WHAT THEY DIDN’T TELL YOU

A written creative work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The Requirements for The Degree A- Master of Fine Arts 2oiS In Creative Writing

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By

Donald Edward Menn

San Francisco, California

May 2015 Copyright by Donald Edward Menn 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read What They Didn’t Tell You by Donald Edward Menn, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a written creative work submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Peter Orner

Professor, Creative Writing

Professor/Department Chair, Creative Writing WHAT THEY DIDN’T TELL YOU

by

Donald Edward Menn San Francisco, California 2015

CONTENTS

Salvage Yard 1 Day of the Living 41 Fellow Travelers 58 Pied-a-boue 89 Stolen Music 126 A Filthy Black Hellhole 164

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

MXT A y y - ______/ ""2 ^ w f- y ^ °

Chair, Written Creative Work Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We have more to say than anyone ever hears. And what we do hear communicates little about what goes on. Mouths full, lips sealed, ears clogged with empty air. Our eyes struggle to unscramble the real meaning. Better for us all it seems, or why else would it be so?

Thanks be to great teachers and classmates whom I hope to keep for life.

Most of all, thanks to Anne Schukat, my constant supporter and ruthless critic, who got me to the post office on time. 1

Salvage Yard

“You gotta use your toe in that type sitiation, see? Otherwise you just blow off your jaw,” the nurse said. “Blast the family photos off the wall.”

A man. A man a nurse? He poked the sutures holding together the thin, raw scabs skirting the heel of Vitezslav’s wrist. “N’if you wanna be like one a dem bitch- kitties who drink lye, well be my guest. Think you depressed before? Wait’n see how you feel after we yank that nasty, fried gullet yours out, and you can’t never do no more of that there emotional eating that is p’bly youse favorite, lastest, onliest joy in one miserable life. Um-huh. Um-uh.”

“Shouldn’t talk to patients so,” Vitezslav muttered.

“All out of love, friend, all for your further edjacation.” He snipped a last knot of each stitch. ‘You didn’t really wanna do it, didja? ’wise you woulda done your homework. Gotta cut lengthwise not crost.” He traced the path with his finger a millimeter above Vitezslav’s tendon, but never quite touching. A tense moment it was.

Vitezslav looked around the room for someone to complain to.

The ER docs staggered from gurney to gurney, too busy to participate in routine cleanup. Five a.m., they had higher priorities. Helping the gunshot victims and rollovers in resus avoid being grimly reaped. Vitezslav wonderd how many would 2

sit up in the box to face another gray, fluorescent-lit morning-after-the-night-before.

But it was the doctors, not the patients, who reminded Vitezslav of zombies, the televised ones he had seen shuffling and stumbling and limping across a half dozen huge flatscreens lined up at eye-level on a shelf in a vast warehouse discount outlet.

He had stood there hypnotized, until security asked him to leave. The ER docs were the walking dead. The patients knew they were going home. The doctors knew they were coming back.

“This here ‘fast track’ slow as molasses,” some drunk too near kept shouting out. In all the hours and hours they had waited, the guy had never shown signs of sobering up in the slightest. He complained over and over about the customer service. Suddenly, for the first time, he addressed Vitezslav. “This here’s where they triage folks they think didn’t really need to come in at all.” He allowed a string of drool pouring over his lip to flow where it wanted, as he stared, waiting for something, probably a response.

“Only hospital I’ve ever been in in America,” Vitezslav replied. He must have looked puzzled, because his neighbor started up again.

“Triage means they check how soon you going to croak.”

Vitezslav did not understand “croak” either.

The drunk added, “The cost.”

Vitezslav shrugged and turned back to his medical provider. 3

“You should be nice. Not un-nice,” he said.

“You mean ‘not mean.’ ”

This was not the person who had treated Vitezslav when he walked in on his

own, palms up and arms outstretched as though carrying an invisible gift box, one

dripping visible blood. He deciphered the nametag a letter at a time. “Chester” slid

the threads out so quickly and gently, Vitezslav didn’t know they were gone until he

saw them squiggle into a basket lined with a red bag marked “biohazard.” An

unexpected warmth flooded his chest, and he sighed.

“Should’ve used ones that dissolve ’ventually anyways. See? I’m not all bad.

Need to learn the clues. Doing you a favor. Now reach for that thumb.”

Vitezslav pulled his fingers into his palm. It was true. He should have learned

the clues, the language, the culture better. But his people stayed to themselves. They

favored conversation in their native tongue. That was all many had brought with

them after the Soviet tanks pointed their barrels down into Wenceslas Square at their

allies in the late 1960s. He still sometimes added “kova” to women’s last names. Still

couldn’t always identify by name faces on coins and bills.

Chester snorted, then peeled off his latex gloves and mask. “Um-huh. You one lucky guy. Folks like you just as often mess up those tendons like they’s cutting

spaghetti, so now I know you really not serious ’bout business, since you didn’t even go deep enough to do that.” 4

He rolled his airlift stool closer. He tweaked the cylinder lever to raise the foam cushion to put him eye-to-eye with his ward. He leaned right into his face.

“Now listen to me. You listening?” But his voice was gentle.

Vitezslav nodded.

“Just in case you ever do get serious for real sometime, and I’m not saying you should. Fact is I’m hoping you don’t. But like I say, no matter what you think, most always a downside, always a downside to steppin’ away from life in the opposite direction. Not as easy as it look.” He glided back to his supply tray. “Tomorrow’s another day, and long’s you here, you doin’ sumthin’ right, even if you don’t know what it is.”

Vitezslav nodded. He stood and tried to button his shirt cuffs, but his wrists still stung a bit. Would the effort rip his skin open again? No point in risking that. He extended his arms for help, but Chester hopped off his stool and rushed towards another gurney.

“T jk urvysynVitezslav grumbled. Walking towards the wide, swinging doors, he slipped on the ancient, uneven linoleum floor, bubbling up here and there from something damp and toxic beneath. What? A mixture of something human? Blood?

Urine? Bile? His sleeve cuffs flapped about like cocker spaniel ears.

Chester called after him: “ ’n next time don’t try no rope trick. Take longer you ever been told—ten, twenty minutes, even if you break you neck. Get cut down 5

’fore that, yeah, you may survive. Live, but end up in vegetable bin rest of your livelong days. Not saying this to rile you all up. Saying it out of the kindness of my heart, so don’t even think ’bout getting all huffy-puffy on me. And by the way, gotta point out you may think I’m dumb, but I do know what that wicked word mean.. .and that’s no way to say, ‘Thank you, Chester.’ ”

“Sorry. Thank you. I talk to someone else. ”

Chester laughed and wagged his finger. “Never argue with someone who’s not in the room.” He grinned and waved good-bye.

Vitezslav shook his head, and began talking to himself again. What was wrong with him? Why should he have assumed Chester’s admonitions and reprimands were nothing but bragging for an audience, many unconscious kept alive by machines? He had no reason to be mad at Chester. He was mad at someone else. But who?

He didn’t even look back as he pushed out into the autumn morning. A Staten

Island gust leapt the water and sent orange and yellow leaves swirling downward.

From under a parked car, a half-dozen pigeons dashed out into the street, pecking at them in frenzy. They, too, had been evicted, driven to the street, even into the subways, the feathered homeless. Razor wire and spikes on the roofs eliminated their nesting sites. Did they know that? Did these leaves know they had fallen, once been alive, might be mistaken for possible food? This was the emptiest Vitezslav had ever seen this intersection. Did the birds know that an hour later, rush-hour traffic might 6

flatten them? That hawks might swoop down from on high? They might eat pigeons.

Who knows? He knew he should have found a better way to get Lenka’s attention, one that wouldn’t have made her scoff and stomp out, while shouting to clean up his own mess.

Vitezslav wandered towards the towers where his mother-in-law lived with his own mother. He was certain Lenka had stayed there since she ran off several nights ago with both sets of keys. Unthinkable she would be anywhere else. Hiding with a secret lover? Never. Oh what might they not say with him not in earshot? Not a door he intended to knock on at a time like this. Vitezslav would wait right where he was.

She would have to return home today. Two days, three nights was the limit. Her mother allowed only brief, cool-down overnights after marital squabbles. Yes,

Maminka had her limits. She needed to focus without interruption on her addiction, playing snapsen with Vitezslav’s mother.

He had never known anyone as entrancing and as terrifying as his wife. She was smarter than he was. She had held her beauty so long and so well that men a generation younger still gave her a once-over twice when she strolled by. They whistled. They catcalled. Their eyes licked her. A few dared to ask her out. Her

English vocabulary was better than neighborhood high-school students, and her accent was so slight it seemed more from one of the boroughs than imported over a iron wall now melted to an smoldering mess. She could stretch a dollar down, 7

around, and up two entire grocery aisles. She had weathered the indignities of immigration with grace, eventually mastery helping both families achieve asylum.

She had even written herself into urban legend.

To win a bet made by a neighbor who mocked their homeland, she had offered to reveal a national secret if allowed to come to the woman’s apartment. The woman had accepted the offer.

Lenka had commanded Vitezslav help. The day they were to go, she thrust a basket into his hands. Under a clean, white, freshly ironed dishtowel, she had stored in it a stinky rock collected from the off-leash section of a small park. When they arrived, the unfriendly woman opens the door. She smirks. She looks them up and down. Her eyes blaze through smeared eyeliner. She is an enraged raccoon. Red stains rouge both knees of her lime-green skinny jeans. Probably catsup drips from a grilled cheese sandwich she uses to wave them here and there. She steps aside pointing with the drooping toast towards the kitchen. But they cannot get around her. She is stepping into a pair of open-toe slip-ons. Vitezslav does not understand women’s shoes. These in particular. They have a leopard-print strap and four-inch heels each notched with a carving, like primitive wood statues. Perhaps they were to help raise her to eye-to-eye with her guests.

“Stone soup, you call it,” Lenka says, waiting.

“What are you talking about?” 8

“You will see.”

Lenka surveys the kitchen. From atop the refrigerator, she lifts down a huge kettle. She fills it with tap water, then sets it on the front burner. She rotates the control knob, and a dozen blue tongues whoosh up and out beyond the bottom of the vessel. Slowly, deliberately, she turns the dial from high to low and then back up—halfway, settling on dots of flame loud enough to hear, but not see crawling out from below the pot.

Lenka sets the kettle’s lid aside and raises the towel covering the basket. There it still is—a rock as large and threatening as a fist. The neighbor grimaces. Lenka nods to Vitezslav, and he drops it in. Its loud splash causes the woman to jump backwards.

She wrinkles her nose and folds her arms defiantly, as Lenka stirs the concoction.

Flakes and green strands and small brown clumps detach from the magic ingredient and spiral around the spoon. As the water boils, the stone bounces on metal and bobbles off the sides, bubbles scrubbing off moss and fungus and who knows what else.

“The first secret,” Lenka begins, “is that in our land we do not use a stone.”

“Then why do you call it ‘stone soup’?”

“We don’t. You do. We use an axe.”

“That’s crazy.”

“But there is none here.” 9

The woman snorts. “Of course there isn’t.”

“But a stone works,” Lenka says. “Some villages without carpenters use stones.” She stirs and stirs. Finally, she searches the cabinets and extracts a soup bowl. She sets it on the counter abutting the stovetop. Half the water has evaporated into steam. She turns off the burner. She blows on the surface of her creation, but looks up and shakes her head. She walks to the sink and fills a glass with tap water, returns, and dribbles some in.

“Still too hot,” she states, trickling more cool water in. “We wait.”

She removes a wife-beater from the oven door handle, folds it in half, and then the half in half until it is a square. She positions it in the middle of the stovetop.

She slides the kettle off the burner onto the undershirt. She stares again at the woman and waits. The woman tears the crust off her sandwich, never looking away as Lenka lowers her nose close to the fluid surface and wafts the steam towards her nostrils.

She sniffs deeply. Her head snaps up. She smiles. As though to hail a cab, she raises her finger and then ladles broth into a bowl. She extends it to the woman as though offering the blood of Christ.

“You gotta be kiddin’,” the woman mumbles, mouth full of the last massive bite of her sandwich. “I’m not going to eat that,” she slurs. ‘You people must be nuts. I’d feel sorry for you, if you didn’t make me sick.” 10

Lenka drops her chin to her collarbone. Her eyes dilate and swell as though to climb out and onto her lids and terrify. Her lips pull back. Vitezslav braces for a snarl.

His wife works her eyebrows into an extreme theatrical frown like those in silent films when they finally could be shown in the abandoned village church. She stiffens her back. She faces the woman full on. Then, over her shoulder, she dumps the contents of the bowl back into the pot. She turns, slams its lid back on, sets the vessel down with great care in the sink, and then swings back.

“I unlocked a treasure and gave away a key I cannot take back,” she proclaims.

“You may be a thief, but who is the fool? I am.” She bows her head, shaking it slowly. She beats her sternum with her knuckles five times. She looks back up, eyes in a furious squint. ‘You may think you have learned how to make this, but now you will never learn what it means. If you do not know what it means, I warn you, you will not make it right, and it shall turn against you.”

“What a crock,” the woman says. ‘You can scram now.” She wipes her mouth with her wrist. “Now.”

Lenka looks at Vitezslav. She indicates the door with that expressive chin of hers. They do as the woman has asked.

A week later, the UPS guy tells Vitezslav that the neighbor spent a messy night in the emergency room treated for dehydration and whatever problem that caused it. 11

When he rushes home to tell Lenka, she nods curtly and produces a slight, memorable curl to one side of her mouth.

From that day on, his wife was feared and revered as far as rumors can go, and

that is everywhere.

Vitezslav laughed every time he remembered that story. He was not sure why.

He was never certain about what was funny. Humor was so very cultural. That had not helped him in the workplace. He laughed when he shouldn’t, and didn’t when he

should. Over and over again, the years proved to him that he could do nothing worth having been done, nothing worth remembering, not even laugh at the right moments, lie when a boss told him he must, distinguish mere coincidence from cause and effect.

His errors became fodder at the final holiday gatherings as guests competed to reenact his “best worst” of the year in improvised skits whiling away the dull countdown to midnight. He did enjoy New Year’s, though. He laughed along and basked in the attention. It was the role he had been given. And proof of the slaps on the back stayed with him for a week, sometimes more. He wondered if the others laughed at him because he allowed it, not because they were any more competent.

After all, useless skill sets were off limits to mock, since they were so common. His friends had been and most still were just as unprepared as he. But laughter made him laugh and made for good memories. 12

The stone soup memory poked the beast behind his ribs to growling. He was

no different from those pigeons, pink feet prancing for breakfast in a panicked dance.

He rummaged his pockets for coins. He extracted only lint. Lenka alone had the power to transform lint to currency. But probably not without a fight. One in which

he was disadvantaged. He didn’t know what there was to fight about. Besides, fights

erased his vocabulary, larger than he could access at such moments, and when that

happened his body and face spoke that language before language, one that Lenka pretended to ignore. Today he needed to find words he’d never found before about

something he couldn’t imagine.

He reached the stoop outside the towers. A yellowish puddle glimmered where he usually sat. And the other risers leading up to the front door were matted with detritus the ledges and windowsills had slobbered down right there. He avoided those glops as well. The wind was warm, even comforting, but Vitezslav retreated down the steps leading towards a studio below street level, with windows peering out at cuffs and hems. He would be less visible there, less likely to be perceived by passers-by as some homeless loser pissing on steps.

He squatted, butt to sneakers. He wrapped his arms around his knees to keep his balance. What if she wasn’t here? What if she stayed elsewhere sometimes, elsewhere than here? He counted bottle caps and broken hypos. He practiced their street names. Even if he read poorly, his ears were always wide open. “Woolah,” “bullet bolt,” “artillery” 13

discarded by “dipsos” and “skeegers.” To his friends he taught those words, not one on

flash cards for citizenship. A test he had never had to take. His family had been admitted as refugees. That they had loved. They were here. They could stay. But economically things were not better. They were worse. Once settled, though Vitezslav’s parents had been thrilled to take him to his first day of school, they were dismayed to learn he could not work legally until he turned sixteen. That law they were too poor to obey. They would have starved. Neighbors taught them what to say to keep their kids home from school to help maintain the household or run errands, while their elders worked two sometimes three jobs each.

As he had in the old country, Vitezslav had helped in the new one. Besides, school was hard. He preferred waiting on corners to be picked up for day labor to being bullied while trying to catch on and catch up. Such jobs always paid cash under.

A Hungarian kiosk owner, with a side hauling service, grew dependant on the young boy’s dependability on weekends and sometimes during the week. His parents were overjoyed, and Vitezslav loved riding shotgun.

He tore out and helped take away things no one else would go near. Ancient wallboard in condemned buildings. Insulation in ceilings and around gravity furnaces.

Flooring from attics invaded by bats. Syringes and used toilet paper where addicts lived until they died. For a landlord that paid well to keep a secret, he scrubbed on hands and knees the floor of an African who was rumored to have died of Ebola, but 14

the landlord’s new renter wanted in yesterday. Vitezslav knew that rumor was false. If it had been true, all of New York would have died before he even got down on his knees with a bucket. The boys who had told that tale were just jealous he made such good money simply washing a floor. When they tried to bully him next, he lied that their Ebola lie was true. He coughed on them. He touched them. They dashed away, and stopped harassing him for weeks.

In a gross negligence case, he arrived before a jury could inspect a crime scene.

No one had ever been so fast in sweeping out pigeon feathers and chiseling away bird droppings two inches thick, and then replaced police tape and a lock that someone had tampered with making it possible for him to go in the middle of the night. He had felt competent, appreciated.

He did countless odd jobs for years until he had grown tall enough to look legal. Older boys sold him a fake driver’s license and directed him to an employment office specializing in immigrants. The agent looked at the ID, and then at him. She was silent for a long time. Vitezslav wondered if she would throw him out. But she hadn’t. She had smiled a secret smile. Did Lenka have a secret smile for someone?

“Well I do declare—whatja doin’ here Precechtel?”

Vitezslav cringed, eyes level with a pair of knees. Behind a rod connecting two sides of a walker, they drooped like sad faces. A dress hem was stuck in the top of a 15

calf-high compression stocking. He looked up into a face collapsed by time into its

own folds.

He sprang up. “Pardon?”

“Haven’t seen you in a month of blue moons.” Her walker had aged no better

than the hag before him. A loose nut would have fallen off, if its bolt weren’t bent

into an L, and rust hadn’t fattened up the end of its shaft.

“You mistake me for other.”

“Oh no I don’t. You gotta remember me—Mrs. Carstenson. Name ring a

bell? ’member? From the building facing you back when your folks brought you from

that beautiful place to this ugly one.” She set the brake on her walker, planting herself

for a while. “Same cauliflower ears, same tattoos from when you was just a pup

boxing with my Lasse.” “

“I know no Lasse.”

“Sure you do.”

“Tattoos common as bed bugs.”

“He took the call to Urgent Fury.” Her ankles were big as knees and her knees

as bruised as the eyes of that son of hers after each pulverizing loss. “Sad—you not

lookin’ so young as you are. No need to be shy, though. Life took a lot out on your hide seems, but you still a boy to me.” 16

He came up the steps slowly. He didn’t like feeling so short. She wasn’t really a hag. Never. He was being mean again to someone else who was being kind.

“I know who you are and saw what you did. Never forget it.”

“Very sorry, Mrs. Not to offend, you confuse with me other.”

“No I don’t, and say so or no, you know I don’t. I can still see that child, on that hot, hot day, crawling out that window onto that roof ’crost from my kitchen view. I saw what was going on, Vitezslav.” She leaned so far forward over the handlebars of her walker that he reached out to make sure she didn’t flip over them.

“I not ‘Vitezslav’ something.”

“Precechtel. Vitezslav Precechtel. Look on your green card, if you want to see how to spell it.”

“Green card gone. I am U.S. citizen,” said, immediately regretting it.

“Why, yes, a passport then, of course. I should think so by now.”

“But I am not that person.”

Mrs. Carstenson seemed to go into a trance, like a popular woman long ago in his village during seances. She threw her hands to her cheeks. She twisted her mouth as though reliving panic. Her eyes rolled back. Her brain seemed busy acting something out. “Yes, all us doin’ chores, hanging out laundry, whatnot. All of us who saw that child, we was all screaming. Screaming. We were too high up and across the courtyard to do anything. And you musta heard us, ’cause before that giant rodent 17

could jump on that baby and eat him alive, you were out your mama’s window, inching along that ledge.

Vitezslav shook his head. “Rats gentle. Not eat babies.”

“Good thing you was only a couple windows over from that poor unfortunate. Like magic, suddenly in your hands was that car battery. You threw it, perfect aim, right on top that monster—biggest damn thing ever. Squished him like a fly on a dinner plate.”

“Rats gentle,” he repeated. “Avoid new things. Cannot vomit.”

“Oh yes it tired, it tried.”

“Battery too heavy for young boy to throw.”

“But not for you. You was out that window lickety-split, scooped that child up, threw that battery with one hand, and got that toddler back in, before the rest of the pack of vermin could get you.”

“Story is good story. Very exciting. But not of me.”

Mrs. Carstenson stared off. Vitezslav looked where she looked, but couldn’t see what she was seeing.

“Excuse, I have meeting,” he said, dancing with her walker, but couldn’t get around it. Her head snapped towards him and her eyes popped opened even wider.

“We all thought you were a hero,” she whispered, “and I guess you were. You tried to do the right thing. You did do the right thing.” 18

Had she really convinced herself of that? He had once, until he had been given

reason to change his mind.

“That’s why I never thought it was fair after all the killing started when all

those busybodies and backbiters started gossiping ’bout how it would have been best

if the rats had won.”

Vitezslav lowered his eyes to the sidewalk. His shame never left him.

“Wasn’t your fault that child grew up to be such a bad boy, but truth to tell, he

done paid the price. In all the news. You musta seen it.”

He had seen it on TV, yes. But not read the details. Reading in English had

never gotten easy. He could interpret street signs and instructions, but newspapers

and books were slow going. Getting from one side of a page to the other was like

plowing a field of moldavite.

A door opened behind Vitezslav, and, startled, he jumped. He was sure he

detected the efficient clattering of his wife’s heels down the stairs. “Excuse.” He tried

to squeeze between the walker and the iron railing.

Mrs. Carstenson gripped the rubber ends of the handlebars to stay upright.

Somehow her brake unlocked, and she began tilting forward at a dangerous angle.

Vitezslav slipped around behind her gracefully, righting her again. He relocked the brake, put two fingers to his forehead, and bowed low. He held that position, 19

focusing on shoe tops. He looked up. Reestablishing eye contact with her, he reached down and swifdy pulled the hem out of her stocking. Mrs. Carstenson gasped.

“And now my meeting,” he said. Before the old woman could sort out all the activity, he rushed away.

Was it Lenka who had already flounced out of sight? Wouldn’t she have

stopped if she had seen him? Perhaps not. He had still been waltzing with Mrs.

Carstenson, and Lenka did care to see all the world presented her with. This was a planet in her orbit, moving where she pulled. She was the surprise, not it.

No matter how many times he ran into her in a week, how many times in a day, Vitezslav was always surprised. Clumping into the kitchen to attend to a whistling teapot. Backing out of the bathroom, hands and shirtfront white from the cleanser he had accumulated while scrubbing the tub, sink, and toilet. Every single encounter, he jumped. He winced as though stung by that wasp in Prague the first time they crossed paths. It had made her laugh. She revealed, only once, it had made her love him. Back then, she had always seemed pleased, but never used words to say so. Still, he could tell. Especially in their bed until that all died down.

When his parents snatched him away from that, from her, he had confessed his misery to plants and insects, watered them with his eyes, sprayed tears to the clouds. Snatched him away from where his mastery was in demand, where things were made not to break but to last just like love. On American soil, he was utterly 20

irrelevant. Unprepared. With his knuckles he had left bloodied graffiti on walls throughout his new land. He felt chopped in half, like the name of his country later.

What he missed most was not in some history book. It was that ironic twist to

Lenka’s mouth, followed by a gentle descending chuckle at something no one else noticed. That sound lifted him up after each tumble down that musical scale of hers.

It sang across the ocean. Seemed to say that everything was a joke, but not a mean one. An invisible power others held over each other not known unless both completed the connection. He did not tell her until years later how that image, that sound, had comforted him, and she did not believe him.

Other unseen forces changed his sad misfortunes. In the early nineties, during the economic chaos of the political transition, her family, disillusioned with all the fizzling promises, had joined a second wave to America. They settled the next street over from his family, the neighborhood where everyone from the old country was herded. Thus their New World encounter more likely than not, and he jumped, and she laughed, and soon enough they married. Soon enough they learned the ways they were alike. Soon enough, they learned the ways they weren’t.

Yes, age had been so kind to her. When they were young, he had assumed through time she would grow as pillowy as most village women. But she hadn’t. She could still wear the clothes she had brought from Pisek. Her hair, she tinted so close to what it had been in her youth that only Vitezslav could detect a hint of variation. 21

“Lenka, Wait!” He broke into a little trot. Maybe she would hear him out. He rolled his sleeves down to avoid reminding her of how he had messed up the kitchen.

Poor performance never impressed her, though she had battled to prove his eligibility for unemployment benefits even if fired because he didn’t meet the qualifications for the job and therefore could not help but fail to meet his employer’s performance and productivity standards.

He had struggled, struggled so long, so hard. He was best at job loss. Because he only knew the metric system. Because he was too dumb to lie for the boss.

Couldn’t have a guy like him around. He longed to be able to parade about like

Lenka, adapt, dominate. She could catch the attention not of just men, but also woman—Slavs—self-employed as seamstresses and occasionally in the garment district, called into catwalks to memorize designs. They would rush back to sketch them from memory for rapid production of low-priced knockoffs shipped from

China before the high-end could drape a single manikin uptown. Everyone recognized that the sight of Lenka alone worked like a business magnet. More lasting, though, she was expert with a needle, a thimble, thread, and any sewing machine whether powered by treadle or by electricity.

How many corners in this vast maze might she have vanished into by now?

Vitezslav sped up. He took the first turn, and there she was. He jumped and winced. 22

She did not laugh. Did not even smile. She stood frozen, arms crossed, head cocked, off the curb protected by a parking meter.

“Come over tonight at seven,” she said. “I have something to say to you.”

“Oh,” he replied. He thought about that for a moment. “Good,” he added.

“But now would be good, too. I should cash check.”

“That’s not important now,” she said.

“But.. .but,” he stammered.

Lenka looked at his wrists. “Not one minute after seven.” And she was gone.

Vitezslav was stunned. This was not a woman who ever waited to speak her mind. Why now? An air conditioner overhead dripped onto the sidewalk grating. The thin metal bars sizzled. They reeked like a skillet left on a flame too long. He cringed recalling the emergency room. In spite of the heat, he felt a sudden chill, a sudden nausea, a sudden hunger, an accelerating loss of control of his thoughts and his body.

His teeth chattered. His jaw muscles cramped to stop that chattering. Pedestrians jammed the sidewalks and crowded the crosswalks. He zigzagged past them, shaking his head back and forth, muttering like a mad man with so much to say to someone not there. Commuters clambered down from idling busses and up from the steaming, subway stairwells. Surely they all must be hearing the echo of Chester’s reprimands.

What could he boast to these strangers he did? Sweated on a soft bed until kicked to the couch awakening in a puddle? Scuffed floor space inside and wore 23

down walkways outside? Not that he didn’t keep busy. Lenka never needed to ask.

No lunchtime arrived without his having washed and changed the sheets. No evening started when a single crumb could be found under the base of the floor lamp. At no time day or night did any angle of light reveal a cobweb swinging down from a corner to surf on the air. No bedtime arrived with tableware waiting to be scrubbed or placed on a shelf or secluded in a drawer. No faucet handle divulged what it held back. No porcelain surface what it transported. A few men sneered he did women’s work. He suspected he was not alone. Hidden in the vegetable crisper was not a welfare payment, but an actual check with his name on it. Even if Lenka found it, the check-cashing service required his signature in person.

Rattling wheels snapped him out of his trance. An old black man, leaning as though into a gale, labored to push a grocery cart stacked high with stained grocery sacks, moth-eaten blankets, and several twenty-quart plastic tubs filled with bottles and cans. Behind him, an old white woman trailed, skin drooping off bones thin as barstool legs. She screamed the piercing shriek of a raccoon and broadcast the man’s unforgivable flaws. She broke off a moment for a snot-shot out of each nostril all the way to the gutter. Then she resumed screeching numbering his innumerable failures grievances for her alone to endure.

Vitezslav turned the corner to escape them. He headed towards the avenues and alleys of his first years here. He passed signs in Greek and Arabic, in Hebrew and 24

Cyrillic, in Hindi and Quoc NgCr. He stopped and stared at some women wearing Ao ba ba and leaf hats. They had gone out of fashion when he lived here, but now the look must be back in. Before their same fractured storefronts, he recognized even now some of the proprietors, in spite of the gray dusting of years in their hair. A few seemed not to have changed clothes since he last saw them in their black suits, unbuttoned shirts, hats, and tzitzit. With the mixture of earnest intensity and constant vigilance of uptown street merchants, whose pockets were rumored to bulge with cash and diamonds, these men still swept the night away from vintage initials gouged into cement buffed smooth by transient shoe soles.

When Vitezslav had first arrived as a child, the neighborhood had been scheduled for a demolition that never came. That clock was still ticking. The wrecking balls still waited to swing even though the skyrocketing interest rates and development protestors had subsided. The streets where his parents, and other parents, too, had seen hope, down here, a war zone then like so many others, redeemable it had seemed, as they had seen happen back across the sea, the hour the latest bombings of the latest war had ended, when the women came out from behind doors, and commenced piling up stones to begin the restoration.

But here in America, day after day, decade after decade, for Vitezslav that hope moved ever towards the horizon growing dark as it sunk with every humiliation, every fantasy that slid in and out of his bed sheets, every ridicule from language 25

errors, every failed attempt to do something making the universe better not worse for

the Mrs. Cartensons and so many others who clung to the belief, on nights too hot

for sleeping inside, that watering their fire escapes to cool the metal down would be

only temporary.

Tourist guidebooks often omitted this section of town, not just because there

were no bars, no restaurants, no stores, no parks, but also because gradually safe

landing spots of any type ceased to existed for anyone. Not one bus-stop bench. Not

a single phone booth, receiver dangling from frayed wires. His parents had endured

this before and did what they’d done before—moved not to another country, but to

another block over. They, all of them, had been abandoned by everything except

fifty-year-old clothespins clipped to ropes dangling across alleys filled with shirts and

socks and bras that fell.

And then Vitezslav saw something he’d never seen here. A redbrick restored.

Its door open. Over the entrance, a white banner flapped making foot-high letters

hula dance in Kelly Green reading: “Good For The ’Hood.” Two delivery trucks, idled in the yellow commercial-only parking spot. Why? The streets were still

deserted. They could have parked anywhere.

Out of the first came a heavy-set man carrying a huge rack of meat on his back. That was a labor Vitezslav knew. One he despised. His eyes welled. He was a child again, singled out as small enough and strong enough for a task requiring both. 26

He lies on his belly on a plank over an inclined ramp. Cows stumble down it prodded along in single file. He waits for each animal to arrive below him at the perfect angle for him to slam his raised sledgehammer down on its crown hard enough to shatter its skulls. This is not always fatal. The cattle are clumsy. Some slip where others had just emptied their bladders and bowels. They rotate about and whirl around like novice skaters. Many fall. They trip on ones that precede them, collapsing before

Vitezslav can whack them. Some flail about in a chorus of thundering moans and crackling whimpers from deep within their chests. The floor-gang rushes up and drags them down the chute. By the time he is ten, he grows immune to the stench that makes many there quit. But then even more debilitating develop severe shoulder problems. He is reassigned. He works the nightshift cleaning out the facility. The powders, compounds, and liquids make him retch. Chronic dizziness renders him unable to control the high-powered hoses used to blast off bone, gristle, and clotted blood from moving machinery parts or the huge meat grinders. One night, he wraps a length of the thick tubing around his forearm to gain control, but when the water is turned on, the flow comes so fast and the force so great that the sudden ballooning out of the hose breaks his forearm. He is fired. Without his income, vital to the family, what else could his parents do than what they did? Emigrate. Take him away from Lenka. He wondered if this deliveryman, struggling under the weight of the 27

skinned, bloody limbless torso, had a life history like his. He wondered if he could

stand to eat meat.

From the other truck, two young men pushing dollies jogged up and into its

back bay and down and out with stacks of fruit crates and produce boxes. They

double-stepped under the banner and rolled straight inside. Vitezslav followed and

looked in, but it was too dark to see clearly to even the front of the aisles. The place must not yet have opened.

Sirens set the air wailing. Vitezslav jammed his fingers into his ears. A police

car, racing at freeway speed, fishtailed to a stop midway through the intersection.

Two officers jumped out and in mirror image extended their palms to halt all traffic.

An ambulance followed, slowing, as it rounded the corner where Vitezslav still stood.

The sirens halted, and he heard again that rending scream. When the scrawny white woman came into sight, her howling dissolved into sobs. Tears flooded the crevices of her cheeks. She kissed the head of the black man over and over again. Is that what it would take for him to get Lenka to kiss him again? A policeman lifted her gently, but she kicked and punched him. He lifted her off the ground and turned her sideways to clear space for the paramedics, who rushed around them, dropping to their knees. The first checked for a pulse at wrist and throat. The other used his finger to scoop phlegm and vomit out of the throat, and then commenced mouth-to- mouth resuscitation. They decided to commence chest compressions, taking turns. 28

A young man wandered out of the store. More than two meters tall, he might be mistaken for a basketball player out of uniform. But in khaki pants and a button- down, blue-striped shirt with a white collar, he seemed more likely a commuter headed to Wall Street. He made a checkmark on an old-style clipboard, then twirled his pencil so it seemed to float above his fingers. He looked at Vitezslav and shook his head.

“Sad,” he said.

“Yes, sad,” Vitezslav replied.

“Any day, anything can change.”

“Yes.”

“For them it just did— for the worse.”

‘Y es.”

“For others though, sometimes for the better.”

‘Y es.”

“You never know.”

“No,” Vitezslav said. “Store yours?”

“Belongs to the neighborhood, really.”

“Are you open?”

“If you need me to be.” He turned and with his head, signaled Vitezslav to follow him back to the entrance. “How may I help you?” 29

He continued to stride towards an antique cash register centered on an old

wooden counter, inlaid with mahogany swirls. Vitezslav trailed the pattern with his

finger.

“I’m hungry,” he said, smoothing his hand over the intricate surface. “You

have candy bars?”

The man smiled and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, we do not.” He unlocked the register, pushed on one of the keys,

and the cash drawer popped out. On the wall directly behind the man’s shoulder were

two frames, one with some sort of a document with fancy letters arching over a

name. The other held the photograph of a young man.

“Is you? In picture?”

The man turned and studied the image, as he slipped rubber bands off of

small stacks of bills, snapping the bands onto his wrist in a repeated easy flourish, while feeding the money into empty slots in the register’s drawer.

“No,” he said. “That’s my dad.”

Vitezslav leaned over the counter. Light reflected off a mirror that faced the sunrise made it hard to see. He shaded his eyes, as best he could, but he stood on his tiptoes so that his body blocked the sunlight. The document was a university diploma.

“You went to college?” 30

“Yes, so I did.”

“Very good.”

Below the other photograph was a small, brass plate. He lip-read an engraved birth and death date and a name. He caught his breath.

“Excuse. Your dad?”

“Um-huh,” the young man affirmed.

“Your dad,” he repeated. His cheeks burned. “Looks like you.”

“So he did,” the man agreed, while feeding other trays other denominations.

“I ask something, yes?”

The man’s hands froze with a stack of twenty-dollar bills. He straightened as though facing a firing squad without a blindfold.

“No need. Yes, he was the one.”

Vitezslav nodded several times. “I.. .1 knew him.”

“You did?”

“His name, not his face now.”

“You mean you knew him when he was a child.”

“When baby.”

The man looked pensive. “Hard to think he was ever a baby.”

“Yes. Cute baby. I helped.”

“How kind of you to help a baby who was my daddy.” 31

Vitezslav took all that in.

“A good baby.”

“Aren’t we all? I mean when we’re babies. Later things can go off-track.”

He turned and studied the photo in silence. “No one ever asks what sort of father he was,” the man continued, “and the answer to that one is he was a great one.”

“A great father. Good. Good. I did not know him then.”

“That never made it into the headlines.”

Vitezslav just stared for a moment, and then said, “I don’t read English so well.”

The young man squared his shoulders, raised his chin, and tightened his lips.

“A really great one,” he said. “Regardless of where you may have heard.”

Vitezslav nodded again and again.

The young man folded his arms and tilted his head back. “What? Is that so hard to believe?”

Vitezslav had so much to say he said nothing. He answered by shaking his head several times and forcing a smile that lifted the corners of his mouth but didn’t ripple up to his eyes. 32

The young man’s voice eased back a notch. “I guess a great father story is kind of rare around here.” He turned to the photo, and stared at the warm, easy-going face in the frame. “His name is my name, and it’s going over the door you came through.”

“Good. Good,” Vitezslav replied. He thought for a moment, then added,

“Best thing I ever did.”

“Never coming down,” the storeowner said.

“Later I thought it was the worst.”

“Don’t care who says what.”

“But it was best thing.”

Neither was listening to the other. The young man seemed to wake up and replay the words he’d been only vaguely attending to.

“You speaking of my daddy?”

“Yes.” Vitezslav grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. “It was. It was.”

“What’re talking about?”

“I have nothing to pay you for what you gave me,” Vitezslav muttered, studying the palm he released.

The young man smiled that same smile in the picture. “I still haven’t given you anything except attitude,” he said. “I’m sorry if I sounded unfriendly. Cruise the aisles and see if there’s something you’d eat. You may not like anything, though. Everything 33

here is organic or ‘humane” certified. You know, ‘Green Is The New Black”” He laughed.

Vitezslav chuckled, too.

“You smiling. I smiling. He smiling.”

The proprietor leaned in and seemed to measure his pupils.

“You high, Pal?”

“No, no—never.”

“Only kidding. You hungry?”

He shook his head back and forth. He studied his own face in the mirror, his frown replaced by a calm smile.

“Give food poisoning?”

“Why would I do that?”

“What about starving someone?”

“You’re right. I better get you fed.” He closed the cash register, reached behind him, and flipped several light switches up. Light showered down, and illuminated the store’s entire interior, spotlessly clean. He lifted a heavy wooden plank bridging the two sides of checkout. He passed under the barrier, came to the other side, and lowered it again.

“You don’t even know me, but you do that?” 34

“Sure. You’re like this place: a bet worth making even if lose the ticket and never know if I won or not.”

“Easy to lose lottery ticket.”

The storeowner picked up a small grocery basket, and herded Vitezslav towards an aisle of snack packets.

“And send loved one to sleep outside. Good thing or bad?”

“Bad. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Never do it.” He started tossing things into the basket. Trail mix. Health bars.

“You have woman?”

“So I do.”

“You wash toilet? Dishes?”

“If she needs me to, sure.”

“Even if she doesn’t?”

The young man laughed. ‘Yes, sometimes to surprise her. Let her know I love her.” He grinned at Vitezslav. “I’m such a liar. I’m no saint. I probably do it hoping to get laid.”

Vitezslav was taken aback. Then he burst into laughter. “Your dad did good things.”

“Lots of folks around here couldn’t name one.”

“I could.” 35

The young man didn’t seem to hear. At least he didn’t react or respond. He squatted beside a stack of cardboard produce containers with holes in the side. He unfolded the interlocking flaps and peered in.

“Let’s see what we got here. Lettuce. The water on the leaves will make you fat. Can’t have that.”

Vitezslav didn’t know how to interpret that. He combed his fingers through his hair, created a part on one side, and rearranged the general direction of the strands near it. The crease between his brows vanished. The storeowner took out a box cutter and opened another.

“Oranges. Apples. Bananas. A banana. Not as juicy, but not as messy as oranges.” He handed Vitezslav two who was too overwhelmed to react at all.

“Okay, okay, I read you,” he laughed, moving to another box. The lid had already been ripped from that one. He sorted through its tiny mandarins, round as tennis balls. He found the biggest, and held it up. “I’ll get you a bag to put it in. As for the other things like candy bars and jawbreakers, the convenience store down towards the bails bondsmen has all that stuff galore. Sorry I couldn’t help you more.”

“You did. Gave me what I needed, wanted.” Tears pooled on his lower lids, but the shop owner didn’t notice. He turned to pluck a cloth grocery bags off a display hanging on the customer side of the cash register. He lifted the items one by one from the basket and set them carefully inside the tote bag. 36

His deliverymen were trying to rotate a large box up from horizontal to vertical on their dolly, so it could fit through the door, but they were losing the battle.

“That’s my goal,” he laughed, “to give folks what the need, even if they think they don’t want it.”

“Yes, gave me a choice,” Vitezslav whispered. “Changed everything, everything.”

The young man laughed. “Wow! I was only trying to change where you shop.”

“Everything different than it seemed,” Vitezslav said. “Nothing same again ever.”

The young man shook his head and grinned. “Well, I’m puzzled, but tell you what: Exaggeration like that gets my day going better than a double-espresso.”

Vitezslav shook the storeowner’s hand with earnest formality. He bowed several times. The deliverymen began laughing, and he hoped it wasn’t at him, but suddenly he didn’t care. He laughed, too. He backed away a few feet and then faced in the direction he had been going backwards.

“I gave us him,” he told the pigeons. They flapped their wings wildly.

He resumed his walk, clear about his destination. Home. Going to that home, his second, his first one here. Where he’d learned to feel bad. He reached it quickly.

The old, towering structure was as it had last been, when he’d last seen it, except now abandoned, boarded up, and plastered with warnings about asbestos and lead paint. 37

He found his way around the corner and into the alley to the back entrance. He shoved the door open. The light streaming in sent rodents and cockroaches into far corners and immediate silence. The crackheads, who had taken up temporary residence, barely stirred. Vitezslav tiptoed politely past them, and found the old service elevator. He pushed the button and listened apprehensively to the grinding gears and clanking pulleys as they dropped the large, rusted cubicle towards him. The doors opened, and Vitezslav held his breath for a moment. He turned to climb the stairs instead, but reconsidered. There were so many. He entered the compartment just as the doors closed. His fear was gone. What could happen anyway? He pushed the top button, and rode the elevator all the way up to the seventeenth floor. He looked right, left, then right again as though crossing a dangerous intersection. He walked down the corridor, reeking of musk and a deathly sweetness. He paused at the number above the entrance of his family’s old apartment. The door was gone, torn from its hinges, and now lying inside on the floor. Boot prints decorated the wood by the doorknob. Probably kicked in. Probably long, long ago. Leaves spilled out into the hallway and piled up in drifts from the corridor into the center of the tiny living room. The walls, partly stripped down to ceiling plates and studs, partly pocked with irregularly shaped holes in the sheetrock arranged to evoke gaping cartoon drawings depicting terror or sorrow or regret. 38

Ancient plastic food containers bore tiny scars of tiny teeth that must have gnawed what was left when tossed aside. Even the floorboards had been pried up. He stepped over a length of lumber, perhaps once a joist that had fallen upside-down, its rusty nails pointing upwards like the spiked hair of young people he had known decades before. A moldy mattress in the middle of the room lay as though spread- eagled by streaming beams of light playing across horrifying stains of a variety of disturbing earth tones. In revulsion, Vitezslav averted his eyes to the ceiling and sidestepped past it. He took his time maneuvering around what appeared to be dangerous debris everywhere no longer with recognizable form or purpose.

The window, too, was completely gone. Not a sash, not a pulley, not a shard of glass remained in the gutted frame. Vitezslav stepped out onto the roof, and looked up towards where Mrs. Carstenson had lived. He wondered if that fire escape was still hers, if she had to manage alone so high up, so infirm.

He shuffled through a covering of blackened leaves that climbed up above his cuffs as he set each foot down. The tarpaper crunched beneath his shoes as he made his way cautiously down two windows. He gauged distance and trajectory from his old window to a few yards out, to the spot. He changed his course and took a couple of more steps forward. He stopped. He kicked the leaves. He swept his foot around in small circles. His toe bumped against something hard. 39

He went back to the old apartment and looked in. On a couch, without cushions, was an old broom. Had it been awaiting his return? He reached in, got hold of the bristles, and eased the thing out, wincing as the sill planted a splinter into his thumb. He bit his lip and squinted, and then grasped the handle’s greasy shaft. He backtracked to where he had paused. He kicked aside more rubbish and began brushing everything away. The positive and negative posts of a battery appeared. He hesitated for a moment, but then leaned over and lifted it up. He had forgotten how heavy it was. He set it down beside where it had lain for decades. At the bottom of the cube of mulch was a small skeleton cushioned by a bed of fur. Poor litde thing.

Wouldn’t have hurt anything, really, Vitezslav now knew.

He sighed and stood and remembered once again. She could have killed that woman. What if she had? Maybe she did. How would they ever know? She was right when she said, “that’s not important.” Nor was whatever it was she thought was. He wandered over to the edge of the roof. It had always been dangerous before and was even more so now. Whatever lip there had been to give one pause at its border had crumbled and collapsed. When? Where? That wasn’t important either. He felt so light, light enough to fly. Not like a dove, but a pigeon. Where he came from they had the same name. Smiling for the first time in so long, he stood looking down and down and down. It was so very far, and time so very short, and he had an 40

appointment he no longer feared to keep. Who cared what she had to say? He stepped back and turned to do just that which he’d never thought he could do.

He had something to say. 41

Day of the Living

The friend entered the room, but stopped and looked down at the Foley bag on the floor. More blood than urine seemed to be burbling into it. The wife lay propped up at a forty-five degree angle, slurring something about her nurse. The husband stood rigidly before his wife, nodding yes. She said something about the way the guy had cleaned her up, the way he had examined her unnecessarily. The husband whipped his head like he was stapling his heart back into his chest. He looked over at their friend and smiled.

“Look who’s here,” he said to his wife. She did, but her eyes crossed a little and her head lolled about as though frayed neck muscles were unraveling. She was connected to all sorts of tubes coming down from IV poles, and up and under her, and around and through her blankets and gown and bandages and bags.

“Hi there,” the friend said. She grinned as though she were the first on earth to see a sunrise. The husband zipped his parka.

“Oh, ah, oo,” she ooed and ahhed. “Thank you for coming! We love you.

Don’t we love him?”

“Yes, we love him,” the husband echoed, stroking her cheek with his knuckle.

He faced the friend and asked, “Could you watch her, while I go have a litde conversation?” 42

“Of course,” the friend said, and the husband, shoulders vibrating, crushed

him in a bear hug, and then grabbed his umbrella and left abruptly. The friend

swallowed hard, and turned to the wife.

“And I lo\ tyou both more than anything. Thankjw/ for letting me in to see you. I wasn’t sure of the rules in IC.”

“Oh.. .oh.. .what? But.. .but...” and her eyes fluttered shut. The friend stared

at her. He bit his lip. She looked dead, but her breathing indicated she wasn’t. She was thirty-five, growing older by the second. He waited and waited, afraid to make a

sound by sitting down or moving at all. Time passed. Some voices outside grew loud

enough to alarm him. He tiptoed into the corridor closing the door to keep the sound

out of the room and to find who needed hushing. He stepped over some darkened

flower petals in the little puddles left on the seamless vinyl by foot traffic. He looked to the end of the hall, and there the husband was, leaning over the ledge of a horseshoe counter, talking louder and louder.

The friend quickened his pace. A police officer, sitting in a chart outside another one of the rooms, stood, and moved towards the husband. The friend noticed and did the same thing, but sped up to get there first, weaving around a janitor as she slowly shoved her string mop from left to right, back and forth, back and forth, working dreamily to swish up the clumps of snow dislodged from visitor shoes. 43

“It is not cool to make a woman spread for twenty-minutes to check a catheter and make poop jokes while emptying her bag,” the husband shouted.

“That’s not what happened,” the nurse insisted. “Not exactly.”

“So my wife’s a liar?” The husband knitted his eyebrows in and down, tightened his lips over his feral teeth. The friend knew the husband’s strength, that he could easily vault over and land right in the middle of the shared workspace, no problem, but he used that strength first on his best friend, when he got too close, by straight-arming his palm hard against the guy’s chest, keeping him out of his way.

“Even if it had,” the nurse said, “for heaven’s sake, joking around cheers patients up.” He stepped back from the divider and folded his arms. He was tall and big across the torso, strong, too—maybe a match.

“Pervert.” The husband’s tongue had a sharp tip that stabbed deep. The police officer stepped closer.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said. “We need you to keep your voice down?”

The husband studied him, then constructed a smile of civility.

“I’m sorry. I’m a little unhappy about something personal.”

“If you could keep it down, we’d all appreciate it,” the cop said. “This is acute- care.” His voice was controlled, quiet but decisive, and his eyes seemed to be assessing things about the husband’s every nuanced motion that no one else would even have known to watch for. 44

“Intensive cate.”

“Acute, too.”

The two men appraised each other.

“Yes, sorry,” the husband said, backing off. “I do know where we are, however,” he added.

A middle-aged woman came through the doors leading to the operating

theater. She wore blue surgical scrubs with a pager and a cell phone attached to the drawstring of her pants. The husband stepped into her path.

“Doctor, I need you to assign another nurse to my wife.” He pointed to the male assistant. “He’s creeping her out.”

The surgeon and the nurse exchanged a look.

“She needs someone now,” the friend emphasized. “I was watching her, but she’s alone now.” The doctor’s eyes darted from man to man to man. Bags of flesh, bruised crescents below her eyes, were so heavy they revealed the vivid bloodshot below her pupils. She yawned.

“Okay, of course,” she said, pushing a loose curl back under her surgical cap.

The nurse’s mouth moved with what must have been a big angry something filling it.

He shook his head back and forth, back and forth, maybe trying to help that big angry something escape or maybe trying to lock it back in, as he then caved in and sauntered away. 45

“Thank you so much,” the husband said.

“Let’s go to lunch,” the friend said, but the husband was approaching the police officer. The friend hurried back.

“Come on, Pal,” he said. “Elevator’s on the way.”

The husband ignored him. He was still in motion, pacing so much closer and

faster to the other patient’s room that another officer inside, seated at the foot of the bed, jumped up and ran out to join his partner. Both were armed.

The patient was imprisoned there, too, cuffed to the bed frame, beside IV poles and a swivel tray with a vacuum drinking cup, a box of latex gloves, and what may have once been Tater Tots and lime gelatin now a single bolus spat out on a paper towel.

“State paying for him?” the husband asked.

The badge in the room, guarded by the other officer outside, nodded.

“Free room and board, drugs, and his own staff,” the husband continued.

The prisoner opened his eyes. “Let ’em alone, Buddy,” he called out.

“My girl is capped-out. Radiation, chemo, surgery—approaching seven figures, Brother, and I’m paying for you, too?” The officers closed ranks.

“Elevator’s here,” the friend said. He got the husband by the forearm and pulled him away. “Time to eat.” When the doors opened, the friend herded the husband in, still in a staring contest with the cops. 46

At the ground floor, they exited in silence, eyeballed by a security guy talking on a walkie-talkie near a tiny hospitality shop and an information desk adjoining a

shallow, open niche. The husband got something out of his pocket.

“I have to drop off a check,” he said. “You may come or just wait.”

The friend paused, his eyes sweeping from the husband to a sign that read

“Financial Affairs” stenciled on a window with a hole cut in the glass. He looked at

the husband; he looked at the sign, back and forth. “I’ll wait here,” he finally said. He watched the husband take the two steps in to figures imprecise due to blinding reflected light. The friend nodded at the security guy, who nodded back but did not

smile. He just stood his ground, looking tough. The friend studied items on display in the shop window: a miniature Christmas tree with flashing colored LEDs, a manger scene in a basket inhabited by chocolate Biblical figures, a polar bear with a halo hugging a pink bunny in swaddling clothes, a menorah shaped like a Moose with nine tines and a yarmulke. Suddenly some cell phone blared out a maniacal hyena ring­ tone. The security guy clawed at his jacket pocket but the zipper was jammed.

Stammering “Sorry, sorry,” he abandoned his post and disappeared around a corner, the laugh going on and on and on down the long, long corridor.

And then things got loud behind the friend. He turned back and jumped aside as the husband powered towards him, almost bowling him over. In the payment alcove, several people, more visible now, flanked a clerk weeping at the window. One 47

had an arm around her shoulder. The other comforters glared out at the husband and

friend. One muttered something inaudible.

“Let’s eat,” the husband said, swinging his umbrella like a hammer. The doors

at the front of the building slid open automatically and ushered in streams of

snowflakes. “Great, just great. Blizzard last night, thundershowers this morning, and

now this again.”

People outside leaned way forward to keep their balance in the howling wind.

The friend flipped his parka hood over his head, and pointed across the street.

“That looks open.”

The husband nodded, ignored the red light, and stepped right into traffic. The

cars weren’t going that fast, because of the ice beneath the snow piling up, but a cab almost hit him. He raised his umbrella like a bat, and started to swing it, but stopped.

“Don’t worry,” he laughed. “I’m not going to do anything crazy.”

The friend laughed, too, but not very hard. He joined the husband in dodging

slow cars that had the right of way even after the two men reached the door of the restaurant. They went into the sudden warmth, and took the table by the window where they could have seen everything if there was something to see besides chaos.

They wiggled out of their coats and examined menus lying on the place settings.

“I’ve never had Vietnamese food,” the friend said, using his forefinger to stir through unsalted nuts and assorted seafood crackers in a small dish between them. 48

“I love it,” the husband said. “You will, too. Let me order. Trust me.”

The waitress came—attractive, young. The husband ordered for them both in

Vietnamese. The girl didn’t need to write down a word. Her tips probably exceeded

average. The two friends sat in silence, nibbling on the snacks. Finally the husband

spoke.

“When we got the CT and PET scans back, I thought, ‘Okay, here we are

again.’ It’s not like at first, back three years ago when I felt all those stages, you

know—outrage and anger and the ‘why us?’ stuff. This time it was more like ‘Okay,

third time is different.’ We’re into this realm where neither of us asks what

percentages we were looking at now. The very first time we had the guts, but now we

don’t.”

“Numbers are just numbers,” the friend remarked, but fell silent. He sipped

his water, but spit an ice cube into his napkin. The waitress saw that and came over.

“Too cold?” She smiled and threaded one side of her long, black hair behind

her ear.

“Yes, too cold. Do Vietnamese restaurants serve coffee?” the friend asked.

“We do. Be right back.” She started off, but turned back to the husband. “Oh, and did you need anything else, too?”

“It’s not on the menu.”

“Maybe we have it anyway,” she replied sweetly, innocently. 49

“Guaranteed you don’t. Guaranteed.”

The waitress looked at the friend, shrugged a little-, smiled, and glided away.

The husband continued, “After the doctors told us what they were thinking of

doing, I asked her if we should get a second opinion, and she went ballistic.”

“Mad, yeah, sure, of course.”

“This was drastic stuff, so all I was wondering was what was the point, if it wasn’t going to help that much.”

“Oh,” the friend said.

“I shouldn’t have said, ‘cost-benefit’ analysis.”

“Who knows,” the friend said.

The waitress brought the coffee, in a Irish coffee mug, tall and slender like

her. She turned it so his left finger would go in the loop.

“I noticed you were eating left-handed,” she smiled, looking down.

“So I was,” the friend said, bending towards the rim to inhale a thin wisp of steam.

The husband peered out the window at the snow, his crowfeet twitching a little. He looked back at the friend.

“She said if she found it wasn’t going to work, she’d take a pile of pills.”

The waitress brought them salads with tuffs among the greenery of curly purple strands that could have been beets or could have been turnips intertwined 50

with other thin shavings that could have been orange or jicama or could have been carrot threads. She also set down the main dishes. The husband’s picked up his fork and poked something that smelled like curry but in a crusty shell. The friend’s plate was littered with rectangular shapes in peanut sauce on top of something that looked close to brown rice but wasn’t.

“I understand. Anything can happen any day,” the friend said.

“Can and will,” the husband said. The waitress came to them.

“How’s everything?”

The friend smiled up at her. “Fine, wonderful,” he said.

“Just let me know if you need anything else.” She felt the side of the friend’s glass. “I’ll warm this up.” She returned to the serving area.

The husband smirked. “Does that happen to you all the time?”

“Does what happen?”

“Do young women hit on you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you notice how she’s been watching you and talking to you?” He was smiling, encouraging.

“Not really.” 51

“That has never happened to me in my life,” the husband said. He took a bite

and chewed, lost in thought for a while. “Not even gay guys hit on me.” And then he

suddenly began to recite:

“ .. for the year runs fast,

and always runs different,

start and finish are never the same ’

—know what that’s from?”

The friend hurried to swallow his mouthful, and then replied, “Sir Gawain.”

“I knew you’d know. Of course you’d know. Of course. I think of that every

day. Every hour.”

The friend put his fork down and took a very deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m not

feeling very intellectual today.” His voice broke, but he coughed the wobble away, while tugging his shirt away from his torso like the fabric was an accordion. “Is it really hot in here?”

“No,” the husband answered, and then his face assumed an angelic softness.

“You know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. Nothing.” His declaration was louder than necessary.

“I know that. Everyone knows that.”

“Ever scooped out a pumpkin at Halloween?”

The friend tilted his chin slightly. ‘Yeah, sure,” he said. 52

“I mean really scooped it out, seeds and pulp and all that gooey sticky gunk?”

“Many times,” the friend said, surveying the other tables, the customers seated at them, at the wait staff behind the counter, the cooks in the kitchen looking out.

“We like to bake the seeds and make soup and stuff.”

“Nothing left in there,” the husband said. “Just a big hollow space, everything gone, no nerves, no nothing, everything sewn closed. Everything.” He dug into his entree’s pastry shell so hard the fork scraped on the bowl holding it.

The friend stared down at his plate. He closed his eyes. He slid his hands quickly down both sides of his face from hairline to jaw. He wiped his napkin under his eyes and across his cheeks. “Forgive me. You don’t need this. Normally, I’m totally in control.”

The husband smiled again. “I love her so much, I’d go down on her right now, bags or not. Clit gone or not.”

The friend choked, put down his utensils, and scanned the others in the restaurant in alarm. He stared at the husband long and hard, but the guy was suddenly focused on his cell phone, which beamed a new text message, that made him frown and begin typing rapidly.

The waitress came back to fill the friend’s cup, but he shook his head no. She smiled so very sweetly, looked into his eyes, almost spoke, but then shook her head, with a funny little grin, while the husband continued typing. The friend pantomimed 53

tallying up a meal check. Blushing, she looked down and nodded, but as she turned towards the cash register, the friend put his hand on her forearm and handed her his credit card, just as the husband set his phone down on the table.

“It’s not like I’m getting religious on you,” he proclaimed, voice getting louder again, and everyone was looking at them in silence from the other tables. “But I realize there’s a sort of unity of everything—in every moment. Every step of the way has its terrors— and its beauties. ‘To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’

Just think what birth is like? It’s not easy either.”

“We’d better get back. She needs you, and I’ve got to be in court,” the friend said.

“In court? For what?”

“Promised to help an undergrad out,” the friend said. “The lawyer is picking me up out front in a few minutes.” The husband squinted, so the friend added, “But I can come back. Do you want me to?”

The waitress brought the bill in a narrow leather folder, the friend signed, and removed his receipt. The husband watched the easy interaction in silence.

“Do you want me to?” the friend repeated to the husband, now evaluating the waitress, looking her up and down.

“Thank you so much, gentlemen,” she said to them both, while resting her hand gently on the friend’s shoulder. “I really hope to see you again soon.” She 54

returned the folder to another woman behind a counter, then picked up a thick coat,

slid into it, and hurried out the door, waving over her shoulder at the friend.

“ “Your absence has gone through me like...’ ”? The husband began, but then looked at the friend eyebrows raised and eyes wide open.

‘“.. .thread through a needle,’ the friend answered. “W. S. Merwin. Let’s go right now.”

“I wish I could haul this whole country before a judge,” the husband suddenly boomed. “I didn’t mean to offend the clerk. It wasn’t her fault. Do you believe me?”

He leaned forward staring into his friend’s eyes. “Do you?”

The friend looked down. “Of course I believe you,” he said. “Come on.

Traffic’s slow already, and the snow’s not going to help me get to court on time.”

“I love being a dad, and if I have to do it alone, I’ll do it,” the husband stammered. “You know, ‘Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness lady...’

Marlowe, a genius.

“Marvell,” the friend said. “He wrote it.”

The husband seemed not to hear. He was on a rant, a loud one.

“Arts are essential.h e bellowed. “Just ask our neighbors. We’re surrounded by rock stars and movie icons. How weird is that? But are they Marlowe or the mystery writer of King Arthur and the Green Knight? History may judge.” The husband mumbled, 55

his threads less and less easy to follow. “Or may not...maybe not.” He was barely whispering now. The friend didn’t correct him this time.

They walked out into the blizzard. The friend put his parka hood over his head, but the husband did nothing. He held his umbrella up like a hammer again, swinging it up and down. Then he swung it like a bat, back and forth. Then he putted with it in front of his shins.

“I’ll put both hands under her armpits—” the husband began.

“Don’t,” the friend said.

“—my palms touching the sides of her breasts, and I’d move my thumbs around the top and down towards the nipples, until they grow firm under them.”

A car horn honked.

“I see a cab,” the friend said, hailing one at the intersection. “I’d better hurry, and you’d better get back in there where you’re most needed. Should I come back? I don’t know what to do?”

“I thought you said the lawyer was picking you up,” the husband observed.

“He’s late. At least one of us has to be on time.”

“Okay,” the husband said. “Okay.” The taxi made a u-turn and pulled up next to them. The husband opened the door of the vehicle, double-parked in the street.

“I’ll text him to let him know,” the friend explained.

“You’re our best friend,” the husband said. 56

“Where to, Pal?” the driver asked.

“I’m there for you both,” the friend said. “Always. Don’t forget that. Both of

you, one of you, the kids, however many of you.”

“Where to?”

“Just a sec,” the friend snapped. The husband stood in the middle of the

street, silent, his hand still holding the cab’s door open. Snow was blowing in. He

looked up at the flakes racing towards his cheeks, tiny snowballs pelting him in the

face. “I won’t forget it,” the husband said. “I’ll definitely not forget.”

The annoying driver car came up behind the cab, and honked even more

furiously. The husband turned slowly towards the sound. The friend closed the door

and whispered to the driver.

“I don’t know. Just drive around the block a few times.”

“You’re the boss,” the driver said, releasing the brake.

“No, wait,” the friend said. He rolled down the passenger window in spite of

the snow.

“Get on up there where you’re needed,” he shouted. “And take care of yourself”

“That’s so very thoughtful of you,” the husband said still planted in the street.

“I’m fine. I’m fine. We’re fine.” 57

He stood paralyzed, just as the impatient driver behind the cab leaned on the horn and roared out and around them so fast the friend couldn’t see who it was—a young girl? The waitress maybe?—hidden by snow falling faster on the windshield than the wiper blades could keep clear. The husband took a swing at the car as it fishtailed past him, and he lost his balance, and he slipped on the ice, and landed hard in the street, and other motorists squealed to a stop, and someone jumped out, even as the cab also sped off, and someone else there hurried off the curb to help the others, several others helping the husband back to his feet, and from a distance as everything faded towards the horizon into the furious swirls of snow clouding all views into or out of the cars and trucks and cabs and busses roaring onward ahead, onward, it seemed the husband was crying, crying very hard, holding on to strangers. 58

Fellow Travelers

Trouble was David, to the best of his knowledge, had never inhabited a thousand-year-old scroll painting, so who was this that did? In the Polaroid image, stubs of trees jutted up and out and downward from crags and punctured mist rolling on the ground erasing details beside a bus, a bus with chipped paint on its side suggesting blurred hanzi. Wondering who even had a Polaroid camera with film still in it, he shaded his eyes from the rising sun’s judgmental glare aimed straight at him.

He’d never had a hangover like this one before. Or had he? How would he know, really? There’d been so many. Just because Bettina despised them and was jealous of the attention he showered on them didn’t mean he loved them more than her, though that was what she had proclaimed in a hissy fit, on her final, embarrassing exit from the Lincoln Center rehearsal space while the strings re-tuned for his new piece. He did love her, he really did, but that sauce loved him more and was a demanding bitch.

He raised his head and squinted before him, scanning here and there. The effort clarified nothing. The photo wasn’t the only thing confusing. There were no examples of civilization’s usual signage either—at corners, over doors, in windows.

None. He eased his head back down to the earth. The blasting heat suggested he might be at or near the equator. But the grainy texture of the ground, the odd shapes of the one-story structures, the unidentifiable animal turds near where he lay, the 59

absence of anything modern anchored him no better than his back and butt plastered flat in the middle of the street and yet unable to stop his bed-whirlies. He raised his head again briefly. More a square than a street, it was.

Like a spider, his left-hand fingers crawled slowly away from his hip, stabbed by a throbbing sciatic nerve, entering the backpack visible in his peripheral vision. At the touch of glass, he hoped it still contained some 120-proof, byejoe red. Palm and three outer fingers supported the bottle; thumb and first finger wiggled the cork free.

Together they moved the solution towards David’s lips. Top of the mornin’ t’ya, down the hatch, hair o’ the dog, he thought. No doubt ’bout it, he’d soon be fit as a cliche. He lip-synced to the song in his head, “London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle coming down.. Except it was Berlin calling. Kent

Nagano on the philharmonic’s podium. The entire classical world waiting—to watch on pay-per-view, stream through webcast, access later by podcast— for his premiere.

Even Bettina he’d bet, would be there, yes even she again, behind the violas and in front of the bassoons, if only to prove her virtuosity on the frightening oboe solo, especially after the doubt her fiance himself had expressed to Nagano about her ability to pull it off, really just to get even and really now much regretted.

David redirected his attention to the photo. Where he was now was not where the photo seemed to have been snapped. That was good to know. Still in question, though, was how it had come into his possession. The moment frozen in time was of 60

someone being dragged off that bus, a bus crowned by a mystery, too—a drooping, five-foot-high bag running the length and width of the roof, reminding David of an ice pack, something he could use right then. Employees of some state appeared to be the agents of action. Local police? State military? But who exacdy was the focus of such attention? The subject wore a fur Cossack trapper’s cap, the twin of one David had picked up in Moscow on one of his freebie jaunts. One earflap was folded on top, while the other dangled down, flopping about like Goofy’s ears in old Disney cartoons. The individual in question also was shod in NB 574 Clips. David owned one of that most rare of rare pairs, too. He’d scored it on a weekender to Jamaica from an unsavory violinist ready to sell his shoes for rapid cash in order to purchase the services of a very young boy. David winced. Oh. So that’s who this idiot in the snapshot was: he, himself, and him.

Still, he did amuse himself, inappropriate as he seemed to have been. He’d always pushed musical limits, but this was social. Cultural, really. Even transnational.

How very daring he appeared to have been somewhere, sometime, in the probably recent past, for the photo was unambiguous about his right hand having wedged itself inside the shirt of a human twenty-something, also in a uniform—perhaps military, too, but profession-specific in any case, looking about as comfortable as fabric made of balsa. He pondered what the proceedings implied. A hint of boobies, nearly strapped down to invisibility behind that shirt, ergo said uniformed person was 61

female, which made it even more admirable, the closer he looked, that his other hand was jammed inside the top of.. .of.. .what should he call them? Certainly not jeans or khakis. Trousers. Everything in that four-by-four-inch square looked as out-of-date as

“trousers.” The young woman did not look pleased. Nor her companions. But David did. Held aloof and horizontal to the ground, he wore a wacky grin and delighted saucer eyes that pivoted towards the camera lens contrasting with the other principals’ humorless, flat-line mouths and almond eyes roofed by epicanthic folds in what must have been an extraordinary misunderstanding. One, you would think, later in life they should thank him for: A grand tale to tell their grandchildren, when they were old enough to hear of such things. The woman was a young one and, the closer

David, looked a likely contender with the Four Beauties in shaming flowers, making fish forget how to swim, and enticing birds to fall from the sky. All right, he thought, way to go Dude, good for you, whoever you were.

Another thought relieved him: This was a Polaroid, and it was in his, not

Bettina’s or some tabloid writer’s, possession eliminating the horrors of pixel distribution via the snoopy Internet. Supporting oneself as an airline employee, coordinating air travel for government officials and contractors, bureaucrats and operatives, had advantages that composing modern orchestral music did not. Steady pay was primary. And while his music had a hard time finding a place on music 62

stands, that music’s composer could almost always find a seat on a free flight to anywhere on the globe.

There were disadvantages, though. The excesses of classical musicians equaled and often exceeded that of rock stars. Not so at the airlines, overpopulated with characters actually choosing to wear company “pilot wings” on their lapels even out on the street—tight-ass types ever prepared to issue the horrifying threat of

“intervention” at work. That had not been fair. Not cool. Why should a supervisor, half his age, care about private fun when David wasn’t on the clock and simply enjoying the perk of an empty first-class seat? Didn’t he bring them occasional borrowed glory with which to seed dull corporate newsletters and fluff up occasional industry publications, especially when he was photographed with luscious eye-candy from the reed section as easy on the eyes as the ears? That Bettina was perhaps the best-looking musician on the planet also had advantages and disadvantages. For

David that is. She knew what to do with it always, which was generally nothing. She was not in a profession where it mattered at auditions the way it might have in the world of modern opera, where the plus-size sopranos and tenors were falling out of favor.

He frowned at his own mental dialogue. Why, oh why did he think that way?

Bettina was not a fetish item. She was the only thing clear enough in his mind to miss. Wasn’t that something? Didn’t that alone count as worthwhile? If he were able 63

to remember even just one thing that preceded this adventure, he would wager—he would hope—that it might be something revolving around his having invited Bettina to join him, gratis, in celebration of his having secured a major placement in a New

Music performance that would appear not merely online but in the print version of the Sunday arts section of the New York Tims and on the following week’s cover of

Der Spiegel. That would reflect the he, he strove hardest to be. In a worrisome flash, he suddenly recalled he had a far-less appealing even loathsome encounter with a prudish corporate inquisitor scheduled for the coming Monday.

He thought a moment on that. Monday was a relative term, wasn’t it, related to other days of a week, and when it was and how far from now he hadn’t a clue and that added gut-churning urgency to the need for its determination. He realized his vision was blurred due to mucous coiled like capellini, but more the length and girth of platyhelminthes on the surface of his eyes. He extracted them carefully in long white strands. Everything was relative, and even more—strange, random. For instance, these extractions could host small guests balancing on them, miniature tightropes from his lower lids to the tips of his fingers. If one or more toppled off, who would notice, who would miss, who would remember?

He rolled over onto his belly. A sudden cool relief from the unconscionable heat surprised him. He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked under him to see why. Oh, urine. Well how do you do? That tiny puddle he welcomed in this inferno. 64

He settled down into it, and gazed at the photo looking for more clues. His head cast a shadow now, which made some parts easier to interpret and others less so. In- or out-of-focus, the logograms on the side of the dull green bus were indecipherable, therefore incomprehensible. Those Huangshan mountains and pines jutting up, and out, and down were more metaphoric—feral dragon teeth, poking through clouds, that had stumbled and collapsed to the earth, and definitely not from here that sprouted not a single tree.

David sat up and swallowed the last swig. All better soon. But no more educated. His blackouts always kept their secrets, demanded he connect the dots on his own. What had happened in some there that got him here? And who else knew of yet another of his forcible removals? The photographer? One who might post Flickr albums potentially available to Monday’s inquisition team if there had been more than one camera available? He rummaged through his backpack. Even if 86ed from one country, his passport was still with him. That was promising. His wallet, too, with some twenties, a couple of fifties, and two credit cards. That was reassuring. A cell phone, still twenty-three percent charged, declared “no service.” He looked up into the sky and towards things down lower. No towers. Nothing to help him connect to the rest of the world. Disconnection was something David understood well. How did people survive before GPS, Facebook, Twitter? By compass and map? Did anyone use such things anymore? More pleasing, if less practical, was a card from Bettina, in 65

German—all the sweeter because of its shared-secret-language effect. David’s fingers

dipped back in and hopped over oily wads whose stink released by touch alone was

too revolting for continued exploration. He would undertake that examination only

after he could drown the foulness under water. Which was where? Where he came

from water exceeded sand. The clothes might have to wait. Still, these key items felt

like a four-leaf clover. All was not all lost after all. He re-read the card from Bettina,

and felt anchored again in spite of that unpleasantness back at rehearsal, in spite of

this mega-blackout of unknown duration.

He opened the back jacket of his passport. Official stamps from hither and yon were more mystery than memory: Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, Korea,

China. A sheet fell out folded over and over. He opened it, read it, smiled, and then

laughed. He held a cargo, “free-on-board” receipt that listed two luggage items and a padded crate containing rare Asian instruments to be shipped to the States from

Beijing.

Of course, of course, now he remembered. Dots were connecting. Like a

school of iridescent fish, rich sounds of those cultures swarmed brightly and warmly and wildly into his ears, jolting him happily as he considered how soon he might coax them into his music as well. So that was why he’d been where he’d been.

He couldn’t wait to see if Alex Ross could stretch his language to exceed that he had once found to describe David’s earlier work when he had proclaimed in The 66

New Yorker, “Containing what at first seem adjunctive and disjunctive elements, from handcrafted instruments—old as harmony, new as uninvited DJ s to the concert hall; bowed and plucked, blown into and struck upon—rose and lingered tonal blends to the level of the newly essential and made tuning rubber bands seem simple.”

“We are as he says,” David had whispered to Bettina the night he’d showed her that very sentence and then the solo he’d written that only she could play. “Just you wait and see.. .‘newly essential’.” Then he kissed her for the first time.

So this voyage, merely missing a known beginning and ending, was after all an apparent victory not a defeat, not merely a bender, but an essential step in a vision quest. A mission for the world that justified having had such a time on the other side of the planet from the one where he faced all sorts of workaday judgments and other world adulation and applause. Besides, weren’t touring musicians supposed to party like there’s no tomorrow?

Yet, this was that tomorrow, but what exact day of the week was that? Here, now, in this blistering dawn’s unnerving Fata Morgana, thought of getting back was not as terrible as he had first worried. What scolding had he not heard and learned to ignore, even as they had increased? And Bettina would surely be at their (well his) apartment in Chelsea whenever fluffy, thirty-pound Petya would want—never need— to be fed. David fantasized re-appearing at just such a moment. They would reunite, laugh at the misunderstanding, pop over “the pond,” and visit Maestro Nagano 67

together, present him the ancient instruments for the largo and andante sections. Like pieces of a puzzle connecting faster and faster, things were coming back.

David looked around. Nothing here looked like Asia. It didn’t even look like morning, really. That blood-red mirage of a sun bounced like a ball on a wall holding back the desert. Or was that due to his weak neck muscles?

He reviewed what he had learned so far this fine morning. If nothing else, it must be too early for the locals to rob a tourist who had lost his way. He eased himself up on one knee, and then another. He slung his backpack over his shoulder, feeling weak-kneed indeed. And that feeling allowed another piece to snap into place:

He recalled one of the protestors holding up placards outside the national museum as he left Tiananmen Square had knocked him to his knee while decrying national vandalism cultural appropriation. At least in this case, officials had been on the side of the artist, and his mission, plus a few gratuities, had uncurled the fingers of the

State from cases holding the priceless relics. David recalled he’d been in a suit and tie.

Yes, a suit. The one he wore for such things, not the cargo pants he’d soiled here.

Perhaps that’s why he hadn’t ended up in some gulag after the bus adventure. Yes, a gift to humanity he was, or at least one he was bringing, no matter what the unruly crowd had chanted, no matter what his day-job supervisor back in midtown-

Manhattan might have to say. The laugh would be on her once the reviews appeared.

A sudden turmoil in his guts warned him that he was in danger. 68

He moved very slowly, very carefully down the street, with his chin lifted a bit, so as not to appear to be staggering, though that frayed sciatic nerve wasn’t helping.

He turned a corner to get the sun to his back. He could see some motion up ahead.

People were waking up. Their dwellings looked like huts from a cartoon show with characters with toothpaste dabs for hair. But there was no foliage around. He moved towards the residents. That seemed like the best direction to be going. He gave in to the limp. A limp was not disreputable. If this was a war-torn land, then it might even be honorable, praiseworthy. Sand swirled on the road lazily at each intersection in a breeze so tiny that the dust devil paused as though to look in each direction before crossing to the other side.

A woman sweeping in front of a door, looked up, seemed to see him coming, and raising her scarf in front of her mouth and nose, hurried back inside. David paused, surprised at her rush, then resumed approaching the spot she had abandoned.

He was glad to see a man rush out from the doorway through which she had vanished. But he, too, went back in immediately. Other doors opened, other people came out, all staring at David briefly before escaping from something, from him.

Why? The flurry could not have been personal or based on knowledge of his transgressions. Had they never seen a white man whose wrinkles hosted a few days’ stubble? Who were these strange people whose skin was more ochre than ebony?

North Africa, he would have guessed, if he hadn’t apparently been tossed out of 69

China. He could not rule out the possibility that he could be in any of the dozen plus countries bordering it—one of the “stans”—Kazakhstan? Kyrgystan? Tajikistan?

Pakistan? Afghanistan? Not to worry. If he could make it to a city, he could find an airport, and in that airport an airline with reciprocal arrangements for airline employees. It was not total desert here. At least not like in photos in travel magazines.

That disorienting absence of signs was as odd as the lack of phone wires or satellite dishes on the sandy roofs.

A pack of dogs trotted around a corner on the stone footing beside the building entrances. They froze and glowered at him, their sloppy jowls wet with who knew what. Adrenalin jolted David, but as fear subsided, he felt glad for the help in awakening further. The gang whirred and zigzagged in this direction, then that, then sprinted off. Whatever their breed, it probably would not have helped David determine where he was. But he savored the way the click, click, click of their nails was abruptly muffled when they rushed into the sandy street. His intestines, already inflamed by the anticipation of facing the music at work, churned with this new excitement.

Out beyond a clump of dwellings, he saw what he hoped might be an outhouse. He went there. The nearer he got, the more it morphed. It took on the appearance of an old phone booth. Then more that of a bus stop. Then into some sort of a shrine. Even as he finally entered, he had no way to determine a shrine to 70

what. Fame didn’t shout loudly across time. At chest level, was a shelf, where sand had created miniature dunes, burying the stubs of votive candles. Key sections of ancient walls had collapsed, leaving only a few decorative hints, complex patterns in faded fresco. Most visible was a kind of nothingness, an absence of color, as though a picture frame or mirror had been removed, leaving just lightened rectangles, the opposite of shadows.

Oh well. He wasn’t here to do archaeology, but latrine reconnaissance.

Looking everywhere very quickly, he went behind the section of wall providing the most shelter, dropped trow, squatted, and disgorged a murky flood that must have clogged his intestines to his pyloric valve. At least he had missed his socks and the backs of his hiking boots. No one on the upper floors of the airline offices or the front row of the Berlin Philharmonic would soon be checking his latrine hygiene, so he quickly hoisted his pants, apologized to whatever powers may have once ruled here, and staggered out into the sand.

The greatest power here now was Bettina, and he wondered when he would get the chance to tell her. He climbed a slight incline to see what he could see besides sand, the dominant feature from which the village structures rose. He saw no one.

No one paying him attention. No one paying attention to anything. Was Bettina paying attention, frustrated by a distance her lashing tongue could not reach, nor the softness of her lips that counterbalanced such episodes? Might she even recall his 71

snoring fondly? She had once claimed it comforted her, but not for long. It became a relentless drill piercing even earplugs forcing her to banish him to the guest room.

Even being a disruption in her thinking would mean she was thinking of him. A place to start. To restart.

He circled the outskirts of the village, looking for a way to enter without being seen. He found a deserted section with buildings tilting so much that their roofs touched as their bases sloped downward. Beyond them, a thin road wound out of town and vanished into a sinkhole that would be quicksand if it rained. He surfed down the dunes and studied the path out, too narrow for cars, maybe too narrow for carts, a zigzagging maze like a set from German silent horror films. He hoped the dogs he had encountered earlier had run out to this place and fallen into hell. The sun was now unavoidable, hostile, ferocious—not sought out, jovial, sociable, as the one over Majorca or Jamaica or Bora Bora. This one cooked the continued mystery of his whereabouts into steaming dismay, then a boiling blend of anger and anxiety. David did like that the thought came to mind of a frog in water, unaware that it was being heated to a slow boil.

He wandered back into the town shadows, anxiety making him more sure­ footed even though limping from that fucking back pain. He moved uncertain of whether he was looking for human companionship company or avoiding it, and suddenly rounding a corner found himself in a courtyard packed with crowds of 72

people, out of other centuries, gliding past each other pausing only to thump a fist against the chest with a nod that seemed more habitual than polite. David stopped and closed his eyes. He listened. He heard tiny bells or coins jingling. Passing between the men but no women, he heard soft murmurs, too, that floated out as though riding low clouds with the sand. These were new sounds, ones he would remember and use.

When he reopened his eyes, he saw men who even here seemed out-of-place.

Two flanked a third on crutches made of crooked lengths of stout wood. The handicapped man, whose face and head of were wound up and obscured by some sort of turban, floated with astonishing speed and grace. David realized why their context had seemed wrong. The leit motif Cirque de Soleil had commission from him swelled in his mind’s ear. The piece was for an acrobat paralyzed from the waist down but who could do handstands on his crutches, dart across the stage faster than the midgets and children chasing after him, swing his atrophied limbs high in the air as though strings on a balloon that could have hoisted him to the high-wire daredevils above or planted him on a monstrous square rectangle of steel turning in space, vertically and horizontally, tilting sideways, and leveling out. Such agility had inspired

David who felt that piece, heavily rewritten after viewing that performance, had been his best, his best that is until his upcoming premiere waiting for Nagano’s baton and

Bettina’s breath control. 73

They trio disappeared around a corner lost in the blurring shuffle of other humans. He liked that most were skinny, because he disliked excess, his own especially. Maybe they were thin because they were starving. Some carried urns and baskets on their head. Some were shrouded in sheets and shawls. Others wore bloomers and knitted hats and vests with beads and coins. Turkey, David wondered?

Chechnya? Some Kurdish village? Libya? Egypt? The West Bank?

On the corner of yet another street, he encountered a row of shops from which floated the sounds of haggling and the smell of food. Men went in, men came out, with increasing regularity as the blistering sun erased all shadows. David heard a low, plaintive groaning. Might that, too, fit into his opus? He surveyed the area, but could not determine its origin. Behind a thick post holding up a drooping overhang, he saw his circus troupe again. The acrobat sat on the stone walkway, crutches arranged like crossbones beside him. He rocked back and forth, moaning and wailing, extending his palm to passers-by. The tallest of the three slouched against the wall, arms folded across a green, knitted vest open at the chest. His forearm muscles squirmed and twisted like roots above shaking ground, but his face was hidden beneath a bright scarf whipped around his nose, down and around his neck and over his shoulders. The other man, in huge sunglasses and swaddled in a dingy robe, looked like a mummy holding up wads of gauze about to unwind and collapse to the ground. 74

Stepping under the same overhang, David felt the temperature dropped noticeably. The air still rippled with heat, but breathing was not quite as difficult.

Suddenly, a squawking chicken flew through a crude window fleeing a horizontal stream of water and invectives. The standing men ducked and covered, and just as quickly stood and resumed their calm post. The three companions chuckled as several children raced out and chased the chicken down the pathway. Each time someone came towards the shop to enter the door, the wailer began to rock and whimper, jabber and whine something, hand outstretched. No one gave him anything. Several inhabitants cursed him on their way in and out. One spat on him. One even kicked him in the ribs. Rather than help him, his friends laughed and ignored the tormentors. Their complacency itself was odd. Was that normal here?

The shadows receded towards the toes of his boots. David backed towards the wall. There was no escaping it. The sunlight climbed his legs. The inside of his socks, soaked with sweat, salted the scrapes on his ankles, skin rubbed bloody by leather with each step. He needed to sit down. He crossed the road but at an angle that gave him opportunity to study the trio, without seeming intrusive. He stopped at a well in the middle of the road. In what century or millennia might it have been dug?

Was it still in use? Merely a tourist attraction? David sat on its stone circumference, bent over, and removed his footwear, then his socks. He stuffed the socks under the laces, and then jammed the pair into his backpack. His loud sigh of relief must have 75

caught the attention of the three beggars. They looked over at him, and he flinched, but only looked away for a moment. They appraised him, he concluded, with a calm acceptance. His confidence surged. He nodded. They nodded back. They did not seem to fit in here either, and it occurred to David the right thing to do was to go over and compliment that man on crutches and share his story of Cirque de Soleil.

Perhaps he could inspire him to do more, to be more. What did the poor guy know of the world’s possibilities?

The one seated said something to the others, while waving David over, and, as he went, he hobbled unable to hide his discomfort that increased because the ground burned his soles.

“You will get used to it,” the crippled man said.

David looked at the man’s legs. “How would you know?” he asked. He regretted the comment instantly. The two men beside the leader laughed. He laughed, too.

“You understand English,” David said.

“A leetle,” the man on the ground said. ‘Y ou English?”

“Des Moines-ish, originally,” David replied. “But now New Yawk-ish.”

“Oh. American! Welcome. How why here?”

David tried to think of a better answer than the real one, but couldn’t. “I haven’t a clue,” he replied. A purr was in the air that he’d not noticed until now. 76

“You teacher?”

“No. I’m a composer. You know—I study sound. I guess I’m actually more a student.” The purr grew into more a hum.

The three locals looked at each other, nodding and smiling.

“I can guess,” the cripple said. “I can guess!” and began chuckling. The other men chuckled, too. They seemed rather like good guys.

David grinned. “You can guess?” he asked. “How?”

“You no money!” Now everyone laughed and laughed.

“Yeah, yeah! So true, so true,” he said. He took the Polaroid out of his backpack and showed it to the other men. Now they howled, harder and harder. The rhythmic hum now sounded choppy and metallic like a leaf blower clearing

Manhattan sidewalks of autumn leaves or a MedEvac copter rushing to a medical center. He could use a lift.

“You crazy composer boy, yes?” the cripple said. ‘You ‘insane in the membrane’?”

David was feeling better and better, and now it was clear that sound was almost certainly a scooter or motorcycle, and it was coming fast. ‘You bet I am.

Wait—you know that song?”

“You don’t know why we know?”

“I don’t even know where I am!” 77

The leader’s smile eased a litde. “You don’t?”

“Not a clue, not a clue! Can you help me get out of here? I’ve got an appointment I shouldn’t miss.”

These guys could use a joke, David figured. “An appointment to get fired,” he added.

“No, don’t want to be late for that,” the tall guy said. ‘You might get fired.”

At that, the strangers howled, and then pointing towards the sound, passed a couple of quick monosyllables around too quickly to discern what language. The leader murmured something private, in a tone more stern than made sense to David.

Just then, a motorcycle roared around the corner, loose engine metal clanking like spent cartridges flying from an automatic weapon like he had heard once in

Harlem. The sound was so earsplitting that David couldn’t hear what the leader was now saying to him while pointing his thumb at the other two men beside him and then gesturing to him to come closer. The bike slowed and stopped beside the row of structures. The driver got off, but left the engine running. It occurred to David that hearing loss, his worst fear, must be common during warfare. The bike’s driver took his time getting to the door. He was in no hurry to find shade. He stopped next to the other men, gave David the evil eye, and muttered something to the guy on the ground in that same perplexing language. The cripple just grinned and looked at his companions. He reached his hand up to David, who balked for a minute. The man 78

pantomimed a yanking gesture. David took his hand, and bent over at the same time

to reach for the crutches, but the crippled man grasped both in one hand and stood

on his own.

“Come on in,” he said without an accent. He led David through a door into a

room that was a void of blackness with neither detail nor dimension. The

motorcycle’s chopping clattering stutter continued, punctuated by backfires.

“Hey, man,” David said. “That’s not helping with global warming.”

Expressionless, the cyclist turned towards him and then turned away.

David’s sight returned. A counter to the left implied a bar or coffee house.

The leader pointed for him to sit down. A man with an apron appeared.

“You got a phone here,” David asked. “Or a map even?”

The man jammed his hands behind the drawstring on his apron and tilted his

head, looked hard at David and the other three. He reached across an adjoining table covered with an array of mugs, cups, and demitasses coated with flies wandering across their rims and down inside sampling the remains of sugar cubes. The man in the apron snatched up a tumbler with facets down its side and sharp chips in the rim.

He flung the remaining fluid on the floor, went behind the counter, and filled it with something thick flowing out like oil. He returned, placed the glass in front of David, and took the makeshift crutches from the leader. 79

“There are no phones here,” the leader said. “And don’t drink that with your left hand. The right hand is for eating. The left for wiping.”

“I always thought that was an urban folk tale.”

The others just stared at him.

“If not, that is so fucking third-world,” David said, but did use his right hand to pick up the glass.

“Developing nation is the correct phrase,” the leader said.

“Whatever,” David said, looking outside again. “I hope Motorcycle Man

Owns a gas station or something. How well do you know him?”

Before anyone could answer, the cyclist was beside them. He leaned over, propped himself with his fingertips outstretched, glowered mutely, straightened up, and then walked out.

“Whoa,” David exclaimed. “That was nasty-ass. He looks American to me.

Bet he’s one of those mercenaries.”

The other three looked at each other and laughed. The leader lifted the glass to David’s lips, and made him drink the rest so fast it flowed out the side of his mouth and down his neck beside his ears. He lurched forward, coughing.

“Fuck—I swallowed a fly!”

The others laughed.

“Protein for breakfast,” the short man, who’d not spoken one word, said. 80

The leader stood and the others did, too. David waited a moment, then stood also. He dabbed at where his upper lip joined his lower, and looked at his fingertip.

Blood. One of the chips must have cut him.

“I’m serious,” David said. “I book travel for the government sometimes.”

“I thought you were a composer,” the leader said.

“I am, but I pay the bills working for Emirates. Did you see the patch on his sleeve? I know that patch and what it means.”

“What does it mean,” the leader asked.

“It means something I probably shouldn’t tell you about. Maybe that’s why everyone was acting weird when they saw me in town. You guys better be careful around here. If they think I’m with him, and you’re with me, you could run into some demographic-profiling trouble here.”

“You think so?” the leader asked. “Then maybe we should go.” He stood, as did the others, who looked around in all directions.

“Good idea,” David said. “I’m an expert on getting into trouble. Had enough of that. No want, no more. Ready for my punishment, ready for my reward.” He was glad to be doing them a favor. The three men were behind him, moving a little faster than was comfortable. One of them flat-tired his heel, right on the blister. 81

“Ouch,” David yelled. “Slow down. You don’t have to be that paranoid.” He shuffled on that foot’s toes all the way out the door. Just get me to a phone, and I can fix everything. I’ll make sure no on earth thinks you’re with me or that other guy.”

“Don’t you want to see the sites first?” the mummy asked.

“The sites?”

“So rare they’re not even in tour books,” the tall guy added.

“You’re kidding, right?” No one said no. “No, I’m not interested. Unless they’re near an airport.”

They all smiled, politely it seemed, and fell silent, as they passed through the door and out into the walkway. David squeezed his eyes closed. Even the glow through his eyelids nauseated him. He covered them with his hands and opened his lids enough to peek through his fingers.

“The sites of where?” he asked. No one answered. They weren’t keeping the conversation ball in the air at all. They all stepped off the walkway into the scorching town square. David could finally keep his eyes open long enough to study his escorts.

The tall guy had blue eyes. The first he’d seen all day.

“You guys aren’t even from here, are you?” David said. “Your accents are about as real as Pig Latin.” 82

They chuckled at the phrase, as they passed the well, David in the center with one oddball on each side, and the acrobat in front, as though the troupe were bodyguards of a celebrity.

“Pig Latin?” the short guy asked. “Pig Latin?” The laughter of the others erupted into guffaws. They roared, doubling over, repeating, “Peeg Latine! Peeg

Latine!”

The leader kept leading, but let silence settle the air. “This land is a land where the world began,” he said.

“Please, not a geography lesson,” David said. “A phone. That’s what we need.”

Regret popped up like whac-a-mole. Sarcasm might be his doom. A bad habit it was. An appalling, bottomless depression suddenly filled him. What he had alleged was true. He was an expert, needing no help at all in messing up his life. He had once liked thinking blame was usually fifty-fifty. But no it wasn’t. Not always. Sometimes never. And certainly not recently when he was involved. Time was a-wastin’. He had a job to do. He had some cleaning up to do. But he had to be where that could happen. This was not the place, and Monday was probably nearer than he wanted to know. 83

“Where language began,” the leader continued. “Where numbers were first counted, where the mountains meet the desert, where not everyone lives in the same century.”

David decided to quit interrupting the pompous ass. He could not imagine being more lost, not just in these walls and under these skies, but within his own skin.

This was not an adventure to tell grandchildren as he had given those people in the photo of his disturbing, little brush with the authorities of somewhere or something or other. He was using the wrong words, not speaking to him in his language, whatever it really might be. As his supervisor, as Bettina, as his small, small world no doubt would echo again, he had been “in denial.” But no more. He needed some help. He’d better play by the rules of these three who were walking him towards a road that was on a side of the town, which had still some green appearing every few feet. The path wound up a hill. The terrain reminded David of the distinctive mix of grass and flowers and sand that sloped down to deep oceans and wide seas in some of the countries he had visited. Green that grew promises.

“Won’t you tell me where we are?”

The other man who’d not spoken, started to answer, but the leader shook his head. “You have to guess! Can you?”

“No,” David said. “I’m terrible at games. Fucking hung over, almost out of money. Be nice, guys—you’re all I’ve got.” 84

His black thoughts turned blacker. Death, he thought. Why fear it at all? On his own, one drink then another, he was dying a memory at a time, and what was he but his memories? And what about the non-memories of events that occurred but weren’t even stored. So much of whoever he was here, whoever he had even been as a child, wherever he most recently had misbehaved apparently in China by a bus—all that was dead to him, utterly, completely, irrevocably. As the only bearer of the truth of the moments of his days, he was already a part of every history forgotten. What a mess, what a mess he’d made, one that beckoned for him to get back to tidy up. Now was all he had. Or rather now when he got back to the now he knew awaited for him to repair. Why would he even care to remember himself after death? There’d be nothing to relate it to. No one. No thing. Nothing.

Now was the goal. Now is what he needed to catch up with. So with these three men, his present company, he moved on, he moved on, he moved on.

At the top of the hill, the grandeur of a new horizon that lay ahead dismayed him. Whatever plants and brush there had been on the first hills they’d crossed were now gone. He was looking out at hundreds, thousands of miles of sand. The leader nudged him along.

“I’m hungry, guys,” David said. “Tired.”

“Tired?” the leader repeated. “I’m sorry. I forgot you said you weren’t doing so well. We can rest in a minute.” He sounded sincere, but kept moving David 85

onward until nothing but sand lay beneath his feet. And it burned like a griddle. He hopped and hopped. He fell over. One of the men who had only spoken once, bent

over to help him up.

“Perhaps you should put on your socks,” he suggested, this time with no

accent at all. David looked up at him and then at the others. They smiled down at

him. He noticed that none of them were skinny like the people in town. In the glaring

sunlight, he could see that one of them even had a spare tire. They were younger than

him. One had a belt buckle with an emblem like the patch on the pocket of the guy on the motorcycle. David felt suddenly exhausted.

“I think I’ve got you figured out, but I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “Please tell me you’re students, okay?”

“Okay,” the leader said. “We’re students. Sort of like you’re a student. Not exactly, but kind of. Here, come over here.” David put on his socks and that did help.

He followed the leader to the edge of a dune that sank down into a vast crater.

“Sit,” the leader said. David did.

The leader sat down beside him. “You don’t sound well. I hope you’re not getting heat stroke.”

The little guy picked up David’s backpack and looked inside.

“Look down in there,” the leader said, pointing into the bowl. “What do you see?” 86

“Sand,” David said.

“Not salt? Not Oil? Not rulers buried in white sheets with no headstone.”

The man with the backpack pulled out an umbrella. He handed it to the leader. Then he dropped the backpack next to David. The leader took it and opened it. Opened it, rifled through it, and then zipped it closed. He unzipped it, he re­ zipped it.

“The smart traveler,” he stated, playing with the zipper absentmindedly.

“You’re Americans, aren’t you?” David exclaimed. “All of you!”

The men looked at each other and then at him. They nodded yes.

“You motherfuckers,” David laughed with huge relief. “Jesus H. Christ. I’m buying the beer later, but only after you show me the way out of here.”

The three men laughed again, and the leader handed the umbrella to the man who had found it. “The problem here isn’t rain, that’s for sure,” the leader said. “But the sun? The sun is not so kind today. Rest a minute more, cool off. ” He looked up at the little guy who positioned the umbrella over David’s head. It did cast a shadow over him, but did nothing to reduce the heat.

“Come on,” David begged. “Give it up: Where the hell are we?”

“Time to go back,” the leader said. The two men leaned over, both reaching for the backpack. David grabbed it himself.

“That’s okay, guys,” he said. “I got it.” 87

But they didn’t let go. They wanted to look in, too. Like jackals ripping into a

carcass, they dug out his wallet and passport and his stinking clothes. They relinquished the official items to the leader. They tussled with David, yanking on the

bag like feral hounds with bones. David tried to stand, pulling hard on the pack. The

bus photo of him in a thousand-year-old scroll painting fell out. The two men let go

of the bag to pick it up, and David lost his balance. He somersaulted and rolled into

the pit, not very fast, but fast enough so he slid faster down than he could climb back

up. He heard the voices of the others as they walked away, their words less and less

distinct. He strained to pull their sounds into him. He strained to crawl up and out to

Bettina, to that mouthy supervisor, to glowing reviews in the Der Spiegels art section.

What was weird that he’d never noticed before, and that he planned to remember

next time, was how hard it was to climb sand. And that the further in you went, the

steeper the sides might become instead of what he’d always thought, more level. He

knew there had to be a trick to getting up, and out, and back. But then the floor of basin itself gave way. A hole in a pit. A steep one, too. For now, he sat down in it to rest. There were some new sounds he was hearing that maybe should be added, the

soft sound of sand filling his lap, sweetly cradling his back, dusting his hair. He tried to think what the trick must be, while he listened and listened. He and sound were

such friends. He gave it form, then gave it to the world. Here was a new sound. A hiss it was, but not unfriendly. A hiss swishing above the rim of this hole, pirouetting, leaping, and sweeping down to his side, begging to be a part of the music he had not yet completed. Sand and air in a dance for him, whispering in his ears, brushing across his cheeks and eyelids, ruffling his hair. Lovely tones swelling, dropping into silence, and then whooshed up like a fountain of fine particles as old as the desert, as the universe, for were they not mixed with darkness adorned by billions of jewels overhead, stars in numbers perhaps only he had seen, music only for him? The hiss, the twisting stir of sand, each grain polishing each other grain, this one, then that one, then that one and now all these others, millions and billions of them for centuries, for millennia, for all time, heard by no one if he did not hear it first.

Before long, the sun finished its crawl towards a night as dark as any. 89

Pied-a-boue

3:30 pm

Yellow as a fireball, first the school bus rolled up. Then came a purple two- seater that looked like a vertical scone, bruised and crunched, behind the bus and endangered by the next arrival, some sort of brand new electric SUV that screeched to a halt a hair from the smaller vehicle’s bumper. The terror did not end. Tonya heard a muscle car shooting her way, down their cul-de-sac. One after another they came, pivoting ninety degrees while backing up, then inching forward to change direction, like tanks, turrets ready to blaze, and she didn’t know which side of the screen she should be on, a question cleared up when son Aaron bulldozed in and around her, shoving her out of his way onto the porch, which, she guessed, was as good a place as any to greet the Webelos pack blasted out of all those one-ton bullets into the front yard of this week’s temporary cub-scout den, temporary until Miriam, the real-deal leader, turned up for (after all) she had said she thought—really hoped anyway—she’d make it over today after her appointment.

She’d call, she’d said, she’d call.

All that idling metal and fiberglass, real glass and rubber, perfumed the air with exhaust and made the sprigs of the hedges lining the sidewalk vibrate at the 90

same rate Tonya was quaking there in dread of that call. What would it mean if it came? Or if it didn’t come? Would that count as good news or bad? Her stomach was a sponge of nerves twisting to squeeze everything out. What cou ldht just could n otbt.

Why oh why did women always get the short end? Sure, sure, Tonya had told Miriam when she had dropped off the white sheet painted with black stripes for the dinosaur’s skin, she could get the meeting going at her place today. Sure.

But here all those boys really were, an enemy crossing borders, toppling over each other in a scramble towards her, the first wave followed by four more ten-year- olds disgorged by invisible drivers. What about the situation didn’t scare the daylight out of her? She caught her breath when she saw that there was one more, a pedestrian, following the crowd. Did the school system even allow that? Elvis

Someone, dragging his heels. Spender. Yes, that’s it: Elvis Spender. A bully. Aaron’s enemy. But one he worshipped. “Elvis is in the house,” she thought. Rumor was that the Spender Chemical Company family had spent oodles on their palace, so maybe this little squirt was thinking he was too good to ride with the other kids, prancing out as he probably did every day of the biggest house north of Little Rock and south of Minneapolis. Compared to his parents’ castle, what would this little smarty-pants think of her clan’s cramped corner of a cave, which Henson dubbed their pied-a-terre.

When she’d joked pied-a-boue was more proper, that husband of hers didn’t laugh or even smile any more than when she’d told him they maybe in Paris they could say 91

they lived on a cul-de-sac, but here they lived on the “ass of a sack.” He spoke only

English so did not get it that “earth” was less precise than “mud,” as anyone daring

to go around towards the backyard would discover to be true on the gooey slide

down.

“Mother Mary of God,” she thought, not religious at all, but a fan of desperate

heroines in film classics and soaps who rolled their eyes to the billowing clouds and

found strength in talking to the sky, and so did she, so did she, even if illusory, even if

just to the ceiling, sometimes after breakfast and before dinner when time stretched

hours into days it seemed, full of uninvited thoughts.

Her exodus from Wynnewood to follow Henson had been a torture of

furniture scavenging where all choices were bad ones, errors in negotiating the best

paths to this store or that doctor, the delicate acceptance and rejection of people and

places and things. All—all she knew—she had left behind except her Philly accent

she allowed recorded for an eternal, humiliating YouTube regional dialect demo viewed by tens of thousands, a disruption never endured by a Ruth or Naomi. Or was it “Mary Mother of God...” or... or.. .damn why didn’t Miriam call, poor thing?

Then, the same way sudden golden light beams through movie clouds uplifted her every single time she watched, here appeared suddenly an unexpected vision, so pleasant strolling her way, calming her, warming her: Dennis Kuni, last one off the bus, pretty as a girl almost. No wonder he’d done those commercials for this and that 92

local retailer. And yet, it never seemed to have gone to his head. Besides, he was dressed like a lumberjack today in a really cool long-sleeved plaid shirt, open and untucked, framing a sky-blue t-shirt the same color as his eyes.

Only Wallace Dotson, the pack’s “sixer,” wore his uniform, walking shoulders back and chin to the chest like he was hanging on a hook for tanning outside a wigwam in one of those old cowboy and Indian reruns insomnia also landed her in.

Or maybe it was just a rammed fanny broom making the corner of his mouth curl down, as he assumed the role of usher up the steps for the other little wolves, lording over them in his yellow neckerchief and blue cap and red patches and merit badges and belt with a brass buckle as though he were king or chief—but one ignored.

Annoying but better than a bully.

Tonya curtsied, and he frowned.

“Mrs. Merritt,” he said. Just two flat words. They did a little shuffle trying to establish who should go in last, and Tonya won, or she guessed she’d won, if his preceding her through the door counted as that.

“Right this way, boys,” she sang, hurrying them along to a corridor door so they didn’t linger by the living room entrance where Astra Carol was trying on costumes by the fireplace, across from a floor mirror to help her and her daddy decide which attire to settle on for the annual American Royal Parade and its various judged FFA events and beauty contests that big sister always used to win. Tonya 93

guessed she ought to be happy for Hope Flower and Henson, the ones who really cared, but it did sadden her to think of their whole little town populated by so many sweet little girls who thought of themselves as losers because of what they didn’t look like, and—grown up and saddled with kids—they would certainly not remember the celebrations as all that wonderful.

Hadi Poplawski, in cargo pants and unlaced red hightops, stopped and ogled big sister’s little sister as she wiggled into her flaming red, Cirque de Soleil unitard, which helped little to shield her cute little undraped seven-year-old body. Hadi’s eyes tracked across the trophies and photos and ribbons in the living display of Hope

Flower’s awards. He paused in front of a movie still, illuminated by a small light in the base of its frame. It was famous here, from the cakewalk part she had played in

Tittle Miss Sunshine dressed like Jon-Benet Ramsey. He moved on to what really made his eyes bug: the four-color photo of a float, three lanes wide, towed by a truck with three-foot lengths of plumber’s tubing twisted into crescents and secured to the front doors to masquerade as the horns of a bull and its hood ornament fitted with a silver hula-hoop serving as a nose ring. The truck’s risers had elevated the rusted roof to power lines that drooped due to pole slant and bird spectators. The driver leaned out his window and looked up. The ten-foot-long, ten-hundred gallon cowboy hat it sported had bumped the wires. Awaiting the poor guy’s solution and seated on the back bed on top of a fenced-in haystack were Hannah Montana and her daddy, Billy 94

Ray Cyrus, resting Hope Flower on his knee as though she were the baby of the family. It was one of the most reprinted images in the history of the neighborhood’s newsletter, but in spite of the position and spotlight, most visitors noticed it about as much as they would the halo of dust on the corner lamp cord Tonya suspected. Of those who passed before it, Astra Carol studied it most often and never with a smile of family pride.

Henson glanced around at Hadi and Tonya, but said nothing. Did he wish their admiration of his sleeveless purple t-shirt, red corduroys rolled to mid-calves, and ankle-cut socks stamped all over with the Kansas City Chief s logo? He snorted and resumed sliding hangers that held other outfits swishing along the rod of a portable wardrobe. He removed one and held it next to a male manikin crowned by a black Stetson with a yellow eagle feather, starched slate-gray satin shirt with pearl buttons, braided string tie, jeweled blue jeans, tooled belt with a tortoise buckle, and snakeskin boots. That’s what he always wore, but the wrong gown might clash.

“Over here, Hadi,” Tonya said, but the boy took his time taking it all in, looking back and forth between the glam shots of Hope and the reality of her little sister before him, probably comparing them, Tonya worried, and that was just not a nice thing to do, just because Astra Carol had a little extra chub she’d not yet grown out of and a nose that could be fixed up later just fine. Astra squinted at Hadi and squeezed her lips together so tightly they disappeared, until her tongue burst through 95

them, in a sassy raspberry, and her nostrils flared like a snout, which really did need to be corrected sometime. When they could save the money, since Obamacare was no help at all.

“Hadi, come on, Honey, meeting time,” Tonya insisted. “And Miss Astra, please remember your manners.” She was relieved Hope Flower would be at her tap dancing lessons until rehearsal time for Oklahoma right up until dinnertime. It aggrieved her to see her youngest, motionless, continuing to glower beneath a dozen other photos of her beaming sister’s blue eyes and treasured dimples.

Hadi, too, tried to stare the little girl down, ignoring Tonya, until Dennis stepped to his side and whispered something that somehow got his fellow cub to re-engage and focus on which direction he should be facing and where he ought to be headed. A hero in training that’s what Dennis was.

Was that quivering in Henson’s shoulder a spasm or a signal he was about to face and address her?

No, he didn’t do that. Of course, he didn’t. He was so engrossed, such a stickler for details, and his eyes continued tracing up and down and flickering across one of the gowns he held up towards the light streaming in from the front window, the sparkle off sequins flashing across his cheeks. Pink taffeta it was, with glittering gold embroidery wiggling down from collar to hem, in and out of the zigzag creases, and what tiny flaw he might or might not be seeing Tonya for the life of her could 96

not discern, a fascinating darn annoyance about him, undermining, too, and she doubted if she’d ever understand how he could figure out just about anything right whenever he wanted, when she couldn’t even get close in a month of Sundays, even if details were as obvious as a whipped-cream pie flung in her face that everyone but her could see to laugh at. And now she had to be den mother. Until Miriam arrived.

Or called. Or texted.

Resisting being herded by Dennis, Hadi was not done. He looked Tonya straight in the face.

“Why are we here?” he demanded. “And where’s Mrs. Lyman?”

This is why she needed Miriam, why she loved her, the only woman like her, the only person who could understand her daily trials who could answer such a question with the right amount of information.

“I’ll tell you all about that when we’re all together,” Tonya replied.

Dennis opened the door to the basement where the other boys already waited.

While the three stragglers clomped down the steps, Tonya took out her smartphone and inspected its face, but no, no missed calls, no popped-up messages, and she felt terror rabbit-punch her adrenal gland, toppling a caldron of anxiety that spilled down her bones and boiled up towards the underside of her skin. Exaggeration, she thought. Stop it. Miriam had been so positive she would be there well before the meeting was over, but Tonya now wondered, she really did, until she realized scarcely 97

a minute had passed since the boys had walked through the door, and then she felt

ashamed. She wasn’t giving Miriam a fair chance, dealing as she was with what she

had to deal with. A gift that keeps giving and you couldn’t give away for free,

acquired from one of those not-so-nice guys she’d met in different bars every night

playing switcheroo with different girls. Tonya slammed the door on the thought, it

made her so mad.

She took a deep breath on the stairway, certainly not to heaven, and spun to

Henson, but didn’t even get one of the trapped words out she wanted to free,

because it was probably better he not turn around while Astra Carol stepped out of

her leotard and raised her arms over her head so that a different taffeta gown, this

one daffodil yellow, could float down like a parachute over her adorable little fingers

pointing to the ceiling and cover again her cute little round belly (did she swallow a

bowling ball the radon tester once dared to ask) and round, pink, not-so-litde bottom.

Tonya shut the door tightly, and hurried down to the rec room, hoping her phone would ring before she reached ground zero. But it didn’t, and she did look.

How blessed she had felt with Miriam’s first appearance into her life, in the bakery, winters long gone by, sorting challah by complexity of braiding. Some tall guy, wearing doctor’s scrubs, barged between them while insulting someone on the phone as though his fellow shoppers were his captive audience. The two exchanged 98

glances, as he poke-tested the sufganiyot and licked his fingers each time. Tonya and

Miriam looked at each other and raised their eyebrows at the same time.

“A preview of the future of bedside manners,” Tonya muttered.

Miriam grinned and whispered, “If Lorraine Bobbit were a mohel, I wonder if she could be persuaded to do follow up.”

Tonya had been so caught off guard that she had choked and spat out a food sample. Thirty minutes later, working their way up and down the aisles in different direction and nodding each time they passed, in the lot, they discovered their mommy vans were parked side by side.

“Well isn’t this a fine how-do-you-do?” Miriam remarked.

While unloading their carts, they agreed the doctor-to-be had no doubt been a douchebag breaking a heart of someone who didn’t deserve it. They exchanged numbers, emails, social networks, but ended up communicating over the last seven years almost only in the flesh. Nothing could be less normal than looking for Miriam in her phone. But that’s what Tonya did again. Her friend wasn’t there in any form, not even with Facetime, and here she was at the bottom of the stairs.

3:37 pm

The boys clumped together cemented in place. Would a jackhammer free them? They maneuvered their heads though, discussing with admiration the jackalope 99

and hodag hanging on either side of a pair of lopsided buck antlers. All except Hadi.

In his rush to join the others, he must have bumped himself. In the far corner, he crouched beside a low bookcase that sprawled as hypotenuse of adjoining walls. A dangerous one, Hadi its latest victim. He grimaced and ooed and ahhed, attending to a thin trail of blood corkscrewing down his shin around towards his calf.

“Are you okay, Hadi?” she asked.

He nodded as he dabbed the bottom edge before the trickle could enter his

sock. He tongued a droplet off his fingertip. Tonya took some tissues out of her pocket. She extended the wad to him.

He crinkled his nose. “Ick!” he said. “Snot.”

She blushed and crushed them into her fist.

Hadi looked up from his research. “What are their real names?” he asked.

Tonya was taken aback.

“Whose?”

“Aaron’s sisters,” Elvis guffawed. Before she could reprimand him, the other boys giggled in pitches that adolescent testosterone soon would lower.

“What makes you think their names aren’t their names?” Tonya asked, but the boys ignored her and rushed to watch Hadi bleed. Tonya felt like the ghost of an erased tally mark smudging the chalkboard beside the cue rack.

“I’ll get some mercurochrome,” Tonya said, and the boys laughed at the word. 100

“With all due respect, M’am,” Wallace began, “things could be arranged more safely.”

“You’re exacdy right,” Tonya said, taking down a first-aid kit hanging on the opposite side of the chalkboard from a fire extinguisher.

Hadi’s injury had not been the first. Tonya looked at her phone again.

Nothing of course. Had even a minute passed since she’d jointed the boys?

She took out the disinfectant, a gauze square, and some tape. Sidestepping the narrow aisle remaining, she bumped her thigh hard against the couch’s armrest. She bit her lips and squinted in pain. Memory of every single resentment had dropped like petals

from the flowers in the neighborhood welcome basket left on their doorstep and swept away by invisible currents. If she had a tattoo it would have been on her palm—written from right to left. Like a branding iron, when she slapped her

forehead in anguish, all could see the sour turning point in domestic tranquility had been the exact month, day, and hour Hensen had pushed that pool table away from the center of the basement where it still remained—no longer parallel to the walls, and too close to a swaybacked sofa.

That castoff disgusted her. A moldy underbelly of its former life upstairs, it had come to smell like men at their worst, stewing in night-sweats or fogged in by farts trapped beneath sheets. If she never had to come here again that would be good.

But come she had to—not never but often—for rushed loads of laundry. Every 101

single time that musky atrocity offended her. Neighborhood hustlers near it always had to shoot from creative angles. Every single visit she counted every single footprint, old and new, that darkened its gutted cushions. That’s the score she had tallied on the blackboard. They were the ghosts.

3:41 pm

Somehow L.M. had gotten around her and was now mouthing the upside down letters stenciled on an old kayak suspended from its keel by chains bolted into the low ceiling. The people from whom they’d bought the place had transformed it into a lamp to illuminate the pool table. Tonya had heard that L.M. was dyslexic. She hoped it was true. He craned his neck, until his ear touched his shoulder, sounding the letters out as the boat rocked, casting shadows as though banked shots across the green velvet and sent back hopping out of the dog-eared rips and slick waxy gouges.

Tonya longed to seize control, divert them if not focus them. She waved as though they had just come over the horizon.

“Hi, boys!” They froze again, brooding and silent. She crossed her arms so fast L.M. flinched backwards into the billiards rack. Cues fell like pickup sticks. Tonya caught a couple. 102

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized. She held them out to L.M., but he was

fiddling to straighten a cue he had caught. Aaron and Elvis were brandishing two others as though light sabers. Tonya cleared her dry throat.

“Careful guys—no one’s going to lose an eye on my watch.” They lay the cues on the felt and pouted.

“W ell.. .so.. .today,” Tonya continued, “I’m going to run the meeting. That is until Miriam—Mrs. Lyman—gets here, which should be pretty soon.”

She stopped, unsure of how much to tell them. The boys fell mute as statues again. Except Aaron. He shook his head back and forth, back and forth. Then

Wallace stepped forward and saluted.

“Yes, M’am.” His voice, a whip-crack. He swiveled on his toe and faced the others. “At ease,” he commanded. They already were. Body rigid, he slowly rotated his head, chin over shoulder towards Tonya. The boy displayed a premature and scary deference to authority. He’d be the soldier in this crowd.

Still, she nodded to him, and began again, “So, Mrs. Lyman has an appointment, and—you know—she’ll be calling and coming here soon.” She took out her phone, gave it some more attention, and then held it towards them. She pointed at its wallpaper, a photo of their kids laughing at Henson wincing as a whale licked his face with a fleshy tongue the size of a thigh. “A message will appear here 103

when she’s on her way,” she continued, “which isn’t yet, but will be real soon.”

Aaron, again, shook his head back and forth.

She peeked once more, just in case she’d looked away for too long and missed something, and then slid it into her back pocket, took it out again, checked to make sure the ringtone glass ding and text message swoosh were on, and both set to vibrate, and then she put it in her other front pocket.

“They know how a phone works, Mom,” Aaron mumbled. He kicked at the shag carpet—a palette of blue chalk, crushed cheddar crackers, and focalized latte foam bubbles.

Elvis laughed, but it sounded faked. From behind Wallace, he swatted the cap off his head, then folded his arms, rolled his eyes, and tapped his foot. Tonya leaned over and picked up the hat that had landed on her shoe. Tussling Wallace hair, she returned the cap to him. “No need to wear it inside anyway,” she said, but faltered when she saw the look on Wallace’s face. Was he about to cry?

Aaron muttered something else and the boys laughed.

3:45 pm

“You’re all going to be marching in the American Royal Parade next weekend.

Isn’t that right?” 104

“Yes, M’am,” Elvis answered. The boys snickered. What?—did they have a secret, a joke, one about her? If they thought her roots growing out were gray, they had a lot to learn, because they weren’t. She had been born as white-blonde as a cloud, and still was. Was it that weird that she had just gone for it, raven black, like

Snow White? Touch-up required more time than she had sometimes. Or maybe it was her voice. In her head, it sounded hyper. Maybe the one in the air sounded that way, too. She knew that was sometimes true. Like today.

But then again, there were worse things in the world. Like what Miriam was facing. Heavens knew that since that poor woman’s divorce she was as susceptible as a virgin to the pick-up zingers of charming, disease-dispensing douche-bags who might be of the opinion that warts were decoration, with no understanding that more than embryos could be planted up there inside a woman—oh.. .oh...Generations could be bred from that one little ancestor, malignant descendants who’d eat a girl alive from the inside out. Tonya struggle to quell a panic attack, and Aaron’s shaking his head wasn’t helping, nor did his fluttering eyelids at half-mast.

“Well isn’t that super?” she exclaimed. “What an honor! A really big deal.” She judo-chopped [antiquated?] the air with both hands on each phrase. “And I guess you know what we’re supposed to do today, don’t you?” She swept her hand towards a blue tarp on the floor where she’d put the large tub the Hensons used for apple bobbing among severed limbs and eyeballs on Halloween. Propped beside it were the 105

components Miriam, on her rush out to get her lab results, had given to some neighbor to drop off for Tonya. A papier-mache assemblage approximated a mummified dinosaur head. The neighbor had kept repeating what Tonya already knew: that incomplete object was to evolve into the cub’s key prop for the parade, worn by a lead boy while the others, stooped over, followed under a blanket with saw-tooth scales. Today, that skull needed to be transformed into a head. Tonya had a messy job ahead, overseeing the boys as they dripped strips of newspapers into quick-dry plaster and then draped them around the top as skin. She studied the other essentials. A stack of rubber boots needing “claws” made of balsa wood. Styrofoam triangles that someone would have to anchor as dentures inside the jaw. She and

Miriam hadn’t discussed these intricacies. Tonya hoped that Wallace or preferably

Dennis would have a clue.

“ ‘Whalde’ awaits his final nips and tucks!” she announced. “We have to finish today, so you’ll have time to practice tomorrow.”

Tonya paused, suddenly realizing the implications: Her duties today could extend into the weekend. Someone would have to teach them how to move as one body smoothly, snaking from curb to curb, going fast, going slow, backing up, kicking to one side and then the other, and even rotating completely around in waders with big claws attached. 106

Suddenly, amber swaths of light swept around the room, like a spirit of

Halloween past. Elvis, kneeling in the middle of the table, had grabbed the chain holding up the kayak’s bow and was shaking it. Then he stopped it, and read the letters.

‘“Fisher o’ men’?” he sneered. “W.T.F.?”

Hadi looked at Aaron and frowned. The others shrugged.

“That lamp was here when we moved in,” Tonya snapped. She wrapped her arm around her son’s shoulders, but he squirmed out from under her forearm and darted towards the basement’s T-shape, which now that she thought about it, looked like a crucifix that had fallen over backwards, with its fat base and thin cross extending into alcoves.

With one hand on the rail of the pool table, Elvis dismounted elegantly and vanished into one of the niches. Aaron followed that show-off back out from the recess where the washing machine lived. He wore a green-plastic laundry basket.

“Hey, look! This can be the dinosaur’s head!” he exclaimed. He jumped on the couch and started bouncing. Tonya rushed him but heard a “swoosh” and felt a vibration in her pocket. She stopped and yanked her cell out.

“Can’t!” the screen read. That was it. She waited. No follow-up came in. More bewildering than nothing at all. 107

“Is that from Mrs. Lyman?” Wallace asked. Tonya didn’t answer. She was engrossed in typing a reply with both thumbs. “Mrs. Merritt?”

“Huh?” She looked up. “What?”

“Is that from Mrs. Lyman?” Wallace repeated.

“Why yes, it is.” She stared at her screen waiting for a reply. “She’s going to be delayed. A little more delayed. Let’s get to work,” she said.

3:48 pm

“We need to say the oath first, M’am,” Wallace muttered, but without making eye contact. Something had changed, erased his decisiveness.

“The oath. Yes. I know that, Wallace.”

Her reply came out ruder than intended. She softened her tone. “Would you be good enough to lead us?”

Wallace pivoted on his toe again and raised his hand, two fingers extended to the ceiling at ear level. The other boys did, too, though Elvis extended his arm in a

Nazi salute. But was it? The boys were to young to know about all that.

“I, Wallace Dotson,” and he waited while the other boys said their names after the comma his pause provided, then continued: “Promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people, and to obey the Law of the Pack.”

“Amen,” Tonya sighed. 108

“Mom!” Aaron complained. “We don’t say that!”

Tonya was stunned, then mortified. “Oh,” she stammered. “You were talking

to God, so— ”

Aaron shook his head at his friends, his palms up and out, from cheeks to

jawbone a hollowed puncture of rictus. L.D., Hadi, and Elvis snickered, though

Dennis kept his eyes on Tonya. Was that empathy? That’s what she saw. She

appreciated it. Dennis was so untypical.

“Order!” Wallace commanded.

Tonya took out her phone, peeked, and then shoved it back in her pocket.

“Okay, sorry guys,” she said. “My bad. Let’s help ‘Whalde’ put his face on!”

The boys didn’t catch that joke either.

“We’re supposed to exercise next, Mrs. Henson,” Wallace corrected.

“Calisthenics and stuff.”

“Oh,” Tonya said. “Like pushups and sit-ups?”

“Crunches. Sit-ups can injure the back.”

“Yes, crunches. Of course.” She looked around the room. The pool table took up the center of the room, and an old treadmill wedged in the corner across from the

Tiki bar left little room on the floor to lie down—even if it were clean.

“I do aerobics. We could do that.”

“How come there aren’t two adults present?” Elvis blurted. “It’s a rule.” 109

“That is true,” Wallace conceded.

“Well there are,” Tonya insisted. “Aaron’s daddy is here.”

“He’s upstairs,” Elvis laughed.

“Well, anyway, Mrs. Lyman should be here any sec,” Tonya said, praying for a greatly delayed vibration in her back pocket. “That’ll make three adults.” It was all she could do to refrain from yanking out her phone again. She resisted.

Miriam was the best, just the best. It would not be fair at all for those things to turn into things that couldn’t be slowed in growing and going everywhere. Tonya could not imagine a world without her. She couldn’t even make that thought. There she was, jumping back and forth through time and all around in little snippets of image and sound. Tonya resumed her chattering.

“So, guys, spread out an arm’s length apart.” She noticed that L.R. was texting someone.

“This is dumb, Mom,” Aaron said. “We don’t have any music.” Tonya caught her breath. Elvis was such a bad influence on this boy of hers who had not so long ago loved her as dearly as Henson had loved her dearly— at first.

“Well maybe, young man, you can just march on upstairs and get your father to bring music to us on that little player thing he’s got.” Tonya’s own volume alarmed even her, but Aaron, beet red, obeyed. He began trudging up the stairs, as the other boys glowered at her like that movie with a village of children in need of exorcism. 110

Thunder must be rumbling behind their stormy eyebrows. She scowled right back, and grasped her cell for rescue, starded at first then angered to see her own terrified face staring out at her from a black, mirrored surface.

“Where’s your Wii or Xbox, Mrs. Henson?” Elvis interrupted, poking around the shelves and corners of the room.

“My what?”

Laughter erupted as though jolted out of several of the cubs by simultaneous

Heimlich maneuvers. Wallace and Dennis, however, looked at each other and then at

Tonya. Dennis stepped towards her, and put his warm, smooth hand on her forearm.

“They’re just games,” Dennis said. “Don’t pay attention to these guys. They’re just nervous in a new place with a new den mother.”

Tonya beamed. What a wonderful litde human being. She grasped his collar and tugged it forward confidently, smoothing the top creases with her thumbs and forefingers. Wallace looked at the floor. Soon Dennis would be an adolescent, so soon, and then a man—a rare one, kind and decent, who would never be a jerk with a woman, never leave that special someone—or any women—in a situation such as

Miriam’s. Some female would love Dennis someday, win him, and be so much the luckier for it. She leaned over and gave him a big, big, long, long hug, and when she broke away, those mute faces appraised her again. I l l

“You are such a wonderful, wonderful, little gentleman, Dennis,” she said defiantly to them more than him, as she straightened up again. “An example to all.”

Wallace’s lower lip was quivering. What was eating that boy, Tonya wondered as she straightened her back, and held her chin high. “And Wallace—I very much appreciate your leadership help.” Wallace nodded but didn’t look up.

The door above them opened. Henson’s feet, then Aaron’s, then their knees, then thighs, then torsos descended towards them.

3:51 pm

Henson cradled gear to his chest. “You needed the iPod dock?” he asked.

Aaron held two small speakers from which variously colored RC jacks hung, bouncing behind him down each riser with a cheerful, upbeat clickety-hop.

“Yes, thank you, Sweetheart.”

Henson did not reply, but thumped on down grimly determined. Or maybe resentful. Tonya examined her son.

“And thank you, too, Aaron. I appreciate your help.”

He, too, said nothing. More and more like his dad.

“You’re a good cub,” she added. Neither male said anything.

Henson set the equipment on the Tiki bar, unplugging a hula-girl lamp. He shoved it aside. He picked up a glass jammed with stir sticks, decorated with girls in 112

bikinis that vanished when in liquid. He gave Tonya the evil eye as he reached over the counter and put the tumbler on a shelf on the bartender’s side. Then he fiddled with the miniature stereo jacks and cords.

Tonya wasn’t sure how long all this would take.

“Come on, boys,” she said. “Time to exercise, music or not!”

She guided them onto spots around the room with enough space to jump about without bumping into each other.

Henson seemed to be finishing faster than Tonya expected. He nodded to

Aaron who depressed the play button.

“It’s on shuffle,” Aaron announced. The green power light was on, but no music came out of the speakers. Tonya jogged in place as though there were sound already. Henson fiddled with the connecting cables in the back. He came around to the front panel. He faced Aaron and scowled.

“You didn’t up the volume, Idiot,” he said, striding towards the stairs.

Aaron blushed, then twirled the knob, and an emphatic male voice already into his rap ricocheted around the room:

“I like big butts an’ I cannot lie

You otha brothas can’t deny ” 113

Tonya rolled her pelvis and shook around in circles while pumping her fists in front of her face and grinding her hips some more. Suddenly she stopped, actually listening:

“That when a girl walks in wit’ a itty bitty waist an’...

“What is he saying?” she asked. The music continued:

“.. .A round thing in yo’ face. You get SPRUNG...”

“Wanna pull up tough,

She rushed to the machine. “Aaron, stop this!”

“’cuz you notice that butt was STUFFED...”

Her son smirked and wandered as far away from her as he could.

“Deep in the jeans she’s wearin’.

I’m hooked an’ I can’t stop starin’. 114

“Aaron, shut it off!” But he and the other boys had begun to gyrate around between the tub of plaster and the pool table.

“Oh baby, I wanna get wit’ ya,

An’ take yo’ picta.

Tonya’s fingers twiddled in front of the controls.

“My homeboys tried to warn me.

But that butt you got

Makes me so horny ”

She twisted speaker volume control and all sound stopped. The boys groaned in disappointment, slowing their dancing like quarters twirled on their edges about to fall over.

“That song is so old,” Elvis declared.

“It’s offensive,” Tonya snapped, “and you shouldn’t have been listening to it.”

“I didn’t know old people could dance.” His eyes lingered on her torso.

Tonya looked down at it. Had she spilled something? Was the brat actually checking her out? Maybe her shorts were too short or her crop-top too high. Was it 115

time for more sclerotherapy on those persistent spider veins branching down both thighs like a family tree? “Gross,” Aaron always said. A woman could just never win.

Except Hope Flower of course all the time. And maybe Astra Carol finally this year.

“Old people?!” Tonya exclaimed. “How old do you think I am anyway?

“Fifty?” Hadi guessed. Tonya’s knees nearly buckled. People guessed her ten years younger—not older—than her real age.

Sixty?” Elvis asked, when she didn’t answer. She sought comfort from her cell again. Still no text or voice mail. Tears welled up. She turned her back to the boys.

This was not a very nice afternoon. Not at all. Scanning the console’s front panel, she took out a tissue and blotted a drip on her nostril. She scrutinized each symbol

[icon?]. They made sense. She could figure this out. She tested the volume, up then down, which helped her regain composure amid a tornado of terrible words inside her head: crows feet, collagen, hysterectomy, triceps skin swinging emptied of muscle, mastectomy, flashes and flushes and rashes and Retin A, and a Scrabble board of

STDs conspiring to murder Miriam.

3:53 pm

A sudden clattering of tap shoes on the stairs made her look again to the stairwell. One step, one step at a time. Astra Carol, it seemed, was joining them.

Dressed now in a uniform of unclear responsibility, she carried a shiny aluminum 116

baton. A double-breasted canvas jacket engulfed her and sparkled with crystal- embellished frogging, silver embroidery, military-heritage shoulder epaulets, gold buttons popping through loops, little medals and lapel pins. She had been crowned with an Uncle Sam hat, the flag of the United States wrapped around its stovetop.

“I’m going to dance, too, Mommy,” she announced happily.

“Dancing is over, Astra Carol,” Tonya replied unable to stabilize a wobble in her voice. “The boys have to finish their project for the parade now.”

“The plaster is hard,” Elvis proclaimed from across the room where he’d been snooping. Tonya went over and peered into the tub. Giggling started—high-pitched and nervous and cruel. The boys were gawking at Astra Carol. Tonya didn’t know why. She rushed to find out, just as Henson thundered back down.

Elvis followed Tonya over, still holding the stir stick from the tub of plaster.

“We can’t finish ‘Whalde’ without soft plaster,” he emphasized.

“Well go stir it. Maybe the water has settled to the bottom.”

“Density would increase with depth,” Wallace corrected. “Water would rise to the surface.”

“Well stir it anyway, Elvis,” Tonya repeated. “At least it could be more the same throughout.”

“Where’d you run off to you little ragamuffin?” Henson chided Astra Carol, snatching her up as he plopped down on the stairs and set her on his lap. “I got her,” 117

he said to Tonya. “See if that boy’s right about the plaster.” He wrapped his arms around his daughter as she hooked her left leg over his left knee, her right over his right.

“You mean, we won’t be able to march in the parade?” L.R. asked.

Tonya gasped. Astra Carol’s tights were too small and squeezed so tightly into all the folds of her body that the central seam had ripped half an inch between her thighs.

The other cubs were jockeying for a better position to see the tear and its progress. L.R. took out a cell phone, and walked around the pool table to the treadmill. He turned his back on everyone, must have placed a call, because he whispered something twice.

Elvis handed the stick to Tonya. ‘You do it,” he said, and then shoved to ringside. “Nice outfit, Astra,” he sneered. “You’ll be a hit like your sister in the boiler room at school.”

Astra smiled a little.

“The boiler room?” Henson repeated. The boys exchanged glances and began laughing at different volume and duration.

“Henson,” Tonya barked. “Get her back upstairs.”

She waved at L.R. “Honey, we’re supposed to focus on in-here, not out- there.” He was hiding the phone behind his back. 118

“I feel sick,” he said. “My mom’s getting me.”

“Oh that not necessary,” Tonya said. “I can get you something to settle your tummy, so—.”

“I’d have to report that, Mrs. Henson,” Wallace interrupted. “It’s against the law to medicate a child without parental permission.”

“Chamomile tea doesn’t count as medicine, Wallace. But you’re right. I wouldn’t want anyone giving my Aaron something if he had the collywobbles.”

Elvis egged Astra Carol on. “Show us the taps on your shoes,” he said, rocking from foot to foot in front of father and daughter. Astra straightened her legs, pointed her toes up, and directed her heels towards him, scissor kicking and laughing.

The seam popped a few more threads.

Henson must have been blind. He laughed along with the cubs, all caught up in their playful cheer. Panicked, Tonya glanced at Dennis who tracked where she was looking, and he moved into action faster than she. He stepped in front of Astra

Carol, shielding her, blocking the view. Tonya felt a surge of love for that little saint.

“Get out of the way,” Elvis yelled.

“Henson!” Tonya shrieked. “She needs to put something else on!”

“Why?” he asked. “She’s practicing her moves in what she’ll be wearing for the parade.”

“Not until I re-stitch it.” 119

He looked down and began fingering the epaulets and the regalia and the buttons and ribbons. “Looked fine to me,” he replied.

Tonya felt no choice. She spelled it out. “Her little p.e.a.c.h.y.!”

“Her peachy?” Elvis collapsed on the floor, holding his sides, and rolling back and forth extravagantly. Henson peered over Astra Carol’s shoulder and clamped her legs together.

“Come on, Honey. Let’s go get something else on.” He scooped her up, and slung her over his shoulder, as she giggled and squirmed all the way up the stairs.

“That’s not nice, guys—not fair at all,” he added.

3:54 pm

Dennis approached Tonya. “I hate it when guys tease my little sister,” he confessed.

“She’s a lucky little girl to have such a fab big brother,” Tonya said. The other boys charged the tub, and immediately began flipping dollops of the plaster and draping strips of soaked paper over each other’s heads. Even Wallace joined them. A mess seemed as appealing as a peepshow.

“I know how to do the music,” Dennis said. “Come on, I’ll show you.” He took Tonya’s hand and led her back to the console. A panic attack swelled like a deadly wave breaking at sky level. She grabbed her phone as though it were a buoy. 120

The face was dark as night. She rubbed her forehead with both palms. Was no news good news? Or the opposite?

“This is the shuffle dial,” Dennis continued. “But if you want to play something in particular, you can select it here. Do you know what’s in there?”

Tonya swam up for air. “Not really,” she whispered. “Probably some of Astra

Carol’s music is on there. She does a lot of little events.”

“Let’s pick a random one,” Dennis suggested. He presented her with a sweet reassuring smile. He tapped several times on an arrow pointing right. “Tell me when to stop,” he said. “And I will.”

“Never,” Tonya said. What he’d said she’d never heard from a man. She blushed and corrected herself. “Now.”

It took a few seconds before the intro started, and then a woman was singing.

“I’ll always remember the song they were playin’,

The first time we danced and I knew...”

Oh yes, she thought, Anne Murray.

“As we swayed to the music and held to each other,

I fell in love with you— ”

Dennis raised his arms towards her, in waltzing position. 121

“Teach me how to dance to that type of music,” he said. Tonya stepped back, but Anne kept singing:

“Could I have this dance for the rest of my life?

Would you be my partner every night?

When we’re together, it feels so right.

Could I have this dance for the rest of my life?”

“No, no, Dennis.” She shook her head. “That’s not what we’re here for today.” But he came closer, not giving up.

“I’ll always remember that magic moment,

When I held you close to me.

‘Cause we moved together, I knew forever,

You’re all I’ll ever need...”

“Please?” Dennis said, putting his hand around Tonya’s waist, and taking her right hand in his left. 122

The room rattled with the roar of a car engine, the squeal of brakes, the thump of a door, the rapid patter of feet on concrete, up the front stairs, through the

front door, down into the rec room so very fast.

3:56 pm

Panting and wide-eyed, Colleen Haefner landed next to them.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded. Tonya broke away from Dennis.

“Oh—oh, yes, Colleen,” she stammered. “Uh—L. M. said that he had a tummy ache and needs to go home.”

“My son said nothing about a stomachache,” Colleen continued, blazing. “He said there weren’t two adults present, and he was scared. Where’s Miriam?”

“Scared?” Tonya’s felt woozy. She pointed to the ceiling. “Henson is here,” she said. “He just went upstairs for a few seconds to get something.”

“I saw. With Astra Carol like that?”

Aaron edged towards Colleen. “My dad had to take my sister upstairs,” he said. “Her outfit tore, and we were teasing her.”

Tonya was speechless with gratitude to that ornery son of hers.

Colleen looked down at Aaron and smiled. “Well, I don’t know but something don’t seem right here with you people.” He shrugged and retreated to the other guys.

“ ‘You people?’ ” Tonya repeated. 123

Colleen ignored her, and faced the boys. “Wipe you hands on those paper towels and follow me.” She meant business. The boys did as told, and while they did, she assessed Tonya. “I just don’t understand, but thank God I got here this quickly.”

“You could have walked just as fast. You’re only a block away.”

Colleen’s voice softened. She wrapped her arm around Tonya’s shoulder.

“You’ve been needing some backup, haven’t you?” She spoke the way Tonya spoke to her girls. “Can we get out down here?”

Tonya eyes flooded.

“It’s mud-central out there. You have to swim up to street level. We need to put some steps up the hill.”

“Not a problem,” Colleen said.

“It’s so soupy and overgrown what with the thaw and all.”

“A little hike is fine.”

“Why don’t you just go up the way you came down?”

Colleen put both hands on Tonya’s shoulder, and leaned in closer. She whispered, “The boys have seen enough of what’s going on up there.”

“What do you mean, ‘going on up there’?” Tonya looked up the stairwell.

“Henson? Henson?” she called out. 124

Wallace approached, looking over his shoulder at Elvis and Aaron. Tonya assumed he was going to lead a march out the basement door. He paused instead beside Colleen. He looked down at his shoes. He began to whimper.

“She touched me,” he choked out.

Colleen grew rigid and alert. She nodded to Wallace, and quickly guided him to the front of the line. She kept nodding and nodding, as she gathered the other cubs into single file. Aaron resisted, and picked up a pool cue that had fallen under the table.

“I just was giving him his cap back,” Tonya explained. Colleen kept nodding—now at her. She opened the back door.

“It’s so muddy and so overgrown,” Tonya protested.

“They’re cub scouts,” Colleen said. “They’re used to mud.”

“But... but...”

“I’ll be in touch,” Colleen said.

“Come on, Aaron,” Elvis yelled. “I’ll show you my house.”

Aaron put the cue in the rack, and then joined the other boys.

“We’re going to have to talk this thing through,” Colleen continued. “With the other parents and all, and see where we’re left—what with Miriam and all.”

And then they were gone. Tonya closed the door. 125

3:59 pm

“Henson?” she called up the stairwell. “Henson?”

Not a sound echoed back. She wondered if she should just go up there, invited or not. Tears welled again. She sat down on a bamboo chair by the Tiki bar with its hanging, glass rack, and its counter covered with thatch that had fallen from its roof. She waited for Henson to reply, for Aaron to return to take the mini-stereo up to his dad, for Miriam to call—most of all Miriam to call.

Why surely very, very soon, even Astra Carol would want to come down here.

She must this moment be needing her music, to get in a couple of more run-throughs before dinner. Maybe she would come down again all by herself, and they could knock out a couple of tunes together, and while they did that, maybe Miriam would finally call to explain her last message, for that had been the agreement: she would call the minute she knew what was what.

Tonya took out her phone and stared at it. 126

Stolen Music

The door whomped open. Sudden punctuation to Menachem’s day. He paused, his tuning hammer on the string pin on its way to 110 kHz. Three degrees

Celsius outside his skin measured as a gust spat in at thirty kilometers per hour. The pianos would know, too. Some parts would shiver, some clench tight, some lose resonance, some lose flexibility like the bones of the old blind man facing them. He might have to tune the instruments again. He could. He would. So the world changed. Outside, a tree trunk had thickened for decades until its shaft now touched the phone line. Swaying in the wind, it bowed the cord. The blind man waited for its cello moan to fade.

Fetid odors followed the visitor in, mold flourishing on leaves piling up in slush. Whoever entered must have been tall, tall enough to bump the mistletoe hanging on a ribbon and tiny bell that bobbed across a hat or hair in staccato bingles as the caller passing under set it whirling. This was the only decoration Herr Schukat put up at this time of year. What did he care? A minor, promotional gesture did not signal a religious testament. Menachem listened. His ears were his eyes. His profession a cliche. But not always. Not back there and then from where they had 127

come. Not at the international convention of visually impaired tuners. Even with digital tuners and voice recognition software.

The caller might have severe scoliosis. A shuffling gait favored the right side, moving through the smells ever present—yeast and glue, damper felt and sheet music, old men and space heater prongs. Now added was an aroma of sachet. A woman then. Perhaps old, too, suggested by the gummy creak of the thick ply of comfort shoes. Such soles would protect her from the nail head sticking up from the floorboard. Menachem’s colleague should have had it fixed by now. A debutante tourist last summer had wandered in barefoot and scratched her toe, and her father had threatened to sue.

What did Schukat care? He did not even remember to remember such pains or sensations. He no longer had them. If he ever were to encounter that nail head, in his pained pacing back and forth, waiting for or waiting on customers, he would need more than the small, round bandage spot he had applied to the girl’s dot of blood to avoid court. He would need sandpaper. His legs were wooden. Pre-carbon-fiber. Pre­ plastic.

“If you could see, Vitnisky, you would not believe your eyes,” Schukat said once after he had stood outside the town’s only sports bar and watched the multiple flatscreens. “An Olympic runner, a double-amputee, wore blades like the hind legs of animals. L’s on tiptoe. Like a satyr, ready for wine and women. And what about those 128

runners who lost their legs in the Boston marathon bombing? They got replacements, new legs with new joints so they can dance on TV. But who’s helping those of us who lost more than what you can see gone?”

“Everyone loses everything,” Menachem replied, not the first time.

“Everyone. Everything.”

“Not all at once,” Heinrich would then counter.

The rehashing never stopped. Tiresome.

Today Schukat seemed agitated. Ian Hagen was expected. No longer so well known, though once the only prominent local, he vanished now and then on tour. Or

so he allowed all to assume. On his returns, he could not resist testing what he thought should have been his, Heinrich’s treasure, a 97-key Bosendorfer Imperial.

Guarded by a movie-theater cordon, it was the most expensive item in town. It

stretched credibility to new limits in all directions. For example, how the town librarian had happened to own it.

Schukat had told Vinitsky he had paid for that information at its auction. The

source was the driver of the flatbed on which it had arrived. Though on consignment

from an unnamed owner, it supposedly had come to her through inheritance from the wealthy, cruel family she despised. At age seventeen, the story went, the day she took possession of it, she petitioned to become an emancipated minor. The family court turned her down. She became a nun. Due to lack of portion, the convent 129

ejected her. She entered prison in service. There she and a black convict conceived a child. She refused to renounce her order and her holy vows. But when she gave the baby up for adoption, she took off her habit forever and cloistered herself among books. Bewildered acquaintances kept her on suicide watch. After several months, their concern declined. After a few years various sentries moved elsewhere. After a decade, a few others died, and those remaining filled their time in more productive ways. Their scrutiny ended, the librarian killed herself with the help of roofies and a plastic bag.

Even to her closest co-workers, this epic was revealed only as single episodes, each visible in each small room of each small present, ones that periodically changed as though without doors or windows in or out. Gossip through time is what linked them together into the fuller tale. Indeed, she would have been a disappointment to all who had never cared at all anyway. Would have been, not was. Not a single blood relative had bothered to stay in touch.

But then again, who could be sure? No one had ever entered her home. No one really seemed to know what had been there. Few even claimed to know where that home was. Schukat regretted never having asked the driver his name.

If the librarian had been real, Schukat wasn’t disappointed in her. If she really had been the owner, he owed her thanks. He felt something akin to guilt that her terrible choices had led to his extraordinary good fortune. But guilty of what? He had 130

played no part in those decisions or outcomes. Did he owe Hagen an apology or thanks for having been on the road? That fact had left Heinrich as the only bidder at the auction, and he had snatched up the prize for pennies on the dollar. Then again, why should he thank a man who offered no thanks to a universe that had given him the opportunity to make this instrument his own this very day with a simple signature on a check—preferably cashiers? Every time Hagen came, Heinrich’s hopes, like

Lazarus, rose.

Schukat reminded his assistant that a more likely disaster, a more terrifying one, had already been averted. And no one noticed. He bragged on Menachem’s behalf. Hadn’t he been the one to overseen the dangerous move from the auction house that left not a single smudge on the underside of a caster? The facility manger had given Heinrich only a few hours to get the thing gone. A pig auction was next up.

Heinrich was in despair, but Menachem had taken over. He gathered up a group of unemployed men, assigned and orchestrated the tasks to disassemble, load, unload, and then reassemble the fewest possible number of the twelve thousand separate parts in the twelve-hundred-pound mass worth one hundred times its weight.

Vinitsky knew who in his crew needed to stand where in that dance. How the legs were to come off in which order. How the harp should be covered. How the strings damped, and the lid strapped down. Every delicate if temporary extraction, each twist in space, while the mattresses were placed on the truck, between the 131

padding secured on the van’s metal bed, and then to orchestrate the slide of the components into the store where the tuner choreographed all those moves again in reverse, commanding his untrained troops to hand him tool after tool as he needed each to make the instrument whole again in its new home.

“I christen ye, “MR,” Schukat bellowed into the reassembled case housing the harp on that day of teleportation. “My Retirement.” The rich reverberation made him smile.

“ ‘HH’ is better,” Menachem said.

“Meaning?”

“Heinrich’s Headstone.”

Schukat laughed the first time. “So cynical,” he replied.

“Who has the money?”

“Hagen, maybe.”

“Maybe not.” Cynical or not, in fact, the tuner did hope someone would buy someday. Heinrich had promised him a share of the proceeds for his virtuosity during the move, and Menachem with age had warmed to the idea of being recognized with money in place of praise. 132

“Stolen,” the woman said. Maybe she wasn’t just window-shopping. She had seated herself on a bench behind Vinitsky, at his seven o’clock, the Steinway. She fell silent for half a minute.

Then her fingers stubbed across the black keys with pianissimo thumps.

Menachem nodded along with each, internalizing the rhythmic patterns suggested. He waited for all the room’s new harmonies to diminish, for the cramped showroom to fall back again to the familiar ticking of the clocks on the wall, sounds that he himself alone could set in perfect sync. Then he pulled his tuning lever down a centimeter, stopping again at the creak and jangle of furniture hardware loose within the wood, adjusting to Heinrich’s shift in weight. He was raising himself from his swivel chair.

This would take a while. Menachem was in no hurry. He was fascinated by tiny motions. They could make such big changes.

Herr Schukat needed his arms to do the lifting. The chair bolts rattled in slots weakened by wood rot. His inflamed lungs competed with eerie, high-pitched overtones. Having achieved his balance, Schukat would then hike up his trousers, he would stretch his suspenders, he would let them slap back against his paunch as prelude for his first step. Next, the rocking chair beside him would cease rocking, where the boy from the Old Country was, frozen to silence by the old man’s perilous journey from his desk in the back of the shop to the display area in the front, nearly impassable with the dozen pianos crammed into the town’s only and oldest music 133

store, its least visited enterprise. The sequence never changed, but the environment in which they happened did, so things were not the same after.

“May I help you, Madam?” Schukat asked. From this, Vinitsky learned the woman was a stranger. Heinrich’s formality sounded old-fashioned and unnecessary in a town of 21,304, in a neighborhood that had not changed paint or shingles or billboards or even one marquee in generations, on a block where customers had come and gone through the same doors since they were the age of their own children now. Of course a stranger was welcome. Always. A stranger might actually buy

something. Though today, if simply absorbing the warmth, a malingerer might stop a

sale that might lead to a cozy retirement. Besides neither of the men was accustomed to more than one customer in the store at a time. So much of their trade was done now out-of-state.

“Gone,” the woman finally said.

How people kept their lights on in a town this size was rarely a mystery. But in this shop it was. What in here wasn’t? Whether a regional avoidance of hearing the truth or a pseudo politeness with an impolite whiplash, two prevailing rumors spread sotto voce jointly created and revised by the citizens’ darkly active imagination.

One was that Heinrich Schukat was a former Gestapo chief who profited mightily from gold dug from Jewish jaws in the camps. The unspoken assumption was that he worked for the losing side, but at war’s end had brought a favored Jew, 134

blinded by starvation, with him to America in exchange for rocket-science secrets.

Werner Von Braun had been his boss, but an explosion on a launch pad had blown off his legs. The U.S. government had paid for his silence, his fake limbs, and his music store inventory in some throwaway town where snoopy journalists would never go.

Another theory, more complicated but just as difficult to disprove, was that the old man had a website where he sold on consignment, for third parties, confiscated memorabilia and personal effects to tattoo parlors, descendants of victims, and militia curio shops displaying war souvenirs beside crosses of valor, skull necklaces, and brown-shirt jodhpurs. And yet, no one’s cell phone had ever revealed a wifi network in the shop. No one had even seen a computer. So then what? And when would Schukat have turned the gold into paper? He never left town. Who would have come in dark of night to buy metals or old papers or reading glasses or dolls made from twigs and yarn, with tiny six-point stars on their lapels? He had no visitors, and if he had, they would have been seen. Their home was under the eye of someone all the time. Lights going on or off anytime at all suspicious would have been noticed and buzzed about all over town.

Curious kids now and then tried to find clues favoring one allegation over the other by sneaking into the basement of the Victorian, sagging on every beam and 135

joist like a martyr on a cross. They discovered nothing, except that apparendy

Schukat lived downstairs and Mencahem up, with separate everything.

The tuner overheard these theories often on his slow passage from here to there, past this person here and that one there, guided by his white cane that he swung before him like a divining rod desperate farmers still used. He passed along what he heard to Heinrich. He asked him often why he did not set the record straight.

“How can I refute an accusation, if no one has the chutzpah to express it outright to my face?” Schukat answered with his own question. “Why didn’t you say

something yourself?”

“I’m not sure I would answer either.”

When they first came, they hadn’t spoken the language well enough to do so.

Not that they could, the truth was the truth could not be told. It was as bad as the

falsehoods.

“Can’t people do math anymore?” Heinrich asked. “Do we look that old?

“How should I know?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” They both chuckled.

Menachem withdrew into his own favorite memories. He had learned that to win the sympathies of young women he did best pretending to be blinder than blind.

Clumsy. Lost. Helpless. A stumble, a march towards a wall, and they would grab his 136

arm to steer, to help, and end up unavoidably physical. When he was young, this was.

Now that he was old, he knew no one to fool.

Since he was a child he’d been told that blind people couldn’t see. In their minds, that is. But he could. He marveled that no one had ever thought to ask him if it were true. People don’t ask enough questions. Some people see the alphabet in color, smell a sound. Who knows what what’s going on in anyone’s mind? But his

fingers and nose and ears furnished his own mental theater for him to assemble. He loved those magic lantern shows. Nerves threading every pore detected the shift of light past a curtain, heat rising towards ceilings, the cold around porcelain, around kitchen cabinet panes. No piano declared its origin to him by manufacturer monogram, but rather by the unmistakable odor of its characteristic wood.

So, too, with all things. Knowing every cubic centimeter of his space in their home and the relationships of all things therein did not make for much drama or pathos in a journey from the front door to the refrigerator. It had been years since he had tripped or fallen.

Not, that is, since he had had required Heinrich to have a separate entrance built for him to get to his quarters safely. This after Schukat’s untidiness had proved to be potentially lethal to Menachem. Twice, he had toppled over his rubble to little harm. A third slip, though, on littered debris, had landed him in the emergency room with a severe facial injury and unconscious. Though already blind and to the hospital 137

staff seemingly unconscious, he heard everything in the emergency room. He was not amused by the coarse joke he had overheard while his eyelid was stitched back to his brow. Something about window shades in a coal mine.

Alone now, he made no wrong turns.

“I can’t quite hear you,” Schukat was saying. “Give me a moment.”

The woman did not reply.

“You sit at an authentic Truman-era, baby grand,” he continued as he staggered closer to her. “I’m not saying it was the President’s, nor am I saying it wasn’t.”

There was no response.

“Perhaps you notice that the ‘soft’ pedal is missing. Easy to replace, if you wish it. But why silence such a voice?”

He played the few bars of Beethoven, the only piece he knew. The woman still said nothing.

“You may find it amusing to be able to tell your friends I obtained it from a state’s attorney who offered it as payment from a man imprisoned for something no longer a crime.”

The unending silence Menachem took as a no, but Heinrich cleared his throat as though it were a stubborn and delayed yes. Patience was key. Pianos had big price tags. They moved out slowly, rarely. 138

That, too, was known. Since the recent economic downturn, the planting of

UPods and double-parking of U-Hauls never ceased. Times were tough. Unpleasant title-tattle stayed afloat. Menachem linked them to the constant ripples on the lake stirred by cold wind from the hills, a constant downward rush that left that part of the region uninhabited. Where the small, huddled together had no large obvious effect.

Moreover, in the last decades, keyboard synthesizers first had halved revenues, already suffering from a youth migration to urban Meccas., where the digital followed them on satellites. They had no need for concert halls or the musicians in them who were not equipped to provide the trending music. Music itself, that had once contained only chords and notes, had acquired lyrics, and finally been nearly emptied of all but percussion and profanity. Then half of that halved cash had flowed downstream after several Civil War-era chapels were boarded up after their faithful joined in an exodus to a God who now dwelt on the bluff above a vast strip mall. A mega-church had been erected that could accommodate high-school graduations and the newly popular Silver Ring Thing ceremonies seven days a week, even Sundays as long as church services were over. As close as next door, a new computer store, packed with music software, was the latest incursion in a community that now created and consumed music on laptops and phones. 139

“No need to get up, Good Lady, to experience the delicate beauty of the harpsichord, beside you. You can simply reach over and its keys are within easy reach.” Again, the woman did not speak.

Menachem wondered if Schukat had assessed the style and cost of her clothes, and decided to alter his strategy. He resumed his pitch, his voice now roughened by a hint of irritation.

“Visitors here sometimes fear trying out such a specimen worthy of a museum. It would not be unreasonable if you were one of those rare people who would recognize this for what it is: a handcrafted Ledgerwood. Why the fear?”

She said nothing.

“So delicate, the moisture in the breath of its audience can leave it out of tune?

Yes, I’m sure you knew, but don’t answer, don’t answer. What your reluctance really must be is so very obvious I am embarrassed to have waited so long to say it. The stool. ‘Flimsy’ was the word some drugstore cowboy used when he complained it floated on toothpicks.”

Menachem winced at the attempt to use vernacular, Heinrich’s word choice so scripted and saturated in pretense.

“But should you chose to test it,” Schukat continued, “you would learn that he was not correct. The history of that stool, too, would make for good telling and retelling to all who come if you hold salons in your home.” Heinrich lowered his 140

voice as though announcing a death. “The seat was created for its owner, a wunderkind. Tragically, at nine he retired, crushed to despondency when he realized he could never be as good as—not just one—but two other children attending

Julliard with him, one plucked from China, one from Sierra Leone.”

“Stolen,” the woman said.

“Stolen?” Schukat repeated. “With all due respect, I assume it more likely that their parents brought them for such long journeys.”

“He changed his story,” Menachem thought. “But why care? Is is as good as any.” He smiled when the wooden cuckoo from Lucerne, he had positioned above the harpsichord, began boinging and clicking, a startled trespasser in a panic attack, from a time of terror. He never fixed the mechanical problems. He enjoyed the periodic surprise and reminder of their salvation, not to ever be shared.

Instead, Schukat created tales for every piece of furniture. Menachem did not mind. His life had always been full of them, variations on a theme, and Schukat spun his histories artfully, for first-time callers the whole works, with virtuosic verbal cadenzas; for returnees, mere appoggiaturas with simple updates.

His tales were lost on the young. History bored them. Not worth remembering. They walked out on his narrations, and he gave up competing with one- to two-minute films on their phones. He liked older regulars. They allowed him to go on and on. With them he perfected sounding bemused, as though he and his 141

listeners had heard the story at the same time and were sifting through the details to see what seemed likely and what just could not be. He never really lied to anyone about his merchandise, but he mastered embedding charming possibility, even improbability into every green-felt pad beneath the most unused key hammer.

Whether for an instrument suited for a concert hall or a barrelhouse juke joint, he had one. Sometimes the one he told applied to another instrument. His favorite he saved for men not wearing wedding bands: The backstory of his 1913 Jacob Doll upright. It had belonged to a rock-and-roll star, fallen on hard times, who had sold it to pay for his wedding to his 14-year-old cousin and their honeymoon. The white keys were marred by heel scuffs and trails of blue shoe polish from treble to bass.

Heinich left them and bumped the price up. He pretended to shudder in imitating the tone the has-been fiance used when he had proclaimed to everyone in earshot, “Old enough to bleed is old enough to breed,” driving most near the front door to leave immediately—en masse, some never to return, prompting Heinrich to buy the piano quickly to get him out of there before an echo reached those browsing in the back, and from there to those wandering by on the sidewalk, only then to curl onward around the corners and up elevators and float like smoke from chimneys around the hills of town.

“Forgive me,” Heinrich said, bringing Menachem’s wandering mind back to the present. Schukat was not giving up. “Have we the good fortune of perhaps 142

having been acquainted before? Time can make us unrecognizable, as those who knew me before would probably say.”

Had she noticed her looking at his legs as he hauled himself over to the player piano?

“Give her a show,” Schukat said. Menachem heard the boy stand, cross the room, and take his place at the player piano to the left of the front door. One of his chores was to do what his guardian could not do: pump the pedals to turn the rolls. A janky rag erupted over the hissing of the bellows that turned the copper cartridge.

“How could anyone ever prove that Jelly Roll Morton actually pumped the pedals to turn such a roll for the patrons at his house of ill-repute?” Heinrich had to shout to be heard above the music. “Were there any photos? I don’t have them. And why would he of all people have needed a mechanical device less dazzling than his fingers? All I know is what the elderly ragman from Tupelo told me as he sold it off the back of his trash truck. Not the best source I should think, and you?”

“Gone,” the woman said. The timbre of her voice hinted her age as easily as crepe-paper skin or age spots would have for the sighted. Eighty probably.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Missing,” she murmured.

“A piano?” Schukat asked, startled. 143

Menachem smiled slightly, imaging the speed of what must have been

Heinrich’s pivoting neck, his nose stabbing every corner in lightning visual inventory.

“No,” the woman said.

The tuner paused to await the reply, but hearing no reply, he eased his wrench down a millimeter, then flicked the string with his fingernail: C-256. He plucked the next string a hand’s breath below its pin. The woman’s neck cracked as head must have snapped towards the sound.

“The note,” she said.

Could she hear that it was four Hz flatter than the same string still in some parts of Europe?

The woman depressed B-natural. And then C. And then B again.

“Gone,” she said.

“What is?” Herr Schukat snapped, patience gone from his voice. The woman hit the one tone and then the other again and again and then both at the same time.

“Gone, gone,” she repeated.

“A note? You mean the ivory fell off of one of your keys at home? Is that it?”

“No. The sound.”

“Sound does not fall off,” Heinrich asserted. “Do you mean a dole snapped and fell off inside the case?” She did not reply, so he persisted. “Sometimes the key itself may follow,” he added. 144

Menachem held his tongue. The woman fell silent again. How might Schukat appear now? Would he be looking around for help, realizing there was no one who could see to respond to his silent plea?

“There should be 88,” Herr Schukat declared. “All pianos do.”

The tuner stood, and walked with solemn accuracy towards the woman at the piano. He leaned into the case. He inserted rubber wedges to damp adjacent strings, and rapidly adjusted all three, one-by-one, down a quartertone. He struck the B again,

forte.

“Yes,” the woman said. A-double-sharp by European tuning, not B-half-flat as in America. She sighed deeply, and put her right hand on the keys and labored to accomplish a chromatic scale. She stopped again

“Gone, too.” Now she sounded as though she would cry. “Gone.”

Menachem tilted his head towards the ceiling. He felt for a stool at the next piano, scooted it over, and sat next to the woman. He reached into the piano again.

His skills were not ones well rewarded in this world, but he was proud knowing he could retune an instrument far faster than the normal speed of twenty minutes per octave. He could do two in thirty minutes, one tuned to a European A and one to

American, and still have his tools beside a third. Doing so now would free Schukat to attend to more pressing matters. And so, the tuner began his task but in slow motion. 145

He heard the boy slide off the bench for the player piano. He tiptoed towards join the tuner. Since his arrival, the young emigre could now avoid all cracks in a

floorboard. Did it look like a slow dance? Vinitsky hoped so. That would be nice. He paused to create the imagine of a Nijinski in the room, until the sudden weight of the child’s Rubik’s Cube made him flinch as it was balanced lightly on his thigh. He released his wrench, picked up the puzzle, and twisted it along its many axes to disarray the smaller squares of primary colors conjoined to form the single larger block. He held it out to his side, and its bulk evaporated. He heard the boy tiptoe away, soon followed by the sound of the toy clicking on the seat of his chair, then the runners rocking so gently he could tell that the cube would not slide or move at all.

The woman began to cry.

Menachem lowered the C a quartertone and raised the B the same amount.

“Maestro Hagen will be here shortly,” Schukat interrupted from across the room. “We must prepare for him.”

“The Bosendorfer is ready,” Menachem said. “But the digital clock—”

“Ah yes, this I know too well, my friend,” Heinrich said lurching forward again. The tuner heard him grasp a keyboard lid, as he always did, to balance himself for an labored adventure downward to unplug the object of irritation, an activity his limbs were not fashioned to make easy. The walls themselves ticked in 146

commemoration of his patience. Menachem continued moving rubber damps, plucking strings, and gently cranking pins. The rustle of Schukat’s trousers ceased.

“As long as I’m going all the way down there,” Schukat ventured, “perhaps I should plug in the space heater to keep his ankles warm.”

“Too soon,” Menachem warned. “It will affect the tuning. Let the boy do both tasks. He can turn on the heater when Hagen arrives.”

“But of course. Boy?” Why did he raise his voice? The child by now had learned to read his lips. The rocking chair quit rocking.

Menachem imagined how this performance might unfold. So many mental pictures superimposed present realities with past visions from when he could still see—exaggerated muggings by silent-film comedians overdubbed with the here and now. Would Schukat first point at the Heizgerat by his desk? Raise his eyebrows, pucker his lips into an “O,” slaps his palms to his cheeks, squish them towards the ceiling? The montage Vinitski created was a prissy pantomime by Hughie Mack instructing Jackie Coogan on unplugging the device, lifting it, lugging it across a proscenium stage, and squatting to plug it in. Menachem chuckled. He liked his mind.

The boy laughed a strange muffled honk. The bumping and clattering fit the fantasy. Perhaps the child imitated all he had been shown, even the labored limp. At last, the tuner heard the click of prongs going into an outlet close to the old woman, and then there was silence. 147

“Gut! Good!” Schukat bellowed, and the tiptoeing recurred as the boy moved away. The air in the room again vibrated with the sound of the speedy twisting of tiny cubes.

“What music is on the tray?” Menachem asked.

“A folio called Hip and Hop, Rap and Rock.”

“Mozart or Beethoven might appeal more to your guest.”

“Of course,” Schukat said. “They are eternal.”

“And Krazy Kat? Sambo?” Menachem continued. The Sambo lawn-jockey timepiece—one eye, a clock face, the other, a barometer.

“Yes, much too much,” Heinrich agreed. At about his eye level, they would not so difficult to get down. Vinitsky waited, as he heard the items removed, and

Schukat pitching towards his work area in the back storage area.

“Ah, better yet,” he exclaimed. “The sheaves he requested before are still here, of Bach and Fasch. I stashed them in the roll-top.”

“Perhaps, then, you should leave them on the bench,” Vinitsky suggested. He heard Schukat moving about in a way he could not interpret. “What are you doing?”

Menachem remembered something. He floated his hand above the lid of the piano on which he was working. Across polished ebony, he slid his fingers. Soon they touched cardboard. The promotional toppled onto the back of his hand. He picked it up, and folded it flat. 148

“Perhaps you should hide them all up and put in the back or under the other

compilations of classics.”

“I shall discard them all and replace them with a selected opus associated with

each instrument.”

Menachem listened as his colleague lumbered about the room, collapsed the

displays, made his way to his office, rustled folios, and returned. The hiss of paper

sheets sliding off of hardback books created an unpredictable counterpoint. The

tuner tilted his chin upward once more and his nostrils flared. “Bernstein’s Kaddish?”

“And this you know how?”

“Its pages are infused with the lingering odor of cheap menorah candles. Put

out Mozart’s Requiem instead.” The front window buzzed a little. “Your maestro

approaches,” he announced.

Schukat’s bumped into things more than usual, as must have been rushing to

finish his project. Then he hurried—as much as that was possible—to the shop front, puffing from the effort.

“Yes, I see he is.” The click of the door latch was followed by a grunt from

Schukat. He tugged and wheezed. Swollen with humidity, the door’s top and the

frame in which it rode probably had bloated up against each other like Weimar burgher fat cats, squished forever next to a whore in a Grosz drawing Menachem remembered having seen, when he still could see. 149

He heard Hagen’s transmission gears grind, and his ancient Kaiser eased backwards. Parallel parking. An arrival drama. Always difficult, always with the same amusing maneuvers. Why couldn’t someone who memorized Bach in only a few sittings learn over the years what would bring him next to a curb? Vinitsky had sat once on its upholstered front seats, more like sofas, on a journey to Hagen’s home to tune his baby grand. Menachem had the dubious though unverified honor of being the only person in recent years to have been invited inside. As he had entered, he had realized why. The smell of horsehair and mold soured the room. A sighted person would have been able to see that the breaks in hundred-year-old plaster that exposed it. The temperature inside less than 12 Celsius, warmer than outside, but uncomfortable to work in. Perhaps Hagen had assumed that a blind man would never notice a reversal of fortune that a sighted person would have seen immediately.

A drop-in, grade school music teacher had once told both Schukat and

Vinitsky of having read in a newspaper somewhere that The Maestro was the wealthiest person in the region. She scoffed at this. Menachem struggled with the school’s upright as she listed all her reasons for not believing. The man bought so much in bulk, and not in town, not even farmer’s market. He had worn the same clothes for years. He purchased gasoline by the liter in two botdes he brought, filled, then carried home by foot. Maybe things were as bad as the evidence implied. So 150

what? Artists having money was not something Menachem ever thought to think about.

That time Hagen had been invited in, he had made his way hand over hand on the backs of the furniture. He had grown to enjoy solving the mystery of all sorts of sensations. He could feel they were covered in sheets of a coarse ply. A faint fluttering in the draft when the door had opened had intrigued him. Making his way along the wall, he had tried to imagine its source. Paper brushed against his cheek.

But of course. He smiled. This must be wallpaper hanging in strips, fluttering in the faint breeze, audible to those attending to its entrance through the window sashes and under the doors.

As they moved towards the music room, Hagen bragged of various photos hanging along the corridor. Black-and-white, he said. So many stationary things. Only the minds of observers changing. They depicted musical figures from days long gone, but Hagan said he was in every image. In some he had been quite young. In others, he had aged. He apologized to someone who couldn’t see. Few today still lived who could guess who these celebrities were or why they had once been famous.

Here, Hagen described, was an image from 1946 of Richard Tauber. He an the

German tenor shared a love of automobiles. Hagen had been a young boy. How else would have been so cheeky as to jump onto the running board of the great man’s

Cord Phaeton? Less than a year later, Tauber had lung cancer. He was bankrupt and 151

forgotten. Did he ever know his medical bills were paid by an extra in one of his films? Marlene Dietrich.

Here Hagen paused, he said, before himself accompanying nine-year-old wunderkind Yehudi Menuin for an encore in St. Louis.

He took another step, and Menachem did, too. Hagen said his grandfather was a close friend of Enrico Caruso’s greatest rival, Titta Ruffo, the baritone with a tenor’s range. Until it shrunk to fewer pitches than the flights of stairs he’d climbed to his fifth-floor garret. He died there of starvation.

One picture they paused before momentarily, but then Hagan had led him onward past it without explanation. Menachem never found out why. What had it contained?

Hagen’s last stop was to look at bis mother shoulder to shoulder with Anton

Webern. They were sharing the same cigarette. The must have passed it quickly. The cloud of smoke was already dispersing. The other just being exhaled. They were on the same cobbled curb where—a week after the war ended—Webern alone stepped outside to enjoy a cigar in the night air. He hadn’t wanted to awake his grandchildren while doing so. An American soldier had shot him in the back. That’s how he died.

Was that how much the world noticed or cared about genius, Hagen asked.

Why did he tell him all this? 152

The entire tuning session had taken more than an hour, but the memory still jarred Menachem like dissonant “beats” of warring harmonics. It had been a depressing excursion, since each story intended as an inspiring encounter had sounded more like a tawdry and embarrassing death notice but paid for by relatives rather than a final salute by means of an obituary written by an esteemed journalist to serve as entry into eternal history. Menachem hadn’t known many of the names either. World famous before world fame was so frequently possible. And he was almost a generation younger than Hagan.

The squeal of a loose fan belt startled the old woman. She grabbed his knee and just as suddenly released it. Menachem caught his breath. He resumed working the other strings between the unisons he had created an octave apart.

“How’s he doing?” he asked Schukat.

“As well as he can. As well as usual.”

The car brakes whined, though the vehicle must have been going very slowly.

Perhaps they were worn down to the metal. The gears ground again, the engine revved, softened, and then the car seemed to move forward a little less than from where it started, stopped suddenly, and rocked on its shocks.

A thunder of drum and bass filled the air. Coming from another vehicle barreling around the corner. Furious men, yelling not singing. New music. Menachem wondered if that car vibrated visibly, as though it were visible air. It roared closer, 153

then screeched to a stop right outside. Its horn blasted four deafening insults. Even from inside the shop, Menachem gauged that the driver inside the passenger compartment was sustaining exposure to decibel levels above 110. Louder than a jet.

The car engine idled with a guttural, chopping snap more like a helicopter than a car.

The horn was now being leaned on. It blared unceasingly.

Poor Hagen, Menachem thought. The recorded sounds would upset him more than performing poorly the art of parallel parking. The other vehicle seemed suddenly to zigzag out and around Hagen, back into traffic, before exploding off to the next stoplight. Hagen persisted in his back-and-forth courtship of the empty space a while longer. Finally the Kaiser fell silent, a door opened and closed, shoes crunched on a mixture of substances left from autumn and arriving with winter.

Heinrich opened the door for his customer. A faint hiss of snow came in as well. Menachem especially loved that sound, a whisper of the unseen entering another dimension or two.

“Maestro, it is an honor.”

“The honor is always mine, Schukat.” Hagen kicked his heels perhaps to dislodge a leaf from his spats perhaps or maybe slush from his soles. Then in the two men approached the tuner and the woman and the boy.

“No doubt the city has repainted the parking spaces to make them more cramped,” Hagen declared. “Increase revenues by cramming in more parking meters. 154

Just as they’ve done in the parking garages. Tighter spaces, more dings. A collusion, I suspect, with the body-repair shops.”

“A disgrace, if so, Maestro. Politicians, even here it seems, find devious ways to make a citizen’s life one of unanticipated miseries that they themselves must pay for.”

“Collisions of collusions,” Hagen ventured. Schukat laughed excessively, but stopped while his visitor cleared his throat, blew his nose, and added a coda. “Even my chauffeur would have trouble—if he weren’t on vacation again.”

“Gone, it seems, most often when most needed, Dear Friend.”

“No one knows that more than I, Herr Schukat. The life of an artist today is no easier than it ever was. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life, and that to his brother.”

“Here they mispronounce his name as ‘Van Gogh’,” Schukat lamented.

They moved into the narrow center of the shop—an aisle scarcely shoulder width between all the pianos. Due to the slope of the floor, the door closed itself, without quite closing. Heinrich pushed it shut and turned the lock. He put up a

“Closed Sign.”

“Mozart was thrown in a pauper’s grave.”

Menachem struck a string several times with one fingernail, turning his wrench a millimeter at a time. 155

“Menachem. Good afternoon! I did not see you.”

“Nor I you, Maestro,” he replied, then paused to listen to the discomfort from his joke. He turned his head, with pride and grace, not quite in anyone’s direction.

“Sounds like you’ve a challenge there.”

“Like one I’ve never had.”

“I hope the Imperial is in a better ‘temper’,” Hagen raising his voice slightly to emphasize his little scherzo.

“As they say: ‘as much as it can bear’,” Menachem countered, startling slightly, feeling the Rubic’s cube on his thigh again. He relaxed just as quickly, picked it up, twirled away its perfected alignment, held it out, and felt it vanish from his fingers.

“And who is this?” Hagen asked. The soft nipping sound must have been was of the honored guest removing his gloves. No one answered.

“Good morning, young man,” Hagen condnued. The boy tiptoed away, back it seemed to his chair, without speaking. “Does he speak English?”

“Sadly, he doesn’t speak at all. He is deaf.”

“Oh,” Hagen said. “Nothing could be worse.”

“Nothing,” Menachem agreed.

“He does have a strange skill, though, in the retention of patterns,” Schukat continued. 156

“Patterns?” Hagen repeated. New effort in the man’s voice and the rustle of cloth allowed the tuner to discern that Hagen was removing his overcoat. The boy whirred the planes of the cube again.

“Ah so—so I see,” Hagen proclaimed. He was meticulous man, and from the click of a button on a piano bench, it was clear where he placed his coat. “And so too do I see at last the Imperial: To its test or to its rest.”

“Only your fingers can reveal its truths,” Heinrich said. The buckle on the cordon clicked. So Schukat was ushering Hagen towards the piano’s bench.

Since the new visitor had entered, the woman had made no sound louder than breathing. Now, though, as the men stroked each other’s egos, surely it was her fingers depressing various keys. The others fell silent for a moment as the tones sounded—compressed, modal, nearer than customary, too near, out of key, from a different scale or time.

“Intolerable,” Hagen said. “You have much work to attend to, Menachem, is that not true?”

“Always,” he replied. The tones ceased.

In recent years, Hagen had introduced more and more modern composers into his repertoire, though he had built a career avoiding them. For decades his audiences had never heard him perform any works composed after the end of the

Nineteenth century. Moreover, in America in recent years there were few paying 157

audiences of size eager to hear Dimitri Shostakovich or Charles Ives, let alone

George Sessions or John Adams whose piano works few human hands had mastered to transport into the ears open and willing to hear.

For a time, Menachem had wondered why the man was now adopting them.

Finally a theory presented itself: Hagen’s was losing his touch, literally. His technique did not seem to be what it once had been for the classics. Who could make sense of these “new” moderns? If Hagan made a mistake while performing one of their complexities, who would know?

Hagen scooted the bench out with such extreme care, as though its castors would gouge a floor made of silk. And it was surely he who seated himself, falling silent for a moment.

“My hands are so cold,” he said. Skin rubbed skin. Slowly, quickly, slowly.

“Take your time,” Heinrich said. “I have locked the door. No one else is expected. No one matters but you, Maestro. Everyone else will soon be leaving.”

The woman did not act on this invitation to exit. Her teeth began to chatter, and Menachem heard what seemed to be her panring into her cupped hands, then perhaps massaging her forehead with the heels of her hands or—something—her eyebrows with her fingertips as she began rocking back and forth? Her bench creaked. Rhythmically. 158

“We set up die Heitzgerat just for you,” Schukat continued. Would he use a grand sweep of his palm towards it as though introducing the two? Would Hagen now be appeased if only briefly? He commanded with pompous authority: “Let us then, as Shostakovich would say, ‘destroy silence’.”

“Silence should always be destroyed,” Schukat agreed. “There is too much silence when there should be sound.”

The car outside, circling the block, blared rap music as it rumbled by with irritating slowness.

“Too much noise when there should be stillness,” Hagen said.

“Too much sound when there should be music,” Schukat added.

The racket outside was suddenly gone. The cello sound from the tree and the tinkle of the bell sounded one after the other. Just as unexpectedly, the room suddenly reverberated with tones and overtones. Hagan still retained his faculties.

Menachem was surprised at his choice, a trio, and he the only player. As a tree needs soil and water, to stay aloft the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s op.67 n.2, from its first bars, needed the staccato threading of violin and cello to stitch together the themes suggested by the piano. Menachem made a decision. With his right hand in the treble, he began to fill in the violin part. With his left in the bass, he added the cello voice. He remembered them. He still remembered. Hagan continued as though this involvement had already been agreed upon. Emboldened, the tuner took the 159

violin solo jumping to the foreground in its dance of death. Hagan varied this line.

Then Menachem replaced it with surges in the bass intended for the deep-throated instruments. The tuner’s hands hammered the keys, suddenly staccato and fortissimo.

Three minutes in, neither had made any errors. Their four hands entered the cascading glissandos, the aching ascensions that followed another minute further on.

Vinitsky stopped to clear the air for the pianist to shove arpeggios tumbling downward from treble to bass and roll them back upwards again, an avalanche of sound in reverse.

Menachem froze. The hint of sulfur. Something burned. Schukat began shouting. Hagen groaned in a guttural panic. The boy’s cry was a lamb’s bleat.

Menachem felt the cuffs of his trousers ignite. The hair of his shins sizzled. He slapped at them as though to punish them. Was there beauty in them? Did they sparkle? The down on the back of his wrists singed and like candle wicks hosted small flames. He jammed his fists into his pockets, stood, and as swiftly as care allowed, shuffled on his toes towards the front door hands still buried in safety. The sounds of the others lunging ahead of him—toppling things, rather than helping him—disoriented and angered him. Flames ate away clarity of what he thought was his world. Somehow he maintained his balance.

The boy seemed to be leading them all, now humming as though reassuring himself, them all. The crackle of wood accompanied Schukat’s wheezing as he, too, 160

struggled towards the front door. His footfalls sounded like duffle bags hoisted and dropped, hoisted and dropped. Menachem winced to imagine the jarring pain such effort might cause the man’s stumps. Other voices outside shouted, whispered, commanded, screamed.

The door whomped open again. The bell tingled again. Arms wrapped around the tuner and lifted him into the air. He felt the grip of terror and the confidence of support. This acceleration speeded him away from danger, though it felt like towards.

Other noises ricocheted off the redbrick walls, smudged display windows, and cracked sidewalks outside. Sirens. Shattering glass. Voices male and female, adult and child. Car motors idling. Tough guy rhymes over booming tones felt as much as heard. Gawkers gathering. His feet at last touched the ground, and several other hands, women’s hands, guided him away from the heat.

“Here, rest here,” one said. He felt the edge of a chair seat pushing against the back of his knees. He sat down.

“Let’s see those hands,” said another. He felt a soothing coldness smeared on them, smooth as yogurt, but surely something else.

“Nothing hurts like first and second degree.” That voice, a calming alto.

“Third degree may not hurt at first. But.. .You’re very lucky. So are you all.”

Menachem’s arm touched the hard wood of the piano he had just finished tuning for the old woman. He felt the small hand of their ward settle on his thigh. 161

The boy nestled his small body up next to him. He felt the boy’s cube drop onto his lap. Its heat seared through the wool of his pants. He picked the block up, then instantly dropped it.

“Check the youngster’s hands,” he said. There was to be no more twisting of it now. It was no longer a cube. More like a distorted polyhedron twisted in space and time.

“Help me! Over here!” a man yelled.

“Right behind you,” another answered.

More glass was breaking. Light things, heavy things were being moved, slammed, and thrown about, wood scraped against cardboard, iron castors bounced and rattled across the concrete.

“Step back folks! Give us room!” The voices and noises were now doused with water gushing overhead from all directions and angles. Hissing came from within. The odors of incineration swirled and mixed together in a frightening whirlwind that snapped its toxic vapor of wood and paper and ash and glue and felt.

“Is anyone still in there?” a man called out.

“There was a woman,” Schukat exclaimed. “I didn’t see her come out.”

“Herr Schukat says there was a woman in there.”

“She started it,” Hagan shouted. “She must have put the sheet music on the heater.” 162

“Everything! Exploded! Gone!” Schukat sobbed. “Everything—the Imperial.”

“Not everything, Mr. Schukat,” another voice said. “We’re doing our best gettin’ things out. Some of ’em don’t look so bad. Some, pretty okay.”

“Got insurance?” someone asked.

“Thank God, yes, thank you, I do,” Schukat said. “But that’s not the point.

Money won’t replace the irreplaceable. My antiques—”

“His garbage,” a young voice scoffed.

“Course he’s got insurance,” someone else whispered in disgust. “Connect the dots.”

“And the timing,” another scoffed. Menachem heard it all. This was how things had been since they came here.

Menachem’s single chuckle was brief and without humor.

A few phrases—“Who’s this?” “A woman!” “Is this her?”—echoed through the crowd.

“Keep your hands off me,” a young woman demanded. “Who’m I s’posed to be?”

“No, no,” Schukat repeated. “That’s not her. I don’t see her.”

From inside someone yelled, “We got it. We got it! Under control in here!”

“My treasures, my treasures,” Schukat wailed.

“I don’t think it’s as bad as you think,” someone said. “We’ll know real soon.” 163

The piano came alive.

“Boy!” Schukat exclaimed. Voices fell silent. The boy couldn’t hear. But he had seen. He was good at patterns. He had remembered the fall of each finger and each landing point, the ones he had seen that produced sounds he could not have heard. His eye-hand coordination was perfect.

“That sounds horrible,” someone complained.

“Is that supposed to be music?” someone else laughed.

Menachem savored the jarring, dissonant phrases, zigzagging lines, inharmonious chords, chopping rhythms, chromatic modes from another world where beauty had not yet been defined—not the exact tones of the music that had stopped, but where those notes would now be in a whole world changed. The note had not been stolen. It needed to be added. 164

A Filthy, Black Hellhole

“ ‘It was twenty minutes past closing, and all the brass hoity-toities, local ass munches, a couple of NGO stragglers, and voluntolds with their unfathomable—

“What’s ‘unfath-na-sumthin?” the farm boy asked.

“Can’t tell what something is. You know—hard to figure out.”

The lead didn’t laugh. He had no idea what they did or didn’t learn out there on the prairie. He was from back East. Back east in the more or less United States, not here in the sandbox. Besides they weren’t in a laughing situation. Word was his default spotter was a talker, but he wasn’t talking much today. Worrisome.

When they were dressing for this shmup, you could still see the Celtic tattoo on his neck and freckles on his cheeks. But no more. Not yesterday either. Or however long their pores had been clogged with greasepaint and desert camouflaged

A couple of sunrises. When all wireless communication stopped. Now, side-by-side, sign language was it. And there was less and less of even that, as the private faded in and out planted on a dune that shape-shifted when the winds visited. 165

Fact was he himself couldn’t pinpoint any recent whens. His own memory slipping was new. Couldn’t have both of them doing that. That was why he decided whispering was permitted until they could actually hear what they were listening for.

“Oh, yeah,” the kid said. “Witja.”

Was he? The lead continued:

“ ‘—voluntolds with their unfathomable Buncha guys with their hard-to- figure-out, scary-ass arm patches, all of ’em had left the internet cafe. Everybody except an old Blackwater contractor.’ ”

“Xe,” the kid said. “Name changed.”

“Not during this story. Besides, they changed it again.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Now it’s Academi, but same jobs.” The kid was still with him, so he picked up where he’d left off:

“He sat in the shadow of the leaves of the only remaining orange tree this side of the river made against the sputtering electric light, kept lit by a generator, since power had been shut off hours earlier.’ ” 166

He was growing hoarse. That Eastern Shore Mumble of his would be tougher to keep up with. Especially for this Midwesterner, bragging in a twang how he enlisted with most of his class from high school. Well good for him, for them. Really.

Facebook page. Families invited. Banners over the town parade. Everyone proud, even dads who farmed now shorthanded at harvest.

The teenager had showed up in a ghille suit. Looked like Bigfoot. Before the other guys were incinerated in the surprise, they had helped him DIY for desert, this particular desert, not an imaginary one some Chinese manufacturer came up with.

Word had it the kid had 20/10 vision, a finger steady as a statue, could see vapor off a bullet, dope the wind, and instantly state adjustments indicated. One of the youngest ever made it in.

“You scared?” the boy asked.

“No.”

“ ’cuz why I asked is you talkin’ a lot.”

The sniper sensed the sun behind them being dragged over the west far, far away. A blast furnace falling into ice water.

He revised his report: “A little.”

Important to own it. Could matter. To the mission.

“Not of them. Of the delay.” 167

If they arrived soon, their targets would find the sun right in their eyes. Blind them. That would be nice. A half-second of advantage was enough.

That same sun was taking the same trip as back home. Same as anywhere.

Didn’t mean the same thing to anyone. Anyone claiming so, just generating yackety- yak, Internet b.s. That shared course wasn’t going to fill two empty CamelBaks hydration systems. Help his wingman pull out of a tailspin.

This story might. It helped the one telling it.

“ ‘In the daytime, the street was dusty. But at night, ash settled on the dust, and the contractor, who by the way just happened to be an old-timer from Moyock, he liked to sit late studying that stew in the street now that it was quiet. Deaf from too much chumminess with RPGs, IEDs, gerbil launchers, and Mother-of-Satan suicide vests, he luxuriated in the appalling danger.’ ”

“Bullfuck.”

Good. Still feisty.

“No one would want to sit outside in a place like that.”

“This guy would.”

“You blowin’ smoke.”

“And you sucking your thumb, Corporal.” 168

“Private, Sergeant,” the boy corrected, but he quit gnawing on his nail.

Responsive. Good. There. He was drying his finger. Rubbing it back and forth on his twiggy sleeve. Like his finger was a litde saw he pulled and pushed. Like the caliphate did with their blades working the heads off of guys like them. Or maybe like he was trying to amputate an arm attached to a trigger finger attached to a M2010 as though it wasn’t his. Or suck water out of it. One deadly finger.

“Where’s Moyock?” the kid asked.

“North Carolina. Ran NASCAR back in the Sixties.”

“How you know that?”

Questions—nothing more reassuring in this heat.

“Who cares? The story is what matters. Make a movie in your head. It’ll calm your muscles.”

“I’ll try.” The kid was so well trained about not budging, it was hard to assess how here he was. Was he wound up ready to pop or winding down to a complete stop? Half the Egyptians soldiers that fell in The Six-Day War died of thirst.

“Speed up your reflexes when it’s time.”

“Seems it’s past time,” the kid muttered.

“Strategy may have changed. Not the mission. Here we go again: 169

‘The two waiters, the last surviving trustworthy Hajis, knew that this redneck was defcon 1, and while he was a good client, they knew that if he became too jagged up he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.’ ”

“ ‘Last week he tried to commit suicide,’ the Bathist turncoat whispered to his nephew.

‘Why?’

‘He wanted to see what it felt like?’

‘Why?’

“Wait,” the kid said. “Who’s talking? I’m confused.”

“The two waiters at the bar waiting for the old guy to leave so they can leave.”

“Why are there two?”

“ W hy’ That’s the word the nephew, the younger waiter, used most. Like you.”

Lips parted, the boy angled his face, towards the rising desert winds that whistled in his cheeks. Sounded like a happy dog in a speeding car, releasing a vapor trail of drool.

“Whose story is this?”

“I forget. But it’s mine now. Just listen. I’m getting to the good part.”

“Good ’cuz I still ain’t heard no good part yet.” 170

“You gotta give it a chance.” He futzed with his LBV, which had twisted around his pecs. Lots of thing to pay attention to.

“ ‘He was part-Kurd, a slow mover from rickets, snappy in the dishwater, but superstitious.

‘He noticed rope length mattered.’

‘How?’

‘The drop was too far. Al-Tikriti’s head came off.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Told me.’ His chin pointed to the contractor. ‘Had to clean up after.’ ”

The farm boy actually tracked the fictitious chin indicating someone not there that only he would see. And then he faded, looking ahead at everything that wasn’t there to be seen at all by anyone.

The lead positioned his tracking scope to reflect light into the kid’s eyes a few feet away to see if he could still blink, but the scope’s glass did a rotten job because of the coating.

“Anyone home?”

His spotter nodded, so he continued his course of action. 171

“ ‘They sat together at a table against the blast-pocked wall near the splintered door of the DFAC and looked at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the Xe guy sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that shuddered in the wind. He seemed to study the blast smudges on the wall that looked like shadows even darker than the shadows that covered them.’ ”

“I thought he was Blackwater era.”

“Oh yeah.. .yeah.”

And now he, too, fell silent, lost in his own darkness. The task was routine; the implementation flawed. Ambushed on multiple flanks an evening or so ago. He’d remember in a sec. On the tip of his tongue.

A second-wave expected; preemption required. He and this E-2 were the only rangers left in the carnage. No observers left to assign. No engineers left to check for obstacles. No overwatch. No flank security. Just air defense notification that a thin- skinned vehicle was headed their way, way too fast. Then things went nuts. Planes on the horizon, planes overhead going vertical, looping, exploding and falling from the sky like it was Fourth of July. Computer system hack? An inside muj? In seconds, no local air left to save them the trouble of engaging.

The battalion commander, bleeding out, judged mobility and survivability could be assured because of the proximity to the staging-area catastrophe. IEDs were 172

improbable, he said, since none had gone off during the engagement as the suicide

bomber trucks barreled down the only road. No countermobility capabilities,

scatterable mines, sub-munitions. There wasn’t even time to write up a FRAGO. He

said he’d backdate one later. Then he expired.

“Quiet,” the farm boy murmured. The lead awoke to now. “I think I hear

them.”

The storyteller waited. He listened. He didn’t hear it yet. He studied his

companion. Must have 20/10 hearing, too. Neither moved. Not even their eyes.

“Maybe not.”

The sergeant exhaled and changed position. His foot was asleep against his

drag bag. He shifted onto his belly.

They had crawled half the night across the desert, using the stars and an old-

school compass when GPS was lost. They’d been trained for this. They reached where they needed to be. Walking back would be faster then crawling. The idea had been to be back in time for pancakes.

“And you deployed when?”

“Just got here.”

“Someone should have told me that.”

“They rushed me in after all your guys died yesterday.”

“Day before.” 173

“Whatever.”

“You were here before they died. They helped you with your suit.”

“Oh...yeah.”

They both fell silent. Memory was a funny thing.

“Where were you stationed?”

“Fort Knox.”

“Not used to these temperatures then.”

“No sir.”

“Your tongue okay?”

“Feels big.”

“Any accidents?”

“Fuck you, man. Bladder like a football. Hold it forever. Not even sweating.”

Not something to brag about. Not at all. Not when it was a hundred twenty out. Back home the kid’s mom would have put him in a tub of ice cubes by now.

Waterboarded him with Gatorade. Then later, all better at dusk, to the sound of locusts and the glow of fireflies, he could have been taking selfies with his nostrils and teeth full of pulp. Buttered corn on the cob. Blackened pork chops. S’mores, instead of civilians, with third-degree burns. Maybe home is where he should be right now. Maybe that’s where he was. Listed two or three times since sunrise the men who beat him home. But in a box. 174

In the dark, yesterday or whenever, just as they had crawled into position, he

had heard the pop-pops and boom-booms. Then a second round. And a third.

Coordinated? An inside job? Burning fuel had stunk up the stars. The sky slid into a

body bag. When the sun came up, he saw a growing mantel of smoke wrapping the

shoulders of the horizon. Here now, however much later, that blackness was still

twisting restlessly on itself in a silent sleep. The horizon trying to shrug it off. What a

fire it must be. Its cloud wider than New Jersey.

And no one was calling, no one coming to extract them. No one knowing they

survived. Once they find out, won’t come in time. They’ll come sometime though.

That’s what they’re always supposed to do.

“I think our work is done,” the kid whispered.

That sun, a fist. About to pound the horizon. About to punch out the world’s lights. The dark could turn anyone inward. Last night the kid was like a kid. Ashamed not to feel more proud than more sad. He didn’t want to embarrass himself by being the only one to come home alive. How was he supposed to feel proud about something like that?

The storyteller tugged his vest very carefully so it wouldn’t tear off a nipple.

He wasn’t sweating either.

“Pay attention. This is a test. See if your brain still works.”

“Really?” 175

“Yeah, really.” He went on:

“ ‘A local and a little girl stumbled down the street outside the wire. The new,

solar-powered streetlights shone on the steel cap on his front tooth.

“I used to walk Becky home. Ought to be doing it now. Her leg pains. Due

any day.”

“Sorry to hear it, man. Must be tough.” This private of his was really floating

off-point.

And guess what? That girly-girl hurrying along beside him wore no hijab.

Anyone could imagine how pretty she must be if it were brighter out. Pretty enough

to give a hajii a woody.”

‘The mutaween will pick her up,’ the uncle said.”

“Damn straight,” the spotter said. Was that motion his hand digging down the

front of his pants?

“What were they thinking.5” the lead asked. “They know the culture.”

“Why don’t the uncle help? I should be helping Becky. Fucking bankers.” 176

The ranger didn’t even want to hear. “Stay tuned, Man, because right then the

nephew actually got something to say besides ‘Why?’ ”

“And what’s that?”

“Remember how the uncle had just said, ‘The mutaween will pick her up’?”

“Yeah.”

“Well the nephew replies,

‘Not if he gets her out, because it’s for sure the safe houses aren’t safe

anymore.’

‘She had better get off the street now. Even if just her family finds her, then

she is dead.’ ”

“ ‘During the last couple of weeks, the militias had arranged free transport of piles of women’s corpses to the morgue like meat delivery to a butcher.’ ”

The second guy drifted off into dreamland again.

“I’m seeing the movie. It’s beautiful. We’re back at the palace lakes,” he sighed, “fishing for those nasty vicious carps jumping to eat shadows.”

“Yeah, that was the best.”

“Like at midnight, whack glow-in-the-dark golf balls over the lake look like tracer bullets.” 177

He checked for motion in his ghille. “You thinking ’bout Becky?

“No.”

So he continued:

‘The guy—“Xe” call him—goes to work early to be ready for sunrise hangings. He raps on his saucer with his Glock. The teenage guy goes over to him.

‘What do you want?’

Sitting in the shadows, Xe points the gun at him.’ ”

“He shouldn’t point guns at innocents,” the farm boy said.

“Xe was joshing. His safety is still on.”

“ ‘Another Arak,’ he says.

You’ll be drunk,’ the kid said. ‘How ’bout a baby dick instead?’ Xe gives him a hard look—type’ll get you killed.’ ”

“Fuck me. No Iraqi wait-staff gonna know ’bout no ‘baby dick.’ ’Gainst their law for them to eat hot dogs no matter how small.”

“Sure they would. They been serving us more than a decade. Anyway, I’m almost at the end, so quiet.” 178

‘He'll stay all night,’ the Kurd said to his uncle, and Tm sleepy now. I never get into bed before three o’clock. He should have killed himself last week.’ But guess what? He took the Arak botde and another saucer and marched out to Xe.’

And by the way. You were right. He’d been demoted. To cleanup.”

“Nutso,” the second guy said, both hands visible now.

“Maybe.”

“Just like me.” It was the sanest he’d sounded in the last ten minutes.

“No/like you. You’re still on this mission.” He lobbed that one to see if it was all just wishful thinking.

“No I’m not.”

“Ask Xe when we run into him back fishing.”

“Sure,” the kid replied sounding far away again. “Sure.”

“ You should have killed yourself last week,’ he said to Xe motioning to him with his little finger.

‘A little more,’ Xe said.

The Kurd poured into the glass so that the Arak slopped over and ran down the side onto the pile of saucers.’ ” 179

“ ‘Thank you,’ Xe said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat down at the table with his sidekick again.”

“Did you hear what I said?” the kid croaked.

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I said they don’t use saucers here.”

The sergeant frowned, but fell silent. He studied his ward. He hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t said a word. That thought made maybe the last water in his entire body roll out and over his lower lid. He opened his lips, hesitated again, but rather than get into an argument about who said what, he stuck with his story.

“ ‘He’s drunk now,’ he said.

‘He’s drunk every night.’

“Your characters ain’t even fuckin’ real,” the farm boy said. “Are we?”

“They’re our characters, Son. You know them, Man— our waiters back near the palace. Remember that one who was so superstitious? My guys are like him, but the one I’m telling you about starts saying all these things about how Xe was crying and that his tears at first were milk, then water, then blood, then oil. Symbolic things.” 180

“Shhh.” The kid closed his eyes and tried to cup an ear. His hood and gloves

made that hard. “Something coming for sure.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t hear it?” Some joker at staging said the boy could hear a mosquito

sneeze between ripples across a moonlit lake. The lead hated those Midwestern

exaggerations the dead men back at camp used to tack on each other.

“Not yet.”

“You will.”

A minute later he did. The hint of a hum made him nod at this private of his.

They both got back into position. Some time passed. His spotter shook his head.

“Still three klicks out.”

“If it’s moving as fast as they said, be here under a couple minutes.” That was

a dumb thing to say. The kid knew it without knowing math.

They waited, but maybe the wind had blown the sound away. The lead had to

follow the kid’s lead, who didn’t seem so sure now. He cupped both ears for another

twenty seconds, then shook his head no.

“.. .the fuck.” He sounded calm, but weaker.

“Yeah, what the fuck,” the lead repeated. His spotter just sort of lay back in a way he hadn’t for a day or two, however long.

“Go ahead again,” he muttered. 181

“What?”

“The story. Beddie bye time.”

“I wish.”

“I know.”

The lead tried to swallow, but there wasn’t anything except skin off his palette.

He tried to lick his lips, but decided to hold on to what he had. His eyes had already had akeady made a wasteful decision. Not letting that happen again. He continued.

“No tears look like milk or nothing to nobody,” the boy muttered. Now he sounded cold sober, spot-on sane, but weak, dry as a corncob husk. The lead got in his face again.

“Not you or me, Junior,” he said. “To them. You have to try to understand how they think. You never know, you never know. You ever see that grilled cheese sandwich on the Internet with Jesus’s face that appeared on some toast? Like that, man. Any thought that pops up, well, there you have it. Can’t deny it. Anything’s believable.”

The private nodded very slowly. He wasn’t really listening. So the sergeant told himself more:

“Unk then says, ‘He’s lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for 182

“I have a wife, man,” the sergeant heard somewhere, “and she ain’t no pleasure marriage like the dude in your story on the street.”

The lead had no one, but he knew what came next:

“ ‘His niece looks after him.’

‘He fuckin’ his niece?’

‘No, she cut him down.’ ”

“ ‘Other guy claims he was only jerking him. Cuts the lights. Wraps it up.’

“Think Xe’s scared?”

The spotter didn’t answer.

“No, he’s not. Been a Seal, now getting paid better than ever, as good as we can when we hired back.”

“ ‘He was fed up. Didn’t give it another thought. Went home. Slept like he’s dead.”

So hot, the sand might turn to glass.

“Right behind him,” the kid whispered, and that was all. 183

“Want me to do you a favor.”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

They both saved their breath.

‘You asking me to do you a favor?” the kid barely whispered.

“Never.”

“Last survivor.”

“We’ll have to see about that.”

And they would have.