Among the Stars and Other Stories

A thesis presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Logan Scott Wells

May 2018

© 2018 Logan Scott Wells. All Rights Reserved. 2

This thesis titled

Among the Stars and Other Stories

by

LOGAN SCOTT WELLS

has been approved for

the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Patrick O’Keeffe

Associate Professor of Creative Writing

Robert Frank

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

3

Abstract

WELLS, LOGAN S., M.A., May 2018, English

Among the Stars and Other Stories

Director of Thesis: Patrick O’Keeffe

Two brothers dream of being astronauts. A man wakes up to read his own obituary in the newspaper. A failed country musician seeks to reconnect with his estranged daughter, and a woman deals with the aftermath of her husband’s alien abduction. In these five stories of cosmic happenings and intimate relations, characters seek to control their lives—both past, present, and future. They hide from their guilt and search for notoriety. They distort reality to fit their needs and learn too late that the universe does not answer to yearning. 4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Introduction ...... 5 Among the Stars ...... 19 Abduction ...... 27 The Obituary of Daniel Sebastian Potter ...... 55 Vox County Case Review Board: Exhibit A...... 71 Four Chords and the Truth ...... 90

5

Introduction

Saunders-esque

In his introduction to George Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, author

Joshua Ferris claims that “while Saunders does satirize, or, in other words, render the real absurd, he also carefully and lovingly and artfully renders the absurd real” (xiv).

Saunders is not then, Ferris says, “a satirist in the early style of Mark Twain.” Rather, he is “the natural heir to both Poe and Melville…[speaking] with Whitman’s original unchecked energy…as close to the nineteenth century as he is to the twenty-first.”

Saunders, in short, is no one but himself, “an entirely autonomous product of his own devising” (xii-xiv).

I first encountered the work of George Saunders about a year and a half ago after the first story I ever turned in for fiction workshop at Ohio University received the stamp of ‘Saunder-esque’ by a few of my classmates. I was almost brand new to the world of creative writing and didn’t recognize the workshop speak for “this story is weird as hell, and, in the hands of someone like Saunders, it might actually be pulled off, though we have no idea what you’re doing.” So that night I read “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” on

The New Yorker’s website and thought to myself, hot damn, Logan, they think you’re as good as this guy.

I was struck by the clarity of Saunders’s prose, his absurdist rendering of a middle class geniality I had grown up a part of. Not only did he capture the repressed lives of suburban America that I was so familiar with, but did so in a way that seemed wholly true despite (I might say because of) its audacity. 6

I set out, then, to be the best Saunders I could be—to write a vision of stunted middle-class America so dark and demented and ferociously funny that I too might be the subject of someone’s critical intro one day. There was only one tiny problem with that plan—my vision sucked. Or rather, I sucked, not as a writer, but as a stand in for one of the most admired contemporary writers in all of literature. The more I read of Saunders’s work, the more I tried to copy it, the more I realized that I was not, in fact, George

Saunders. So where did I turn? You guessed it.

In his author’s note to Civilwarland, Saunders cautions against the very kind of literary imitation I was attempting, saying that a writer must “tear down the scrim” holding back his or her natural ability of voice (189). Failure to do so, he claims, results in a “disclarifying clapmuddle”—one that might pass in MFA workshops (if only because no one wants to admit they didn’t ‘get’ your story), but produces no pleasure or entertainment or greater insight/purpose for your reader (188).

And so, I decided to take Saunders’s advice and blaze my own path—one still inspired by his voice but not beholden to it as I had been before. Much of my work, then, was influenced by his absurdist realism, though just as much took lessons from his precision and empathy of character. He has said before that “a book [or story] doesn’t have to do everything…it just has to do something,” and I took that message to heart

(198).

The stories that appear in the following pages are trying to do exactly that. What

“something” that is varies from story to story, though I do hope I’ve begun to harness my own vision. To me, it is one of desperate yearning, of a desire to control one’s fate. It is 7 not divorced from the middle-class absurdity I fell in love with in Saunders, but that is not, by and large, its focus. Instead, I’ve cast a wider net, one that reaches out to many corners of life (and beyond), to understand the necessary delusion that takes place when our classmates call our work ‘Saunders-esque.’

Levels of Unreality

Picture a boy. He’s a little shrimpy looking, wears glasses and has crooked teeth.

This boy is 11 years old—11 and a half, we’ll say. He has just stepped off the bus from a long day at school where Timmy Thompson, the playground bully, has shoved his head into a puddle again. The boy hates Timmy Thompson, wishes he would go fall in a hole.

He is jealous that Timmy gets to kiss Suzy Mitchell behind the vending machines at lunch. The boy likes Suzy Mitchell, told her so in a note last week that she promptly threw away while her friends giggled in his direction. He sometimes thinks that when he hits puberty—the teachers all showed “the movie” before Christmas break, so the boy knows all about what happens when his testosterone kicks into high gear—that he will grow big and strong and have a thin little mustache. Suzy will start to take notice of him, then, and Timmy Thompson will stop grabbing his crotch at the boy for fear of being pummeled to death. He envisions all of this as he walks upstairs and lies on his bed to stare at the ceiling. His mother has still has not taken down the glow-in-the-dark night- light stickers even though she said she would. They’re childish, the boy thinks, something a baby would have. He stands on the mattress but is not tall enough to reach them. He gets a box out of his closet and sets that on top of the bed too. He can just barely start 8 scraping at the edge of the little plastic pieces. They fall to the floor like little shooting stars, and the boy grows taller with every one.

This is the boy’s reality now. He has created a life that does not exist because he is unhappy with the one he is living. He is not alone in this act—the only reason Timmy

Thompson bullies him so much is because he has a crush on the boy, and if the truck- driving, gun-toting Mr. Thompson ever found out about it, he would do a lot worse than shove Timmy’s head in a puddle. In both cases, these boys have constructed an unreality based on expectations from a multitude of sources. The boy sees Timmy Thompson as the epitome of masculinity and projects that template onto himself. Timmy, meanwhile, is influenced by the societal expectations of sexuality that the boy perpetuates by striving to achieve them. And both boys are affected by Suzy Mitchell’s presence as a popular social figure in their world of elementary grade school.

Suffice it to say that the boy’s construction of unreality is based on a separation between expectations and reality. That is, because the boy cannot really grow up faster than he would like—and because he is unlikely to actually become the muscle-clad Fabio that he anticipates—it is easier for him to manipulate the reality around him so that it meets the various expectations at play.

As a fiction writer, I believe every story and every character is a byproduct of this separation. Some accept it and move on with their lives. We might call them happy characters. We might also call them very boring to read about, because the flip side are characters who, like the boy, are unwilling or unable to accept the separation between 9 their expectations and reality. They act against it then—dramatize, if you will—and the result is a conflict and fullness to the world that creates compelling change.

When a character like the boy constructs his unreality, there is a second life that is born on the page. It is neither real nor unreal, and it can manifest itself as a simple determination or utter delusion. In every story, there are layers of this unreality, and they must often be stripped away for the characters to complete an emotional arc. What I’m interested in is the types of layers that can be applied to fiction. That is, how can a story about aliens or robots be as real and affecting as one about a marriage in crisis? How can a stroll through the woods be as interesting to read about as a family trying to escape from monsters? The answer, I think, lies in perceptions of unreality and the truth they reveal about what’s being hidden on the page.

Hyper-reality

The first level of unreality is one I call hyper-reality. By this, I am referring less to the stark paintings of Chuck Close and more the off-kilter world-building of David

Lynch. It might also be helpful to think of hyper-reality in this context as akin to absurdism, surrealism, or even magic realism. It is often defined by elements of Freud’s uncanny or satire and is primarily a metaphorical mode of storytelling in that the story itself—the setting or situation—comes to represent a facet of the true emotional undercurrent. In other words, an author might manipulate a version of heightened reality or surreality in order to examine some theme or idea he is trying to uncover. 10

In contemporary fiction, though, metaphors and allegories are often only useful to the extent that they break down, and as such, the hyper-reality of a story must at some point be stripped away—even for a moment. For example, in Saunders’s “Escape from

Spiderhead,” we note hyper-reality’s function in revealing narrative truth. The protagonist, Jeff, is a convicted murderer who is living in an experimental prison in

Utica. He and the other prisoners are surgically implanted with a device called a

“MobiPak” that administers various drugs to be sold for commercial use. Jeff is obliged to be part of a “crazy-ass Project Team” in which he is subjected to a love serum known as ED289/290 that makes him fall in and out of love with two female prisoners—Heather and Rachel (91). Later, to test the effectiveness of this drug, he is asked to watch as the project leader, Abnesti, administers a drug known as Darkenfloxx to both women that will effectively torture them to death. Jeff eventually administers the Darkenfloxx to himself so that he does not have to kill anyone else, and he floats above the prison, “there but also everywhere” (81).

On the surface, “Spiderhead” is a tale far removed from our general understanding of realistic fiction. It is an absurdist satire of moral dilemmas and the sanctity of human life. It crafts a world so futuristic and strange that it can hardly be familiar at all. And yet it is. Saunders’s gift is in making the absurd become real. Here, does so not only through a critique of the penal system and capitalist bureaucracy, but also through careful layering of the story’s hyper-reality. He does this first by making that hyper-reality integral to not only the characters, but also to the plot itself. After Jeff has had sex with Rachel, his dosage of ED289/290 is returned to baseline, and he feels 11 saddened at the loss. “I guess I was sad that love was not real?” he says, “Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad because love could feel so real and the next minute be gone. All because of something Abnesti was doing” (54-55). Here, we see a real moment of clarity for Jeff. He is spending his life in a drug-induced haze, but when he comes down from these highs, he is able to pierce through his unreality with clear-eyed observations that ring true for readers outside of the story—love comes and goes, and we’re unable, by and large, to control it. But where this moment could easily become heavy-handed, even preach-y, Saunders skirts this pitfall by giving the observation relevance to the plot. That is, we accept this sentiment as true because we understand the rules of this reality and know that Abnesti can quite literally give and take love from the prisoners as he sees fit.

In building credibility for the hyper-reality of the story, Saunders allows himself to start stripping it away more and more as he goes. Before Jeff kills himself using the

Darkenfloxx, he is observing Rachel from a control room known as Spiderhead:

Just then, in Small Workroom 4, Rachel, I guess thinking the Spiderhead empty, got up and did this happy little shuffle, like she was some cheerful farmer chick who’d just stepped outside to find the hick she was in love with coming up the road with a calf under his arm or whatever. Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess (p. 78).

Here, unlike before, Jeff is making an observation that is almost entirely separate from the hyper-reality of the story. He is catching Rachel in a moment of unawareness, where the absurdity of the plot has no relevance to her actions. She might as well be alone in her room in a two-story townhouse on Maple Street. The plot is still moving, Jeff must still make the decision to administer the Darkenfloxx, but Saunders has effectively pulled 12 back the curtain on the hyper-reality of the story and left us with an intimate human observation that drives home Jeff’s understanding that “every human is worthy of love”

(69). This leads to a final absolution, a change in Jeff’s character once he is dead, that

“forevermore, I had not killed, and never would” (81).

Performed Reality

If hyper-reality is akin to absurdity, then performed reality would be most readily paired with chewing with your mouth closed only because you have company over. That is to say, there is no small amount of absurdity in the inner lives of even the most mundane characters or plots. This is why David Mitchell’s Blackswan Green is as much a page-turner as his Number 9 Dream—why Haruki Murikami’s Norwegian Wood feels every bit as full as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. A performed reality, then, is to repression what a hyper-reality is to metaphor—a character’s performed actions, his geniality, must be stripped away in order to reveal truth within the narrative.

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Long Walk to Forever,” is a prime example of the way in which performed reality functions to disguise and then reveal a character’s motivation. The story is simple enough—an A.W.O.L. soldier shows up at the house of his childhood friend and asks her to go for a walk with him. The friend, Catherine, is about to be married, and the soldier, Newt, knows this. He confesses his love for her on their walk, and the two struggle with the impossibility of their relationship. Eventually,

Newt goes to turn himself in, and Catherine calls out to him, running into his arm. 13

Here, we really see the separation between expectations and reality at work.

Vonnegut imbues the first two lines of the story with this tension, saying first, “They had grown up next door to each other, on the fringe of a city, near fields and woods and orchards, within sight of a lovely bell tower that belonged to a school for the blind,” and then, “Now they were twenty, had not seen each other for nearly a year. There had been playful, comfortable warmth between them, but never any talk of love” (48). We are given expectations right away of an intimate, potentially romantic relationship, and then we are stripped of those expectations by the harsh reality that, not only is there no talk of love between these two, but Catherine is about to marry another man. This tension becomes present not only for the reader, but for the characters as well, particularly

Catherine, who is trying to diffuse any suggestion of a relationship with Newt. “We shake hands,” she says after Newt confesses his love, “We shake hands and part friends…that’s what happens next” (51). While Catherine is insistent that there can be no future for them, Newt is careful to poke holes in her poised façade. “What’s good about him?” he asks, referring to Catherine’s husband to be. Catherine responds, “Do you have any idea how offensive you’re being? Many, many, many things are good about Henry! Yes…I love Henry and I don’t have to argue his merits with you!” (52-53). We begin to see

Catherine’s performed reality—the repression of her feelings—fall apart as Newt challenges the truth she has constructed for herself. Soon after this small outburst, Newt kisses her “because she wanted him to” (53).

While Vonnegut is careful to peel back the layers of Catherine’s performed reality bit by bit, it is not until the very end of the story that it is stripped away entirely. After she 14 and Newt stop to take a rest beneath an apple tree, the bells in the tower for the school of the blind begin to ring. This is a call back, of course, to the opening line of the story, but it is also an emotional turning point for Catherine who has begun to question her love for

Henry. She attempts one final time to send Newt on his way, but as she watches him go,

Vonnegut notes, “[she] knew that if he stopped and turned now, if he called to her, she would run to him. She would have no choice” (54). Newt does call, and she does run to him, and for the first time in the entire story, we understand that she has been in love with

Newt all along and has simply been repressing these feelings because it would be a transgression to give into them. This performed reality then, becomes her unreality for most of the story, and not until it is stripped away do we as a reader understand the emotional shift in her character.

It is important to note that while Catherine’s performed reality is constructed by various expectations around her—Newt’s expectations of love, Henry’s expectations of marriage, even her own expectations of not being “crazy”—almost none of these things is overtly stated. Instead, they come out via interaction with Newt, whether that be through his interrogation of her silver pattern or his rather aggressive attempts at kissing her.

These are moments, similar to “Spiderhead,” where Vonnegut is not manufacturing change in his characters, but making it an integral part of the plot and present action.

Among the Stars: Writing a Cosmic Reality

I’ll return to George Saunders only briefly to discuss the ways these unrealities manifest themselves in the process of fiction writing. Saunders claims that, “if one is 15 going to do something artistically intense…the trick might be to destabilize oneself so that [his] skills come to the table fresh-eyed and a little confused” (“what writers really do…”). In other words, the writer himself might need to construct an unreality any time he sits down to write a story. This allows him to suspend his judgement, to let the work come organically and messy. And then, of course, that unreality must be stripped away in a process we like to call revision (torture).

In my own fiction (as well as my writing process) I am endlessly fascinated with these levels of unreality. They are ways for characters and stories to make the familiar unfamiliar (and vice versa), all for the sake of manipulating unfavorable situations. This is a rather human impulse, I think, to try and better one’s current standing. And I think it is an even more human impulse to be affected by the inabilities to do so.

I strive, therefore, to tear down or strip away these unrealities so that the story might find some emotional truth underneath. In the five stories that appear here, I have explored both hyper-realities and performed realities, though I don’t think the two are so inherently different. What I mean is they are both ways of bridging the gap between expectations and reality so that characters or plots might find an ideal form that can then be subverted in a surprising way.

When I wrote “The Obituary of Daniel Sebastian Potter,” I had not intended for it to be a story about infidelity. Rather, I had begun with a character who struggled with his masculinity and woke up to find himself dead. This was an unreality that he had constructed for himself, and it took me several drafts to understand why he was doing so.

When I realized it was a coping mechanism, a way to ignore, even absolve his guilt, I saw 16 how this unreality might be stripped away, and the humanity of his actions could be dramatized. The challenge, then, became rendering the surreality of the plot alongside the more intimate human details of Daniel’s relationship with Madeline. What I attempted to do was create a multi-linear narrative that provided context as the present action became more and more unfamiliar. This way, when Daniel meets Miss Connie and the balance in reality starts to tip, we at least have a foothold in his emotional state. These are moments, effectively, where the unreality is removed, bit by bit, until we are given the reveal that

Daniel was not at his own home in the opening scene of the story. What we are left with, then, is the emotional reality Daniel must face in confessing his infidelity to his wife.

The same can be said for a story like “Four Chords and the Truth.” While it is a much more ‘realistic’ story than “Obituary,” the same elements of discovery are at play.

The reveal in this story is the narrator’s abduction of his daughter more than 20 years before. But where Daniel’s unreality is more of a hyper-reality focused on an absurd/surreal story line, “Four Chords’s” narrator is enacting more of a performed reality. That is, he is actively repressing his past—specifically Melissa’s abduction— because it represents a painful moment in his life. The stripping away of this unreality is done in two ways. First, similar to “Obituary,” the story shifts back and forth between a present and past timeline. This informs the narrator’s present action and forces him, eventually, to reconcile the moment of repression. In another way, this unreality is represented in the materials he hoards in his home. He is unable to let go of his past— though he also wants desperately to change it—and the trash that consumes his life 17 becomes a physical manifestation of this impossibility. These points of repression come to a head as he comes face to face with Melissa:

It is a moment of recognition, a moment where everything comes rushing back— the busted lawn chairs sitting in my bathtub, the bundles of extension cords stuffed into a laundry chute. All the decrepit, decaying memories that sit piled in my home hang there like drop of ink at the end of her slender fingers.

Here, the narrator’s unreality, which has been peeled back bit by bit as we receive more context on his past, is blown wide open as that past comes into contact with the present manifestation of his repression.

In nearly all my stories there is some level of unreality at play. Sometimes, that is a hyper-reality far removed from our present world. Other times, it is a familiar, intimate unreality that is simply performed by the characters on the page. But at the heart of all this, I hope, is the very human impulse to want to change our past while also controlling our future. Inherent in this impulse is the reality that we are unable to live in or affect anything but the present moment. For me, then, the stripping away of unrealities in fiction helps us capture that present, even for a moment, so that we may understand its function in our lives. I might call this a cosmic reality—a truth that is both fleeting and infinite. And a truth that persists, even when it’s gone.

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Works Cited

Saunders, George. Civilwarland in Bad Decline. Introduction by Joshua Ferris, Random

House, 2016.

Saunders, George. “Escape from Spiderhead.” Tenth of December, Random House, 2013.

Saunders, George. “George Saunders: what writers really do when they write.” The

Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-

do-when-they-write

Vonnegut, Kurt. “Long Walk to Forever.” Welcome to the Monkey House, Dell

Publishing, 1988.

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Among the Stars

T-10 seconds to launch: Crew members of the space shuttle Solaris close and lock their visors. Hydrogen burn-off systems activate. Main engine starts—

Kris will be born first by exactly two-minutes and eleven seconds. Climate

change will ravage the Earth, and he will insist on blowing out the candles at

every birthday party. Martin will come next. The human race will commence

mass interplanetary travel, and he will claim his brother’s identity to avoid being

pummeled by a group of hulking lettermen jackets. At the school science fair,

Kris will explain the effects of gravitational time dilation—how a human being

will age more quickly in space than he will on Earth—and Martin will make

everyone laugh by pretending to be electrocuted by a potato. They will tie. While

the Earth’s last inhabitants—the poor and the fundamentally religious—wither

away, the brothers will argue over who gets to drive their father’s truck to the

prom. Kris will run track, and Martin will smoke weed. They will pair up for

games of euchre but disagree on the proper tactics. And through it all, their nexus

will encapsulate both space and time. As civilization fades out like lights on a

switchboard, the brothers will walk through a rolling field at the edge of town.

They will lay out a star map, trace constellations like strands of DNA overhead,

and Kris will ask, “Do you ever wonder what the world looks like? From up there,

I mean.” Martin will scrunch his nose, cup his hands like binoculars. “Small,

probably.” He will take a clump of dirt and toss it through the air. Kris will mark 20

its trajectory as it arches toward the sky, and right then, he will see their destiny.

“Someday,” he’ll say, “we’ll go find out. You and me. Together.”

T-0 seconds to launch: Solid rocket boosters ignite. Liftoff—

The sun will grow brighter in the dark expanse, and Kris will press the phone to

his cheek. He will be outside of Lecture Room 113 in Longley Hall to take his

brother’s mechanical engineering final. “It’s a 300-person seminar,” Martin will

say, “no one’s going to know the difference.” “That’s not my point,” Kris will

respond. The burning star will convert its hydrogen atoms to helium, and Martin

will try to quiet his girlfriend’s giggles on the other end of the line. “I know all of

the equations by heart if that’s what you’re worried about,” he will say. “Want me

to recite them for you?” Kris will ask why he just doesn’t take the test himself,

and Martin will ignore the question. Fiery rays will fry all life and vegetation on

Earth as the sun’s outer layers creep forward. Kris will see Dr. Ulloa rounding the

corner and pretend to take a drink from the water fountain. “You know how

pissed Dad’s going to be if he finds out,” he will say. Mountains will melt away,

the oceans evaporate, and Martin will give an exasperated sigh. “Look, it’s too

late now. I’m all the way across campus, and I can’t fail this class. They don’t

take college dropouts at NASA.” The now lifeless rock will become a blazing

inferno, and Kris will scrunch his toes. “Fine, but I’m not doing any of the extra

credit.” “Good,” Martin will say, “that would be a dead giveaway.”

21

T+20 seconds from launch: Solaris is already several hundred feet in the air. The five crew members aboard are pressed back in their seats as the shuttle rolls 180 degrees—

The twins’ father will tell everyone that his sons are astronauts before they

actually are. “It’s just the interview round,” Kris will remind him, “we haven’t

even made it to basic training yet.” The sun will exhaust the last of its helium

supply, and Martin will shrug his shoulders. “Kris has a point, Dad. It takes years

to get a mission. Old fart like you might not be around by the time we go up.” The

bloating star will dominate the sky, an angry Red Giant bearing down on a

speckled black canvas. “You all might be spacemen,” the father will say, “but I

can still kick your ass.” He will take his boys in a headlock, and the sun will

struggle against the frenzied atoms scrambling in its stomach. The bar will be

silent when the father yells, “Now y’all better wear butt plugs up there ‘case them

aliens try and probe ya!” Kris will drop his head and Martin will raise a beer.

“Come on, big brother,” he’ll say, “we’re celebrating.” Swollen, blistering skin

will stretch and tear against the soundless vacuum of space. “There’s nothing to

celebrate yet,” Kris will say. “We still have to get into the program.” Inside that

glowing behemoth, a defeated, hollow core will collapse under its own weight,

and the father will decide his sons need another drink. “Hey bartender,” he will

call out. The gaseous bulb will throw off its crippled shell like breaking from a

cage. “Another round over here.” The sky will explode in a shimmering,

sprawling nebula. Kris will catch Martin’s eye. There, crystalline clouds of red

and green will seep into the interstellar fabric. He will look at his brother and see 22

all the work to be done—the years of research and training, the Spartan-like

dedication it will take to achieve their dream. He will begin to feel the

impossibility creep in on him. But he will also feel, despite himself, a steady,

swelling pride as their father raises a toast and exclaims for all to hear— “Can I

have everyone’s attention? I’ve got an announcement to make. My boys are going

to Mars!”

T+26 seconds from launch: Main engines reach maximum dynamic pressure. They throttle down to conserve energy and fuel—

A dense, glowing orb will be all that remains of a once raging goliath. The dying

star will squeeze itself like a fist, and Kris will get the call. He will excuse himself

from lunch with friends, head to the bathroom to answer. There, a man at the

urinal will piss so loud against the porcelain base that Kris will have to cup his ear

in the stall. “Hello?” he will echo against the cold tiled floor. The man will flush,

and Kris will only hear part of what is being said—regret to inform you…strong

candidate pool…appreciate your interest. That little white marble will smash

itself down into sub-atomic dust, and Kris’s words will seem to come from

somewhere else— “I understand. Thank you for the opportunity.” While he

pretends to wash his hands, the sun will be downright vindictive in its extinction.

It will crush and mangle, threaten to bend even gravity itself. The only thing

worse than hearing the news will be thinking of Martin. Kris will imagine his

brother, at home on the couch, listening to the same garbled message for the very 23

first time. Any remaining spots of light will be stamped out by the sudden weight

of darkness, and Kris will know he has let them both down. The stomach cramps

will be easy to fake. Kris will leave a tip and drive back to the apartment. The

whole way, he will feel the heat being sucked from him, find comfort only in the

knowledge of a mutual fate. And then, as he opens the front door, a single ray will

shine for a moment—one last, infinite sunset. “Did they call you too?” Martin

will ask, “I can’t believe it. It’s a fucking dream come true.” Kris will close his

eyes and swallow hard. Behind that curtain, a tiny black speck will disappear into

a sightless cosmic backdrop.

T+60 seconds from launch: The main engines throttle back up to 104 percent. Crew members stand by at the manual controls—

Years will pass. Decades, centuries, millennia. Andromeda’s arms will spiral

toward a now defunct solar system at over 400,000 kilometers an hour, and

Martin will travel, alone, to a training base in Texas. His brother, meanwhile, will

move back home, take a teaching job at a local community college. A galactic

collision will send tremors through the stars, and Martin will call every other

week. The planets will scramble like marbles on a hard tile floor, and he’ll tell

Kris about his training—stints in the Neutral Buoyancy Chamber, rides in the

Vomit Comet. Kris will listen, flip through channels on a muted TV screen as he

does. While the Earth and Moon are flung far apart the brothers will live their

separate half-lives. Martin will decode images from the Hubble Space Telescope, 24

and Kris will dog sit for the family. When Martin gets his wings, he will invite

Kris down for the graduation ceremony, but Kris will stay home and watch a high

school football game instead. He will tell his brother that the flight was delayed.

New constellations will form, ones wholly unrecognizable to dusty star maps

stored away in a garage somewhere. The father will ask Kris why he doesn’t just

re-apply, and Kris will tell him, “It’s not that simple. Besides, I’m happy where

I’m at.” He will stop answering calls. Martin will leave voicemails and text

messages, but his brother will suddenly be too busy to even keep in touch. Kris

will sell his old text books online, the telescope that Martin got him as a

Christmas present. These things will ship to new cities, towns he has never heard

of. He will begin to forget they ever existed. Then, one day, when the planets

have settled in their new order, Martin will show up on his older brother’s front

porch. He will not have announced his arrival, will not ask to stay. There will only

be one request. “I got a mission,” he will say. “I’m going up.” A supermassive

black hole will eat away at the center of the universe, and Kris will stare back at a

reflection that is not quite his. “Please,” Martin will say, “I need you there with

me.”

T+2:06 seconds from launch: Solid rocket boosters detach. Solaris begins to leave

Earth’s atmosphere—

Nothing will change. Not really. The universe will go on expanding, and Kris will

fly down one day before the launch. Earth—what’s left of it—will settle in a cold, 25

unfeeling region of deep space. That night, the brothers will take a six pack of

Rolling Rock to a hillside overlooking the city. Martin will lie flat on his back and

breathe in the air. “I want to tell you something,” he’ll say. Light waves will be

pulled into long, fraying strands, and Kris will sip at his beer. “You’re the reason

I’m here, Kris. I wouldn’t be nothing without you.” The older brother will think

through all the way to respond—I’ll miss you. I’m sorry. It should have been me.

Instead he’ll settle on, “Jesus, why don’t you write a fucking poem about it,” and

Martin will crack a smile. In the morning, Kris won’t be able to bring himself to

go to the launch site. Instead, he will watch from a hotel bar as cosmic entropy

ceases production. A newscaster will begin the countdown, and Martin will lock

his visor into place. Kris will grip the table as his brother is pressed back in the

seat. For each passing second, Martin will feel two. The rocket’s G-forces will

pull and squeeze him through time while Kris remains firmly on the ground.

Television cameras will lose sight of the ship. The cosmos will slow to a crawl.

For one fleeting instant, the brothers will be the same age, the same person. And

then, just like that, time will collapse in on itself. Every moment, past and future,

will flatten down into a singular, static present.

***

Kris squints one eye and covers up the little dipper. He can almost feel it, thousands of lightyears there across the width of his palm. A breeze rustles through drying rows of corn, and the city lights hum off in the distance. Up there, somewhere, Martin is on a different plane of existence. There’s no telling how many millions, billions, trillions of 26 years he’s put between them now. Kris pretends he can make out the shuttle’s blinking lights, its sparkling energy panels angled toward the glowing sun. But there’s only the amorphous night sky, the vague memory of what might have been. He adjusts his weight, cranes his neck. Crickets chirp to one another in the still night air, and Kris stares up at the distant stars, some of which have already burnt out billions of years before. 27

Abduction

1.

Gretchen leans forward on the fold-out metal chair and says that her brother has been sleeping on the roof again.

“I just don’t get it,” she says, picking a blister on her hand. “Is he trying to contact them or something?”

The poor therapist who has agreed to lead our discussions here in the basement of the 10th street United Methodist Church sighs though his nose and looks around the circle. He’s a diminutive man, not more than 5-foot-3 if you were to stretch him on a gurney, and he always wears the same brown sweater vest over a mustard yellow shirt.

“Well perhaps—” he begins, but he is cut short by a hand from one of the suits who is stationed behind him. This suit leans forward and whispers something into the therapist’s ear, and there is a groan from the rest of the group. I take the opportunity to slip away toward the snack table where I shovel Hostess doughnuts into the bottom of my purse.

“You can’t keep us in the dark like this,” says the Dad-bod whose kids have begun tap dancing at all hours of the night. He has heavy bags under his eyes, and his hair is getting thinner every time we meet. “How am I supposed to protect my family?”

George, the ex-marine whose buddy has converted to Quakerism, stands from his seat and demands to know what military action the government is planning to take.

“Now let’s just calm down,” the therapist says. “We’re all going through this together.” 28

The Bug-eyed lady points out that the therapist’s girlfriend isn’t dressing like a cat to go to the grocery store, and there’s a chorus of agreement that rattles the stain glass windows. The other suit—there’s always two—steps forward in the circle and puts a hand on her waist. I start cramming Goldfish into my mouth, a fistful at a time, because I know what’s coming next.

“Everyone, please,” the therapist implores. “Just sit back down and let’s talk this through.”

“I’m tired of talking,” Dad-bod says. “My wife and I haven’t slept in a month!”

He takes another step forward, and the suit in the circle hits him with the

ShockWand. Dad-bod goes all rigid and his palms start slapping his thighs like he’s spaz- ing out. There is a swell of movement as everyone leaps back, and the therapist shakes his head and says, “Oh my, oh dear.”

Dad-bod hits the ground and that’s our cue to disperse. I take a few of the roasted almonds and shove them in my pocket while Bug-eyes moves Gretchen away from the scene.

“We’ll get answers,” I hear her say as she wipes Gretchen’s tears from her face.

“And we’ll get a tent for your brother in the meantime.”

I’m about to fall in line with everyone else when I catch something out of the corner of my eye. Nathan is tucked behind one of the altars they use for communion, and he has his cell phone out which is a big-time no-no because the suits don’t want us doing exactly what he’s doing now—which is filming. I catch his eye like what the fuck? but he just holds a finger to his lips and waves me on. 29

I don’t move at first, because I know that if he gets caught, it’ll be on my conscience. Nathan is the only other person whose spouse has been affected by all this, and as such, he’s insisted that we have each other’s backs. His wife is crazy obsessed with having a baby to the point that she has shown up outside of his work office on three different occasions and asked the secretary to please inform her husband that she was ovulating. Nathan insists this isn’t a problem, though. He says that he’s excited to be a father, and, all things considered, there are worse fates than being compelled to pro-create with the woman you’ve chosen to marry.

I get outside and pace up and down the sidewalk, hoping he’ll follow behind. For the record, Nathan never asked if I wanted his help. He took it upon himself one day and told me, “If the roles were reversed, I’d want you to do the same for me.” I told him that sounded like a line from a bad television show, but he just smiled and patted my shoulder.

When he finally emerges from the church, he’s tucking his phone away, and I pull him off to the side.

“Are you insane?” I ask. “You won’t be much of a father if you end up dead.”

Nathan just smiles, his high, sturdy cheekbones still protruding from a rounded, pudgy face. “It’s okay,” he says. “We’re gonna get these bastards. Now where do you want to eat?”

2.

The looting and the riots have stopped for the most part. The stock market is beginning to recover, and all but a few fringe media outlets have eased up on the 24/7 30 fearmongering. The government, for their part, continues to assuage any panic amongst the general populace by insuring that they are “hard at work” with other world leaders to gather as much information as possible on these “unidentified objects.” They’re careful to avoid language like “flying” in regard to the giant shifting blocks that hovered over the city for three-and-a-half days. They’re also opposed to “extra-terrestrial,” and the

President’s Chief of Staff was just fired last week for even daring to breathe the word

“alien.”

It makes sense then why everyone at the church has been sworn to secrecy. The official story is that no contact was made—no green Martian-men descended a ramp and said, “Take me to your leader.” Which is true. But we know how our loved ones were beamed up in the middle of the night and returned a few hours later with no recollection of the event. The CIA, the FBI, some special agency, must have known what was going on, because as soon as the ships departed, we were whisked away to a government stronghold and forced to sign official looking documents that basically said we were crazy if we ever told a soul. In return, we were promised answers and a twice-weekly therapy session where we were encouraged to “voice our opinions and concerns.”

My biggest one right now is when I pull into my driveway and see an unmarked van parked at the end of the cul-de-sac for the second time this week. It’s sitting next to

Susan Cutshall’s house where some high school kids have knocked down the mailbox and replaced it with a spray-painted sign that reads Martians R Real. I grip my keys between my knuckles and scramble up the front porch steps. When I get inside, my heart is racing, and I barricade the door with my body. A light sizzle is coming from the 31 kitchen, and I follow it down the hall to where Anton is waving plumes of smoke away from the oven. He’s wearing an apron that read Kiss the Chef, and he has two different colored oven mitts on either hand. He tosses the tray onto the stove, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, and the smell of burning oil smacks me in the face.

“There you are,” he says, wiping the fog from his glasses. “You’re just in time. I made something real special tonight.” He ushers me toward the table, and as I sit, he swings the tray under my nose where there are a dozen or so deep-fried circles that look vaguely like crab rangoons. The waft of vinegar stings the back of my throat, and my eyes go watery from the heat.

“I call them hatchlings,” Anton says. “Might have left some of them in a little long.” He sets the try on the table and picks out the pieces that have turned a dark brown.

This is, I have to admit, a little better than I was expecting. Before his abduction, Anton cooked two meals a year—one on my birthday and the other on our anniversary. Usually he would just heat up a lasagna or blend some quick-mix pancake batter, but the way he brought it to me in bed or guided me through the house with a blindfold on, you’d think he fancied himself a three-star chef. Once the ships left, though, things were different.

It started with a few eccentric cravings—pickle spears with peanut butter, roast beef and mango yogurt. But it wasn’t long before he was surprising me with a pizza crust that he’d coined “the flying saucer,” on which he’d spread cream of mushroom soup over a layer of grape jelly. For a while, I tried to take him to restaurants, thought that might curb his desire to create such ungodly concoctions. But after he smuggled a jar of green 32 olives into the Chinese buffet and put one at the center of each of his sushi rolls, I decided it was best to keep things in the house.

My stomach makes a sound like a garbage disposal as Anton sits across from me.

“Well somebody worked up an appetite,” he says.

I’ve been telling him that I’m hitting the gym a few nights a week after work. The truth is, Nathan usually takes me to the McDonald’s drive thru after the meetings where I wolf down a large order of fries and a couple of Big-Macs. He says I shouldn’t feel guilty for eating behind my husband’s back, but he doesn’t know how Anton almost cried the one time I offered to cook instead.

“Go on,” says Anton, gesturing toward the tray. “Eat up.”

I smile weakly and lift one of the hatchlings onto my plate. It feels squishy between my thumb and forefinger, and a little bit of green ooze seeps from a crack in the shell. Anton breaks one open and scoops little chunks of goo into his mouth. It has the consistency of cottage cheese, and I’m convinced it’s held together with some kind of toothpaste.

“Did you, uh, bake that pie for me?” I ask. I’ve given Anton my grandmother’s old cookbook in hopes that it might help him transition into more traditional dishes.

“Mm,” he says, chewing with his whole body. “I was going to. But we don’t have any scallops.”

“It’s a cherry pie,” I say.

“Right. That’s what I’m saying.” 33

I look down at the table and trace my finger along its splintered edges. The kitchen suddenly smells like marinated feet, and Anton grabs another hatchling from the tray.

“Seriously,” he says. “Try ‘em. They’re good.” He smiles at me through swollen cheeks, and I can see how truly happy he is.

After dinner, Anton insists on doing the dishes. He tells me to go relax, and I head into the living room where I open a drawer in the hutch beside the window. There, I’ve hidden a bowl full of dum-dum suckers and those little airline peanut bags. I empty my purse on top of all this and add the doughnuts to the pile. This is my secret stash of food.

I live on it five days out of the week, and Anton knows nothing about it. I don’t care what

Nathan says, it’s not fair for my husband to be eating some soggy looking taco thing called “The Probe” every night while I have real food without him. The only reason I let

Nathan take me out after meetings is because he threatened to send me to the hospital if I didn’t. Apparently my cheeks have started sinking in and people are beginning to notice.

I slide the bowl back in its spot and plop down on the couch. The TV is on, and

Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s face is paused on the screen like a sneeze. I’ve been watching a lot of Cosmos recently, trying to make sense of all the chaotic aromas around me. I figure the show might hold some secret answer or clue that I’ve never been aware of before. But the only thing I’ve learned so far is that the universe is in a constant state of change.

Anton comes out of the kitchen when I’m halfway through the episode and drapes his arm across the back of couch. There’s still a little bit of dish soap on his hands, and it reminds me of that time we found a kitten stuck in our gutter drain. Anton cut it free with 34 a pair of hedge clippers, and we gave it a bath in the mud-room sink as we tried to think of names that would suit its off-white coloring. Eventually, we gave it away to one of

Anton’s friends who had a daughter that named it Karen. It was a good home, but we kind of wished we had kept it after all.

Though the curtains, I can see the tail-lights of that unmarked van glowing at the end of the street. I must tense up without knowing it, because Anton looks at me and asks if I’m okay.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine.”

The tail-lights blink on and off and I have to close my eyes.

“Are you sure?” Anton says. “You’ve seemed—I don’t know—stressed lately.

You can talk to me you know.”

I look at him now and see the genuine worry in his eyes. I wonder what he sees in mine. “I’m fine,” I say again, and I lean my head on his shoulder.

Later that night, as we’re lying in bed, my phone buzzes on the nightstand. I reach over to grab it and feel Anton’s leg press against mine. The message is from Nathan, and all it says is, U up? I set the phone back on the nightstand, and it buzzes again. This time there’s a link to a webpage that’s straight out of the 90s. It’s got flashing section headers set against a starry backdrop, and a little pixelated saucer zooms across the screen when I scroll.

I’m about to text back that I’m trying to sleep when a pair of headlights sweeps the far wall of our bedroom. I tuck the phone under the covers like someone might see its glow, and I wait until my breathing returns to normal. When it does, I put the phone on 35 silent and stare up at the darkened ceiling. Anton rolls toward me in his sleep and his rancid breath cascades over my nose. Come to think of it, there is something I want to say to him, something on the tip of my tongue. But I can’t quite get it out. My thoughts, it seems, are overwhelmed by the smell of deep fried rotten eggs.

3.

At our next meeting, there are two more suits stationed at the front doors of the church. They stand on either side of a sign that reads PUSH, as though daring someone to step even one inch out of line. They have a wide-angle view of the entire room which means I can’t get up to scavenge the snack table without being noticed. I try to pay attention to the discussion instead, but little pops of static keep crackling my vision.

Bug-eyes is saying something about how her girlfriend has started buying dog collars in bulk from Amazon.com. The therapist, meanwhile, keeps glancing over his shoulder to see if he’s allowed to talk, and Gretchen is doing everything she can to keep from sobbing openly. Dad-bod is back in the circle again, though he doesn’t say much this time. He just sits with his shoulders slumped in his chair and his neck twitching every so often.

Across the room, I can see Nathan trying to get my attention. He bounces up and down, waves his hands like he thinks no one else can see him. I’d shoot him a look, but I don’t want the suits knowing we’re in cahoots. Besides, the second I look at him, he’ll probably do something stupid like shout-whisper over the group that he has something he wants to show me. 36

Every week, he’s got a new theory from some obscure internet resource. He’s been finding people who study extraterrestrial life—Xenologists, I think they’re called— and telling me to look them up. These are people who would have been considered wack- o’s and nut jobs before the invasion—old, white guys with big, poofy hair and lazy eyes.

They’ve apparently discovered something called “Neo-Parasitic Assimilation,” which, as

I understand it, is basically an Invasion of the Body-Snatchers type deal. There have been at least 12 reported cases in the last 30 years, but they all got swept under the rug because people thought they were crazy. The symptoms affect everyone in different ways, but patients reported wild changes in personality and behavior—crazy stuff like pretending to be a potted plant any time they had guests over.

Anyway, Nathan is convinced that’s what’s happened to everyone who got abducted. He’s found a guy named Dr. Kein who is supposed to be the foremost authority on what the Xenological community refers to as “Neo-Pass.” He’s been trying to convince me to go and meet with him, and even though I’ve said no a hundred times— that it’s way too dangerous with the suits watching our every move—Nathan still approaches me after the meeting and taps me on the shoulder.

“Did you get my text?” he asks.

I’m hovering over the snack table, trying to fit an entire blueberry muffin into my mouth. I have to hike my pants up while I eat because they’re starting to get loose around my waist, and Nathan holds his phone up to my face.

I tell him to keep his voice down, but because my cheeks are packed full of baked good it comes out like “Keef yof foyf fown.” 37

Nathan starts pulling up a webpage, and body moves between us. It’s Miltary

George with his flak jacket on, and he shoves a flier in my face. It’s got a picture of

Uncle Sam on the front—only instead of pointing a finger, he’s holding what can only be described as a Loony-Toons photon ray gun. The caption, THEY WANT YOU., is centered above some fine text about a locally organized militia, and there’s a phone number to call at the very bottom.

“We ain’t going down without a fight,” says George. “If you love your country, you’ll take up arms.” He hands a flier to Nathan as well and then continues through the room. One of the suits has caught on and is following his trail, snatching fliers left and right.

“You two the ones handing these out?” he asks when he gets to us. He eyes

Nathan’s phone and I squeeze the muffin down my throat.

“No, sir,” I say, handing my flier over. “We were just talking about where to get some dinner.” I look at Nathan and jerk my head in the direction of the exit. It takes him a second, but he catches on and drops his flier to the ground.

“That’s right,” he says. “No offense to your muffins, of course.”

The suits gives us both a suspicious look and then grumbles off through the crowd. Nathan waits until he’s out of earshot and then looks back at me.

“Well that was close,” he says. I tell him to put the phone away before somebody sees and then take him by the arm.

“Come on,” I say. “There’s an Arby’s over on 5th.” 38

The suit going after Military George has caught up to him now and is hauling him off toward a closet where they keep the Christmas decorations. I reach out and shove another muffin into the pocket of my cardigan, and the suits by the door nod and whisper in our direction. I smile at them as we pass, try and look as natural as possible. Nathan, meanwhile, is still typing something on his phone.

***

When we get to the restaurant, a plasma TV is showing CNN where a round-table of experts debate the pros and cons of funding NASA’s space exploration. I’ve ordered two roast beef sandwiches, a large mozzarella stick, and some curly fries. I’m tearing into it like a hungry pig trying to win an eating contest.

“Jesus,” Nathan says, a salad fork hovering before his lips. “You poor thing.”

I set the sandwich down and stuff a couple of fries down my gullet. “How’s

Stephanie doing?” I ask.

It takes Nathan a second to snap out of his trance, and when he does, he stabs at his plate like it’s trying to kill him. “Stephanie?” he says. “Oh, she’s great. Just great.

Still no luck on the baby front, but these things take time, yeah? Yeah, Stephanie’s great.”

I down the mozz-sticks two at a time, and Nathan keeps talking to fill the silence.

“You know, no one ever told me trying to conceive a kid would be so much work.

She’s really putting me through the ringer.” He starts to put more dressing on his salad and pauses. “Sorry if that’s TMI.” 39

“No,” I say. “It’s fine.” The truth is, I’m happy to let him talk. He’s usually not very open about Stephanie, I think because he can tell I’m not getting any from Anton.

My husband and I haven’t exactly been intimate since he started experimenting with the culinary arts, and I think that’s something that might bother me if I had the energy to really notice.

“Yeah, I came home the other day, and she’s hanging upside down from the second-floor balcony,” Nathan says. “Said the angle would help with insemination or something.”

“You had sex on the balcony?” I ask. The words come out with a bit of fried breading, and I almost choke at my lack of filter.

“Oh, well, uh, yeah,” says Nathan. “She’s been open to experimenting, I guess.”

There’s an awkward silence, and I take another bite of roast beef. “Have you and Anton ever thought about having kids?” Nathan asks.

I swallow my bite and slurp it down with a drink of Pepsi. “For a while, yeah. But now, I mean—it’d be tough, you know?” I imagine Anton with a little toddler, staring into an Easy-Bake Oven and watching the dough rise on a loaf of green bean banana bread.

“Unless he got better,” says Nathan.

At first I’m not sure what’s he’s saying, but then I see a twinkle in his eye like he’s waiting for me to open a present. “We’ve talked about this,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “But this guy could actually help. He’s the best in the field, and—” 40

I put my hand on his arm to cut him short. Some guy with a black tie and dark shades has just walked through the door. Nathan turns to see what I’m looking at, but then the guy whips off his sunglasses and veers toward a table full of laughing friends.

“What is it?” Nathan asks. “What’s wrong?”

My heart comes down from my throat, but I don’t let go of Nathan’s arm. “I told you,” I say. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” says Nathan. He looks around the room again and then leans forward. “You want to talk about dangerous? Look at yourself. You’re starving. You’re starving, and I’m—” He stops himself short and grabs my wrist with his free hand.

“Listen,” he says. “We don’t have another choice, alright? We’ve got to get answers somehow.” He squeezes until cold needles prick my elbow. There’s a desperation to his eyes that I haven’t seen from him before, a silent panic that I know all too well.

“You’re hurting me,” I say, but he doesn’t let go.

“Look,” he says. “Just think about it, okay? Please. This guy could really help us.

He could really help you.”

I finally wrench my hand away and rub the spot where he’s grabbed. This seems to snap him back to reality, and his face goes long and white. He sits back in his chair and digs in his pocket for a box of yellow Tic-Tacs. He shakes it like a tambourine and pops two in his mouth. He must notice me staring then, because he raises his eyebrows and offers me the lid. “Sorry,” he says. “Did you want one?”

41

4.

The van is still parked in the street when I get home. It’s a few blocks closer this time, almost like its drivers can tell that I’m hiding something in my stomach. I try and convince myself I’m being paranoid, that no one knows or cares if I went out to dinner instead of coming home like I probably should have. But my breath reeks of fresh mint, and when I get inside, all the lights in the house are off.

Anton doesn’t answer when I call his name, and there’s a dull glow from the kitchen down the hall. I find him there, hunched over a plate of pickled onions and chicken liver that swim in a pool of melted ice cream.

“Hey,” I say, approaching from behind. “What, was the electricity bill too high this month?”

He doesn’t react, just picks at his plate and gives an exasperated sigh. I cross to the counter and set my purse down. The room goes a little wobbly, but I try and shake it off. “Any more luck with that pie?” I ask. He turns to face me.

“I found these,” he says, tossing a bowl onto the table in front of him. “I was trying to clear room for an extra spice rack.”

I recognize my secret stash of food, the empty candy wrappers an incriminating finger print along the plastic ridge. A vice grip squeezes my lungs. “Oh,” is all I can manage.

Anton stands and pushes his chair in. “Do you even like my cooking?” he asks.

His glasses hang from the end of his nose, and there’s real pain in his voice. Six years of marriage, and he’s never caught me in a lie—nothing major, at least. There was that one 42 time I threw his favorite necktie away because it was the most hideous thing I’d ever seen. But even then he didn’t confront me like this.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “Of course I like your cooking.” I try and reach out for him, but he grabs his plate and moves away.

“You don’t have to lie,” he says. “I can tell you haven’t been eating.”

“Anton,” I say, but he isn’t hearing me. Or else he doesn’t want to. I stare at the blackened bits of liver that float in a pool of soupy cream as he moves toward the sink.

“It’s fine,” he says. “You don’t owe me anything.” He turns the plate on its side and watches the contents slide down the drain like he’s giving it a Viking funeral.

“Anton,” I say again, but I’m too in shock to do anything but watch as he rinses off the dish and lets it clatter from his hands.

“You know, I thought you might appreciate me helping out around the house a little more,” he says. “Guess I won’t try that again.” He shuffles down the hallway to our bedroom, and I listen to his footsteps trailing off. I remember when we first moved in to the house, how he rolled me in an office chair from one end of that hallway to the other.

We had set up cardboard boxes as makeshift bowling pins and spent a solid half-hour trying to roll a perfect game. We were fresh back from the honeymoon, ready to start our lives together with no idea what that meant. Anton pretended to hurt himself when I bowled him into the wall, and I ran up to check on him. He pulled me to the ground, pinned my body on top of his, and tucked his thumbs into my belt loops. He told me how lucky he was—how he couldn’t imagine a life any better than the one he had. It was the kind of thing that would make you gag if you weren’t a part of it yourself. But, of course, 43

I was, and as we held each other there on a flattened cardboard box, I thought I might do anything for him.

I’m at the sink now, staring down at the swirling drain where a half-pink bit of liver is hanging from the lip. It’s water-logged and pulsating, almost like it’s got a mind of its own. I pinch my nose and dangle the specimen over my mouth. It feels slippery in my hand and I think of Nathan—how his only plight is having copious amounts of sex with the love of his life. The pungent juices run between my fingers, and outside, I can hear a car engine sputter and rev to life. My teeth feel like they’re wriggling in my gums.

A light over the stove hums quietly.

I drop the liver back in the sink and grind it up with the disposal. I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to take even one measly little bite. Anton has probably locked himself in the bathroom now, is staring at himself in the mirror and trying to think what spice he could have added to make me love him more. I grab my purse and dig around beneath a layer of pretzel sticks and Little Debbie cakes. I fish out my phone and pull up Nathan’s message from a few nights before. My fingers type out a response, and the text pops up on the screen.

Okay, it says, I’m in.

Three little bubbles tell me Nathan’s typing back. They go away and re-appear three different times. Eventually, a message comes through.

Great, it says, I’ll set it up.

44

5.

There are at least a dozen suits at the next meeting. They stand in every corner of the room and lurk outside on the pavement. Meanwhile, Anton has quit making food for two people anymore. He just fries up an egg now and puts it in a bowl of ketchup pea soup so he can slink upstairs and eat in the guest bedroom by himself. Of course, this makes me feel even more guilty than before, so I’ve been eating less and less.

To make matters worse, Nathan is suddenly MIA. His chair sits as empty as my stomach across the circle, and he won’t respond to my texts. I haven’t heard from him at all since agreeing to meet with Dr. Kein, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I know why.

While Gretchen is trying to describe the tin-foil hats her brother has started wearing, the suits all stare at me behind their tinted glasses. I can’t actually see their eyes, but I can feel them, working up and down, scanning me head to toe. I try not to react, but my blood sugar is so low that I don’t really have control over my face. I feel my phone buzz in my lap, and it’s almost like a plane engine rattling my bones.

I stand and head over to the snack table where they’ve got an assortment of bagels with hazel-nut cream cheese. The suits all follow me with their eyes, and I start hoarding snacks away like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. I use this as an excuse to look inside my purse and read a message from a number I don’t recognize.

911, it says. Meet behind BK.

For a second, I think I might be hallucinating, but then another message pops up that reads, Make sure no 1 follows. 45

I grab a handful of skittles from a nearby bowl and tuck them into my bag. A suit stops me at the front door when I try to leave and asks me where I’m headed. I tell him I need some fresh air which isn’t too hard to pull off given how malnourished I probably look.

Outside, there are three more suits lounging on the steps. They turn to face me when I appear, and I stare past them at the half-lit Burger King marquee sign just around the corner. It reads, OUR WHOPPERS R OUTTA THIS WORLD!, and I head toward it, pretending to take a phone call from some customer representative.

Dark shadows are tunneling my vision by the time I make it behind the restaurant.

I don’t see anyone near, and I’m about to text the number again when a hand reaches out from behind a dumpster and pulls me out of sight.

Nathan’s hair is disheveled and flat. He’s started to grow a patchy beard, and his eyes are forked with bloodshot talons. He presses my body flat against the rusted metal and peers over my shoulder like we’re making some kind of drug deal.

“No one followed you, right?” he asks.

“Jesus,” I say. “Don’t grab me like that.” I push his arm away and ask where the hell he’s been. He doesn’t seem to hear me though and bounces up and down on his toes.

“Come on,” he says. “We gotta get out of here.” He pulls an old flip phone out of his pocket and tosses it into the dumpster. It makes a hollow ping that reverberates like bucket in a well. 46

“What the hell is going on?” I say, but Nathan doesn’t answer. He just grabs me by the arm again and starts pulling me forward. I’m too weak to really resist, but I try my hardest and he turns to face me.

“Look,” he says. “I’ll explain later. But right now we need to—”

His voice drops off. His face goes as white as I imagine mine to be, and his eyes bug out of his head. I turn to see what he’s staring at.

Across the street, in the middle of the crosswalk, is a woman. She has scraggly brown hair that falls past her shoulders and wide, pear-like hips that jiggle as she walks.

Her gaze is fixed on me and Nathan, and it’s not until a car passes in front of her that I realize she is 100%, totally, unabashedly naked.

Nathan’s grip loosens on my arm, and I hear his voice squeak out a single word.

“Run.”

The woman springs into action, her bare feet slapping the rugged pavement.

Nathan tugs on my sleeve, and before I know it, I’m racing with him toward his car which is parked in a handicap zone. He drives an old Chevy Geo with no automatic locks, and he fumbles with the keys. The woman draws nearer. She dodges traffic with breasts flopping up and down, and the motion is enough to make me woozy. People honk their horns either because they’re about to hit her or they like what they see, but she never takes her blazing eyes off of us. Nathan gets the car unlocked and reaches across to let me in. He cranks the keys in the ignition, and the engine whines like a cat choking on gravel.

“Come on,” he mutters to himself. “Come on.” 47

The woman is in the parking lot now, less than 50 feet away from us. I have no idea what she’s planning to do, but there’s a fire in her eyes I’ve never really seen before.

The engine lets out a soft gurgle and then sputters gently to life. Nathan slaps the dash in exaltation and throws it in reverse. The patrons of the restaurant are staring through the windows now, and a manager pokes his head out of the drive-thru. The tires screech as Nathan guns it, and peels around a traffic cone. I stare in awe as the naked woman takes a running leap and breaks the world record for longest jump in a single bound. She lands with her body flat against the windshield, and the folds of her skin crease underneath her weight. She is yelling something at the top of her lungs, but I’m not quite sure what it is. Nathan pulls a lever to release the windshield wiper fluid, and the spray soaks the woman’s hair. She doesn’t let go, though—not for anything. Nathan starts doing laps around the parking lot, jerking this way and that to try and get her off, but the woman clings for dear life to the hood.

Finally, Nathan jams on the brakes, and she goes rolling out into the street. She comes up bloodied and a little disoriented, but it doesn’t take her long to find us again.

By this time, though, Nathan has jumped the curb and is zooming down the road. The woman chases after us in the rearview mirror, her hair twisting back and forth in the wind. When she finally disappears from view I turn to Nathan.

“What the fuck was that?” I say.

“That,” he says. “Was my wife.”

*** 48

We drive for what seems like an hour. I’m too delirious to really talk, and I down a box of raisins to keep from passing out. At some point, we pass a pair of dueling protests on either side of the street. To the left, a group of people hold up signs and chant,

“Keep us safe! Close off space!” while to the right, another group counters with slogans like, You can’t build a wall around the Earth. These figures zoom by in a single blur, but

I’m able to somehow focus in on one or two at a time.

Eventually, we come to a parking garage that’s in a part of the city I’ve never been before. Nathan winds up the ramp toward the highest level, and the constant turning makes me nauseous. I think I’m about to ralph all over his car when he whips into a parking spot and slumps forward on the wheel.

I step out into the chill evening air and gulp it down with my lungs. I can hear a wind or something blowing in my head, and I have to steady myself on the hood of the car. Nathan gets out too and crosses over to where I’m standing.

“You okay?” he asks, reaching out to hold me up. I shove him away.

“The hell I am,” I say. I dig into my purse for another snack and find a candy bar near the bottom.

“Okay,” he says. “I can see you’re upset. But you gotta understand, she never wanted kids. Not really.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I say.

“Stephanie,” says Nathan. “She never wanted kids. Not before the invasion, at least. We talked about it and we both agreed that we were happy the way things were.” 49

The sugar from the candy bar is going to my head, and my mind is jumping all over the place. “Would you just tell me what the fuck is going on?” I say.

Nathan takes a breath and nods his head. “She caught me putting birth control in her coffee this morning.”

“You did what?”

“I’m telling you,” says Nathan. “She was fucking insatiable. Morning, noon, and night, all she wanted was sex. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. She poked holes in my condoms for chrissakes!”

I push myself off the car and try to stagger away.

“Please,” he says. “You understand, right? You know what it’s like.” His eyes show the same frantic expression as the one from a few nights ago—the one like he’s been backed into a corner that keeps getting deeper and deeper.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask. “At the meetings.”

“You mean complain about too much sex?” he says. “You all were the ones with real problems.”

I rub my head which feels wet and clammy. Nathan grabs my shoulders.

“Listen,” he says. “Let’s get out of here. You and me. Just start driving and don’t look back.”

“You just ran over your wife,” I say.

“She’s not my wife,” Nathan counters. “Not anymore. She’s different now. Your husband too. You can’t tell me you’re still happy with him.”

I try to wriggle free, but his hands clamp down even tighter. 50

“Let go of me,” I say.

“Please. You’re the only one who understands.”

I can feel his fingernails digging into my flesh. They pinch a nerve in my arm, and

I can honestly say I don’t know what he’s capable of in that moment. The threads of my shirt strain against his grasp, and a surge of adrenaline courses through my body.

I wrench my arm free and pull it away. The straps of my purse pull taut as they swing behind my back and then directly at Nathan’s face. It’s a clean hit, and the skittles

I’ve stashed explode from the opening in a rainbow cloud of destruction.

Nathan holds his nose and staggers back. I hear him mumble something about

“You stupid bitch,” but then he tries to jump toward me, and his feet slip on the rounded candies under foot. He does something resembling the splits, and I think I hear a crack. I don’t stick around to see if he’s okay. I turn on my heels and flee toward the stairs, but I only make it about ten feet before I’m stopped cold in my tracks.

An unmarked van, just like the one outside my house, screeches around the corner and jams to a stop right in front of me. Four suits pile out of the back, and I drop my purse to the ground. I throw my hands in the air, and putting them above my head like that sends the world in a spin.

“Oh thank god,” Nathan says, crawling on all fours behind me. “Thank god you’re here. This woman just tried to assault me.”

The suits all look at me. “Ma’am,” says one of them, stepping forward a bit.

“We’re going to ask you to come with us.”

“What? No. No, fuck that,” I say. “I didn’t do anything.” 51

“Don’t listen to her,” Nathan shouts. “She’s jealous of my wife or something. I don’t know. But she’s loco, man. Check her purse. You’ll see.”

I think about lifting that purse again and bringing it down on Nathan’s head one more time, but I barely have the energy to keep my legs underneath me.

Another suit steps forward and stands next to the first. “Ma’am,” he says. “We’re not gonna ask again.” The other two join their partners and they all bring to life the gentle hum of their electric ShockWands.

6.

They take me to some holding cell that looks like the inside of a dentist office for post-apocalyptic masochists. There are wires hanging from the drip-stained ceiling, and a large two-way mirror is showing me a ghastly reflection I can hardly recognize. They leave me cuffed to a bolted-down table and refuse to return for several minutes, hours, or days.

I don’t have my purse anymore, so the only thing keeping me conscious is the genuine fear clogging my intestines. At some point, a suit comes in and offers me a lobster dinner if I can tell him about Dr. Kein. I say I don’t know anything about the man, but that apparently isn’t good enough. He tells me that Nathan’s already given me up, that they have reason to believe I’m the mastermind behind tracking down the Xenologist and uncovering the Neo-Parasitic Assimilation. “Tell me,” he says. “Does the term

‘Interstellar treason’ mean anything to you?” 52

I think of Nathan’s wife—how she’s just out wandering the streets now, bloody and naked. The skin is rising on her back from the cold, and I can almost feel it on my own. My stomach gurgles, and the suit leans back in his chair.

“You know, it doesn’t matter if you talk or not,” he says, locking his fingers behind his head. “At this point, we can do pretty much anything we want.”

I try and reason that I’ve done nothing wrong, that I was just trying to help my husband, but the suit shakes his head and says, “This isn’t marriage counseling, lady. It’s a goddanged global crisis.” He stands to leave, and I beg for a bag of Cheetos, a piece of chicken, anything at all. He just slams the door and leaves me there, dry heaving out of panic.

Some more time passes, I can’t tell how much, and I start to think I’ll never get out. I imagine myself withering away here, slowly disintegrating like the floating dust around me. For a while, I doze off and have vivid dreams of another invasion, one where the aliens are much more violent and destroy all life on earth. They never come to look for me though, and I just sit there, the last surviving human, waiting to be a skeleton like all the others.

A violent buzz pulls me from my sleep, and I jerk up to see another suit pushing through the door. “You got a visitor,” he says, and steps out of the way so I can see

Anton in the hall. I try to rise up, but I’m chained and weak, and I fall right back into my seat. “Five minutes,” says the suit, and he pushes Anton forward. 53

My husband crosses to me immediately and cradles my head in his arms. His chest smells like he’s been mixing hot-dog relish with fermented cheese, and I swallow down in the bitter scent.

“You gotta get me out of here,” I say. “You gotta. You gotta—”

“I know,” says Anton. “I’m trying.”

He rocks me back and forth, and my eyes feel like pinballs pinging around in my brain. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry I didn’t like your food.” A part of me realizes how trivial this is at a moment like this, but that part is floating somewhere overhead, detached from the rest of my body.

Anton doesn’t respond. He just pulls back a little bit and stares at the mirror over his shoulder. “I brought you something,” he says. He digs into his pocket and pulls out the crumbled remains of a stale Hostess doughnut. “It was all I could get past them, but I figure it’s better than nothing.”

I look from the food to him and back. If I had any salt left in my body, my eyes would be filled with tears. My hands reach up to grab the snack, but they snag on the cuff around my wrists.

“Here,” says Anton, and he cups the back of my neck with his palm. He raises the doughnut to my face and lets me eat the pieces from his hand. I keep tilting my head back so I can swallow, and then I looking at him with pleading eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I keep saying, over and over again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” says Anton. “Go on, eat.” 54

He feeds me the doughnut, one bite at a time, and I can feel my energy returning.

It is small, almost depleted, but it is there. Anton rubs a hand between my shoulder blades and says, “It’s okay. We’re gonna figure this out.”

I chew another bite and stare into his eyes. I want to believe him—I really, really do. 55

The Obituary of Daniel Sebastian Potter

What a surprise to, at the age of 33, find yourself dead at the age of 102. That’s a discrepancy of 69 years—the juvenile hilarity of which was not lost on one Daniel

Sebastian Potter. Indeed, as he stood there in a shallow ditch on the side of the road,

Daniel couldn’t help but think he was still pretty damn alive. Sure, the trip out to the mailbox had left him a little more winded than he would have liked, but high blood pressure and flat arches were a far cry from the Great Beyond. He looked back down at the folded newspaper and read:

Northborough—April 22nd. Daniel Sebastian Potter, 102, died yesterday of complications resulting from heart failure. He was a resident of Sunnybrook Retirement Community.

And that was it. His whole life summed up in two measly little sentences. Only it wasn’t his life, couldn’t be. He’d never heard of Sunnybrook Retirement Community before, had even started eating Honey Nut Cheerios to help lower his cholesterol. Still,

Daniel couldn’t shake the feeling that this was more than some unfortunate coincidence of nomenclature. First, there was no “survived by” designation on the notice. Sure enough, Daniel and his wife, Madeline, had yet to have any children of their own. Every time they tried, it inevitably ended with Daniel in a closed off room holding a plastic cup and a stack of Playboys while a nurse called through the door— “Sir, it gets creepy after

15 minutes.” Besides, if his years as a palm reading mystic had taught him anything, it was that there were never any guarantees. And so, Daniel Sebastian Potter decided to respond to his own obituary like an ad in the paper as to better understand the mysterious circumstances surrounding his untimely death. 56

Back inside, he traipsed through the kitchen where his jacket lay crumpled on the floor. He fished around in the pockets for his cell phone and found Madeline’s message still on the screen from the night before. It read: Going to bed. Can u grab some milk on the way home?

A hot ball of phlegm rose in Daniel’s throat. He marched down the hallway to the second door on the right and poked his head inside. The bedroom walls were bare and angled near the top. A sliver of orange light froze little specks of dust as they floated through the half-drawn blinds. A hand poked out from the twisted sheets, and Daniel examined the palm. Long, sweeping lines showed an eagerness to please, a wide, sturdy wrist betrayed undying trust. The fingernails were colored with little specks of white, and

Daniel knew these as a telltale sign of vitamin deficiency.

He pulled the door closed again, careful not to make any noise, and headed back to the kitchen. He closed out of Madeline’s text and pulled up a Google search for

Sunnybrook Retirement Community. The phone listing was a full ten digits long, and

Daniel sang the numbers to himself as he dialed. It rang twice, and a woman answered sounding young and chipper.

“Sunnybrook Retirement Community, this is Megan, how may I be of assistance?”

“Yeah, Megan, hi. Listen, I was wondering if you could—” Daniel cut himself short. His phone vibrated against his ear, and he pulled it back to see what had happened.

There was no new message or notification, just the ticking clock to show how long he’d been on the call. 57

“Sir?” he could hear Megan saying on the other end of the line. “Sir, are you there?”

He scrolled through the home screen for the source of the phantom ring, and then a noise came from down the hall. A pair of feet were creaking on the bedroom floor, and

Daniel cursed under his breath.

“You know what?” he said, pressing the phone to his ear. “I’ll just come in.” He hung up before Megan could say anything and lifted his coat over his shoulders. He felt around for his keys and bumped into a large potted plant near the door. He stifled the clatter with his arms and took one final look around. A drying rack of dishes sat next to the sink, a dirty microwave blinked atop the counter. Magnets from places he’d never been clung to the fridge, and the newspaper sat open on the kitchen table. The last thing

Daniel did before leaving the house was fold it up as though no one had read it yet.

***

Even before his death, things had been pretty rough for Daniel Sebastian Potter.

His fortune telling kiosk at the mall had closed down, and he now spent his days soliciting palm readings to strangers in the street. They would pass his make-shift table with a sign that read $5 Fortunes and toss wary glances in his direction. Madeline, meanwhile, was working as a paralegal for some hotshot lawyer with a giant billboard off of 75. She would come home every night and try to convince Daniel to take a job at the firm. “I’m telling you,” she said one evening as Daniel pulled a TV dinner out of the microwave. “Todd could easily pull some strings. He’d get you a great starting salary.”

Madeline’s boss—Todd Crenshaw of the law firm Crenshaw, Crenshaw, & Crenshaw— 58 was the type of guy who took two seats on the bus and talked loudly into his Bluetooth earpiece. Daniel had met him only once, at an office cookout party for one of Madeline’s co-workers, and the lawyer backed away when Daniel tried to shake his hand. “Woah there, Nostradamus,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You’re not gonna read all my deep, dark secrets, are ya?” As a matter of fact, Daniel could tell by the way

Todd’s virility line curved at the edge of his pinky that the lawyer would sometimes lean over Madeline’s desk and let the tip of his Gucci tie tease the edge of her keyboard.

Madeline, for her part, denied any such happenings, but Daniel could remember a time when they were passing Todd’s billboard on the way back from a movie, and Madeline looked up, unprompted, and said, “Oh my god. Mr. Crenshaw hates that picture.” She giggled and put her head against the car window, and Daniel stared up at Todd’s twinkling baby blues. He imagined, in that moment, how good it would feel to spit right in that six-hundred-square-foot face.

It was this exact image—the airbrushed skin and the pearly white teeth—that lay on the horizon as Daniel pulled into the parking lot of Sunnybrook Retirement

Community. There was only one other car in the lot—a yellow punch-bug parked in a handicap zone—and Daniel killed the engine right next to it. The building entrance was decorated with a great arbor of flowers, and an unfinished ramp led up the side of the steps. Daniel had started up them when his phone buzzed again. The screen was still blank except for the same message he’d already seen, and he was beginning to wonder if this might be some strange byproduct of death. 59

He put the device back in his pocket and slipped through the front doors of the building. Inside, a row of fold-out chairs sat empty along the far wall, and posters hung over top with captions that read, SUNNYBROOK: Where your real life begins. They showed young men and women wearing yellow polo shirts and pushing empty wheelchairs through a garden. One of those yellow shirts—Megan presumably—was sitting alone behind a small reception desk, measuring her hair with a ruler.

“Excuse me,” Daniel said, leaning forward on the counter.

“Jesus H!” Megan nearly jumped out of her seat, and the ruler clattered to the floor. She clutched her fists near her chest, and Daniel saw the bloody, dried-out knuckles from a lack of moisturizing. “Holy crud,” she said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Daniel. “I called earlier.”

Megan bent to retrieve the ruler and brushed the hair from her eyes. “That was you?” she asked. “Oh my god, I thought you were some crazy stalker or something.”

Daniel scanned the room to see if there was anyone else nearby, but Megan appeared to be alone. “I’m looking for some information on a former resident,” he said.

“A Daniel Sebastian Potter.”

Megan reached the ruler down the back of her shirt and scratched her shoulders with the tip. “Oh, he’s not here,” she said, and Daniel flattened his tone.

“Okay, well can you look him up for me?” he asked. “Don’t you have like a database or something?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Megan. “I think you misunderstood. We only have the one resident.” 60

Daniel’s phone buzzed against his leg, and he covered the noise with his hand.

“Do you need to get that?” Megan asked.

“What do you mean you only have one resident?” said Daniel. His fingers were suddenly clammy and moist like he’d dipped them in a bowl of Jell-O. Megan shrugged.

“It’s just Miss Connie,” she said. “She pretty cool for an old lady. You want to meet her?” She stood from the desk and gestured toward a pair of swinging double doors that Daniel hadn’t noticed before. They were rusted and angled like the gates to a crypt, and they seemed to appear from the shadows on the wall. Daniel’s throat dried up all of a sudden, and he tried to swallow the saliva on the back of his tongue.

“Come on,” Megan said, waving him forward. “Miss Connie’s real smart. I bet she can help you find that guy you’re looking for.”

She turned and pushed the doors open to reveal a long hallway with a flickering light overhead. A cold breath floated from the opening and sent a chill up Daniel’s spine.

He could feel a dark presence lurking in the dimly lit corridor, and he almost wished he hadn’t come here anymore. But then his phone buzzed three more times in quick succession, and the vibrations sent little waves of panic zipping through his legs. He had to know, one way or another. He glided like a spirit across the floor and passed over the threshold as Megan nodded happily. “Just down the hall and to your left,” she said.

“Room 444.”

***

Daniel Sebastian Potter had only felt this unsettled one other time in his brief life.

It was several years before, when he and Madeline were first dating, and he sat at a 61 dinner table surrounded by her parents, aunts, and uncles. Madeline was still in law school at the time, so the name Todd Crenshaw, esq. meant nothing to either of them yet.

Her family was deeply religious—hung crucifixes in her apartment without her permission—but Madeline had not quite prepared Daniel for this information. So when little Aunt Rita asked what he did for a living, Daniel was surprised when Madeline jumped in and said, “Oh, he’s a hand specialist. You know, orthopedic therapy, that kind of stuff.” She shot Daniel a desperate glance, and Uncle Max chimed in that he’d been feeling a bit of arthritis settling in his knuckles lately. Daniel spent the rest of his visit massaging Max’s thumb while the rest of the family looked on, and he fought the urge to reveal the liver disease that Max would develop if he kept sneaking booze from the liquor cabinet. Later that night, while he and Madeline squeezed onto the lumpy twin bed in

Daniel’s apartment, she pressed her palm to his and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t have a choice. My parents would literally think you’re the devil or something.” Daniel felt her heart pulsing in her wrist and squeezed it gently with his fingers. “Besides,” she said, heat rising in her fingertips. “There’s other things you can do with these hands too, right?”

He thought he heard his wife’s giggle now as he felt his way along a cool, slimy wall. He had walked down the hallway and taken a left, just like Megan said, but all he found was a dead end. He tried to turn back then and find the reception area, but when he did, the doors had suddenly vanished. It was growing darker in the hallway now, the light overhead slowly dying. The floors had turned to dust and dirt, and the steady drip-drip of 62 a leaking pipe echoed somewhere off in the distance. Daniel was sure he’d stepped into a whole other realm.

He stumbled along for several more minutes, convinced he was in purgatory or hell or worse. Then, just as he was about to call out for help, a heavy door appeared marked 444. Its outline was barely visible in the shadows, and when Daniel pushed it in, a faint strip of orange light shown from somewhere inside.

The room was cold and smelled of wet earth. A dresser stood off to one side and a desk off to another. Two wooden rocking chairs creaked back and forth by the window, and a something like a giant snow-globe balanced on the sill. An all-consuming silence fell over Daniel’s ears—and that’s when he noticed the feet.

A tattered blue curtain had been drawn from one of the near walls. Behind it, the edge of a rickety hospital bed poked out just beyond its reach. A pair of yellow toenails lay visible like jagged hunks of bamboo. The grisly talons poked out from under a cotton blanket and were held in place by a frail membrane of greying skin. Daniel traced the tangled web of veins, felt an invisible hand creep up his spine. The air in the room had suddenly changed as though he’d stepped into an airtight crypt.

“I’m not taking another bath if that’s what you’re here for.”

A voice floated out from behind the curtain and gripped Daniel’s chest. There was an incantation to it—a rasp that could raise the dead. The feet shifted, and Daniel braced himself, expecting to see the grim reaper come to take him at last. Instead, the curtain drew back, and a frail old woman lay there, her back propped up with pillows.

“Who the hell are you?” she said. 63

The door behind Daniel was either closed or missing. He felt trapped all of a sudden—like a deer lured to its death by the sound of a hunting call.

“I asked you a question,” said the woman who Daniel took to be Miss Connie.

She had sagging skin around her neck, and the frown lines were so deep on her face that

Daniel could almost read them like marks on a palm.

“My—my name’s Daniel Sebastian Potter,” he said. “I think I might be dead.”

The words fell off his lips so easily, like he’d been waiting to say them his entire life. Connie propped herself up on her elbows and cocked her head to the side.

“Oh Jesus, not another one,” she said. She unfurled her body and slid down to the floor to grab a four-pronged walker next to the bed. She motioned to the rocking chairs by the window, and Daniel hesitated. Connie licked her teeth. “Look,” she said. “If you got questions, then either answer them yourself or sit your ass down.”

Daniel wavered on his feet and wondered who this woman was. He couldn’t quite see her hands in the fading light, and her mere presence exuded something Daniel was unable to touch. He inched along the far wall and lowered himself next to the old woman.

“Alright, hit me with it,” she said, cracking the bones in her wrists. Daniel stared, unblinking, and Connie sighed again. “You’re dead?” she reminded him. “Tell me about that.”

Daniel felt like a child explaining a broken window to a neighbor. He told about the obituary, how he was certain it was more than just a misprint.

“And you read this where?” she asked.

“In The Gazette,” Daniel said. 64

“No, no, no. Where were you physically standing when you read it?”

Daniel wasn’t sure what this had to do with anything, and he told Connie as much.

“Ugh, you’re all the same,” she said. “Alright, put your hand here.” She reached over and grabbed the snow-globe off the window sill and Daniel saw that it was clear and empty inside. “Your hand,” said Connie again, growing more and more impatient.

“What are you doing?” Daniel asked, and Connie grabbed his thumb. He felt a swirl along the bottom of her palm that told of a great, unspeakable loss.

“If you’re not gonna cooperate, then we gotta do it this way,” she said. She pressed his hand flat against the orb and rolled her eyes back in her head. Daniel felt a swell of energy racing up his arm. He tried to pull away from the crystal ball in Connie’s lap, but he was glued by some mystical force. A dull light flickered inside, and Daniel was pulled, head first, into a hazy memory that shifted into focus as he fell—

He was standing over the punch bowl at the Crenshaw, Crenshaw, & Crenshaw

Office Holiday Extravaganza. He’d had three glasses of champagne already and was about to down his fourth. Madeline was off somewhere with a group of co-workers who told jokes that weren’t funny, and Todd stood next to Daniel wearing a fake beard and a giant Santa hat. “Well if it ain’t Nostradamus,” he said, slapping Daniel on the shoulder.

The force sent a bit of champagne onto Daniel’s candy-striped tie, staining it with a dark streak down the front. “Thought the missus might have left you at home,” said Todd. 65

Daniel breathed through his nostrils and stared down at the lawyer’s Italian leather shoes. He imagined bumping the table accidentally so that the punch bowl would soak the expensive fabric.

“By the way,” Todd continued. “Maddie mentioned that you might be looking for some work. Don’t know that the partners would go for full time, but I could probably get you in on the mailroom or something.”

Maybe it was his head growing heavy on his shoulders or the way that Todd had used a nickname that Madeline had claimed to hate for years, but Daniel felt a bubbling rage pulsing in his fists. “Todd,” he said. “I wouldn’t work for you if it meant giving up my left nut.”

Todd reached out and grabbed Daniel’s elbow. He squeezed until Daniel’s arm went numb and leaned in close. “Listen here you little shit-stain,” he said. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that in this building, you understand? The only reason I’d even offer you a position is because Maddie practically begs me for it every fuckin’ day. You know,

I’m amazed she hasn’t left your sorry ass yet—jerking off over this hand fetish or whatever it is. You need to grow the fuck up.”

Daniel was so surprised by the sudden force that he could not muster a response.

A pudgy intern girl passed by the table, and Todd smiled from beneath his Santa beard.

“Don’t sleep on the rice krispy treats,” he said. “Made ‘em myself.”

For the rest of the night, Daniel sat in a bathroom stall, winding toilet paper around his hand. Whenever someone came in, he would lift feet and hold his breath until 66 they went away. When the party was over, he stumbled into the parking lot where

Madeline was waiting by the car.

“There you are,” she said. “I’ve been trying to text you.”

Daniel didn’t answer but pulled at the door handle. “Talked to your boss,” he said. Madeline scrunched her eyebrows in confusion and Daniel told her about the exchange. “Didn’t realize my career path wasn’t respectable enough for you.”

“What are you talking about?” said Madeline. “I never said that.”

Daniel knew it wasn’t fair to attack her like this, but Todd had breathed, “hope you have a nice night,” into his ear before heading back to the party, and Daniel couldn’t bring himself throw a punch.

“You know, you might as well fuck him and get it over with,” he said. “Would save us both a lot of trouble.”

The color drained from Madeline’s face, and she pressed her tongue to the corner of her lips. “Maybe Mr. Crenshaw’s right,” she said. “Maybe you do need to grow up.”

She lowered herself into the car then and unlocked the door for Daniel to follow. He thought about apologizing, probably should have, but his tie was still stained from the champagne. They drove back to the house in silence. On the way there, they passed

Todd’s picture on the billboard, four giant spotlights casting shadows on his face.

***

The vibration pulled Daniel Sebastian Potter back to reality. His phone was buzzing non-stop, louder and louder, like a jackhammer against his thigh. Miss Connie 67 sat across from him, slumped and exhausted in her chair, and the crystal ball was a murky white.

“That help?” she asked. “Or do you need to see more?”

Daniel did not need to see any more. He already knew what was there. He had gone to a dive-bar the night before on the outskirts of town where he’d slipped off his wedding ring and offered to read the palm of a woman who claimed to be a yoga instructor. She had long, sweeping lines and a wide, sturdy wrist. Little flecks of white colored her fingernails, and Daniel had gone home with her where she pushed his jacket off his shoulders and led him back to her bedroom. If he looked in that crystal ball now, he knew, he would see a folded newspaper on her kitchen table, see himself slipping out the door before his one-night-stand emerged from the hallway.

“I think you should be getting home, Daniel Sebastian Potter.” Connie stared at him with a tired expression, and Daniel’s phone reached a fever pitch. He pulled it from his pocket, if only to stop the shaking in his leg, and saw the new message he’d been ignoring all along. It was from Madeline as well, sent just this morning: R U coming home? I want to talk.

When he looked back, Connie was in her bed again, feet poking out from under the covers. The crystal ball was back on the sill, and Daniel could barely make out his own reflection in the glass. His eyes were wide with guilt and fear, and his cheeks bristled with stubble that he had not shaved.

He sprang to his feet and almost sprinted out of the room. The hallway was suddenly clean and well lit, and the double doors marked Lobby had re-appeared. He 68 burst through them, heading for the parking lot. Megan was behind the desk again, spinning in the office chair while trying to balance a stapler on her nose. Daniel zoomed past, and she paused to wave him out the door. “Come back soon!” she said.

Daniel sped through traffic on his way home. He ignored red lights and stop signs, whipped past a semi-truck on its wide left turn. He tried to think of something to tell his wife, some excuse for where he’d been, but everything that came to mind was abstract and farfetched—a story even he could not believe. Maybe he could just come clean, he thought, admit to being weak and despondent and stupid. Perhaps Madeline would take pity on him, hold his head in her lap like a child and coo him to sleep like his own mother used to do. But the alternative, Daniel knew, is what he really deserved. Why else had he spent all morning chasing after some ghost he knew did not exist?

He fishtailed into his driveway and rushed past the mailbox through the front door. Inside, a pile of unwashed dishes was stacked in the sink. The microwave clock showed ten minutes after ten, and a photo of Daniel’s wedding day hung from the fridge.

It was stuck to the side with a piece of masking tape and showed Daniel holding

Madeline’s hand as they cut into the cake together. He tried to remember their feel now— palms, crisscrossed and rough, fingers long and slender. Something moved in the doorway to his left, and Madeline stood there, a stack of papers in her hands.

“You’re home,” she said.

Daniel stepped toward her but stopped a few feet short. “I need to tell you something,” he said. 69

“Wait,” said Madeline. “Let me go first.” She moved toward the table and motioned for Daniel to sit down. He did. Madeline clutched the papers close to her chest and took deep breath of air. “I owe you an apology,” she said. “I haven’t been very supportive of you. With your job and everything. I just want you to know that I’m with you no matter what.”

She slid the papers over toward Daniel and he looked at them without touching.

They were printed from some job search website, and two of the listings were circled in red pen. One read MANICURIST WANTED and the other, JEWLERS ASSISTANT

NEEDED FOR RING FITTINGS.

“I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for,” said Madeline. “But I thought it might be a little closer than law clerk.” She smiled weakly and shifted in her seat. “If you you’re not interested, it’s fine. I just want you to do what makes you happy.”

Daniel looked from his wife to the paper and back. “Madeline, I—”

“Just think about it,” she said. “And if you want to just keep doing what you’re doing, that’s fine with me.”

Daniel rubbed the paper on his palms and felt it crinkle in his grasp. Madeline seemed lighter now like a weight had lifted from her shoulders and placed itself on

Daniel’s instead. She stood from the table and crossed over to the fridge. “How about some French toast?” she asked.

Daniel stared at the wedding photo, watched as it flittered when Madeline opened the door. In the picture, Madeline’s thumb was laid over top of his. It caressed his joint and ran along the underside of his hand as though trying to read their future. He cleared 70 his throat and opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, though, Madeline pulled back from the fridge and looked over at him.

“Wait,” she said. “Did you not get any milk?”

71

Vox County Case Review Board: Exhibit A

April 6, 2018

In the case of Vox County v. Jasper Willet, we, the undersigned defense attorneys of the defendant, present the following evidence for a hearing of mistrial and immediate termination of our client’s 25-year sentence to the Vox County Case Review Board on the grounds of unethical and criminal treatment of the plaintiff, Mister Jasper M. Willet, by his arresting officers.

1.

Vox County Administrative Outreach Form F-13: FTO Weekly Progress Report

Date: 10/9/ 2005

Field Training Officer: Howard McCoy Badge Number: 5819-B

Recruit Name: Maggie Shaw Badge Number: 3399-A

1. Uniform/Appearance: Good 2. Cooperation and Loyalty: Needs improvement 3. Interest and Attitude: Annoying 4. Public Contact: Average 5. Judgement: Average 6. Driving Ability: N/A 7. Report Writing: Like she’s got a stick up her ass

Comments:

Here’s what I know about Officer Maggie Shaw—the kid needs a new

profession. She’s young and smart, two good reasons not to be a cop

in this town. It’s also worth pointing out that she’s the only one with 72 tits around here, and I wouldn’t trust you animalistic bastards with a prom date. First day on the job, she asks me if I have any advice. I tell her, learn to look the other way, but she didn’t think that was very helpful. Still, that’s what I wish someone would have told me back when I first started out. Maybe then I wouldn’t be a 24-year beat-cop writing up some bullshit weekly report for Lt. Cason to smear his grubby little paws all over. But I digress. I’ll tell you this much, she’s a nosy little thing. We’re sitting in my office the other day getting ready to head out, and she picks up this little glass swan

I keep sitting on top of the filing cabinets. She asks me what it is and

I tell her it’s a gift. She wants to know who it’s from, and I tell her it’s not from anyone. Well then she wants to know who it’s to, and I tell her to mind her own damn business. She starts chewing my ear about this aunt she had, some actress out in Hollywood who was an extra in a bunch of movies I’d never heard of. Tells me this lady never had any kids of her own and so every time she’d come back from LA she’d bring a little present for Maggie—a box of candy or a necklace or some shit. I guess one time it was this little glass giraffe that reminded her of my swan which I told her was a pretty damn interesting story. I think she got the hint after that. We’ve started meeting out in the pit now to go on patrol. Last thing I need is her chain of command brainwashed ass finding that syrup in my desk 73

drawer. Then again, the way she’s walking around here—tie on

straight and belt in order like she’s gonna save the fucking world—

hell I wouldn’t be surprised if she asks for a sip sooner rather than

later.

[ATTACHED] Vox County Summons and Complaint Parking Infraction

Date: 10/12/2005 Issuing Officer: Maggie Shaw

Vehicle Registration: Your Mother Make: Toyota Model: Highlander Year: 2001 Driver’s Name (if known): Jasper Willet

Violation: 586 – Parking in Handicap Zone Amount Due: $200 $400

Comments:

Failure to display proper tags. Defendant’s vehicle parked in reserved handicap

zone outside of Wal-Mart Super Center on Gleeson Ave. Oil leak near front

passenger side tire would suggest vehicle had been parked for some time, though

defendant came out of store with cart full of groceries claiming he had “just run

in for one second.” When asked to produce proper handicap identification,

defendant became unruly, stating, “This is a free goddamn country.” I told Mr.

Willet exactly where he could stick Fine was subsequently doubled when it

became apparent that defendant’s back left tail light violated traffic code 562-VC.

74

2.

Vox County Administrative Outreach Form F-13: FTO Weekly Progress Report

Date: 10/16/ 2005

Field Training Officer: Howard McCoy Badge Number: 5819-B

Recruit Name: Maggie Shaw Badge Number: 3399-A

1. Uniform and Appearance: Showing off 2. Cooperation and Loyalty: Better 3. Interest and Attitude: Asks too many damn questions 4. Public Contact: Average 5. Judgement: Fair 6. Driving Ability: N/A 7. Report Writing: Heaven forbid a cop should have some thoughts of her own around here.

Comments:

I’ll tell you what—the kid’s gonna do a better job of running me off

the force than all you dirty sleezballs in this department who

actually tried. We stopped by Hancock’s the other day for lunch, and

she’s sitting there grilling me before I’m even through my first cup of

coffee—what made you decide to be a cop? Is this the only place

you’ve worked? Why they still got you behind a desk? Oh, how I’d

love to give her all the juice on that last one, but I’m not trying to

ruin anyone’s career here—other than my own, of course. Anyway,

she eventually gets around to asking about my family, so I tell her

about Taylor—how she was smart enough to get the hell out of here 75 and make something of herself, how she certainly didn’t get that from me. Maggie wants to know if that’s who the swan is for, but I’m starting to get tired of the third degree, so I just throw something back at her—why’d you want to be a cop? Well sorry I asked, because off she goes about this aunt of hers again. Apparently the woman moved back around here a few years ago and married some certain kind of asshole up near Warsaw County. Said her aunt got into cosmetology school, but this guy wouldn’t let her go because he thought it was a waste of money. Can’t say he’s wrong, but I see why

Maggie doesn’t think much of him. Anyway, I ask Maggie what this has to do with her wearing the badge, and she tells me that she was visiting this aunt of hers in the hospital when the towers fell. Says she can remember sitting in the waiting room seeing the news broadcasts on the TVs hanging from the walls, and she knew, right then and there, that she wanted to be a cop. I pointed out that we’re a long damn way from New York, but she said that wasn’t what she’d meant. She tried to go back to Taylor then, ask if I had any other kids, but I was half way to the cruiser. That scanner in there’s the only thing that’ll shut her up. I swear, put her on a call, and she’s like some kind of animal. Spells justice with a capital J. I keep saying that’s gonna get her in trouble around here, but she doesn’t listen to me. 76

[ATTACHED] Vox County Police Department Incident Report

Date Reported: 10/19/2005 Incident Types/Offenses: 1) Suspected Domestic Violence (no charges filed) Reporting Officer: Maggie Shaw (3399-A) Approving Officer: Howard McCoy (5819-B)

Persons: Role: Caller Name: Susan Whiteshall Sex: Female Race: White Age: 52

Role: Suspected Offender Name: Jasper Willet Sex: Male Race: White Age: 37

Role: Suspected Victim Name: Katherine Macintosh Sex: Female Race: White Age: 28

Detail of Events:

On the night of October 19, 2005 at approximately 0100 hours, the Vox County

Police Department received a report of an alleged domestic disturbance at 4477

Thompson Ridge Road. I, along with my Field Training Officer, being assigned to

the Response Section, working from 12:00AM – 8:30AM were dispatched to the

scene. Upon arrival at approximately 0115 hours, I radioed ECC to have the

caller meet us outside the above stated address. A white female, later to be

identified as Susan Whiteshall, approached wearing what appeared to be a cotton

bathrobe, and identified herself as a resident of 4479 Thompson Ridge Road. She 77 informed us that she had heard shouts from her neighbor’s property about 45 minutes before, but the noise had since ceased. We asked that she remain in her home while we investigated the alleged disturbance. My Field Training Officer drove our cruiser approximately one quarter-mile up the drive until we reached the residence. When we arrived on the scene, we took note of a red Saturn Ion parked next to a white Toyota Highlander. There was also a rusted-out truck bed with tall weeds growing through holes in the metal. We approached the front door and knocked twice before a white male, later to be identified as Jasper Willet, answered. I had encountered Mr. Willet a few days before, and my impression was one of We informed him of the alleged disturbance and asked if there was anyone else in the house with him. Willet appeared calm and unconcerned with our presence. He informed us that his girlfriend, a woman later to be identified as

Katherine Macintosh, was there and asked if we would like to speak with her. He called back for Ms. Macintosh and a white female wearing a hooded sweatshirt appeared in the door. She was smoking a cigarette, and her hand was visibly shaking. I asked that she step outside onto the porch so that I could ask her a few questions to which Mr. Willet protested, saying, “Why can’t she answer them here?” My Field Training Officer informed Mr. Willet that his cooperation would be greatly appreciated, and Ms. Macintosh obliged in stepping onto the porch with me. Before I could ask any questions, she informed me that Mr. Willet had done “nothing wrong,” and that she wasn’t sure why we were out there. I informed her that we had received information about an alleged domestic dispute 78

to which she replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I asked if Mr.

Willet had harmed or threatened her in any way, and the cigarette, having burned

down to the filter, scorched Ms. Macintosh’s hand. She dropped it and stamped it

out and I repeated the question. She informed me that Mr. Willet would “never

lay a hand on [her],” and when I attempted to further my line of questioning, she

grew flustered and anxious. I informed her that if she felt in danger, then we

could remove Mr. Willet from the property, but she was very insistent that we

“leave him alone.” By this time, my Field Training Officer asked to speak with

Ms. Macintosh, and I moved to question Mr. Willet instead. He recognized me

from an interaction exactly seven days prior (see traffic report #1562) and asked

if I “[had] something against [him].” The truth is, I got a lot against someone

who’s gonna beat up on At approximately 0141 hours, my Field Training Officer

informed me that Ms. Macintosh was insistent that there had been no disturbance,

and, given our lack of probable cause, we returned to the cruiser and arrived

back at the station at approximately 0200 hours having filed no charges.

3.

Vox County Administrative Outreach Form F-13: FTO Weekly Progress Report

Date: 10/23/ 2005

Field Training Officer: Howard McCoy Badge Number: 5819-B

Recruit Name: Maggie Shaw Badge Number: 3399-A

1. Uniform and Appearance: A little more normal 79

2. Cooperation and Loyalty: Average 3. Interest and Attitude: Kind of concerning, honestly 4. Public Contact: Good 5. Judgement: Needs improvement 6. Driving Ability: N/A 7. Report Writing: Dam’s starting to bend, but it hasn’t quite broke

Comments:

I’m starting to think it’s time for me to cash out of this damn burg.

It’s gone rotten, blood simple, all that jazz. Or maybe it’s been like

that all along and I’ve just been looking for the right excuses. Or

maybe I already had my excuse and was too chicken-shit to actually

take it. Either way, I called Taylor last night. The baby’s due here

next month. She didn’t answer, but I left a message and told her I’ve

been looking at a few places down there—nothing fancy, just some

fixer-uppers a little closer to the people I should have been a little

closer to all along. I don’t know how she’ll take to that, but I think I

can get her to come around. But listen to my drunk ass rambling. I’m

starting to sound like Maggie. Except she doesn’t blabber on quite

like she used to. Oh, she’ll get going from time to time, sure, but now

it’s all about folks in this town not knowing there’s more than one

direction out of it. As if that hadn’t already occurred to me. I think

she’s starting to see how you can’t really help the people who don’t

wanna help themselves. She does still talk about her aunt, which I’ve

found I don’t much mind anymore. Told me how, when she was out in

LA, this lady would go to all these big, fancy parties with a bunch of 80

celebrities. Said there’s a picture of her and Tom Hanks in some

scrapbook somewhere. I started wondering why she ever came back

here in the first place, why her aunt wouldn’t just stay out there

when she was living a life like that. I kind of figured it had to do with

her getting sick, and I asked Maggie about it, but she said her aunt

wasn’t ever sick. Well I guess that just goes to show you why I’m in

this spot in the first place—how I can’t even pay close enough

attention to a story, let alone a daughter who just wants to see her

old man sober from time to time. But there I go again. I really ought

to cork it before I write these things. Anyway, Maggie kind of

clammed up on it after that. She went back to spitting and cussing

about some guy we booked on drunk driving a few days back, said

it’s men like that, the ones who don’t even look at the things they

break, that are the real reason people get stuck here. Fella had his

ten-year-old kid in the front seat with him.

[ATTACHED] Vox County Police Department Incident Report

Date Reported: 10/24/2005 Incident Types/Offenses: 1) Suspected Domestic Disturbance (No charges filed) Reporting Officer: Maggie Shaw (3399-A) Approving Officer: Howard McCoy (5819-B)

Persons: Name: Katherine Macintosh Sex: Female Race: White Age: 28

81

Offenders: Name: Jasper Willet Sex: Male Race: White Age: 37

Detail of Events:

On the night of October 24, 2005 at approximately 1900 hours, Jasper Willet was

placed under arrest at 4477 Thompson Ridge Road on suspicion of domestic

disturbance. This was the second time in just a five-day span that such a call had

been placed, and frankly, we probably should have thrown his a At

approximately 1826 hours on the above stated date, an ECC broadcast went out

for a possible domestic disturbance at 4477 Thompson Ridge Road. My Field

Training Officer and I, being on uniformed duty assigned to the Patrol Section

working from 3:30 PM – 12:00AM, answered the broadcast and were granted

permission to dispatch to the scene. We were informed that the complaint had

been called in from the house itself, and we arrived there at approximately 1843

hours. A white woman, later to be identified as Katherine Macintosh was sitting

outside of the house on what appeared to be an old tractor tire. Her chin was

caked in thick swabs of makeup, but it was pretty easy to see the swelling

underneath if you knew what you were We asked Ms. Macintosh if she had called

in the alleged disturbance, but she did not respond to any of our inquiries. At

approximately 1845 hours I radioed in a 10-52 and remained with Ms. Macintosh

while my Field Training Officer investigated the house. It was pretty clear that

she had been Her breathing was labored, and when I looked in her eyes She

appeared to be in a fair amount of distress, and I attempted to calm her when the 82 front door opened and a white male, later to be identified as Jasper Willet, emerged. He was shirtless and came onto the porch with his hands clearly visible above his head. My Field Training Officer followed behind, one hand on his duty belt. He moved to place his handcuffs on Mr. Willet, and, for the first time, Ms.

Macintosh reacted. She sprang up from her seated position and ran toward the front porch. I attempted to impede her progress, but her sudden animation had caught me off guard. She grabbed Mr. Willet around the neck and began pleading with us to let him go. She told us that she had not meant to call 9-1-1 and that she and Mr. Willet had only had a “disagreement.” We informed her that, in accordance with RCI 10.31, we were civilly obligated to make an arrest. She draped herself across Mr. Willet’s torso then and pleaded that they were “in love.” Her Stockholm tears just about broke my heart. My Field Training Officer restrained Ms. Macintosh while I escorted Mr. Willet to the cruiser. He did not resist and was placed in that back seat at approximately 1851 hours. While we waited for the ambulance to arrive, Ms. Macintosh leaned against the door, speaking to Mr. Willet through the window. I began to write up the above stated charges in the front seat of the cruiser and overheard him consoling her, informing her that he would, “be back in the morning.” The ambulance arrived at approximately 1902 hours, but Ms. Macintosh refused to go with the EMTs.

83

4.

Vox County Administrative Outreach

Form F-13: FTO Weekly Progress Report

Date: 10/30/ 2005

Field Training Officer: Howard McCoy Badge Number: 5819-B

Recruit Name: Maggie Shaw Badge Number: 3399-A

1. Uniform and Appearance: Poor 2. Cooperation and Loyalty: don’t care 3. Interest and Attitude: Appropriate 4. Public Contact: don’t’ care 5. Judgement: don’t care 6. Driving Ability: n/A 7. Report Writing: dont care

Comments:

There’s some days I wish I didn’t never become a cop. I should have

finished school and went to work for my old man at the paper mill

but no, I was bleeding blue. I wanted to save L-I.-V-e-S. Shit, a fucking

preacher saves lives, but you’re not gonna find him dipping his hand

in the cookie jar just cuz every other cop in the department’s doing it

too. Goddamn if I wasn’t young enough to know any better. The guilt

sprung a leak in me so big that I started going straight to the bar

after the graveyard shift instead of going home to my family like I

should have. Taylor called me back by the way. Said she didn’t think

it was such a good idea for me to be down there with them, not with 84

the way thing was.. Ain’t that a load? I’m gonna be a granpa and you

motherfuckers helped me drink away any chance I had at even

meeting the kid. You crooked sons of bitches left me bone-fucking-

dry and I got half a mind to return the favor. I’d do it too if it

wouldn’t come back on Maggie like I know it will. I could care less if I

go down with you now, but she’s the only reason I haven’t blown the

lid on your whole crock of shit. You know I think I’’m starting to

figure out the whole thing with her aunt and that boyfriend. I’m

getting the thing I wasn’t getting before. It’s those little gaps and

omissions, the things that used to be there but suddenly aren’t once

you hear it again. And you don’t even look for them because you

don’t think people can be the way that people actually are. But they

always are. Maggie’s right, they break shit and it;s me and her are

left to try and put it back together again. Only we don’t have nothing

to fix it with. We just fall apart right alongside, and next thing you

know some hot shot hillbilly prick who whoops up on his girlfriend is

sitting at a bar getting drunk with his buddies two nights after

getting his ass hauled off to jail. Fuck it. Fyck it all.

[ATTACHED] Vox County Police Department Vehicle Repair/Service Work-Order Form

Date: 10/25/2005

Vehicle Number: 4 VIN: 17171717171717171 85

Last Operators: McCoy, Shaw

Areas requiring repair/service: Door, Window, Locks

Notes:

Moderate structural damage to right side of vehicle. Front passenger side door

appears to be kicked-in with large boot-shaped dent in panel. Handle is cracked,

and automatic locks are disengaged. Will likely need to replace whole frame.

5.

Vox County Administrative Outreach

Form F-13: FTO Weekly Progress Report

Date: 11/6/ 2005

Field Training Officer: Howard McCoy Badge Number: 5819-B

Recruit Name: Maggie Shaw Badge Number: 3399-A

1. Uniform and Appearance: Average 2. Cooperation and Loyalty: Average 3. Interest and Attitude: Average 4. Public Contact: Average 5. Judgement: Average 6. Driving Ability: N/A 7. Report Writing: Effective

Comments:

I started thinking about it, and I changed my mind on that advice I

gave Maggie her first day. Sometimes, I think, you just gotta handle

things yourself.

[ATTACHED] 86

Vox County Police Department Incident Report

Date Reported: 11/7/2005 Incident Types/Offenses: 1) Felony Possession 2) Resisting arrest 3) Assaulting an officer Reporting Officer: Maggie Shaw (3399-A) Approving Officer: Howard McCoy (5819-B)

Offenders: Name: Jasper Willet Sex: Male Race: White Age: 37

Detail of Events:

On the night of November 7, 2005, Jasper Willet was placed under arrest for

possession of narcotics and forcefully resisting arrest. On the above stated date at

approximately 2200 hours, an anonymous tip was called in to the Vox County

Police Department Drug Enforcement Unit informing them of an alleged

exchange of controlled substances. A county wide APB went out for one Jasper

Willet, white male, 5 foot 7 inches tall, approximately 180 pounds with brown

hair, and last seen leaving the The Brew Pub on Macon Boulevard wearing a

dark brown Carhartt jacket. At approximately 2204 hours, my Field Training

Officer and I were on uniformed duty in a marked police cruiser, assigned to the

Patrol Section working from 6:00PM – 2:30AM. My Field Training Officer was

operating the vehicle on Watt Street near Macon Boulevard when we both noticed

a white male on the sidewalk who fit the above stated description. We radioed

ECC and pulled the suspect over to confirm his identity as Jasper Willet. We

informed Mr. Willet of the call for his arrest, and he protested, stating, “I don’t 87

even do no drugs.” My Field Training Officer attempted to search his person, but

Mr. Willet forcibly resisted by placing his hands on my Field Training Officer’s

duty belt. I intervened, grabbing Mr. Willet around the collar and performing a

basic leg-sweep takedown. My defensive maneuver resulted in Mr. Willet’s head

colliding with the asphalt. A small group of civilians passed on the nearby

sidewalk, and my Field Training Officer moved to keep them away while I cuffed

Mr. Willet’s wrists behind his back. Mr. Willet continued to struggle and curse,

calling me a “lying, stuck up bitch.” He attempted to flee, but I was able to grab

hold of his arm, resulting in three of the fingers on his left hand being broken. I

was finally able to subdue him enough to move toward the cruiser where he again

attempted to flee. This time, I was forced to throw him onto the hood of the cruiser

where he again hit his head, resulting in lacerations to his face and neck. Mr.

Willet refused orders to cease resisting, and I eventually sprayed him twice with

my standard-issue oc-17 pepper spray. We were finally able to place Mr. Willet in

the back seat of the cruiser where he was discovered to be in possession of

multiple controlled substances as well as 8 grams of methamphetamine. We

reported the arrest and findings via ECC broadcast at approximately 2225 hours

and were instructed to wait on scene for a full drug-inspection unit. Backup

arrived at approximately 2231 hours at which time Mr. Willet was treated for

injuries to his head, neck, face, shoulders, hands, abdomen, and torso.

6.

Vox County Administrative Outreach 88

Form F-13: FTO Weekly Progress Report

Date: 11/13/ 2005

Field Training Officer: Howard McCoy Badge Number: 5819-B

Recruit Name: Maggie Shaw Badge Number: 3399-A

1. Uniform and Appearance: Excellent 2. Cooperation and Loyalty: Excellent 3. Interest and Attitude: Excellent 4. Public Contact: Excellent 5. Judgement: Excellent 6. Driving Ability: Better than Expected 7. Report Writing: Excellent

Comments:

Not much to say. Things have been kind of slow around here since

that big bust last week. It started raining four days ago and it hasn’t

let up since. Haven’t seen something like this since that blizzard

back in ’92. It’s a cold kind of rain, the one that drives daggers

underneath your skin. I’m not sure things’ll ever dry out. The kid’s

ready to be cut loose. She’s better prepared for this shit than I ever

was. I still think she ought to get a different gig, but she’ll do just fine

holding her own out there. She’s talked about transferring units—

moving somewhere closer to that aunt of hers, but then she decided

it wouldn’t be any different up that way. Got to agree with her there.

I think I’m gonna leave that swan for her once I get out of here. She

seemed to like it alright. I thought about sending it down to Taylor as 89

a present for the baby, but you know how that is, it’d just get lost or

broken along the way. As far as us civil servants go, postmen aren’t

too high on the list. In either case, there’s not much left for me to do

now. I can’t teach her anything she hasn’t already learned on her

own, and I’m not sure I was doing any of that to begin with. I think

it’s time I pick up that pension that’s been waiting on me and hit the

road. Not sure where I’ll go or what I’ll find on the way—probably

just a bunch of pieces of things.

*For review by the Vox County Case Review Board on the behalf of the defendant in the trial of Vox County v. Jasper Willet, signed: x Mark A. Daughtry, Esq. lllllll x Susan P. Phillips, Esq. l

90

Four Chords and the Truth

The milk carton has a faded expiration date printed on its top near the unopened flap. Below that is Melissa’s picture. The polythene paper edges are bent and worn from twenty years there on the shelf, and a hole has been poked through the bottom with a No.

2 pencil to drain its long-spoiled contents. Melissa flashes a toothless grin underneath the word MISSING, and the strap of her denim overalls hangs loose around one arm. The portrait is a far cry from the photo-shopped Rolling Stone covers that stand piled on either side. One of them shows a tall, slender woman posing in a leather jacket and holding a large flaming guitar. The headline reads, ON FIRE: Sasha Grae is the hottest artist alive.

I am the only one who can tell the resemblance.

My living room is a maze of sagging boxes and broken furniture. When I move through it, I have to be careful not to knock over the four foot columns of old newspapers that line the cracked walls. I’ve cleared out a little space near the La-Z-Boy, just enough to recline back and kick my feet out. ‘It’s the little things’ is what Peter would say. I want to tell him he’s right, but not in the way he thinks.

Underneath an end table overrun by Target coupons is a metal CD rack. It’s empty except for a hard cover book that sits on top with pages turned down in dog ears.

On the cover, Melissa sits waist deep in a field of bright purple flowers, and her hair falls over one shoulder as she cranes her neck from the camera. The memoir title, Look What

They’ve Done to My Song, stands out above her stage name.

I’ve read a few chapters so far, just bits and pieces here or there. The stuff about rehab kind of gets to me, how she’d do concerts and interviews blitzed out of her mind. 91

But I never really saw that side of her. It’s the early chapters—the growing up and the running away from home—that I can’t really bring myself to read. She mentions Sadie’s name a couple times early on, and I had to put the book away for a week the first time I opened it.

A car horn blares through the walls and startles me out of my trance. It lets out a dying gasp, two short and one long, and I yell that I’m coming as though the driver might be able to hear. In the kitchen, piles of mail clutter the sink, though I’ve started to move some of it to the windowsill. One of Melissa’s studio albums is sitting on top of the refrigerator and I tuck it under my arm with her book. The front door is blocked by a mountain of Tupperware containers, so I have to push my way past the garbage bags at the base of the back screen door.

When I squeeze my way into the fresh, open air, Peter is waiting at the bottom of the hill. He always parks there, close enough to see the flat, busted out car tires on my front porch, but not so close as to make out the hundreds of empty soup cans bulging against the north window. I open the car door, and he pushes his hair back from his deep sunken eyes.

“I gotta piss,” he says.

“Do it in the woods,” I tell him.

He sweeps an empty McDonald’s bag off the passenger seat and cracks a smile.

“What is it today? Getting the place bug bombed again?”

“Toilet sprung a leak,” I say. “Water all over the place.” 92

Peter shakes his head and rubs his eye with his palm. “You know you gotta let me in there some time or another. I’m your sponsor for chrissakes.”

I sit down and buckle my seatbelt as Peter shifts into gear. He was the first person

I met when I went to a meeting about six months ago. Melissa had just gotten out of court ordered rehab, and something about the color in her cheeks when I saw her face on the news made me want to get my own shit together. Peter had been attending for a year and a half at that point, said he had a twin sister who’d died a few years back, and he’d been trying to fill that other half of his life ever since. He’s the kind of guy who talks as fast as he drives, little flecks of spittle splashing against the rearview mirror. I’ve figured out that it doesn’t matter if you respond to him or not. He’ll just keep on going like you’re not even there—which I don’t really mind so much.

“So how’s the purge coming?” he asks when we roll up to a stop sign.

I shrug my shoulders, give a non-committal grunt. Melissa’s book sits tucked between my legs and I run my finger along its spine.

“I’m telling you man, the program works. You clear five square feet a day, and you’ve got a brand new life in less than four months.”

Peter’s always on about these self-help remedies. He once tried to get me to dump the contents of a trashcan over his head because he said it would help me see what I was doing to myself. The truth is, I already kind of know, but it’s a little too late at this point.

I can’t go back anymore, can’t return to that burning campfire and that little girl sitting on my lap while we roasted hot dogs over the flame. 93

“You wanna put that thing in?” Peter asks, nodding to Melissa’s CD in. He ejects a Metallica disc and gestures for me to replace it. “Don’t know what you’re on about with this chick,” he says. “A little too sappy for my tastes. But hey, let not judge, amirite?”

The stereo lets out a soft whir as it loads the disc in the player. A few beats of silence, and then a low, throaty voice comes over the speakers.

“Hey, you used to slay a little axe back in the day, right?” says Peter.

“Not for a while,” I say. I picture my old guitar case, probably buried beneath used-up tissue boxes and soda cans in a closet I can no longer access.

Might think about dusting it off,” says Peter. “That shit opens you up. It’s all spatial, man. Can’t clear out your house until you clear out your head.”

I close my eyes and lean back against the headrest. My knee is pressed up against one of the door speakers, and Melissa’s rasp echoes through my limbs. It crawls up my shoulders, into my ears, and it starts digging around in all that clutter I’ve got between them.

Before Melissa was even born, I had dreams of going to Nashville. I’d grown up listening to Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, played county fairs and local jamborees with people twice my age. It was at one of these shows one time that a talent scout came up to me afterwards and handed me his card. “People are tired of hearing these rock ballads posing as country songs,” he said. “Your style, it’s preserving something. Four chords and the truth—that’s not ready to go away.” 94

I was just 19 at the time, living with my Aunt Rita who took me in after my mother died. Sadie was dating my buddy Tyler who I played wide receiver with back in high school. I’m not sure he ever knew about me and her—at least not while it was happening. We were pretty discreet about things, and Sadie never really acted like it was that big a deal. So when I decided to move, I figured I could do it without making too much of a fuss. Sadie had already told me she didn’t want to break up with Tyler, and I was feeling pretty raw about going behind his back as it was. But some way or another, she found out I was leaving, and came storming over to my place the night before I did.

“Were you even planning on telling me?” she asked, her eyes more wild than I’d ever seen them. Aunt Rita was asleep before her night shift at work, and I tried to get

Sadie to calm down.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “I’ll still come back sometimes. Besides, you and Ty have some shit you need to work through.”

I had a habit of saying the wrong things back then, and Sadie wasn’t afraid to let me know it.

“You’re an asshole,” she said. “Why don’t you go write a song about that.”

I couldn’t for the life of me understand what she was getting so worked up about.

We’d both said multiple times that it wasn’t right what we were doing, and the way I saw it, this would ensure it didn’t happen again.

“Well how far is it?” she asked after I got her to sit down on the porch finally.

“About six and a half hours,” I said. “Give or take.” 95

She turned her face away from me then and stared at the moths dancing over the porch light. “And you’ll come back?” she said. Her voice sounded scratchy and rough.

“All the time,” I said. “I’ll bring you some platinum records.” That got her to smile a little bit, and she leaned her head on my shoulder.

“Make sure you do,” she said, and I reached up to stroke her hair.

That very next morning, I was gone.

***

The slow deceleration of the exit ramp pulls me back to consciousness. I sit up and look over at Peter who drums his palms against the steering wheel to the chorus of

“Enter Sandman.” When he sees that I’m awake, he fumbles with the controls and ejects the CD.

“Shit. I’m sorry,” he says. “I couldn’t handle that mushy-gushy crap anymore.”

He moves to put Melissa’s CD back in and I squint out the window. A gas station stands next to an Arby’s a quarter mile down the road, and three or four cars are lined up behind us, all waiting to turn at the light.

“Where are we?” I ask, wiping some drool from my chin.

“Oh man,” says Peter. “I zoned out and missed our exit back there. Didn’t realize until just now.”

The seatbelt tugs against my neck, and Melissa’s book goes tumbling to the floor.

I scramble to pick it up and it’s open to the dedication page. For Ma, it reads.

“Easy there,” Peter says. “We got time. Her pen’s not gonna run out of ink.” He turns onto the overpass and stops at another light. “It’s important that we accept a certain 96 level of chaos in our lives, you know? When we try to have too much control, that’s when we end up holding onto things that are probably better to be thrown out.”

I sneak a peek at the dashboard clock. Its digital numbers are the same as the alarm in my bedroom that sometimes gets lost in the sea of unfolded clothes.

“I gotta ask though,” says Peter, “what’s the obsession here? I listened to half that disc and about had my first period.”

I adjust the jacket on Melissa’s book and put her CD back in its case. “It’s not for me,” I say. “It’s for a friend.”

“Well shit, you never told me you had any friends.” Peter laughs and accelerates back onto the highway. I think of that campfire again—the crooked smile Melissa gave me, like sunshine through a dusty window, when I showed her how to pluck guitar strings.

Peter starts in on a girl he used to date from Virginia Beach, and I try to tune him out. I think of Nashville again, how the first thing I did when I got there was march right into the talent scout’s agency and hand the secretary his business card like it was some kind of golden ticket. She let me sit in the waiting room for about three and a half hours before she told me I should just go home. I wasn’t prepared back then for the cut-throat reality of my dreams. I’d walk up and down Broadway Street, staring at the performers who set their cowboy hats out on the sidewalk for tips, and I could see in their looks that they knew how bright-eyed and stupid I was.

I spent my nights bussing tables and my days dropping in on local honky-tonk bars to see if they needed any entertainment. Sadie, meanwhile, was writing me letters 97 about every other week. I’d given her the address of the place I was working and asked my boss to keep an eye out for any envelopes addressed to me. I even started calling her from a payphone eventually, just filling her in and checking how things were going there.

“So you’re liking it?” she asked one night, speaking slow so that I could hear her over the shoddy connection.

“It’s alright,” I said. “Not what I expected, but I guess I’m adjusting okay.”

“Well don’t go forgetting about all of us when you’re rich and famous,” she said.

She was always doing stuff like that, reminding me of home, wondering when I’d be coming back for a visit. Sometimes, when I’d get off work, dead-tired and cold, I’d curl up in the back of my car where I’d been sleeping at night and listen to Emmylou

Harris on the stereo. I’d think of Sadie then, how I used to slip in through her apartment window back when we were still sneaking around, and she’d curl her arms around my chest from behind.

We talked a lot those first few months. I was struggling to find a gig, and I got fired from my job for skipping a shift to go to an audition. I started working as a gas station clerk instead, and we had a phone in the back office. Me and Sadie would chat for hours during graveyard shift, my feet kicked up on the desk so I could see if a customer came in. She’d tell me how the Avett barn had burned down again, how Coach Miller said he was going to retire at the end of the year. The more she talked, the more I kind of missed it back home. There didn’t seem to be anything going for me here, at least not in the way I wanted. I’d go to open mic nights and feel the music pumping belief through 98 my veins, but as soon as I stepped off that stage, I realized no one but me was really listening.

“It sounds like you need a break,” Sadie told me one evening after I’d mopped the gas station floor. “Why don’t you come up next weekend. I’ll make a spot for you on the couch.”

“How’s Ty gonna feel about that?” I asked.

There was a pause, and then her voice went all low and gravely like she was reading from a note card. “I don’t think Tyler’s coming around anymore,” she said.

Another pause, and then something like a wince on the other end of the line. “Anyways, I think you should come up. I’d really like to see you.”

I didn’t end up going, but the more we talked, the more I thought I should. Our conversations shifted from ‘if’ to ‘when,’ though Sadie never really pressured me about it. Looking back, she handled it a lot better than I ever would have, which is why I don’t think she ever told me. I was still hung up on being the next Marty Robbins, the next

Hank Williams Sr. But six months went by—then seven, then eight—and the most I had to show for it was one little hand-written flier with my name smaller and lower down than the two headliners.

But then I caught my break.

It was at one of those open mic nights I’d been going to, a place with neon lights and so much smoke that you could barely see the crowd. A man in a grey suit and a belt buckle in the shape of Texas came up to me afterwards and offered to buy me a drink.

“Anyone ever tell you you sound just like Woody Guthrie?” he asked. He told me about a 99 record label he worked for, how they’d been looking for a twang like mine. He wrote down an address on a nearby napkin and told me to come by in three weeks. “And bring your guitar,” he said. “We’re gonna make you famous.”

I called Sadie as soon as I could which was about two o’clock in the morning.

“I thought you said you were coming back,” she mumbled, her voice full of sleep and something else I couldn’t quite place.

“Well yeah,” I said. “But that was before. I mean, this is the whole reason I came down here. I’m about to be a star.”

I could hear her getting up and moving about the room. A cabinet door creaked open and closed. “Max,” she said. “I need you to come back home.”

I really didn’t know what to say to her then, couldn’t understand why she wasn’t just happy for me. We both hung up feeling a little raw, but if I had any idea then, I must have chosen to ignore it. She could be like that sometimes—ornery for no good reason— so I didn’t think anything of it. She gave me the cold shoulder for the next couple of weeks, told me she was changing shifts at work so she’d most likely be asleep when I called. I left messages anyway, sometimes two or three at a time. Eventually, I got through, and a gruff voice I didn’t recognize answered the phone.

“Who is this?” it said.

I checked to make sure I’d dialed the right number and then heard the man asking again.

“It’s Max,” I said. “I’m looking to talk to Sadie.” 100

There was muffled chatter on the other end, a cough away from the phone. “She don’t live here no more,” said the man. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t keep calling.”

I started to ask where she was, but the line went dead before I could.

***

Peter follows me through the convention center. The hallways are long and wide, and the ceilings are tall enough to stack hundreds of empty shoeboxes in vertical rows like the ones in my garage. There are big cutouts with Melissa’s face that say ‘Sasha

Grae: Autograph signing this way!’ but we don’t really need them. The crowds tell us where to go. Their masses flow like a river, its current pulling us ever closer to the gaping mouth of a raging falls. Peter is blabbering on about how we’ve got to be careful with the language used to categorize “excessive accumulation.”

“Now, I’m not trying to be a snowflake or anything,” he says. “I just think it’s important that we recognize the nuances associated with what drives people to hang on to things.”

We round the corner to where a line of people traces along the wall. It bends through a set of wide double-doors and shuffles forward a few feet at a time. Peter grabs my arm and says, “Holy shit. Are there really this many people with that bad of taste in music?”

I shift Melissa’s book back and forth in my hand. Peter takes the CD case so that he doesn’t look “like some 40-year-old creep prowling around looking for where they shoot the Disney Channel.” Up ahead, I catch a glimpse of a man and his daughter. The girl is maybe five years old, clinging to her father’s leg and staring up at him with big, 101 watery eyes. I can see Melissa, around that same age, begging me over the last dying embers of that campfire to play another song. Her voice drifted up into wood smoke, and my mind drifts back, one more time, to Nashville.

My big break, as it turned out, wasn’t so big after all. I went to the record label, checked in at reception, and then joined a waiting room of maybe 40 other people, all of them with Gibson guitars in their laps. I hadn’t heard from Sadie yet—my Aunt Rita said no one around town really knew where she went—and I was starting to get that feeling

I’d thrown something away before it was ready to be trash. The folks at the record label had me play a few songs, shake a few hands, and I left there knowing that nothing would come of it. Every country station I listened to was playing stuff with electric guitar riffs and heavy drum solos. I’d spent years getting compared to George Jones and Waylon

Jennings, but apparently those roots weren’t as deep as everyone thought. I stuck around for another year or so, played a few gigs and slept on some couches. I met a woman 12 years older who’d been on stage with a twilighting Tammy Wynette, and she tried to hock my guitar for blow. Eventually, I had to come to terms with the cold hard truth.

I went back home then and turned myself into a bad country song. I was drinking a fifth of bourbon every other night, getting sober just long enough to feel the sting of regret before I beat it back down again. I stumbled over to Sadie’s old place a couple of times, banged on the door and yelled myself hoarse for trying to get her to come out. The poor folks that lived there called the cops on me enough that they started parking a cruiser at the end of the street. I knew I’d messed up, lost something I didn’t know I had, but it wasn’t until a couple years later that I really found out the full extent. 102

I was at a convenience store buying a pack of Salems when someone started tugging at my sleeve. It was Tyler, bigger and more worn than I remembered him, but still with the same crooked nose from where he’d broken it in the county championship game. He had a soul patch goatee and a little cross necklace dangling from his neck. It made him seem lighter somehow—like he’d figured out a puzzle everyone else was still trying to put together. His eyes searched me up and down, and I could tell by his look that he knew everything that’d happened. I planted my feet in case he tried to hit me, but instead he reached out and gave me a great big bear hug.

“I thought that was you,” he said. “What the heck are you doing here, man? You all didn’t move back up again, did you?” His face went suddenly serious, and he dug into his back pocket for a card. “I wish you would have told me at least. I could have gotten you a quote.”

Apparently he’d been practicing realty across the river, had moved there pretty soon after he and Sadie split.

“How’s she doing by the way?” he asked. “She’s not missing that empty nest life, is she?” He slapped my shoulder, and the blow rattled me as much as his words.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He laughed like I was joking at first but must have noticed I wasn’t. “You guys didn’t split, did you?” he asked. Oh, I’m sorry, I just assumed—” He stopped talking then, some new realization twisting his face. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh shit.”

*** 103

The line dwindles down, and Peter bounces up and down on his toes. He’s suddenly nervous in the presence of a celebrity, and I step forward gently as though trying to navigate the narrow corridors of garden hoses and lamp shades that line my decrepit hallways. Melissa’s house, she said in her book, was the opposite of mine before she went to rehab. She had sold almost everything, paintings and furniture, all so she could get her next high. People were shocked by this revelation—thought she’d made enough money from her success that she could never go bankrupt like she was. But that’s the thing about discovering the truth. It’s almost never what you expect it to be.

Tyler got me an address through some realtor database. He must have felt bad for me or something which tells you the kind of shape I was in given how little he owed me.

It took me some five counties over to a little one-story at the top of a gravel hill. I parked near the bottom, around the bend behind some trees, and saw her there in the yard. She had emerald green eyes and a little bow in her hair. Even from a distance, I could see the dimpled cheeks, the little crease on her chin that I’d been stroking in front of a mirror my whole life. Sadie was there too, her hips angled wide and her breasts sagging low beneath a t-shirt. She lifted that little girl over her head, spun her around and whooshed her back and forth like a jet plane. Something blew apart inside me then, sent little pieces scattering around my insides that I’ve been trying to pick up ever since. I felt entitled, I think. Or maybe desperate’s a better word. I’d missed out on things back in Nashville because I showed up a day late and a dollar short. To do it again, even if it was my fault, felt like I was losing both the instrument and the music. 104

Peter tells me he’s got to piss like a Russian Racehorse, and I see Melissa, some twenty feet in front of me. Her hair is tied back in an off-center braid, and she smiles for photos with her fans. I squeeze her book between my hands, try and feel the life I missed out on. So far as I’ve read, she doesn’t mention meeting me. She doesn’t recount how, when Sadie went inside to answer the phone, I crunched up the side of that hill and waved her over. She doesn’t tell about how she wasn’t afraid—how she poked a scar on my face and asked if I had a ‘boo-boo.’ I think I could tell right then that she was going to be a star.

The line shuffles forward, and I try to imagine what she’ll say when she sees me.

Perhaps she’ll leap up to hug me right away, show me off to everyone in line as the man who inspired her work. Or maybe it’ll be more subtle than that. She might suppress a smile, slip me a folded note with a phone number to call. She’ll want to meet me after the signing—in her manager’s office or a hotel room—somewhere neat and clean where we can be alone. She’ll admit, like me, to revisiting that campground in her mind—the one we stayed at for three whole weeks living off packaged hot dogs, four chords, and the truth. She’ll forgive me for that too, the thing she didn’t understand back then, but knows now is wrong. She’ll get how I was backed into a corner, how I felt like the only thing to do was pick her up, buckle her into that truck seat, and drive off down the road with bits of pollen sticking to the windshield.

Peter tells me he can’t hold it anymore and thrusts the CD back into my arms. I’m right on her now. There’s only two people in front of me, and a large man in a black t- shirt stands over Melissa’s shoulder with arms across his chest. He bends down to 105 whisper something in her ear, and she nods to acknowledge. It’s my turn then. I stumble forward and Melissa smiles up at me.

“Hi there,” she says.

I catch a glimpse of those emerald green eyes like looking at them for the very first time. They are the same ones that giggled when I’d call her my Louisiana Woman, the same ones that cried sometimes when I told her we couldn’t go back home.

“How are you doing?” she asks. She glances at the man standing over her shoulder.

I sway side to side and remember turning myself in to a park ranger when I finally came to my senses. Sadie decided she wouldn’t press charges, but I got slapped with a restraining order instead, and it took over ten years to expire.

“Let’s move it along, sir,” says the man behind Melissa. He steps forward, and I hold out the memoir with a shaking hand. Melissa smooths its cover across the table and clicks open one of her pens.

“Who should I make this out to?” she asks.

“It’s for my daughter,” I tell her. The words feel like Velcro on my tongue. “Her name is Melissa.”

She clicks her pen again, and there is a moment—small, almost absent—where her arm hovers over the table. It is a moment of recognition, a moment where everything comes rushing back—the busted lawn chairs sitting in my bathtub, the bundles of extension cords stuffed into a laundry chute. All the decrepit, decaying memories that sit

106 piled in my home hang there like drop of ink at the end of her slender fingers.

“Melissa,” she says, nodding her head. “How do you spell that?” ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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