I say.

“Kate, I’ll have to call you back,” he says and in the background Sarah’s yelling – “Like hell you will!” And the line goes flat.

I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, but I can’t say I was to blame for all of it.

The phone rings again, my mother this time.

“Honey, I’ve been thinking and it really might be time for you to think about freezing your eggs. You know they can do that now? I saw it on CNN,” she says, kind of, through gulps.

“Hello? Are you there?”

18 “Yes, I’m here Mom. I just don’t know how to respond to that, I’m only thirty-two this year,” I say.

“I just wanted to throw in my two cents. Your old mom has to have a say in some things, doesn’t she? And the way you live, I don’t know if you’ll ever find a decent man in that city. I heard on Fox that rapes are increasing by the day.”

“What does that even mean? I don’t even know if I want kids. Where are you?” I ask.

“I’m in bed, your father is working again. He’s always working. I know he’s just trying to get away from me,” she says and she puts the drink down on the bed side table. I can hear the ice clink, clink on glass.

My mother picked on my father constantly. He was never good enough, never around enough. In a discount grocery store when I was ten, my mother had me do the math on the back of an old receipt. I was supposed to subtract each item from the eighty dollars we had to spend that week on groceries. I messed up and forgot the loaf of bread so when we got to the checkout, she was three dollars and twenty-two cents short.

“How could your father do this to me?” She said. The lady at the register turned red and I stared at my shoes.

“It was my fault, mom, I forgot the bread. I’m sorry,” I had said.

“Nonsense. He did this to us on purpose. Do you have a husband?” She asked the woman behind us and the woman shook her head, no.

“Keep it that way honey, not worth the trouble.”

When nobody wanted to take her picture anymore, and she refused to get a job, my dad worked more because he had to, and even then she never understood why. The embarrassment of her public declarations of disappointment in him, in their marriage, was a strong starting point in

19 my learnings of love. Although he tried to please her, it was never enough and that distance between love and resentment grew closer and closer through my teenage years until it collapsed into a divorce on paper but he never moved out of the house. My father didn’t want a divorce, he just wanted her to quit drinking. I think it was a stretch of her pride that my mother pushed for it.

She secretly knew she couldn’t live alone, but I think more than that, she didn’t want him to live with anyone else. Most nights are like this, she calls to talk about what-if’s and I try to get off the phone as quickly and peacefully as possible.

“Kate, you know who I should have slept with when I was your age? Jeremy Price.

You’ve seen pictures of him. What a doll he was, that blonde hair, that Datsun!” She squawks, letting out a half laugh, half cough. “Katie, I want to come out there. I want to come next week.”

“Oh Mom, you know I’m trying to finish a project for the Vogt’s, you know that. Don’t come okay, I’ll send you some dates,” I say.

Every few minutes the carpet shakes below my feet from a car chase or a bridge collapsing. My neighbor Ron got a new television, and it takes up most of the south side of his apartment wall which is directly underneath my bedroom so it’s kind of like we watch television together most nights. He’s watching an action movie, clearly, tonight. Ron is old, and alone. He keeps the TV on whenever he is awake, I imagine for the company. Mostly it’s the news so my house is flooded with the muffled voices of broadcasters describing the weather patterns and stock market drops, Syrian refugees, and panda births.

“The Vogt’s, what have the Vogt’s ever done for me?” She says.

“Well, for starters, they’re paying me three thousand dollars to put up that sculpture up town,” I say, even though I’m doing it for free.

20 “That’s enough, Kate. I’m coming out there. I’m your mother and you won’t give me grandbabies so it’s all your fault that you’re all I got,” she says and hangs up. Below my feet gun shots go off and grown men scream in what I imagine to be a back alley or a hotel lobby.

I graduated college with a double major of international business and engineering because I wanted more than anything else to make money. By my sixth year in school, I had a Master’s degree in international finance, and was hired straight out of my undergraduate internship as a financial analyst with an oil company based in Dubai. I stayed there one year until I realized I missed building things, and so I took a role at a start up in the valley that built big metal drones. I saved nearly every dime I made. When I was hired they gave me twenty shares of the company worth two hundred and fifty dollars. I quit when the company went through their IPO last year and when I left those shares were worth nearly five million. That, on top of everything I had saved and milked them for, my net worth was almost ten million dollars. I was thirty-one and had millions in the bank that nobody knew about except for my father. I told my mother I was in industrial fabrication, which was true now, I built sculptures for the Vogt foundation, an artist collective up north in the vineyards.

So when my mother tells me that my father is working late again, I know she is right when she says he’s just trying to get away from her. After two years of coaxing him, I was able to convince him this year to let me pay off their mortgage, the cars, the credit card debt. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her. There was something about being her silent financial savior that I relished. At least on paper, I could always prove to myself that I was a success, no matter how disappointed she was in the fact that I existed.

21 I was happy to do this for my father. I’m an only child and we never had a lot of money, but I never had to want for anything and I knew that was all him. He grew up in Kaleen, TX and before he met my mother, worked long weeks at a factory that made metal pipes for a gas company. His parents were Irish immigrants and how they settled in Kaleen, I still didn’t know, but they drank and his dad beat him up. When he was my age he had enough money saved to leave and he came to California and took a job with Cisco doing something with numbers and spreadsheets. When he met my mom he was forty-two and she was twenty six and he asked her to marry him after six months. I was born seven months after that.

My mom said her depression started after I was born. Said she didn’t have a real identity after that. And my father, although I could tell it pained him to say it, told me she had been sweet before me. Before me, she was a commercial model, posing for magazine ads for lip balm or hair spray or wax strips. Back then she was pretty in an approachable way. Blonde hair just above her shoulders in a blunt cut and skin so poreless it could have been folded onto her face like fondant.

My father said when he first saw her he thought he was going to faint, she was the loveliest thing he’d seen in all his life and he often said, even now, that tricking her into marrying him was his greatest sleight of hand feat to date. She was hard where he was soft, and then there was me – a confusion of both masses, a science experiment gone right in many ways, aesthetically at least.

She still holds herself with book-on-her-head posture, and never, ever lets anyone see her without makeup, not even me. But her eyes sag on the top now and eyeliner always clumps in places on the outside, where the corners of her eyes meet and it bleeds into lines so that black veins extend too far to go unnoticed. She puts diamonds on every day. The same ones she’s had for years. I tried to let Dad let me buy her new ones for Christmas last year. I told him I would

22 buy them and he could give them to her, but he told me she didn’t deserve that from me. From him maybe, but not from me.

The phone rings in the morning, it’s Jack. I’m at the warehouse in the industrial neighborhood by the docks where my metal shop is. It’s an old garage with a view of the bay from the office upstairs and I’m working on this sketch for the Vogt’s. It’s a cylinder copper cone with bike wheels attached, and when the wind blows, the spores move around the wheel and it sings, all in note C. The whole thing is arbitrary. Unnecessary except that it will look pretty and sound okay, if it’s windy.

“Kate, I’m sorry,” he says.

“It was bound to happen eventually, not your fault, not really,” I say.

“I’m going to be in California next week and I want to see you,” he says. His voice shakes a little I have a familiar burning in my chest.

“I think my mother is coming next week,” I say.

“Kate, I have to see you…” he says.

Before I met Jack he was just his stories. He was not anything physical, but more so a culmination of characters who I picked my favorite pieces of and strung together in my head like a line of negatives. He was part Viking with an alcohol addiction, part housewife with an apt for violence, part twelve-year-old boy with a hook nose. Not one thing, not one person, and while I found myself going back to his book more so than any other, I never thought to look him up, not in all those years after I first read it. There was something about the mystery, leaving room for possibility that kept me from wanting to know. Even when I found out we had some mutual

23 friends in New York, I never asked about his demeanor, or his hair, or how he held his body at

the dinner table. The only thing I ever looked up was his last name: Gorski, a Polish word

meaning mountain.

It is easy to be swept by a man like Jack. At first this fact bothered me. When I found out he was married, it actually made it easier, because I had something that she did not and that was my negative space, the truth that while she might have a ring and a promise, I had nothing to lose, and if I had nothing to lose, then I would always win.

We met at a book party of his in New York, back when I was still working and was often

sent there to schmooze with executives in navy blue suits, to flirt and compliment those fancy

men who were starving for a young pretty thing to show them the time of day. Nobody ever said

that to me outright, but it was obvious. I had no place in sales, I was a builder, but my male

coworkers liked me because I had no morals. It’s not that I didn’t have morals, I shouldn’t say

that, it was just that I was willing to go places outside of myself that most women weren’t and

because of that, I usually got what I, we, wanted. And, I looked the part.

I didn’t know it was Jack when I met him. It took me a moment to realize he was Jack

Gorski, the author of the only book of fiction I had ever finished. I bought his book because the

cover was a disaster – neon yellow with curling cursive red letters, looping the too long title

together in one roped strand. That night we met I couldn’t seem to get anywhere alone.

Everywhere I went, there he was, next to me, whispering something with that hot breath in my

ear, so close to me his face would disappear into my thick, dark hair, fucking me up sideways

with those baby blue eyes. He stared at me from feet away, and I couldn’t get enough. How was it so, that this person I never knew but had known of for so long, was now setting his arm on my

leg, holding a cigarette to my lips so close that his fingers touched them? Standing behind me in

24 the middle of the street pointing up at skyline lights, with the palm of his hand on the small of my back?

It was a problem of language, really. He made his living telling untruths. He knew what to say and when to say it and the worst thing he ever did to Sarah, was when he leaned in that first night, coated my ear with that wet breath bath, and requested that request that left me soaked. This is what he said when he started it, foraging through my dark headed web of hair to the ear that would hear it:

“Let’s get out of here.”

Let’s get out of here. It was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. And yet, I’d been waiting a long time for someone else to give me that kind of direction – would’ve let him pull me anywhere by then and he knew it. He knew it like he knew language, the particular way he can put words on paper or into thin air and let them dangle there for a long time, long enough for anyone to be horrified, mesmerized, as if in the time it takes for a snake to swallow a mouse.

“Let’s get out of here.”

I could have stayed. Could have planted myself on that plastic chair I sat on, or laughed at such a line that was soaking wet with male ego. Could have pretended not to hear him, but the truth was I was drenched in this demand.

It was not possible to ignore such a request when the requester requests it by burrowing into, burrowing through, so much hair and pressed that whisper so close that his bottom lip brushed the bottom half of my ear, and when he pulled back I moved with him, as if he had threaded a needle with some part of me. We moved out the door, where a light rain dripped from places unseen – it cooled my hands and neck, but not where the whisper was whispered, there where the hot was still hot, and wet. I wanted his breath in an aerosol can.

25

“Kate?” He says, “I just miss you. It’s not working out with Sarah. I know you’ve been wanting me to say that for a long time, and I know I probably blew my chance, but Kate, you have to trust me.”

“You know me well enough to know that this kind of talk is boring me,” I say, and hang up the phone.

The day my mother arrives the house cleaner leaves, just as the buzzer goes off downstairs, and I hope the house is clean enough that she won’t feel inclined to automatically grab for the sponge in the skink and start rubbing the caulk for mildew.

“Katie,” she says, “I just don’t know how you live here. The pigeons! One flew right into my head, I swear,” and she drops her suitcase with a grunt and leans in for a cheek kiss.

“Hi Mom, thanks for coming,” I say and pick up her suitcase to roll to the guest room.

She looks tired, like she got dressed in the dark, hurried, and her hair is knotted in the back of her head. I have an urge to take a comb to it but I know better. She walks away from me to the kitchen, opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of white wine. The wine is opened and two glasses poured.

“It’s ten thirty, Mom,” I remind her and then regret it.

“I’m on vacation, honey, don’t forget. If you don’t want any that’s just more for me.”

I take the glass and chug it down. This was a typical issue. In order to save her from getting black out drunk, I’d drank as much as I possibly could and ended up with a headache or writing an email to Jack that I knew I shouldn’t, or worse, calling my dad and complaining about her.

26 The kitchen floor erupts in game show laughter. Ron must be in a good mood because he records episodes of Family Feud and saves them for days when something goes right and he feels like a laugh. Mom doesn’t see the appeal of this.

“What on earth is that? You’d think the street cars and those God-awful busses were enough to live with, but what is that shrieking?” She says, her mouth full of chardonnay, little drip in the corner messing up her lipstick.

“That’s my downstairs neighbor, Ron. He just got a new television. You and Dad might like a big TV. What if I shipped one to you?” I say.

“What do I need a big TV for? To sit and watch alone? You know your father works almost every day. Seventy-four and still working. It’s ridiculous Katie. I’m going down there to give that neighbor a talking to,” she says and before I can convince her otherwise, she’s out the door, bottle in hand.

The buzzer goes off again and expecting it to be my mom, I ring it up without answering the intercom. He stands there with his grey coat and dark denim, bagged eyes and pot belly, but that brown hair, lax as always, with the piece in the front that falls just above his eyebrow.

“Oh goddamnit, Jack, this is really not a good time,” I say.

“Well, I couldn’t stay there. Sarah threw my shit in the yard.”

“What did you expect?”

“Right? Such a cliché.”

“Look, my mother is here.”

27 Footsteps coming up, two pairs and our reunion is interrupted by my mother and Ron, standing behind him in a two-person line.

“Well, turn around handsome, let me get a look at you,” she says, and he lets go and faces her and she wobbles, kind of, side to side. “Hm, not bad.”

“Mom, this is my friend, Jack. Jack, this is my mother Bette,” I say.

“Hello there, Bette, I’ve heard nothing about you, so don’t worry,” he says and she lets out a rolling laugh that is neither loud nor quiet but more so, pervasive.

“Good, you can join us then. We’re taking this old man to dinner. He wants some chicken, and by all means, this day is for getting what you want, right Ron?” She says and finishes her glass in one throw back, like a frat boy with a Budweiser.

“Been thinking of Franks all week,” says Ron, “told your mom, best fried chicken in the city. And if I ever had a day to celebrate, today’s the day! If I’m wrong, lunch is on me.”

With that, he throws a saggy arm around her shoulders and the two of them saunter down the stairs like a pair of old friends. Jack doesn’t hesitate and I follow the three of them out the door and into the noise of the street.

The restaurant is one of those self-proclaimed “best of” places with dark wood paneled walls and no windows, miscellaneous trophies and portraits of long dead movie stars with autographs in dirty frames. The hostess seats us in a front corner next to the window and I’m relieved to have the street to distract me. Ron sits next to Mom across from me and Jack diagonal from her, his hand under the table brushes the back of mine and I sit up straight, ready for the inevitable, question of how do we know each other. But instead she waves the waiter down with one pink nailed finger.

28 “Ron and I here will have two vodka martinis. Olive or twist Ron?” She barks.

“Your call Bette, I’m just along for the ride, and the chicken,” he says. I’ve never really

looked at Ron before. He has a five o’clock shadow even now at one-thirty in the afternoon, and his blue t-shirt peels up from his hard, round belly to expose a little black hair. Nearly bald and short, he could have been one of millions of other men I’d seen who look exactly like him.

“Olives. Three olives,” she says. “Kate, Ron told me some exciting news, tell her Ron.”

“Well, Kate, it’s like this. Sometimes the world smacks you upside the head one too many times before it offers you an olive branch. Today I got a whole damn tree. Your old neighbor is moving up in the world, on account of one piece of paper.”

“I’m not following this, are you following this?” says Jack. I shake my head, no.

Ron takes a folded post it out of his t-shirt pocket and lays it flat on the table with a smack.

“I won,” he says, and face up I see the post-it is a lottery ticket.

“Five-hundred thousand dollars!” Mom barks. “Can you imagine? What luck, Ron, what luck. You must be a nice fellow to deserve this.” And they clink martini glasses, take a sip holding eyes. I could have written all three of them checks for double that without blinking.

“That’s great Ron. What will you do with your winnings?” Jack asks with that tone of sarcasm only realized by me. His condescending response makes me want to run out the door and leave the three of them here.

“The other half of the win is this lady right here,” he says with a sloppy grin and a crumb of bread that was stuck to the stubble on his upper lip drops and he catches it on his tongue.

There’s no bread on the table so I’m not sure how long that’s been there. “Taking this dream boat out dancing tonight – what do you say Bette?”

29 “I say, hear, hear! A man who knows how to make a woman feels special is a man worth

betting on,” she says.

Jack’s phone rings in his pocket. I can feel it vibrating down his chair, into the floor, and up my leg. He silences it but it rings again, and then again.

“Excuse me,” he says and walks out the door.

Mom and Ron order two more martinis and continue their what-would-you-do-if game. Mom says she’d buy a yacht and sail the high seas, after all the plastic surgery so far available through science, of course. Ron yells she doesn’t look a day over thirty-five and the two of them giggle like kids while I try not to lose myself in disgust. The chicken comes on a big white platter with parsley garnish, macaroni and cheese in a bowl, grits, and fried okra. The chicken sits on my plate growing condensation underneath, getting soggy. Jack stands outside the window with his back to me, the phone pressed hard on his cheek and he has his other hand on his forehead, as if in pain, then he’s waving it around and he looks unraveled.

I think of my dad at home, alone, probably enjoying some silence in the house I bought for him. I hope he has the music up loud and didn’t get dressed today. Hope he feels happy this morning.

Jack turns to look at me through the window and he mouths “Sarah” and makes a motion with his hand that explains she won’t stop talking. I smile and nod and he turns around again and walks down the street, out of my vision.

Ron and Mom are half drunk now, he has one chubby finger in her thinning blonde bob and she’s rocking her shoulders back and forth.

“Bette, let me see your hand,” he says, “I can tell you your fortune.” She puts her hand out to him and he turns it over and studies her palm.

30 “This line here is very unique. See how it splits just halfway here? That’s very rare. That

means you have something special to give that you haven’t found yet.”

Bette drops her head to the side a little and her shoulders shrink. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her look this small. She closes her eyes and says, “Say that again Ron.” He does and she hums with eyes still shut.

“There’s something about receiving a compliment from a man you’ve just met that never loses its appeal,” she says to me. “I could live the rest of my life in the first few days of a new relationship, over and over and die a happy woman. You know Kate, everything gets old. Even ink.”

I excuse myself and go outside to find Jack but he’s nowhere in sight. All of the different sounds of the city melt together. I don’t know how long I stand there, with the white noise of everything around me, holding me in a small space. I’ll stand here for a long time, I think. I’ll just wait for something new to happen.

31 Funhouse

I’m having trouble with truth. My roof is leaking, kitchen table turned to ash, muddy tile and I wake up soaking, heavy wet. I’ve been listening to music I don’t know the name of. Frustrating, maybe. Thinking of DB Cooper belly up in that muddy puddle in the middle of my kitchen. Thinking I would look so bad ass with red baron goggles and $200,000 in cash. He should have called on me as a confidant. I look good in black. Gingers only look good in black.

I roll over and sit up. Grab the white paint bucket with my right hand and shove it towards the front door where the dripping water is coming faster. I wonder how some people seem to have so many talents while others have none. DB Cooper was a gentleman, almost handsome, cool and slightly terrifying. Like a new neighbor who turns out to be Christian Bale.

She told me that day at the beach she wished she was the stewardess he passed the note to. She said she would have asked him if she could tag along. She said her whole life would be different. She said, wouldn’t it be exciting?

The music is still going in the living room. I don’t want to go in there. It’s slippery and there is a comfort in this unexpected flood. Some sort of promise against boredom.

I’m having trouble with truth. I know what is true now. Now I am alone, in the kitchen, in a puddle. I have no idea where she went. Disappeared as quietly as snow in the sun. Nobody knows.

I stand up in the puddle and slosh over to the refrigerator. This photograph of her at

California Beach. Horizontal lines. First the division of parking lot and sand, then sand and

32 water, then water and crest of wave. The only vertical thing is her. This fact seemed so important to me but it meant nothing to them. They wanted the original, but I refused. They got a copy.

“We’re going for a drive,” I said, “Where do you want to go?”

She said, “The beach.”

I said, “The beach will be freezing.”

She said, “Everywhere is freezing.”

Another grey day, another day trip. There was a pale pink building, paint chipping, baby blue block letters spelled FUNHOUSE on the front. We tried to pry the door open, but jammed due to the swelling of wood in fog.

Snow on the dunes. Wanted to feel water on toes no matter the snow. She dove and I sat, nervously hugging my shoulders, holding my breath. I was scared when she reappeared, skin so light blue. But she was smiling with lips purple and wet, like the meat of a plum.

Got her in the car and wrapped her in a towel. Damp terry cloth on shoulders reminded me of my mother. We secretly wished we were with him now, holding hands as we jumped from the plane over the dense North Western forests, laughing as our chutes opened, landing on that bed of sticky, soft moss.

Got her in the car and wrapped her in the towel. Snow falling on the windshield of our car, she was hanging out the window with a cigarette. Hair so dark and dripping. Towel fell and I saw the outline of her spinal cord pressed tightly through thin pale skin.

I woke up this morning with loose teeth. My tongue swollen and I knew it was her. Only she knows what is what. I never made it to the moss. She and DB Cooper left me in midair, halfway between the plane and the earth. Heavier with the weight of fortune strapped to their

33 backs. I saw her face below mine, falling so fast, dark hair weightless and framed by a million evergreen trees.

My blood has thinned. Fingernails fallen away from hands like leaves from the birch trees. I’m having trouble with truth. Can’t remember how to pull this parachute.

34 Jenner

The young couple have been missing for three days and Nick has been gone for fifteen

hours when I decide to make the call. Early this morning he woke me with a shake of my

shoulder, said he wanted some space and to see the seals on the beach below, bodiless barking

heads in the water. He’d be back in a couple hours. I didn’t protest. For the second day this week

I was glad he felt the desire to do something other than sit on the porch, drink and smoke, some odd music blaring from cell phone speakers. We bought the house six months ago. I inherited enough money last year so that neither

Nick nor I work anymore. Our realtor described the house as “a quaint, sweet home with room to

make our own,” which is really just realtor talk for money-pit. Fifteen hundred square feet of

1920’s architecture, oddly paired with mid-century wall paper, linoleum tile, a hideaway ironing board in the kitchen, peeling bathroom paint, and avocado-green shag carpet in the hallway. But it sits on three acres across from the shore of the Pacific Ocean in Jenner, California, a fishing town with a population of less than two hundred. I was apprehensive about a small town after living in Seattle for so long, but Nick said, “It has good bones, let’s do it.” So we did.

I’m not sure about missing person’s etiquette, so I call the Sheriff first.

“I need to report a missing person,” I say when the dispatcher answers.

“Not another one,” says a rough female voice.

“Well, this is my first one. Unrelated to the couple,” I say.

“What is your relationship to the missing?” She asks.

“He’s my husband, Nicholas Martin. He went out to the beach this morning around six.

He’s not much of an outdoorsman.”

35 “Ma’am, we can’t do anything unless it’s been twenty-four hours. I suggest you wait for your husband to come home. You know how it goes with men,” she says.

I hang up the phone and pour myself a drink. The ice cubes shake in the glass, a shiny, simple tune, and I go out to the porch with the binoculars. Just fifty yards below is the mouth of the river. The ocean pours through the gap in the river wall, angry as I’ve ever seen it, but the seals are there on the bank, resting in a brown mass, in the pale orange glow of the sunset. It’s

rare to see the sun set here. Usually a thick coat of fog covers everything from evening to

daybreak. Tonight it’s clear and bright, even now, in the last few minutes of day light, when the

sun melts into the ocean and the redwoods cast deep shadows on the draught-ridden hills behind

them. Where did he go—a question I ask myself often, and this truth makes my toes curl, a dull

pain in my Achilles tendon.

We saw the couple at River’s End hotel the day before they went missing. Nick and I

were at the bar, drinking cranberry vodkas and talking to Jim, the bartender who looks so old he

could have panned for gold in this river. I saw their reflection in the mirror before they sat down

next to us. Pretty and young, the two of them, like a Gap advertisement, they both wore blue

jeans and down vests and she had a blue knit hat on top of blond, straight hair. He had a smile

like a dog, desperate.

“Ya’ll mind?” the boy asked us when he pulled out the bar stool.

Nick told him not at all so they sat and ordered two rum and cokes.

“You guys from around here?” Nick asked.

36 “Just visiting. We were working at Camp Awake down in El Dorado. Came up here to

celebrate for the night,” the boy said and held out her hand to show us the girl’s ring. Fused to a

thin band of gold, was a fat diamond.

“Wow, beautiful,” I said.

“Damn, you guys don’t look old enough to be getting married,” said Nick.

“We’re twenty-two,” she said. The both of them beamed with irrevocable joy, and she let

out a tiny noise I think was a laugh, gave him a wet kiss on his cheek.

“We thought we’d get a room here tonight. You know, celebrate some more,” he said to

Nick with a wink.

Behind the bar, Jim yelled out from the refrigerator, “We’re all full tonight, you could try

down the way at Jenner Inn though.”

“Maybe we should camp. Where’s a good spot on the beach? It would be so romantic to

see the stars, what a clear night, what a perfect night!” The girl said.

“Camping isn’t allowed on the beaches here, but try down the highway in Bodega,” Nick

said, “No seals there though,” he added in a slur.

He was five cranberry vodkas deep by then. I knew what he was seeing—blurred lines,

and he squinted a little bit.

“Let me buy you guys a drink, it’s a party. An engagement! Only happens once.” Nick

smiled at me and tilted his head forward to brush his cheek on my hair. “Jim! Champagne, Jim

for these young ones. It’s like Shakespeare, eh? Goddamn, I hate Shakespeare.”

The next morning, we stayed in bed late, half-drunk still and half-asleep. Legs wrapped up, twisted, ankle bones pressed together—what an uncomfortable necessity. I’m not sure why

37 we feel like being that close sometimes. Sometimes in the early mornings or late nights, when all the stores are closed, we are that way. I often think it’s out of lack of resources, but I could be wrong.

“Do you think we made the right decision?” His voice muffled in the crown of my head.

“With the house? Maybe. Who knows? Sometimes I worry we don’t have one original

thought, even between the two of us.”

“My stomach hurts.” He rolled me over to get out of bed.

He came back and stood in the hallway, looked at me on the bed and said, “Let’s go

mushroom hunting.”

“I thought we’d work on the house today. The bathtub is still in the front yard and that

hole in the closet?”

“We’ve let it go this long, what’s one more day?” He said and I couldn’t really argue.

I thought this house would give us a purpose, a reason for him to stay sober long enough

to finish a project. I was desperate then, and I still should be, but I am mostly impatient.

So we went mushroom hunting in the hills by the coast in the redwood forest. The water

was deep blue that Monday, and cliffs jetted out staggered and gray. Nick’s truck held to the

curves, steady. He turned east off the highway, up the narrow road where the gravel crunches

under the tires, and parked the truck in the turn-out. We hiked down off the trail, into the woods,

stepping on logs that crumbled under my feet, rotten with salty ocean air. We found mushrooms

the size of my fist, yellow heads glowing purple on the stem. I didn’t know what was edible but

he pointed them out: the tiny orange ones with spikey spores, no gills. I believed him, blindly, as

I always had, and we found a handful in the creek bed under the bridge.

38 There was a moment when we were separated and I stood on a log, still sturdy, with my face towards the sky. A bird with sleek black feathers let out a scream and there was the distant sound of the ocean, faint ebb and flow of a tide. I sink my teeth into those moments of quiet solitude—not completely alone, Nick was just a few yards away, but alone enough that I can pretend I am independent.

We drove back down to the beach and lit a fire in one of the barbeque pits. I cut onions and we sautéed them with the mushrooms, put the steaks on the grill, and when it was ready we ate with our fingers. The fog came crawling in on both sides of the cove, and Nick gave me his sweater. He’s much bigger than I am, and the empty space between my skin and the wool could have fit another person. We picked rocks from the sand and then he held me at the hem of the sea, swayed back and forth, a slow dance to the tide. It is impossible to think of leaving him in those moments when it feels like there is no place, no person, left to go to.

Where is he? It’s ten thirty now, dark and so clear the stars pour over-head like beads of water in the shower. I’m still on the porch, the mosquitos buzzing above my hair at the light. I think about walking up the hill to River’s End, he’s probably there playing cards with Jim.

It was already a year into our marriage before I discovered his secret addiction in the form of six liters of vodka stuffed in various places in the closet. Bottles hidden inside of sweaters, shoeboxes, storage containers with Christmas lights, duct taped to the underside of the toilet lid. We all drank a lot. It was Seattle, rainy all the time, nothing to do really but sit inside and play cards, drink and smoke and play music. I didn’t think anything of the stainless steel cup that was always held in his right hand, because in the beginning, Nick was a great drunk. But like any cliché it deadened over time, and my resentment grew slowly at first and then detonated.

39 We needed a win. So, I bought us the house. We would move to the beach because everyone I’ve ever met says the coast is healing. And we needed to be healed.

The porch is what sold the house for me. It wraps around the front and west sides in thick white and you can see the bay and hills behind it. Seals come out and once in a while they pop up like buoys from the water, big black whiskered faces bobbing quietly up and down in the calm while twenty yards away the mouth of the ocean spits and hollers. We wanted to fix it up ourselves. Take all the credit. And like most of the things we did together, this too lacked necessary planning. The first thrust of the sledgehammer to the kitchen wall hit a pipe with a hard clink, but we kept going, and it burst. So now there is a hole in the kitchen wall. The living room ceiling has a similar gash as a result of another overly ambitious do-it-yourself attempt. We thought we could raise the ceiling, no problem, expose the vintage beams. Turns out there were no vintage beams. There were bats though.

I fell asleep on the porch, and when the sun comes up in the morning, it wakes me like a slap and I sit up gasping. It’s unusually warm for northern California at six in the morning. I go into the house and set the percolator on the stove. A seagull pokes his white head through the hole in the ceiling.

No sign of Nick. I think about calling the Sherriff again but decide against it. I don’t want to hear that voice of false comradery. By ten I know I need a distraction. This is what my days have become since I stopped working: a series of forced distractions, projects I’ve created from nothing, for no reason at all but to give myself, give us, a sense of necessity. I put the coffee in the thermos and pack a bag with a cheese sandwich, some water, and headphones and start the hike down, half a mile to Shell Beach.

40 The beach is loud and full of children. A father in a baseball hat is playing catch with his young sons, each wearing blue swim trunks and no shirts. A mother hastily rubs sunscreen on her baby’s face and arms, pulling at the limbs in desperation, stay still, she mutters. Dogs run in and out of the water, mouths hung open as the white caps hit their necks, tennis balls and Frisbees forever lost to the sea.

I sit in the sand and wonder if any of these people know about the missing couple. I wonder if any of them have seen Nick. Maybe he’s just twenty yards away from me, down the shore, sipping mimosas with some new friends he made while trying to surf. Maybe he’s with the young, soft, couple. Maybe he fell off a cliff and was eaten by seals. Sometimes I wonder what it might be like to be a widow. I think I’d be good at it. Wishing Nick knew where I was right now.

There might be something that would make him jealous about this.

Next to me is a pregnant woman with two young daughters. One of them looks not yet two-years-old, wearing a pink hat that ties around her chin and a saggy diaper. The older one is in the water, just to her knees, squawking like a bird, demanding attention. The woman is so pregnant she can hardly pick up the little one when she starts to cry, sand in her eyes. She gathers her clumsily and splashes water from a bottle on her tiny, red face. They lie in a huddle on the blanket and the mother yells every couple minutes for the bigger one to get closer to the shore.

She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in real life, and I guiltlessly stare. She might be just a couple years older than I, and in an ugly way, this gives me hope. Her hair is tied back, thick black ponytail, and her skin, pulled so tight across her belly that I almost expect to see the outline of her unborn child pressed against it like a crime-scene chalk drawing. Isn’t that the dream? To have that skin and those children, another one on the way, cuddling with her baby next to her giant belly with her feet in the warm sand.

41 I was pregnant once. It didn’t work out. And later when we decided to really try, it was

too hard with Nick’s drinking, and my doubts. This kind of project is just not in the cards for

some people, I suppose.

The bigger child waddles over to me and holds out her hand.

“What you got there?” I ask her.

She opens her little fingers and a tiny sand crab wiggles in the middle of her palm.

“Seashell!” she says to me and dumps the little crab into my lap. I pick it up and watch it twitch a little and then it stays lifeless, dead or just pretending.

“Lovely, thank you,” I tell her.

“Ivy!” her mom yells to her, then to me she says, “Sorry.”

“Do you want this back?” I ask Ivy and she nods her head and holds out her hand. I drop

the crab in her palm and she opens her mouth and pops it in, gives me a big smile and meanders

back to her mother with her cheeks bloated.

A sheriff’s helicopter cuts over the beach sky with noisy authority and people stop to turn

their faces towards it, hundreds of hands over foreheads all at once.

Ivy points up at the sky and yells, “Airplane!”

It heads north above Fish Head Beach and I know that the couple is dead.

When I get home from the beach, it is nearly dusk and Nick is sitting on the porch with

his feet up on the railing, staring at his phone.

“Hey, Hon,” he says, pulling his sunglasses slightly down to look at me over the lenses.

“Where ya been?”

42 “I could ask you the same question,” I say, not bitterly. “I was at the beach. There was this pregnant lady there, she was so huge.”

“Sorry I didn’t come home last night. I fell asleep on the cliff above Fish Head, not sure how. I guess I had a little too much before I climbed up. But you know what? They found the couple.”

At River’s End, Jim gives us the full story, at least his version of it. They found them dead in their sleeping bags. Each with a hole in the head, no robbery, everything still. Her blue hat still on her head, but so stuck with blood to her hair they’ll have to cut it off.

“Sheriff said when he first saw them, he thought they were just sleeping, so still. The boy had his arm slung around her chest. Their eyes were even closed. Can you imagine? Such mindless murder. Poor babes.” Jim sighs and continues wiping down the bar.

Nick twists the straw in his drink and shakes his head. He doesn’t look well. I tell myself he’s just tired—he slept on a rock last night. The longer strands of his hair in the front fall forward as he bends his head down, and although I desperately want to, I can’t see his eyes.

Look at me. Look at me. I’m about to break. He killed them. I already know he did because I know him. One time in Seattle, Nick got into a bar fight and put two men in the hospital, one with a broken jaw, the other with a punctured right eyeball. He didn’t have a scratch on him when he got home, but he didn’t have to—I knew the second I saw him. That’s the trouble with growing up with someone. You start to recognize them better than you ever could yourself.

On the walk home from River’s End, Nick holds my hand like he used to when we first met. He always holds my hand when he’s uncomfortable. Affection towards me waxes and

43 wanes depending on what kind of trouble he’s in. If he’s doing well, sober for the moment, he hardly touches me.

We get home and take a shower. He rubs my shoulders under the water, slippery soaped- up bodies, toes waterlogged because of the clog in the drain that needs fixing.

The breeze through the blinds of an open window sounding like a spoon on a washboard, soft, dusk light, the color of cool honey in a room with white walls and clean baseboards, a hole in the ceiling above the closet, I can see some stars. Under the sheets, naked and clean, we face each other in the dark.

“You know what happened last night, Sam. I drank a bottle of vodka and blacked out.

It’s the same shit that always happens,” he says.

“Sure, I know,” I say.

“You know what I’m like when I’m that drunk. I can hardly take my own clothes off,” he says, and then adds the obligatory, “It was just one night, it won’t happen again. Come here,” he says, bringing me close. He smells rotten, even after the shower.

“Why are you telling me this?” I say into his chest. “What is it that you really want to say? Don’t make me say it.” He’s quiet.

“Nick?”

“I don’t know. No, no! It’s not possible.”

“It is entirely possible,” I say.

I have been putting the blacked-out puzzle pieces of his drunken nights together for ten years now. Being with him is like being with a rubix-cube that has ever-changing color blocks. I roll over away from him and he remains paralyzed on the other side. The breeze is cool and comes in waves through the open window. It makes the room a little damp, salty, ocean breeze

44 on white sheets. I wonder how many times we’ve lain like this together, on floors, on beds, on couches and kitchen tile, it never mattered. One big toe hangs out from under the blanket. I’ve hated him before, but never have I hated him without a stitch of love attached. The way I used to hate him was concentrated in moments, fleeting. His panicked breath from the other side of this bed makes me realize for the first time, that he is afraid of me. He’s scared of the power I have right now. For the first time in ten years, I feel big.

I was having a dream about the couple. Not really both of them, just the girl. She was reaching out for my hand, thick brown blood dried on her left cheek, and her eyes were black. I wake up with a heavy chest, trying to catch my breath. Nick is gone from the bed. I walk into the kitchen and he’s on the floor, holding his stomach. It’s bloated, round and hard and he’s groaning like some sick dog, sweat dripping from his scalp, in his eyes. I wet a washcloth, press it to his forehead, kiss his eyelids, and we go to the hospital.

In the morning his jaundice is thick. Skin deep yellow where it’s normally brown.

Reptilian eyes, dry and always dripping eye drops. He bends his head back, neck stretched out like a bird, mouth gaping and then exhales, blink blink blink, tiny drops of artificial tears on his temples, a relief of some sort. It happened over night, although we all know that’s not true. It feels that way though. Unrecognizable in an instant, as if he went into a magician’s box, a disappearing act.

I read the newspaper while he sleeps. On the front page is a picture of the couple. Alice and Adam. Twenty-two years old. Newly engaged couple murdered on a beach in the sleepy town of Jenner, CA. The motive is unknown. Suicide was quickly ruled out. All of their belongings were still with them. Their IDs and credit cards, cash even, remained in pockets of

45 clothing next to their camp. The weapon was determined as a .45-caliber Marlin rifle. They were found on the sand below the cliffs of Fish Head Beach.

I set the paper down on the floor. I need to fix the house. I can’t live like this. We had a vision, I know we did. I need to fix this house, with or without him. And I need to start right now.

On the way back to Jenner I go through Bodega and stop at Casino. It’s a bar owned by two elderly Italians whose last name happens to be Casina. I park the car and go through the back entrance, through the garden on the side gate, and enter the dining room. Oversized oak chairs and tables with red checkered cloths scattered under walls mounted with the taxidermy heads of elk, moose, and deer. Chopin plays from speakers of a jukebox and the place is full. One seat at the bar, on the very end next to the refrigerator. On Fridays and Saturdays, Mr.

Casina goes fishing in a tiny boat his father left for him and brings whatever he catches to the bar for a pop-up dinner. I sit on the cushioned swivel stool and order a beer and the steamed mussels.

They come to me in a hot silver bowl, in a lemon garlic broth with shaved parsley. I eat them one by one, tossing the shells into the bowl next to me. They’re bitter and sweet and wonderfully warm.

“How were they, mi amor?” Mr. Casina, leaning over the edge of the bar. I give him a smile and nod to the empty plate next to me. “And how is Nick doing, my dear?”

“Oh he’s doing fine, thank you, he’s at home right now unclogging the drain. Good to have a man around, no?” I say, smiling. “But actually, Mr. Casina, now that I’m thinking of it, do you know someone who could help us with the renovations? Just some small things that Nick doesn’t have time for.”

46 “Gustavo, perhaps? Give Gus a call, he’s good man,” he says and hands me a cardboard

coaster with a number on it.

Gus comes with a crew of three on Monday. He has a thick head of black hair, round

face, and wears a heavy gold chain with a crucifix hanging around his neck. I show him the

blank check made out to just “Gus” and tell him to write his weekly rate in the amount box.

We’ll need him for at least a month. He gives me a broad smile and they start in the bathroom,

working their way down the hall to the kitchen. The house is quickly covered in tarps, paint cans

on the counters, nails and dust and screw drivers. Gus likes jazz and plays Charlie Parker loudly

through a Bluetooth speaker.

On Wednesday I’m on the porch, paint brush in hand, when the Sheriff’s car pulls up the gravel driveway. She walks up the driveway with one hand on her belt, the other hiding her eyes from the sun as she takes mental notes of the surroundings.

“Good morning, Mrs. Martin,” she says.

“Morning. How can I help you?” I say.

I put the brush down in the tub and stand to face her. She’s a little taller than I am, with wild curly black hair, and bright coral lipstick accentuates a snaggletooth.

“Mind if we speak for a few minutes?”

“Sure. I’d invite you inside but all of our furniture is over there in the yard,” I say pointing to the outdoor living room on the side of the house. “We can have a seat here. Would you like something to drink?”

47 “No, this is fine,” she says and sits down on the top step. “I hear you and your husband

met the couple the night before they went missing. I was hoping you could share details of that

meeting with me.”

I tell her everything I can remember. Then she asks me, “And can you tell me what you

did on Wednesday, August 18th?”

“I think Nick and I went to the beach,” I lie.

“We have record that you called the Sheriff’s office to report your husband was missing.”

I don’t hate her because she’s prying, I hate her because she thinks I want to defend him.

I don’t want her to be the one to get to punish him.

“Right. Well, that was a little premature of me. He was just out fishing.”

“Is your husband home now?”

“No, he’s not.” I think about giving her more details but decide against it when she looks

at me with her eyes narrowed and stands up, brushing the back of her pants with her hands.

“Well, here’s my card. Have him give me a call when he returns. We’d love to speak with

him as well. You have a nice day now.”

I turn the speakers up and finish painting. Her card falls between the cracks in the wood floor and I make no effort to find it.

“You always know what to do, don’t you?” He says when he sees the crew on the side of

the house, making ground beef tacos on a hot plate. Nick’s yellow eyes hidden under

sunglasses. I know he won’t take those off for days. Where is he, and where has he been? It doesn’t matter now. Now, I have a plan. I’m going to fix this house and then

48 “You’re going to help Gus and the crew with the painting,” I say, holding his hand as we

walk up the steps to the front door, “and we’re camping tonight.”

We set up camp in the yard on the back side of the house, out of view of the spitting

ocean, the bobbing seals. We face the hills, dry, drought-dry, and decide against a fire. There aren’t any bugs anyway. We pitch the tent and roll out the sleeping bags on top of the pilates mats I found in the garage. Nick lies on his back, arms out, bloated belly like a pitcher’s mound under his thick wool sweater. I curl up next to his body, in the little nook where his arm bends, and place my hand on his collar bone, bush my fingers across it, feel his bones, and it makes me think of the log I stood on in the forest when we went mushroom hunting. It’s almost soft, under thin skin, thin from the steroids, all the medicine he’s had injected from needles into empty veins, dark purple, like the meat of a plum. I’m so close to him right now I can feel his pulse in my ear that’s pressed against his chest. The fog slithers its way over our tent. Through the hole in the zipper I can see it moving along, so thick I wonder if I reached out my hand could I scoop it up in my palm, mold it into something else, let it dry and harden like clay.

He used to fish. Up in Seattle, where we had our first apartment, he’d leave for the water in the early mornings and come back late with a cooler full. This was before the money came, when I was working at the bar and he was selling whatever he caught and we lived off it too, and we had nothing but a studio apartment, an old pull-out couch we shared as a makeshift bed.

The best were the lingcods. They were bright teal in color, big and restless, hard to catch and easy to let go of, and when we cooked them they lost all their color, turned gray and rough brown on the edges but the meat was sweet and we’d sit on the living-room floor with the fish on a plate and lemon wedges in a bowl, Nick pursing his lips, using fingernails to pick a thin,

49 invisible bone from his teeth. There was a day when we lay on the floor of the living-room on a sunny fall evening, the light through the blinds pressed shadows like bars. He had taken a piece of my hair in his fingers, twisted it curled-up around his thumb and said, “I love you too much.

You’ll never know, will you?”

Nick is asleep next to me in the tent. I’m still curled next to him, listening to the tiny snores, like a purring kitten. I have a sudden urge to be on the water. Go to Fish Head Beach. I heard there is a memorial for the couple where people have placed flowers and Jesus candles, teddy bears soaking wet and molding in the sand. What can I leave for them?

I roll out from under Nick’s arm and put on my jacket and boots. The air is still and white with fog. It’s nearly midnight and silent save for the restless ocean. The kayak is in the shed. I drag the boat down to the docks and hike back up for the rest of the gear. Water shoes, and slick snow pants, Velcro at the ankles, a teal knit cap I find in the closet will work as our gift to them. I hang the flashlight on the front of the boat with a wire and switch it on, step in, and push my paddle against the ground. The bottom of the boat scrapes on the loose concrete but then I’m up on the glassy water, hardly any wind and I’m in the middle of the river now, so deep black around me with a soft layer of gray fog, shiny silver floating ghosts around my boat.

I head west down the river, towards the ocean, fairly calm. I turn off the flashlight and sit still, let the tide pull me out naturally. It makes me think of rainy days, my brothers and I just little kids, we used to sit on the sidewalk, one of us upstream in the gutter, the other twenty yards down at the end of the block. We built tiny boats out of toothpicks, using our mother’s hot glue gun, sticky wisps of blue glue stuck to our fingers, hot to the touch and cool in an instant. We painted each boat a different color and my older brother lined them up, holding them by the tips

50 and calling out 3-2-1 and go, we would run down the block after them, hollering, jumping like bookies at the race tracks, nothing really to lose though. The water in the gutter pushed them forward—a winner declared, nothing more, nothing less.

There’s a break in the fog and I can see the moon only slightly through parted clouds, it hangs like a clipped thumbnail, chipped, weightless and blue light reflects on the white caps.

Fish Head Beach is about a quarter mile down now and I know I will be there in no time at all. I hold the paddle closer now and dip it back through the water on the right side, to get closer to the shore, and away from the seals sleeping place. They’re piled on top of each other on the bank by the mouth of the ocean. They breathe as one heavy figure, large black bodies all moving ever softly slow, up and down in the silver glow of the moon. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were dead. Bodies on bodies, a pile of burnt black flesh, a mass suicide.

Fish Head Beach is hidden in a small cove, surrounded by jagged rocks, and the tide is up high now. The boat rocks, shakes with the lapping current as I pull in and drag it to shore. It’s only now I realize I’m breathing heavily and my chest is tight walking through thick sand to the memorial ten yards away. I feel my knees shaking. I think I’m just cold. The wind has picked up now and whips my hair. I know it will be more difficult to paddle back, against the current.

The memorial is marked with a thick white wooden cross, burnt out candles in heart shaped holders, some seashells laid out forming their initials in the sand, a wreath of wilted red roses hangs from behind it on the rock. There are waterlogged envelopes and a piece of damp yellow legal paper with a note written in black ink, dripping in on itself: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where” RIP young lovers.

51 How to be. How to be. To be like a person who knows what to do next. I sit in the sand and stare at the note, my hands propped up behind me, pitched like a tent, and with legs outstretched I lie back in the sand and place the teal knit cap on my head.

Staring up through the ceiling of fog, I know that the sun will start to come up soon and

Nick will wake with a pang of hunger, growling, he’ll stagger from the zipper opening of the tent to the kitchen and talk about what he wants to eat without ever actually eating it. Instead he’ll drink a rootbeer from the bottle and smoke two cigarettes while he finishes the last paragraph of the crime novel he’s reading. Gus and the boys will be there too, and they’ll have coffee on the porch before they start the hammering and lifting, pulling, and I think today is the day Gus will switch from Charlie Parker to Django Reinhardt. I left him new batteries for the Bluetooth speaker. The bathtub will be carried into the house today and Nick will be in it when I come home, shedding skin, a thick mote around him of popping bubbles, dim lighting, he’ll sit in that tub and let the water burn.

Crown of my head touching the candles, my shoulders bend and flinch. I know what is beneath me. Picture this: brittle white bones, the hollow skull. My eyelashes, baby blue clumps of ice, skin pale, pulled tight. I am warm and incredibly sleepy. The earth shifts, can feel it below my back but I don’t move, just stay like this, small and tired. A moon still hanging half-way sideways, glowing white on black. I know that I am scared and that I am the only living person awake for miles.

It is only then that I notice my heartbeat. Flat bass against bones. He told me there were no such things as ghosts. But I know that he’s wrong. I can feel the sand pressing knuckles along the notches in my spine. There is something below me, I say, and he tells me there is, always.

52 Toad

My wife put a hold on my credit card just as I made a big fuss at dinner about ordering

the lobster, steak, whatever you want, on me! I got this, don’t let her pay—talking to the waitress

like some kind of hot-shot. My wife can be a real piece of shit when she wants to be right, and I can be a real jackass when I know I’ve been wrong. “Your card was declined, Hon,” said the waitress.

“Just run it again,” I said. “Probably just a bad chip or something.”

Adam did me a favor and laughed. He’s good under pressure, because no matter how

fucked up his life is, he never seems to notice. The guy hasn’t had a job in five years, has a six-

year-old kid who lives in Arizona with her mom—the result of a Tinder date gone good, and then

fuck-you-up bad. It was Adam’s thirty-fifth birthday, almost ten years older than me, and he’s my best friend. I bought him new Chucks just a little bit ago and the card worked fine, which is

how I know Annalisa must have put the hold on it.

“It’s still coming up bad, every time,” said the waitress, embarrassed with a pity smile.

“You sure?”

“Every time, Hon,” she said.

“I got it,” said Mom, and handed over her card, and I knew this would set her back. She had that stupid Spiderman sweatshirt on again, and old jeans she got from the Goodwill. She stopped putting on makeup some years ago, and the lines around her eyes and mouth go deep and zig-zag. At forty-six she looks about sixty, but she’s got a spirit that’ll break your heart and a story for everyone. She might be the only woman I’ve ever loved.

My internal thoughts are fucked when I’m that hammered. That last sip of Manhattan put

my stomach in a knot. It left me with undeserving swagger, and I pulled the waitress’s face to my

53 face and made Adam take a picture of us, told her how beautiful she was, even though she was

pretty much a haggard old bag – body like a bag of potatoes, all lumpy where it should be flat

and concaved where it should be curved.

Goddamn I wonder when I won’t feel like I’m drowning all the time. I don’t remember

what it feels like to not be lonely. Even with Annalisa I’m so lonely I can’t help myself but drink

and drink and bored out of my mind, I end up wrecking the car or peeling off scabs too soon,

leaving a bloody mess on the bathroom floor. That’s how I ended up in the hospital three days

ago. I peeled and picked at this scab on my leg, a skateboarding accident from a week ago when

I went to jump off this side ramp at the mall but missed, probably due to the ketamine Adam

gave me. That shit will destroy your depth perception. So I was high again, this time alone, and

the scab had me thinking something rotten, just had to get it off of me. I took a knife to it and

caught a vein and of course, Annalisa comes home the second I do it. I was in a puddle on the

floor of the bathroom, covered in my own blood, trying to sop it up with one of her t-shirts she had hanging on the towel rack. She started wailing about, throwing a fit, yelling at me in

Portuguese which I still don’t understand even though she paid for lessons with a private tutor, but I just took the money every time and went to the bar with Adam.

So, been in the hospital and was only meant to go in for stitches, but I have a history you could say, and the doctors thought I’d tried it on purpose, so they charged me with a 5150. Third time’s a charm for those things, so they sent me straight to the white walls this time. Wasn’t too bad, they had good coffee there, actually, and a couple days sober was fine. I was planning on taking a little vacation from the booze and junk so this just forced the inevitable, anyway.

“Look at my account though Mom, I have the money, she put a fucking hold on my card.

Such a bitch,” I said.

54 “We’ll deal with it later, Trav,” she said.

“You wanna go next door to the Toad?” asked Adam.

“We gotta get home, Trav,” said Mom, words half-coated in worry, half in annoyance.

“Ah, you go on then, we’re good, yeah bud?” said Adam.

I shrugged my shoulders at him and grabbed my leg under the table. I need an Oxy before I need

another drink.

“All right Trav,” she said. “Please be careful though?”

“Course. Love you.” I wrapped her little shoulders in my equally little arms, gave her a big kiss on the cheek. “Love you, Mama, really, thank you for today.”

She tried. Goddamn did she try with me. But she had her own demons to fight, and it

ended up just being a kid trying to raise another kid. I can’t help but adore her – no matter how

many times I fucked up she always bailed me out, even now, even with a woman of my own at

home.

I found skateboarding when I was twelve and just like that, it was all I ever wanted.

Adam gave me my first board. He was outside the high school, skating up the ramp and jumping

the rail down the steps while his friend Squints filmed it. Squints is a hella good boarder. He can

ollie over anything, all the while wearing his coke-bottle glasses. He’s missing one of his front teeth. We were on a Thrasher tour a couple years ago. There were six of us in this van cruising around the East Coast, skating on whatever while Tony the camera guy filmed us and posted clips to the website. They made a video called “Redemption Riders” and I actually made a few bucks off that. Squints started growling somewhere in between New York and Philly. His tooth had been aching since we left California.

55 “My fucking tooth, man, I gotta get this shit out!” He was screaming.

“Dude, calm the fuck down. We’re almost to Philly, we’ll find an urgent care or whatever the hell,” said Adam.

Squints reached behind the back seat, grabbed the tool bag, and brought out the plyers.

“No way man, no,” said Adam. The rest of us started laughing.

“Shut up Adam, just don’t look then if you’re going to be a pussy,” said Squints. “Give me that,” he said to me and grabbed the bottle of Jameson from my hand.

He took three giant swigs from the bottle and then pulled out his tooth, before throwing it out the window of the van. We all just stared in disbelief. Adam started screaming about the blood on the carpet, which was stupid because we all knew there was a lot worse on that carpet.

Squints took another swig of Jameson and swished it around in his mouth before swallowing.

Then he opened his mouth real big and gave us a broad smile as he let out an animal scream.

Adam and I grabbed our boards and rolled over to the Toad – a pub underneath an apartment complex, just down from the train tracks. We know the bartender, and she lets us put beers on a tab that we never pay, because Adam can be a real sweet-talker most of the time.

The bar was sparse for a Friday night. A couple of the old Irish guys sat at the end, watching a rugby game on the television above the taps. Annie came out from the kitchen and smiled big at us. She’s a cute girl, a little plump in the middle, with big blue eyes under thick black glasses. She wears her hair in messy pony-tails, thin wisps of hair fall on the sides of her face. She’s only twenty-five but has the voice of a middle-aged smoker. It’s sexy as hell. Once I walked in on her and Adam in the bathroom at this house-party. She was on her knees in front of him, and he gave me a thumbs up when I opened the door.

56 “Hey, happy birthday buddy!” she yelped.

“Annie, how’s it goin’ girl?” Adam said and gave her a wet cheek-kiss.

We took a seat opposite the Irish guys and Annie poured us a pitcher without asking. My

phone rang and I silenced it – Annalisa calling to bark at me.

“Check it out,” she said, and took out her phone to show us a picture of a tiny green

lizard. “I got a gecko! His name is Pops.”

I ducked outside to smoke and call Annalisa back. The phone rang twice and went

straight to voicemail. Admittedly, I was relieved. When she’s mad I can hardly understand her,

she speaks too quickly and her voice gets loud and shrill. We’ve only been married for about a

year, and both us knew it wasn’t going to work. We fought. She did little things I hated. Like the t-shirt in the bathroom I used to wipe off my blood – she was always leaving her clothes hanging on the towel racks. I’m not a particularly clean guy, but this drove me crazy. She had this look she’d give me sometimes when I’d give an opinion she didn’t agree with. She furrowed her brow and made a half-frown before saying, “Really? Um, hm.” It was a look of annoyance. And contempt.

She was jealous too. She knew all my passwords to everything and she checked frequently. I watched her do it one time. I walked into our bedroom and she didn’t hear me. She was frantic. Like a dog trying to dig up a bone he covered, she had the computer open and was scrolling through e-mails and texts. I could only see the back of her head, but I knew what her eyes looked like – darting up and down the screen, looking for something she wanted to, but would never find. In all the time we’d been together, I never cheated. I had been a good husband, in that regard. But it’s often not enough to be good only in one aspect. Women want the whole

57 pie – they want the trust as much as they want the praise, and the gifts, and the respect. Goddamn respect. It’s harder than you think to respect someone for so long.

I went back in the Toad and joined Adam at the bar. Annie was showing him pictures of her recent trip to Iceland – all white snowy mountains and her in a big down coat with fur around the rim of the hood. She looked pretty in the pictures with all that snow.

“Oh, this was really cool, check this out,” she says as she flips to a picture of her naked in a steaming blue pool at the base of a mountain. “This was a hot spring we went to that was just in the middle of this huge valley. We didn’t have our swim suits, obviously, so we just got in naked. It was so beautiful. It was really quiet, and the water was amazing. My skin was so soft afterwards.”

“Wish I had been there,” said Adam.

“We’ll have to go sometime,” she said, “Save your money, let’s go next summer!”

“Yeah, I’m trying, you know.”

“I want to go there too,” I said, well knowing it would never happen. In a year I’d be divorced, probably, and living with Adam in his shed. We’d lie to ourselves and say we were just taking our time, finding ourselves, figuring our shit out. The truth was, this is who we are and who will be. So, I better learn to be okay with it. The sooner I can stop dreaming, the sooner maybe I could start living.

My phone rang again and I let it go. I let it vibrate all the way down my leg and into the floor and out the door, down the street where the homeless have set up tents under the bridge. I let it ring and ring and ring and I pictured all of my stupid mistakes, her included, dripping out of that phone as it rang and rang and rang only for nobody to ever answer.

58 Shanghai

In Shanghai the air is thick. Something like glue and garbage. It’s loud and because I

don’t speak the language, it’s lonely. This loneliness is not distracting though, and instead it

fuels some sort of nauseating excitement of being somewhere so filthy and far away. I am nobody and yet everybody notices me. On Friday night the hotel bellboy in his long green coat, hails me a cab and I hand the driver my card with an address written in Mandarin for a place in the French Concession. Over the bridge the skyline lights are muddled by the smog and so they melt into each other and I’m reminded of how, as a kid, I used to mix all of the paint together to see what color it would make, and it was always the same mustard brown that I never wanted to use. I slip into a jazz bar, order a gin and tonic, and throw my bag over the back of the bar

stool. The room is smoky and loud, red leather and stained glass behind the stage spells out

Cotton Club. The band plays quick jazz, the drummer dripping sweat onto his kit and the

pianist wears a black fedora with an ostrich feather and takes sips from a glass of whiskey

with one hand, the other still on the keys. The beat slows down and the smokes clears for a

moment long enough for me to notice a man with huge blue eyes staring at me with his back

against the wall. He has a puppy in a backpack, worn backwards, slung across his chest and a

white mannequin with no arms and no legs, but a tiny plastic penis. The mannequin is on the

floor and this man is holding his plastic head in his right hand. I look at the mannequin, and

then the puppy, and I laugh because I don’t know what else to do. I know that I won’t ask the

question of why, and I don’t. Instead we get drunk and eat dumplings outside on the street

where an old man and a monkey are dressed in matching sweater vests. We sit on the curb with

our feet in the gutter, amongst the tossed toothpicks and paper plates, beer cans, we just sit in

59 the middle of this trash and somehow we talk in slurred shifts. This stranger is from Oregon and he has a good job at an advertising agency here, and he takes photographs, has a full head of thick dark hair, strong arms, and a fear of commitment shown by the way he clings to me: a person who will be gone, as far away from him as possible, in about twelve hours. There is a moon but it doesn’t offer much light, it just hangs low in smog and sits there heavy, like a fat man sleeping in a hammock. The monkey walks over in his red knit vest and touches the puppy’s face with one weird, pink index finger.

How it ends is I’m in a bathtub in my hotel room and the puppy is on the bed looking at me with one ear bent and the man is across from me, nothing but a smile, water up to his chest, where a silver chain and a round medallion lie in just a bit of black hair. He reaches through bubbles and touches the inside of my thigh. Leaning forward, the sound of his body through water after such silence startles me like a migraine, or a knock at the door, and he puts his mouth on my neck. He thinks it’s so odd to take a bath with a stranger. I agree.

A lot of things happened between the moment we first made eye contact and these final hours here now, but what is in the middle is usually unimportant. We have everything in common except for location. Except for the next four hours we will spend in this hotel room on the outskirts of Shanghai; so much lost in a simple plane ride. I know and he knows that it is a nice thought, after all, to be so far away, in a city so big and full of garbage, in which two people such as ourselves could meet and laugh this hard in a bathtub in a hotel room on the outskirts of Shanghai. And there is comfort in knowing we owe each other nothing. And there is a brokenness in knowing we owe each other nothing.

All the men I’ve ever loved have lived far away from me. My therapist says this might be a subconscious decision and not purely circumstantial. I paid her eighty dollars to tell me

60 that.

She asks me if I’m scared to die alone. I tell her I thought that’s how this all worked, anyway.

61

Buffalo

Wake up. Skip pill. Drink water. Shower. Brush teeth. Towel dry. Switch lock. Dress. Eat yogurt. Drink coffee. Get shoes. Leave. Bus work. Sit down. Phone rings. Talk. Bus home. Make dinner. Eat dinner. Shower. Brush teeth. Journal. Sleep. Repeat.

I named myself Buffalo. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old man with a diagnosed illness I will not disclose to you because frankly, I don’t think it matters, and also, I like to keep people guessing. Today I didn’t take my medication.

I live in an apartment with a man named Jason who I met off Craigslist three years ago when my inheritance ran out and I couldn't make rent by myself anymore. Jason was in the army and has six scars from bullet wounds on his chest and right arm. They look like white stars, jagged-chunky circles on otherwise bare and flawless skin. Jason lives off of disability, doesn't have much money and doesn't work, and instead he spends his days at the gym, lifting smooth silver barbells over his head. I've seen him do this. He bends his knees so that his thighs are flat like a table and his back is perfectly straight, and an even larger man stands behind him, wearing a loose tank top, pectoral muscles exposed out the sides, to show off the mote of hair around nipples. Jason's chest and stomach are sculpted like this statue I once saw in a museum with my father. A giant white man towered over me, nude and hairless, he looked like what I imagined

God to be if I believed in such a thing. I spent years daydreaming of that enormous ivory man – he'd come to life, lean down, and teach me how to properly kiss.

I can already feel my bones softening, the jaw unclenches slowly like a rusty gate, and my brain feels heavier – a bag of rocks. The apartment that Jason and I share is set in a complex behind a mall that nobody ever goes into. The complex is grey-beige with peeling red trim, a

62 carport with space for one car per home, and a wooden box with holes for each residents’ mail.

Must use key to open. Jason and I live upstairs in building B which means we aren’t right on the

street but set back just one section in. I like being set back. I don’t like the buzz of the freeway,

those obnoxious purposeful cars screaming, who knows where they will end up, but I don’t want

to hear it. We live in B3. It’s hot. It’s been hot for months now. Everywhere I go people are

talking about the heat. All I can do is lie on my unmade bed, sheets tangled in a ball on the floor,

sweat stained yellow.

Jason brought home a rabbit last week and I didn’t ask why or where from, but I think

rabbits are filthy, so I told him he had to keep it in a cage outside. The rabbit is in a small cage,

maybe two feet by three feet, and it sits on the front deck next to the door. The rabbit has silky

black fur that shines in the sunlight, and black beady eyes which never look quite open or closed.

He sits in his cage and sleeps or drinks water from an upside down bottle that is tied with wire to

the inside of the cage. We gave him alfalfa and he ate it up quickly, little nose never stopped

twitching. I wish that rabbit would relax.

Today I woke up and there were ants in my blood. Today I woke up and I regretted it.

My name is Buffalo. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a grammatically correct sentence.

I saw my psychiatrist today. I didn’t tell him I skipped my medication. It went something like this, but not exactly like this:

“How do you feel today Eden?” he asked.

“I told you to call me Buffalo,” I said.

“Yes, Buffalo. My apologies,” he said.

63 “Jason brought a rabbit home. It’s in a cage on the front porch. When the sun sets it hits her directly on the tail. Do you think we should move his cage?”

“Rabbits are actually very sensitive to temperature. What did you name the rabbit?”

“Mr. Long Ears,” I said, but this is a lie. We didn’t name the rabbit. I just wanted to see if

I could make Dr. Budjak smile. It’s hard to make him smile.

“That is a clever name,” he said, smirking.

His office smells like sour cream, and there are too many books in there collecting dust, lonely on shelves bought from Ikea, no doubt, and he always has a half-empty glass of water on his desk, a sticky sheen of Chap Stick on the lip. Dr. Budjak has a slight hunchback, thinning brown hair he combs back with gel that hardens atop his triangular face, and sunken brown eyes set back under an enormous forehead. I like him because he is, in fact, the most hideous human being I have ever seen.

“The heat has been making me feel crazy,” I said.

“I understand that. It can be suffocating,” he said. “Do you have an air conditioner in your building?”

“No. But Jason put up thick curtains. It’s not helping anything but now it’s dark like night in the middle of the day,” I said.

He keeps still.

“I don’t want to take this medication anymore,” I said. “It makes my skin feel weird. I feel like there are ants on me. I feel them right now.”

I scratched at my forearm and pursed my lips together to let him know I was serious. He maintained eye contact and kept his legs crossed, his hands clasped in his lap, horn-rimmed glasses fell forward just a bit on the bridge of his nose.

64 "We can try something else. We'll need to ween you off this one first, though. It's

dangerous for you to stop just like that. You could get really sick," he said.

“But I am really sick.”

“You’ll start hallucinating again if you stop. Do you remember how scared you were the last time this happened? Do you remember the trouble you got in?” He asked me, his voice raised at first but sunk back down once he noticed he was showing emotion.

“But I’m already scared,” I told him.

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m a little scared of this heat. I’m scared it’s pulling something out of me. I forgot how sad I am. When I first started the pills they made me feel better, but I think I’ve developed a tolerance. I feel like my insides are leaking out.”

He was silent for a solid minute after I said this. He sat very still with his mouth open just slightly, just open enough to slide a quarter through his lips.

“I think it would be helpful for us to continue our discussion from last week’s session.

You had mentioned you wanted to meet a girl. Have you thought more about this?” He asked, changing the subject. This is what he does when he gets scared of me. Change the subject, revert back to the problem at hand: my loneliness. His desperation was palpable.

“Of course. I think about women all the time. I just can’t seem to get one to come home with me,” I said.

This was a lie and he knew it.

“Eden –,” he started to say but I cut him off.

“Don’t call me Eden. Only my friends call me that.”

I have one friend and he calls me Buffalo.

65 “Sorry, Buffalo. You know you are an attractive man, yes?”

A strange thing for him to say, sure, but it wasn't the first time, and it is true. I nodded. I am what you might call, interestingly handsome. I have a scar on my right cheek which is perfectly placed where a dimple would be and is often mistaken as such. It makes it look like I am always smiling, or just on the verge of it. A woman in the grocery store once told me my eyes were the same color as a beta fish she had, silvery teal with specks of gold. My hair is black, wavy, thick, and I let it grow to my ears. I'm over six feet tall and people think I work out with

Jason, but I never do. I'm not as carved as the nude white statue, but amazingly so for someone whose only mode of exercise is crying himself to sleep. It's a great ab workout.

“I truly believe that you could get yourself a date with a nice young lady if you continue to work on yourself, take your medication, and be honest with me so we can sort this all out. You have every opportunity to have a happy, healthy relationship, but you have to take your medication. I know it might make you feel strange now, but those effects will wear off in time.

One day you’ll wake up and not feel a thing,” he said.

This is what I am most afraid of.

Wake up. Skip pill. Drink water. Shower. Brush teeth. Towel dry. Switch lock. Dress. Eat yogurt. Drink coffee. Get shoes. Leave. Bus work. Sit down. Phone rings. Talk. Bus home. Make dinner. Eat dinner. Shower. Brush teeth. Journal. Sleep. Repeat.

Today I woke up and I was hungover. I’m not supposed to drink when I’m taking the pills but since I’m not taking the pills, I thought I’d have some gin last night. Jason and I got a bottle from the liquor store on the corner, the one with the neon beer signs and the ATM machine that never works but displays my balance like it's something I need reminding of. The guy

66 behind the counter is from Tibet. He has a round brown face and a small mouth. He loves all the women who come into his store. With them, it's all smiles and slow moving around the cash register. When Jason and I come in it's no eye contact and one finger on the hidden alarm button under the counter.

Jason has no trouble talking to girls. He’s never cared if they like it or not though, and we sat on the curb in the parking lot of the liquor store and passed the gin and the bottle of soda back and forth. It was another hot night. The heat made my muscles ache and sweat dripped from my hairline down my temples, salt in my eyes.

"Hey baby, you need a ride?" He asked every long-stemmed lady who passed by in short shorts or a sundress with straps that fell, delicately, to rest on the outside of shoulders. None of them answered him. Most looked down at their phones while readjusting sundress straps or hems of their short shorts. A few of them glanced at me.

"Let's go to the bar, nothin' out here for us now," he said and chugged the last mouthful of the bottle before wiping his lips with the back of his tattooed hand.

As I followed him to his car, the edges of shapes started to blur and any words I wanted to say came out in slurred lumps, but luckily I rarely speak in public. There are only two places these days where I dare to open my mouth: Dr. Budjak’s office and at work where I take pizza orders over the phone. Jason swerved a little on the way to the bar. He was drunk and I knew what would happen. The first girl who made eye contact with him would be in our apartment tomorrow morning.

“That-a-girl,” he said when we pulled into the crowded parking lot of the 500 club. A girl with black boots that stopped mid-thigh stood smoking a cigarette under the glow of the front door light. I didn’t see anything past those boots. I can’t even tell you what color her hair was.

67 As we walked through the windowless wooden door, Jason gave the girl a hard, toothless smile.

She turned her back towards him and stubbed out her cigarette with the toe of her boot. Inside, the barstools were full so Jason got us two beers, and we leaned against the wall on the south side of the room. This used to be a classic dive, a quiet joint where men with gray beards could sit and eat peanuts with classic rock playing on a tape deck behind the cash register. A darker place where I could come and sit alone in the corner to observe the way friends talk to each other, easy like putting one foot in front of the other foot.

Not so much anymore. The addition of a jukebox, dart board, and small stage for live bands changed the clientele overnight. Now it was the place where hip, affluent, twenty- somethings could come slum it for a night, sucking up three dollar too-strong whiskey highballs in their pre-ripped jeans and faux leather. Jason and I didn’t care. The trendiness of the bar brought in better looking girls who didn’t know how to hold their alcohol and would sometimes trade you glimpses of their nipples for key bumps of cocaine in the bathroom. A win-win for everyone.

The boot girl came inside and sat at the bar next to a man about my age, who kept his sunglasses on inside and swept a ringed hand through dirty blonde hair when he took sips from the tall glass in front of him. In the dim, smoky light, I watched as she leaned in and said something close enough her lips disappeared behind his greased curls, and as she said it, her eyes caught mine and she held them there, for the duration of her secret or her confession. Whatever it was she said, it was clear he didn’t like it as he stood up and stormed out without a word, or a glance back at her. She finished his drink and then ordered another. After that, the details of the night are dizzied up, and I’m not sure I could tell you the order of events, but there’s one thing I know that happened, and her boots are in the hallway.

68 Now I'm lying head on pillow, scared to open my eyes and face the spinning walls and so

I think about calling anyone of my ex-lovers, desperate for any sort of adventure. They'd know as soon as they heard the silence on the other end who this was. And they'd do one of two things: hang up or head over. I'm edgy today. Maybe I should take my medicine.

Too many women have licked the backs of my ear lobes and said that only once they would like to be free of breath and concern, neglect and weight. Too many have been tangled in these sheets and too few have been ones who can kiss me in a way that makes me wish I still had the effortless effervescence of a child. I don't know how it happens. I just stand with my back against walls and watch. I like to watch women laugh, eat, smile at me from across crowded rooms. I don't have to say a thing. So many of them. Walking towards me with blurred outlines, shadowy figures melting into the backgrounds of bar stools, neon lights, with mozzarella stick grease on her fingertips, run it through my hair, and put lips on mine, tastes like vodka, tastes like sugar, you wouldn't even want to know and how could I tell you of the metallic after taste she left there. Not one, all of them.

I’m thinking this all at one in the afternoon, still in bed, still horizontal, and eyes shut, thinking of beer, thinking of orgasm, thinking of water and air and scratch scratch scratch under the floorboards, under the bed, under this bed that is so awfully comfortable and it doesn’t make sense to feel this way about something so incredibly filthy. I’m thinking of the word perfect and its perfect usage and the perfect bottle of gin and the perfect way it would sting and slide, glide gently and without caution to the back of my throat to the bottom of my perfect stomach.

You want to know what happened to me? Nothing. Nothing happened to me. I was never a good student, always too concerned with the weather to concentrate. People seemed to like me.

They were always telling me things I didn’t want to know, confessing things to me, saying it was

69 because I had kind eyes. I lost my virginity to a waitress when I was fourteen in the alley in the

back of the chain restaurant where she worked. She told me she was thinking about killing

herself and then she was up against the dumpster, her skirt hiked up and held in a knot by my

hand. I don’t remember her name. I never knew my mother, and my father died suddenly when I

was sixteen. One week he was sick, and the next week he was dead. He didn’t have many

friends, and certainly didn’t have any friends who cared about me, and so I stayed in our

apartment alone and finally got this job at the pizza place and that’s the end of the story. That’s

the thing about it all, nothing really happened to me. Nothing really ever happens.

And yet we think we know something about anything. We think we deserve excitement,

thrill, some sort of excuse. We think this life gets better, we think it so much that we believe it

and when it doesn’t we blame anything to make it make sense. We blame sex, drugs, booze, pills, animals, food, money, bodies. We blame noise, weather, time, distance. We blame the day for beginning and the night for ending and the carpet for being dirty.

There is someone at the door so I get up, drag my socked feet over the hardwood. Knock, knock, knock, click, lock unlocked, and door opens.

She stands there with red shoes and a black dress and dark hair up, tied tightly up, with a rubber band, wide hips, big smile and she doesn’t blink an eye.

“I’m so sorry to bother you. I live in B2. I’ve locked myself out. Can I use your phone to call the landlord?” She asks.

I blink twice and turn around, take the phone off the table and hand it to her. The sun cuts through the space between the open door and the frame, hot on my chest. I watch her dial and she kind of bounces side to side and gives me a smile and then turns her back towards me. She has a tiny rose tattooed on the back of her neck, no bigger than a nickel. I think of hot, muggy

70 days and a bead of sweat dripping from her scalp, down and across that beautiful little rose, and

then her hand reaching to wipe it away. I think of blaming her for everything I have ever done

wrong in my life.

She turns around and hands me the phone.

She goes, “Thank you so much. I’m Mary by the way.”

I go, “Hi Mary, I’m Buffalo.” My voice startles me and I choke a little on my own saliva.

“Well, nice to meet you Buffalo. Cute rabbit.” And she turns around with a skip.

I shut the door and stand with my back pressed against it. My skin is moving underneath.

I can feel the ants in my blood stream, pulling at veins, little feet getting stuck in between cells.

They march. Marching up. They’re marching up and I can hear them, soon they’ll have a plan,

and I will never relax again.

I look down and see her boot. It’s slumped up against the white hallway wall, like a resting vagabond on the side of some dirty train tracks. I close my eyes and try to remember the rest of last night. Jason, handing me a small blue pill and nodding to a drink at the bar, singing to me with his index finger in my jugular, “You, you know what to do.”

And then Jason on the opposite side of the bar, smoke clouding my vision, he was

holding her face and kissing her on the mouth. I could only see her hands on his back and a

booted leg coiled around his. I dropped the pill in her glass like it was a favor. Or maybe it was

the other way around. She was kissing me up against the jukebox, and out of the corner of my

eye was Jason, leaning alongside the cushioned edge of the bar, peering at us over the lip of his

beer.

Perhaps it was a favor.

71 Mary, you’ve washed me in sweat. Anxiety swells from the lining of my stomach, it lurches upwards to my throat with a force like a choke until I can’t breathe and I kneel to the floor gasping. Stretch out my hands to crawl to my room, but a pain I didn’t know I had sucks the pulse from my right hand. Looking down, I see my index finger has a fresh purple bruise, the nail is raised black and two sets of pretty pink teeth marks mirror each other on the palm and top.

I slide myself on my forearms like a snake to my room, and when I can sit upright, I wedge my left thumb under the fingernail and it pops off like a bottle cap.

Fumbling with the phone, I call Dr. Budjak, ask if he can see me today for an emergency visit. He tells me I’ve overstepped my boundaries too many times and admits that maybe he has as well, with me.

He goes, “I think we should stick to the schedule we’ve made and go from there.”

“But I’ve stopped taking my medicine,” I say in a hushed voice from inside of my closet.

“Buffalo, we’ve talked about this,” he grunts.

“Please…,” is all I can manage in between heavy breath, wiping snot on my forearm.

On the bus to his office, the sky is so clear blue I imagine it's a movie set, a fake backdrop like the ones they use for laundry detergent advertisements or tampon commercials. I put the rabbit cage in between my feet. I brought him in hopes Dr. Budjak could help – he looks like he’s dead but I can’t tell. Everyone is looking at me. Everyone is always looking at me. The bus washes white. I pull my head down into my hands, between my knees. The ants crawl up my throat again and I choke, swallowing them down.

72 “Thank you for seeing me. I can’t breathe. A woman came to my door this morning and

she really frightened me. I think she wanted to kill me,” I tell him and collapse into the nook on

the couch between the cushion and the pillow.

“Was there something specific she did or said that makes you think that?” He asks.

This man is an idiot. He always wants to know details and then he never believes me

when I tell him truths.

“She had eyes like the rabbit and a black dress like his fur. She touched my phone and then I touched the phone and why is it so hot in here can you turn on the AC can you give me some water I can’t focus can I have a drink do you have any gin do you have any gin do you think I could brush my teeth?”

“Buffalo. Please look at me. Take a deep breath and I need you to take this glass of water,” he hands me his water glass from the desk, smeared Chap Stick still on the lip, “and swallow this pill.”

I do as he says without asking. The floor will soften under my feet like sand.

“What happened to your hand?” He asks.

“Someone bit me,” I say. The finger is swollen raw-red where the nail used to be, a cracked stream of dried blood on my palm.

“Why did you bring the cage?” He asks.

“I think the rabbit is dead,” I tell him and hold it up for him to see the rabbit, laying on his side, not breathing.

“It’s not dead,” he says slowly.

73 He opens the cage and takes the rabbit out by the skin on its neck and looks into it's face.

The rabbit's nose twitches and he blinks. He puts the rabbit in his lap and strokes his black fur while he continues to talk to me.

“Have you been drinking again?” He asks with his eyebrows all scrunched up.

“Last night. Yes. Jason brought a woman home with him, with us. I think I drugged her.

Her boot is in the hallway. I haven’t seen her yet. I heard scratching from behind his door,” I say and the muscle under his left eye starts to twitch, like a tiny finger trying to poke out of the skin.

“He told me to slip a pill in her drink and I did,” I tell him.

Dr. Budjak puts the rabbit back in his cage. Then he sits back in his big leather chair with his hands in his lap.

He says, “Buffalo, I need you to think very carefully about what you are telling me, and think again about whether or not you really want to tell me this.”

He says this sometimes now. He doesn’t believe me. More than once I have lied to him, told him I’ve done horrible things but then it turned out I didn’t or at least there is no trace of me in it. I’ve started to think I’m a ghost, but there is only one answer to this statement and it goes like this:

“I made it up,” I lie.

"Very good. I recommend we meet three times next week," he says and holds the door open for my exit.

When I get home there is a pair of bare, pale legs sticking out from under a black sedan.

Her waist scoots out on a skateboard and then torso, chest, white neck – Mary. She's got a screwdriver in one hand and black oil wiped on her chin. Her white-against-black hair has me

74 stop mid-step and I think I might panic but the pill Dr. Budjak gave me has kicked in and I'm numb. She puts her elbows back behind her and leans up like that on the pavement.

“Damn thing won’t start,” she says to me. “I’m assuming you’re not a closeted mechanic?”

I say nothing and hold the rabbit cage close to my chest. She sighs and slithers back under the body. "Nobody is with a screwdriver," I say under my breath.

“What?” she says from inside metal.

Upstairs and the black boot is gone from the hallway. My hand starts hissing in pain.

Wake up. Watch Mary. Skip pill. Drink water. Shower. Brush teeth. Towel dry. Watch Mary.

Switch lock. Don’t dress. Don’t eat. Drink coffee. In bed. Sleep. Skip work. Sit down. Watch

Mary. Phone rings. Ignore. Stay put. Dress hand. Ice hand. Skip dinner. Brush teeth. Journal.

Sleep. Repeat.

Mary in a floor length black lace dress loading groceries out of her sedan in the middle of the afternoon on a Monday. Mary with red lipstick opening her mailbox and taking out a thin stack of white envelopes, coupon books, a cooking magazine, and shutting the mailbox while still looking down at her stack on a Tuesday. Mary with her hair up and large gold hoop earrings getting into her car at 5 AM on a Wednesday. Mary with red high heeled sling back shoes, one leg hanging out of a man's yellow '59 VW bug, and then the other leg, just legs, all legs, and then the toe of her left shoe hits the pavement and then the other foot and then, as slowly as sleep, she rises up out of the car, and walks to the driver's side door, a musical click, click, click, of heels on ground, she bends down, kisses the man on the mouth and his hand reaches around the back of her neck and covers her tattoo. Mary.

“Did you have another day off?”

75 It’s Jason’s voice at my back and I drop the binoculars as subtly as I can behind the sofa

cushion, turn around to face him and nod my head.

“Well, well, well…,” he says when he sees the lens poking out from the top of the couch.

“So, you got a crush on the neighbor, huh? First time a girl wouldn’t give you the time of day,”

he laughs. “You know you’re gonna have to talk to that one. I don’t think she’s the kind of girl who’ll saunter up to you at the 500.”

He puts one leg up flamingo style and grabs his ankle, stretching, "Doesn't strike me as one of those, but just in case," switches legs, "you know where the goods are and you know how to use them don't you, you handsome son of a bitch. We make a good team, huh? That girl from the other night, ooh-wee, she was a firecracker. Sorry if we woke you. She started yacking in the morning. Said she didn't know who I was, I'm like bitch, you know who I am! You were beggin' for me less than four hours ago!" He ends with a jovial punch to my arm, starts to sprint in place, slapping each thigh on the way up. I turn around with the binoculars pressed to my face. Her blinds are pulled tight.

Jason leaves for the gym and I go to the kitchen, pour four ounces of whiskey over three ice cubes, and head out to the porch. The rabbit is on his side, not breathing. I sit on the top step in front of our dead pet and wait for Mary. Another hot day, low hanging gray sky, I'm in jeans and a white t-shirt, barefoot, tanned toes. My arms are heavy and to take a sip from the glass takes an effort I'm not fond of.

I haven’t seen Dr. Budjak all week; haven’t taken my medicine in over two. My skull is itching, full of crawlers. Every breath I feel the ants climbing up. I coughed some up earlier and they came out in a viscous black mass, a ball of dried ink in my palm.

76 He’s called six times. Left voice messages on my phone like, “Buffalo, this is Dr. Budjak

calling. You’ve missed all three of your appointments now. You will be charged for those

appointments Buffalo, but I also want to make sure you are okay. I’m worried about you.”

In all of his voicemails, I can hear scratching in the background and I know it is his hand on his patchy, bearded face. Stop calling me, you hunchbacked psychopath. I sent an email to my boss at work and told him my father died so I had to take a few days off. They didn't question me, and since he's been dead for twelve years it didn't feel like too much of a lie, not that that would bother me.

Mary coming out of her front door. Black shorts and a black t-shirt, hair down and dark, a messy tangle of pony hair swinging to the small of her back. She waves up at me.

“Hey Buffalo, how ya doin?” Big smile, red lips. Give me a kiss you sweet, sick woman.

“Hi Mary,” I reply so quietly I can hardly hear myself, so I do that thing women like where I run my hand through my hair.

“I’m heading to the coast. Too hot here. You want to come with me? I could use the company. Bring the bottle of whatever that is you’re drinking.” She pops the trunk of her car and throws in the blanket, shuts the door, turns around and asks, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say and pull myself up, one muscle at a time, off the step. Slip on shoes, grab the bottle from the cupboard and start to head out. I turn around and go to Jason’s room. In his top dresser drawer, taped to the inside, is a small pill box. I take out two pills and wrap the tape back around it. There’s a sleek silver butterfly knife under a pair of white socks and I grab that too and close the door behind me.

77 It’s dusk now and we’re halfway to the ocean. You can feel the pavement turning

underneath the tires. It’s changed in the past six miles from city-sleek to country-pothole. Pale orange light fills the car, and Mary’s eyes are golden brown, every blink is slow motion, every turn of her head towards me as she talks fills my throat with bile and I keep swallowing to stop myself from vomiting. I focus on her pale neck. The contour of her veins from her earlobe to her collar bone is so lovely it hurts me to look at it. She hasn’t shut up since we got in the car. I haven’t heard a word she’s said.

"…so, I told him I couldn't be with him if he treated me that way. I deserve someone who can at least listen to me when I talk, like really listen to me. It never seems like you're just waiting for me to shut up so you can speak," she turns her face to look at me. "You have the sweetest dimple," she says as the car glides at seventy-five around a hill.

“It’s a scar.” My voice is like gasoline. I have a cut on the inside of my cheek from chewing at the ants and when I speak it stings and I taste blood under my tongue.

“Really? How’d that happen?”

“Can you pull over here?” I say. “Just stop for a minute. Let’s stop and just look at this

for a second,” I say.

I’m going to kill her. I’m going to kiss her first.

She pulls the car over to the shoulder and puts it in park. Simple breeze through drought-

ridden grassy fields of golden gray. It's all hush-hush like a secret. I'm begging her not to speak.

If she speaks I will swallow her whole.

“I grew up with only my father,” I begin to say, and the ants come up. I swallow hard.

“He was a nice man, a fisherman and a painter. He used to take me to this river in the summer

time. He’d let me hold the box of worms and we’d hike down the little hill to a private beach.

78 We'd sit there with our fishing poles in the water, catching whatever, but mostly we'd just sit in

silence. He was a quiet man, kind of like me I guess. I caught my first fish when I was six years

old. I remember it flopping on the line, splashing water on my feet. I was laughing at it dangling

there with the hook in its cheek, dopey, dead eyes, just hanging, dying. It took him so long to die.

He flopped around on the rocks like some dumb clown before he took his last, stupid breath. We

cooked it on the barbecue and ate it. I asked my him if it was the hook that killed him and he

said, ‘Of course not, it's because he was out of the water.' I asked him why fish needed water to

live. He told me it was because of their gills. That they push water through their gills.

I remember telling him, ‘I want to live under water and have gills and hide under rocks and when I die I want to flop around like this one did for a long time.’ He told me it would be a very, very long time before I died, but that if I wanted to be a fish, I’d have to be smart enough to never get caught and if I did, I’d have to learn how to live with a hook in my cheek. After we ate and he was sitting in front of the TV, I took one of his hooks out of his case, ripped it through the side of my mouth, and that’s how I got this scar.

It didn’t seem weird to me. We had done it to the fish. But it freaked my dad out, a lot.

He tore it out of my cheek and had my blood all over his hands. He made me hold a pack of frozen steak to it but it didn’t hurt. I didn’t even cry. I don’t think I felt a thing. I don’t think I have ever felt anything. I’m immune, Mary, that’s why you should be afraid of me. I look at you and I want to devour you. I want you to love me and I want it to hurt.”

I take the butterfly knife out of my jeans pocket and switch it open, hold it in my palm where the teeth marks are invisible, but I can still feel her jaw on my hand.

Mary with her dark hair down and her red lips, holding onto the steering wheel with both hands, a backdrop of orangescicle glow, I can taste it – sweet. Her mouth is tight now, and I can

79 hear her breathing like a bass drum. The blade just touching the corner of her lips, catches on the sun and a white glare bounces off to shine on my chest.

“I could give you one too, if you wanted,” I tell her with a real smile this time, holding the blade to her cheek, and reach out my other hand to brush her hair behind her ear.

“Please…,” she whimpers.

“It all hurts, doesn’t it?” I say and drop the knife into the cup holder between us but keep my hand on her face. “It hurts. To be lonely. To be lied to. Your intuition hurts. The dentist hurts. The doctor hurts. Your parents hurt. It hurts to be hot. It hurts to be cold. It hurts to be silent. It hurts to kick someone out of bed. It hurts that more people I’ve known are dead than alive.

Let me ask you something Mary,” I say, “Why did you let me get in this car? Why did you take a drink out of that bottle?”

She sits very still with her elbows hyperextended. A crow on a telephone wire behind her head drops a walnut to the pavement. He ducks down, scoops it in his beak, flies back up and drops it again. Up and down. Up and down. Up, down, up, down, up.

“I don’t know,” she mumbles, as the crow eats his broken treat. “I’m lonely. You’re attractive.”

“You make poor choices Mary, you shouldn’t trust the way you do. You have to know that you are responsible for all of this. Just like I am responsible for this scar. You don’t know how lonely I am. You don’t know how little I have to lose. You don’t want to admit that sometimes there is no reason. There is never anyone else to blame.”

I have both my hands on her face now and I bring her close, kiss her on the mouth. I slip my tongue in between her lips so she can taste my blood and she does.

80 There is the distance between Mary and I. Even with my lips on hers, we are miles apart.

And here lies the great sorrow of my life on this earth – the knowledge that she can't convince me not to kill her, and I can't convince her that she was never alive to begin with.

The blade is red.

81 Paradise

Gravel crunching under leather cowboy boots. That’s what I hear first. Then I hear, “Eh, Darlin’, can I bum one of those?” I raise my right hand to hide my eyes from the setting sun. He’s tall, maybe six five, thin

but broad chested. He has a navy blue western shirt tucked into dark Levis and a turquoise bolo

tie. I sit on the bench of the picnic table, have to strain my neck to see his long face, strong jaw,

straight pointed nose. He tilts his head to the right to block the sun and I have a better view.

“You’re dead,” I say.

He shrugs a little and says, “Guess not. I’m standing here now asking you for a smoke.”

Right, and I hand him the pack. We’re at the Paradise Store in the mountains of Santa

Barbara. Chris, John and I left Los Angeles later and angrier than we expected. We are on our way to San Francisco, to a mutual friend’s funeral. We heard the news of Jacob yesterday. On his motorcycle on his way to work at the florist, he collided with a white van on South César

Chavez. The rumor is he was decapitated on impact, head rolling to the shoulder of the road, still stuck in the helmet, heavy as a bowling ball. Two homeless men on the sidewalk began to vomit at the sight as Jacob’s big brown eyes stared at them from the fogged shield of the helmet.

In the car on the 101 Chris goes, “Mind if we make a quick stop?”

The quick stop turned into the Paradise Store. Dinking a six pack at a picnic table and

listening to Bob, a man who looks like he participated in the gold rush and hasn’t showered

since. Bob plays piano, plays a lot of Dylan, even some Waits and it’s nice, sitting on the bench

with old Bob in the background, his voice like something you wouldn’t appreciate without this

scenery.

82 Just minutes after we got to the Paradise Store, Chris and John left me at the picnic tables to buy weed from Jesus, the Mexican kid across the street.

John says, “Stay here and we’ll bring back a spliff.” I tell him I really just want to get to

San Francisco, we still have at least six hours to drive. He said the worst part is over, this will be better for the ride, if we’re stoned. They wanted to check out the car grave anyway. I can see it from the bench, down in the valley just across the street, maybe four square miles of old beat up cars. Orange light falls over the mountains, into the valley, melting into the spaces between gutted Dodge Darts and rusted VW bugs.

So I sit on the bench and listen to Bob.

Bob says, “Now I’m gonna play all the songs I know with blue in the title.”

And he starts with Goodbye Baby Blue but after the first line the song somehow turns into

Auction Block which he doesn’t seem to notice. It’s then that I hear the boots on the gravel. And when he blocks the setting sun from my eyes I think, I’ve been to your grave.

So I say to him, “Aren’t you Billy?”

“Why do you ask?” He replies, a slight tilt of his head.

“Billy the Kid,” I say.

“Ah, come on…no one calls me that anymore. Look at me, I’m a grown man for Christ’s sake.”

He takes a seat next to me and lights his cigarette. He sits slumped, his legs apart and rests his right hand on his inner thigh, his left elbow bent against the picnic table. He has an elongated face, his chin is slightly curved out and his eyes are narrowed and green, the shape of pumpkin seeds.

“How’d you know I was dead?” he asks in between a drag.

83 I keep my eyes on Bob. They start the barbecue and the smell of charcoal reminds me of

a camping trip I took in Baja, the summer after high school. We were all there, Jacob included.

When the tequila was gone and the fire almost out we waded naked in the ocean under a half lit

moon. We were chest deep in the waves and I was holding onto his back and he walked back and

forth through the still tide, bobbing a little, I could have fallen asleep with my cheek pressed in

the space between his shoulder blades. I always slept that way with Jacob, comfortable as a

child.

“Everyone knows you’re dead. There are postcards with your tombstone on them. But I

saw your grave in person. When I was nine I went on a cross country road trip with my father.

We stopped at every cheesy tourist spot. The largest rocking chair, the biggest rubber band ball,

Winchester Mystery House, the Petrified forest, your grave.”

“I guess a better question is, how’d ya recognize me?” he says.

I keep my eyes straight ahead and focus on Bob’s hands on the piano keys.

“You have a face easy to remember. How are you here?”

“Let me tell you something Sweetheart. There are ways ‘round death that you’ll learn about eventually.”

He puts his hand on my thigh, felt cold over my jeans, and I feel the muscles in my shoulders flinch but don’t move. He is wearing a wedding ring, bronze.

“Who’s the lady?” I ask.

“You know I was crying earlier? I was standin’ in the bathroom, staring at my face in the mirror, watching myself cry. You know what I thought? I thought, in movies when people cry they always look a little bit prettier, softer, something someone somewhere would want to touch. But I looked like shit.”

84 “You want a beer?” I hand him a bottle and he takes his hand off of my leg, cracks it

open with a lighter.

White twinkle lights turn on in the trees surrounding Bob’s makeshift stage. More people arrive at the adjacent picnic tables and settle down with their barbecue and beers. There’s a

babble of Spanish around us and Bob is now singing North Country Blues. Billy’s hand is back

on my thigh, unmoving.

I stare at his hand on my leg, and think how cool I’d be if I brought Billy the Kid to my

ten-year high school reunion. I’m twenty-seven and have nothing to show for it but a mountain of debt, student loans from a degree that taught me nothing but how to keep a constant chorus of narration in my head. My thoughts are full of descriptions and repetitive “he said, she said” after

anyone speaks to me.

I look up and he is staring at me, wet eyelashes. Without taking his eyes off of mine he

takes a swig from the bottle. His lips linger for a few seconds at the glass lip while he swallows.

“I’m so tired,” says Billy.

I pat my hands on my thighs and for the first time his mouth moves into a half-smile and

he puts his head in my lap; stretches out on the bench. I put my right hand in his hair and hold

my beer with my left. Sit still and feel his shoulders on my lap move up and down with every

breath.

I’m worried about Jacob. I had a dream about him last night. I saw him through the living

room window, talking to the neighbor, holding a helmet, his olive green jacket on, big smile on

his face. I waved at him through the window, and he saw me and smiled, waved back. I went

outside, I went, “Jacob!” and dove to hug him but he pulled away, laughed and said, “How do I

know you?”

85 I said, “I’ve known you for years. You died last week,”

Then he said, “Did I have a lot of friends?”

That was the moment he let me hug him and I started to cry and I told him that he had so many friends and we miss him so much. He was smiling the whole time, and then I woke up.

It said 5:03AM on the clock. I had that feeling like when you go down a slide at the

playground when you’re a little kid and then you touch your friend’s hair and you both get

shocked with static electricity. I had that feeling like when you’re a teenager and you go for a

drive in your friend’s old Volvo to the river and you listen to music you’ve never heard before. I

had that feeling like when you’re older and you get a phone call and while it should ruin your

day, it doesn’t because you’re older now and you can’t let things ruin your days anymore, not

because you think they’re precious, but because you have to go to work, and feed the cat, and

take out the trash.

I couldn’t go back to sleep. I sat at my desk and watched the sunrise over Griffith Park,

the palm trees wave in the breeze, back and forth, leaves moving like a swaying crowd at a

concert.

I push his hair back from his forehead, staring into two strange eyes, wet still and unblinking.

“Tell me how you are here.”

86 Scraps

We are cheating by going underground. The world above doesn’t mention it, but it thinks we are cheating too. Does it offend you? That I can do this? That I can bury myself so deep under what you can merely stand on? We are cheaters. We steal candy from the grocery store bulk-bins. We eat it in front of people who purchase. We don’t work. We hardly work at anything. We say we’re architects of truths. We don’t know anything. We can hardly read. We sit on street corners with a dog named

Bruce. Bruce rarely gets fed. Sometimes a stranger will give him dog food because they feel sorry, but they only feel sorry for Bruce.

It is heavy under here, under all this earth. It’s not so much the dirt, but the people above me, their feet stepping on my house every damn day. I want that hollow feeling, the one you only get when you’re above everything, and nobody steps on you because nobody can get that high.

Okay. We’re on the corner of a busy city street, doesn’t matter what city. We’re on the corner. We’re slumped over each other. We’re high as fuck. It’s been twelve days and we’re still high; we keep building on it. Every time it starts to drop, we add more layers to the top and it builds back up. We’re like the old walls of an old house – layers and layers and layers of paint, on top of layers and layers and layers of wallpaper. That’s how thick this high is.

Scraps twitches under my shoulder and he wakes me up. Bruce licks his paw with a grey tongue.

“Scraps, Scraps,” I say. I shove him upright. “Scraps, we gotta go man. We gotta move it.

Been here too long.”

87 We can only stay on one corner for so long before we gotta get moving. Can’t claim

anything, not even the concrete, for ourselves.

“I need some water, man,” Scraps says.

“Yeah, yeah, the park, let’s move it,” I say.

In the park and it’s not that late, like ten or so. Bruce is moving slowly. A stranger gave

him food earlier and it made his stomach funny. He pukes in a bush and we keep walking.

There’s so much fog, it’s like walking through a haunted house. What is all this blue fog; so wet?

“It’s so wet out here,” says Scraps. “I’m soaking, dude.”

“It’s not that wet. Here, take my shirt,” I say, and hand him the shirt from my hand. It’s

only then I realize I’m not wearing it under my coat. He puts it on his head.

“Bruce!”

Bruce comes running from behind a tree. He barrels into both of us and our knees buckle

and we’re in the grass.

“What the fuck, man!” Screams Scraps. We stay in the grass. I can see through the trees.

The fog opens a little, and I can see the sky. It’s not very dark, it’s actually lit from the city lights. We’re still in doors, almost, because of those lights.

I was a kid. I was a kid like any other kid. There’s no reason for me to be this way.

“There’s no reason for me to be this way,” I tell Scraps.

My dad took me to Disneyland when I was a kid. I was maybe nine. All I wanted to do

was ride Space Mountain and my dad was okay with that. We rode the ride and then

straightaway got back in the line to wait for another forty-five minutes until we could be spat

through fake-space again. I was staggered. I thought I was really in space, I really did. I thought I

88 was doing something special, thought my dad was an astronaut, thought the darkness was real, the stars real, the gravity was just that, the air was funny because we were in space and it smelled like burning oil and sweat because that’s how space smelled. The other kids’ parents were astronauts too – we were all so lucky. I got to see it all. I got to see the whole universe. We got corn dogs and Slurpee’s and sat on a bench. My dad drank a beer out of a can that was wrapped in a paper bag. It was 1987. Kids walked by in Mickey Mouse hats, and my dad laughed when I told him I wanted one too. He said he’d get me something even better, and we went into the store and he picked out a little silver pin that had a space ship shooting through the stars and he pinned it to my jean jacket.

On our fourteenth time through the ride, something broke. On the first upside-down turn, the car sputtered and then stopped short. The kid behind me was thrown forward and out onto the ground, maybe twenty feet below. He cried on the way down and his mom screamed. I had bruised my ribs on the gate. The lights turned on. Everyone was screaming. I saw my dad’s hair hanging down, we were upside-down, stuck like that in a fluorescent light-bright warehouse.

Below us, the kid was smashed on the concrete, flat and broken.

“We gotta get some money man,” says Scraps. “Gotta get that dough man, and go see

Hector!”

He’s shaking under my t-shirt but it’s not cold.

“Is he dead?” I asked my dad.

89 “Nah, just broken up a bit. Don’t look, alright? Just look at me, this is pretty cool huh?

We’re hanging upside-down like real astronauts. You know what real astronauts do when they’re like this?”

“What?”

“They breath really slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and they close their eyes and picture their bedrooms,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” I tell Scraps. I stand up and brush the dirt off my already dirty jeans.

“We gotta do it,” says Scraps.

“No, com’on. We’re gonna get caught man, com’on. I’m way too high to do that again,” I say.

“What else are we gonna do?” He says and picks up a handful of mud.

We’re under the earth again, wanting to get above it so badly. I need oxygen – need to get these worms out of my head, out of my ears. Scraps rubs mud all over his face, his arms, his neck. He’s covered in it, ready to be invisible in the dark brown of the trees in the park. He picks up another fistful and rubs it through my hair, paints it onto my cheeks and ears and chin. He rubs his hands together with a thick ball of mud in between, and puts his hands on my neck and holds my head steady, massaging the sludge into the creases of skin and onto my naked collar bones.

“Yes,” he says.

“Let’s go,” he says.

We scurry over to the other side of the park, where the trail leads in from the fancy street

– the one with the overpriced restaurants next to section eight housing. These people, these

90 fucking people, they eat their fifty-dollar tuna tartar and right outside we sit, and we wait, to

show them just how much it will cost.

I’ve been on the streets for ten years. Some days I want help, some days everyone else wants help, some days I’m a walking ghost, some days I’m a walking nightmare, some days I’m just a simple nuisance – a yellow-jacket buzzing around your picnic charcuterie board. You

people look at me like I’m the monster, when you’re the ones feeding it. You encouraged this,

you fostered this, and how do you not understand that you are our maker? You’ve let us grow

and form memories and hold grudges and learn. You think Scraps and I are dumb junkies, you

think we’re the statistic, and we might be, but more than that, we’re here. We have nothing to

lose and everything to gain, everything that’s already yours.

We wait behind a tree, disguised in mud, a couple of loose-leaf terrorists, no tethers,

that’s how we like it. Even on top of this earth we are under it, invisible to most, ignorable to all,

but only until we change that, make you notice us, make you beg for us. And you will. I’ve made

you do it a thousand times.

91 Sugar

In the garage with X. A corner carved out of chaos for the air mattress, small green coffee table, heat lamp and stool. Two bicycles, twelve boxes with various art supplies, Christmas decorations, a moped, half a sparkly black drum set, three guitars, two rolled up rugs, a few tables (one missing a leg), and no window. I lie belly down on the air mattress listening to

Talking Heads on the laptop, looking at X on the stool with the computer screen glow on his face. Cheekbones an artificial blue. We know outside is all fog and grey. This room is cold and smells of mold and stale coffee, not unpleasant, kind of sweet, and I taste it when I take short breaths.

X goes, “What do you do when you feel something that is cliché? Does it matter what you do?” He takes a swig of whiskey from the flask, wipes his lips with the back of the same hand all in one movement; swift like a dancer, and answers his own question. “When I’m sad I drink. When I’m lonely I rearrange the furniture in my living room. When I’m frustrated I ride my bike. What difference does it make what you do? It doesn’t make a difference. Listen to this song, ‘Sugar on my Tongue’. David Byrne is an avid cyclist. Com’ere,” and he reaches for my hand, singing along, “put it right there on my tongue.”

I crawl on all fours to him and his brown hair curls into the shadows on the wall.

I have to get up north. I drive towards the Golden Gate and realize how it is to be alone. Not lonely, but alone. It is the first time in five years. Midway over the bridge and I’m through the wall of fog and grey. The water blue, the sky blue, the air soft white terrycloth on my shoulder blades. There is comfort in this commute.

92 The hospital is loud. Suburbia is screaming today as they work on the Emergency Room

renovation. A team of yellow vested, hard-hat wearing middle aged men are scattered in the parking lot: hammering, pulling, lifting, spitting. People should not be dying here. People should not be born here. What could we use this space for? Through the sliding front doors, up the elevator, and it opens to white.

My eighty-eight year old grandfather attempted suicide and is consequently here with a broken rib and collapsed lung. A frail, quiet man with blue eyes, coarse white hair and bruises on

his arms. A native Texan and retired semi-truck driver, he lost his wife years ago and held strong for a while until he had his driver’s license revoked. He recognizes me, and when I kiss his scabbed forehead he starts to cry. He tells me he’s afraid everyone thinks he is a coward.

He goes, “I messed up. Everyone is mad but I don’t know why.”

He couldn’t remember that he used his oxygen tank cord as a noose, wrapped part of it on the hook in the ceiling, meant for a hanging plant, and kicked the wooden stool out from under his feet. This was a failed plan from the beginning.

I go, “Grandpa, you just had a fall. No one thinks you’re a coward.”

I lie beside him on the bed and hold his hand. I’m amazed at the fact that this old man could feel guilty. I always expected that at some point there is no room for guilt, no patience for the ways others see you. He is scared to die, holding my hand so tightly my fingers go numb. We lie side by side and I don’t say anything. There is the hum of the monitor and hospital staff footsteps in the hall outside, rubber on linoleum, an irregular heartbeat.

Three years ago in Waco, Texas we sat on the bed of his white Chevy pickup in the early hours of night and watched the heat lightening flash from miles away across the sunflower field. Hot

93 breeze through my hair and the sky gunmetal grey. We clinked cans of Budweiser and passed the cigar, not saying much of anything, enjoying the rare silence of thunderless lightning.

In the kitchen my grandmother sat at the wooden table, issues of TV Guide and Readers

Digest piled up in the middle with a cellophane bag half full of orange sugar gummy candies.

Grandma was in a wheelchair and on oxygen. She liked video poker and still asked for a Pall

Mall cigarette from time to time, even though she had to take the tank off and go outside. My grandfather, unable to deny her anything, cut the cigarettes in half, thinking she wouldn’t notice, thinking if she only smoked half, somehow that would make it better. But my grandfather, also being a child of the Depression, could not waste anything and so in the kitchen drawer, where one would normally house forks and knives, was a stash of cigarette tips. Hundreds of white paper shells stuffed with golden tobacco leaves. Even after she died at the end of that summer he kept the drawer full. For the next two and a half years we sent each other letters, his always on the typewriter, coupons or a five dollar bill tucked in the folds. Mine always free hand with a photograph.

Six months ago my parents moved him out of Texas and into their suburban home in

Northern California, into the room I used as a teenager. He quit the cigars and the beer, but brought the faint syrupy smell with him. When I came to see him in his new home and my old one, I buried my face in his blankets, taking deep breaths, picturing flashes of light over rows and rows of black faced flowers.

Back over the Golden Gate. Go through the tunnel. The fog is resting just above the skyscrapers now and I can see it all. The body of a city, its peaks and dips and blood and guts. I call X from the car and tell him to meet me at the garage; I need a distraction tonight. I get to the Richmond

94 District, to the garage I made into a makeshift bedroom below Kelly’s house. She’s letting me stay here until I can “get my shit together,” she says so graciously.

I had left the boyfriend of five years in our top floor Victorian apartment in Alamo

Square six weeks ago. He was gorgeous and I was sick with boredom. Stuck in a domestic space

I wasn’t ready for and didn’t need. There was nothing wrong but nothing right either.

At first I took pride in the fact that I was the strong one who knew well enough to walk away. I lied and told him it was because I didn’t love him anymore, when the truth was I never did. He’ll be better off without me. And he is. He had a new girl in less than thirty six hours; she was sleeping in our bed before I even had a chance to clear out my half of the closet. Isn’t it just like that though? Just uproot for the sake of uprooting. Then I realize I don’t have to try; these things seeming like bliss are as fleeting and weightless as a moth on your collar bone.

I lasted two weeks alone until I met X, the sweetest distraction. We met a month ago and this is not a love story, but there is a similarity between us. The day X arrived I was reading outside the coffee shop. Green eyes stared at me; skin dark with dirt, travel. A nomad like me, he rode his bicycle from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I know he is running from something though I haven’t pulled it out of him yet and I may never know, but he likes distractions too and there are so many easy ones: art, music, food, sex, television.

X meets me at the garage and we ride bicycles to Baker Beach. Stop at the liquor store and purchase two tall cans, a flask of Jim Beam and oh what the hell, a pack of swisher sweets too.

There’s a breeze and we sit with knees touching. It’s four o’clock and the fog peeks its grey head around the corner of the cliffs. He wraps his right arm around my shoulders and we smile. As if we could love and still carry on along the same thread that was spun before we ever met. As if we could love like we know what that word means.

95 Dark now and we run to the broken concrete bunkers to hide from the wind. We build a fire and I do cartwheels until I’m dizzy, drunk now, laughing and he holds me up and then starts to hum and we dance. Waving back and forth, pressed, and he smells like something I’ve always missed.

X slides his hands down from my shoulders until he’s on his knees and holding the backs of my thighs in his palms, looks up at me with the orange reflection of the fire on his face and goes, “I can give you nothing but the promise against boredom. Please tell me that is enough.”

It’s quiet in the hospital parking lot on Saturday. The renovation is almost finished, glass walls are up and the neon ER sign. Elevator up and opens again to stale white lights, antiseptic smell and when I walk into the room I can tell he’s been crying again.

He goes, “Everything is failing me. My body don’t work anymore and I hate to say it but

I’m scared.”

I lie on the bed and rub his hands. Veins like embossed calligraphy. I try to think of something to say that will sound like I know what I’m talking about.

I go, “Grandpa, do you remember the letters we used to send to each other? I have them somewhere, the ones you sent to me. I can bring them next time.”

He does remember and yes, please can I bring them?

He goes, “The worst thing anyone ever said to me is ‘I’ve got to go’. So I promise I won’t be saying that. I won’t say anything, but you sure are pretty, Granddaughter.”

On the drive back to the city it occurs to me that I have no idea where the letters are. It feels like these days my stuff is scattered all around Northern California; garage, storage unit, parents’ house, the boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s bedroom. There isn’t time to go looking. When I get to

96 the garage X is waiting on the air mattress, bags and bicycle propped up against the coffee table.

I tell him we have a project and ask if he can write letters from the perspective of a dying retired

war vet turned semi-truck driver. Of course he agrees and we rewrite the letters. He uses my

typewriter that the boyfriend gave me for Christmas last year. I sit on the edge of the air mattress and tell X what to type. David Byrne sings ‘This Must be the Place’ and we both yell out, “I’m just an animal looking for a home and…”

We finish typing and it’s time to go. The original plan was to stay a week and X is well past that now. I tell him I can give him a ride to the train and in the car we listen to nothing. He holds the back of my neck while I drive through streets dodging ghosts.

In the parking lot in West Oakland we sit in my car and wait for the train. It’s now that I realize I know nothing of the details of X’s life. I have no idea who he’s going home to, why he came here in the first place, where does he sleep at night and what will he eat for dinner? I don’t know how he will spend tomorrow. The stitching of how we got here doesn’t make a difference.

All I know is that my back is full of worries, petrified by the thought of sleeping in that garage alone, a slow leak in the air mattress and I suppose I don’t care who he is or how he got here but only that he’s leaving.

How do you describe a universal pain? He told me it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference what you do. He pulls me close up against the car, kisses my hands and says thank you. He was there and then he wasn’t, but isn’t that just how it goes? Those are the facts but I don’t know what the truth is.

The next morning, they send my Grandpa home from the hospital to my parents’ house. I arrive just shortly after him and he is lying, blue faced, under the covers in my old room. There’s a

97 thick smell like spoiled milk but it’s easy to ignore. As I tip-toe to the bed I think how stupid that is; as if you can stir the dying. I’m surprised when I see him blink and lift his hand to the stack of white envelopes I’m holding.

I go, “You want me to read to you?”

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