Ink

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Daniel J. Dominowski

May 2014

© 2014 Daniel J. Dominowski. All Rights Reserved.

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This thesis titled

Ink

by

DANIEL J. DOMINOWSKI

has been approved for

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

Patrick O'Keeffe

Assistant Professor of English

Robert Frank

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

DOMINOWSKI, DANIEL J., M.A., May 2014, English

Ink

Director of Thesis: Patrick O'Keeffe

The process of writing in the first-person perspective is that of haunting a narrative, as the narrator is unable to interact with the story, only to observe and interpret it. The fiction that follows is presented in this style to explore the notion of not confessing but attempting to justify, or at very least explain, past actions. The work is an exploration of trying to justify a feeling of guilt felt in a particular moment by unfolding the past and providing context. Moreover, it is an exploration of the precise nature of the guilt and what has caused the narrator to feel this way. 4

DEDICATION

For Michelle.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the faculty of the Ohio University English Department for their dedication and care in pushing me to excel as a writer. I would like to specifically thank Patrick O’Keeffe, Joan Connor, Amritjit Singh and Albert Rouzie for their patience and guidance.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments ...... 5 Critical Introduction for Ink: Narrative Ghosts ...... 7 Ink ...... 20

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CRITICAL INTRODUCTION FOR INK: NARRATIVE GHOSTS

As a fiction writer, I am especially drawn to the way in which a first-person narrator can simultaneously appear and not appear in a narrative, how a narrator can produce ghosts out of things that were once tangible and real and how it becomes possible for a narrator to haunt his or her own story. For example, the narrators in

William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Charles Baxter's Believers and Alice

Munro's Child's Play haunt their stories as much as they tell them. Their hauntings transform mundane moments into moments that are complex and satisfying. These ghosts color the simplicity of a particular moment that would otherwise be insignificant and make it a defining moment, not only for the narrator but for the human condition and what it means to be human. That moment’s context is provided through the events that lead to it or even proceed from it. The narrator must provide this context through layers of his or her own interpretation, the how’s and why’s, the concrete details that create the world, the people involved in the story. Longer forms of storytelling, such as novels, novellas and long short-stories, allow for a more nuanced and complex significance to emerge out of a single moment—a defining moment for the narrator, particularly in the first-person—than shorter forms, which rely on discovery through a smaller slice of life.

Take, for example, the key moment in William Maxwell’s short novel So Long,

See You Tomorrow: The narrator, having navigated through a detailed and vivid imagined recreation of a sordid affair and the violence that erupted from the alleged affair in his hometown during his youth, arrives at a moment in which he passes another boy in the hallway at school. Early on, he tells us, “I very much doubt I would have remembered 8 for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never laid eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn't been the father of someone I knew, and (2) I hadn't later on done something I was ashamed of afterward” (6). Maxwell’s narrator believes this boy is the son of the man who was murdered in the small town that they lived in and upon a moment of recognition, he chooses not to acknowledge him, not to say anything. It becomes a devastatingly minor event but one that lingers in his mind and forces him to explain the history of what becomes the central moment in the novella.

This moment of inaction is deeply affecting to Maxwell's narrator-character.

Because of the narrator's present-tense interjections, his hauntings, the reader understands the context from which the narrator believes he knew the boy and the events that, even though they are imagined due to a lack of first-hand knowledge, lead to the boy and the narrator-character arriving at the same place and time. Moreover, it provides a way of understanding what it means for the two boys to not only not interact or speak, but to continue on without even acknowledging one another. The narrator is struggling with the shame of one particular moment; the rest of the narrative exists to understand why he would feel that at all and to specify the exact nature of the shame.

This moment is acknowledged by the narrator as being deeply significant to his sense of self, as being meaningful. Without the winding narrative of his youth, the imagined events of the murder, which is based on limited factual evidence, the moment is insignificant. Even with the provided context, it is still nothing—it is simply a moment— yet it somehow breaches into a liminal space where it is also something. While it is an external moment that happens—the boys exist in a hallway and pass one another, there is 9 a physical, tangible, meaningless moment—the meaning is created within the narrator- character alone. It is a part of his self, a constellation of memories, dreams and speculation from which meaning seems to spontaneously emerge. The catalyst for this emergence is an off-chance encounter with someone from his past.

Maxwell’s story is presented as a faux-memoir, but over half of the narrative is simply imagined, pieced together from fragments, conjecture, and speculation. Even the moment of passing the other boy in the hallway is unconfirmed: he does not know if it is indeed the boy of the murdered man in his hometown. “This memoir—if that's the right name for it—is a roundabout, futile way of making amends,” Maxwell's narrator tells us

(6). He saw someone who he believed to be the same person and it sparks a need in him to articulate that moment's meaning, synthesized with his speculations, conjectures and daydreams to produce an awareness about the world he inhabits. That moment somehow becomes the moment in which he considers his role as a human being, as a self that constructs its own meaning—as a self that both exists and does not simultaneously, that creates itself from nothing, a self that feels shame. It is a moment that is haunted by a past that may or may not have even existed but is real enough to the narrator-character that it is the basis for who he is, and what meaning he experienced in that moment. This moment has led the narrator to years of therapy, shaped him in ways he cannot articulate fully. He tells us that it is a moment that he “keep[s] reliving in [his] mind, as if [he] were going through a series of reincarnations that end up each time in the same failure” (133).

The moment, intrinsically meaningless, gains importance right then: he cannot escape it.

It is focused but fleeting, but the impact that it imparts is one that haunts the narrator, 10 provokes him to tell the events of the story, to seek amends. And it is still on-going—the story has not stopped for the narrator—the meaning is still developing and undefinable, continually being reinvented.

The embodied, or experienced, meaning is, of course, unsayable; the narrator can only present the situation, not what the situation means. Experience does not translate into language perfectly; to make matters worse, memory is fallible and fluid. Because of the constraints imposed by language, the narrator must invent a narrative that is not merely about his or herself but is a crucial and fundamental aspect of his or her self. He or she is attempting to appropriate language in such a way as to reveal the hidden self that is impossible to expose. Meaning, however, can emerge from an effective narrative, but it cannot be abstracted and defined. It is a ghost in the linguistic machine; the revealed experiential meaning must suffice.

The narrator is a ghost in his or her own narrative; he or she is there, able to observe but not interact. That distance is where the story has developed and become coherent inside the inaccessible and hidden mind of the narrator—it has become marked with his or her personality, acquiring the trappings of his or her flaws, quirks, vices and virtues. That distance comes through as a retrospection, a reflection. The moments where the narrative speaks from the present indicates a need to evaluate a particular moment and its context in relation to who the narrator is, was, and is possibly becoming. For example,

Charles Baxter, in an interview, says that the present tense would be most useful when

“the characters aren't particularly good at remembering their pasts and aren't planning much for the future … when [they’re] living in a kind of blanked-out perpetual present, 11 when they are living ahistorical lives” (103). Conversely, it could be said that a narrators who focus on the past and resists the present are stuck perpetually in the past, unable to move forward or accept the present as a logical progression from their past, if it is even their past at all.

Baxter’s own novella Believers features a narrator who only grudgingly reveals details about his own life; he continually returns the focus of the story to his father’s life, which he necessarily must reconstruct imaginatively: “[My father] told me some of this but I'm making up the rest” (187). Later on, the narrator says: “this is my version, my imaginings, of what happened, no one else's” (215). He is inherently part of the story, a story which, at first glance, seems not to be about himself. The focal moment of the story seems to be one that he didn't experience himself—it’s not even one that anyone can tell him about, confirm or otherwise explain clearly. That event is that a woman, who his father was acquainted with, ended up on the running board of Joseph Goebbels’ car during a motorcade through Berlin and had a conversation; nobody, however, can say whether or not she jumped up there or was pushed. The narrator is desperate to find out but nobody can say for sure, not even the woman’s widower. Whether or not she did it on purpose alters the nature of the story, but it is to forever remain ambiguous; the truth is never to be known. It is only when the past intersects with his own life that he is forced to open up his own life: he travels to visit the widower and his own frustration becomes the not only a narrative driving force, but also a part of the action that colors his understanding of the moment he seeks to articulate. 12

The moment is not, however, the woman speaking to Goebbels; it is instead a photograph of his father as a child. The ambiguity of the conversation and her motivations fall away as unimportant to the narrative but remain inherently important to the narrator’s navigation through the story. The narrator is desperate to make sense of this moment, to come to a conclusion about the nature of the act that forever changed his father's outlook on life, but ends up telling a story about his journey to make sense of it, to figure out how the boy in the picture became the man he knew as his father. Similar to the narrator in So Long, See You Tomorrow, he is forced to imaginatively reconstruct events that are inaccessible. In Believers, the narrator is trying to tell a story about his father but inevitably ends up telling a story about his own obsession with his father’s life, how his father went from being a priest to married with children, how his father lost his faith, how rapture seemed consistently to fail him. It’s his obsession with trying to understand his father, with how this moment affected his father and then in turn affected him—it is an event that is conspicuously culpable for his own existence. In order to make sense of it, he must analyze and understand his father’s life. In doing so, he must reveal his relationship to his parents, his own failed marriages and the way that traumatic events can affect the sense of self and create us as individuals. When faced with a certain lack of knowledge, instead of seeking it out, he imagines it and then tells us, “I'm making this up.

I don't have the heart to go over there to check those details out” (222). He repeatedly opens paragraphs with “One must imagine,” rather than pretending it is fact. The narrative is indeed his own story, a story about the figuring out and coming to terms with events that have been lost to failing memories and history that he's telling us. It is his 13 story that haunts the pages, the speculations and the imaginings that are what he needs to explain so that the reader too can understand the significance of an old photograph of his father. In the photograph he describes his father's eyes: “as if he had seen something fall on him, and it aged him instantly” (272). The effect that the photograph had on him is what his narrative seeks to explain, though the narrator only realizes that much later, after having realized that he necessarily has had to make up much of the story and that any evidence he finds is going to be just as, if not more, flawed than anything he can come up with.

The use of inconsistency in first-person narration demonstrates the narrator’s understanding that he or she is not simply a vehicle for the story, but that the narrative is influenced by his or her perceived feelings about the narrative even as he or she tells it.

Rather than producing an objective retelling of the “truth” —the narrator’s self-conscious subjectivity, intended or not, causes “errors” in memory, imaginative reconstructions, time-slips, and what-ifs instead of what-was. This is not so much a amalgamation of

“errors” that produces something coherent, but is a demonstration, an experience of the narrator recreating the events as he or she understands them. Coherence is, then, a matter of striving for intelligibility, a striving to reveal that which cannot be revealed: the Self.

The meaning is embodied, experienced, and enacted, not foisted upon the story by sheer will. Will alone cannot overcome the limitations of language; instead, it is revealed in how the narrator chooses to reveal it. A first-person narrator is, like any storyteller, a part of the story even when the story is at a distance. The narrator haunts his or her own story, in a sense. 14

These moments in fiction are perhaps nebulous and difficult, if not impossible, to define, although the narrative aims at doing exactly that, despite its inherent unreliability.

While these moments, inextricably linked to the narrator’s sense of self, exist as a particularly important brush stroke that outlines or shapes the narrator's being, they are, at the same time, not what defines these narrators. For example, in Alice Munro’s long short story “Child’s Play,” the narrator weaves the past and the more recent past to arrive at a moment that happened as a child in which she and another girl drowned a mentally challenged girl at a summer camp. In order to understand that moment, the narrator must first tell us about her childhood interactions with this girl, her later life, and the reunion with her accomplice. The abstract meaning is that guilt is not only needless but useless: the moment has guided her toward a productive and positive social role. This abstraction is banal and uninteresting, lacking the humanity of the moment. The actual meaning is wrapped up and embodied by the act itself, the event, that can only be understood within the context of her later life being told first. She tells us, regarding her telling of this story,

“for a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant” (189). However, the narrator qualifies this, saying that this past is “wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done” (189-90). Despite these claims, the narrator continues to tell the story.

The narrator is seeking to make sense of it, an act that she has claimed is not possible. Yet she tries to, anyway. Its meaning becomes manifest only because of the path the narrator chooses to lead the reader down to that moment. The reader must 15 understand and journey through the narrator's adult life and her childhood friend's final moments before being able to understand what happened when she was a child. The story provides a lush and winding story that is not superfluous but holistic and continually altering and revealing what that moment in the narrator’s life embodies to the narrator before the moment is ever revealed. The drowning does not appear until the very end, once a full context has been made available.

The narrator is telling the story from well after having sought out a priest for her summer camp friend to, presumably, confess and repent. But the narrator knows something the character does not: that she does not need forgiveness. She tells us “what's done is done,” (221) yet she finds herself unable to drive herself home, because she is emotionally paralyzed by the interaction with the priest. The character has not yet realized what the narrator knows. The character has not dwelled upon the event, but faced with it, begins to turn into the woman that is the narrator. The narrator, as differentiated from the character, has considered her part in the events and decided that guilt isn’t even an option—it’s not a justification or a glazing over of the seriousness of the event, but it is a reflection on the understanding of how that event affected her life. The life that she led after it was only possible because of it, in fact. It exists, for the narrator, in an amoral space. The narrative is unapologetic about the murder because the narrator understands that she is not a murderer now and that while that event was something that shaped her, it is not the defining moment of her existence. She says, “we did not decide anything, in the beginning” and later, “we had no choice... that choice had not occurred, did not occur, to us” (223). She defers the event to the fact that sometimes things just happen, even the 16 horrific and tragic. It is no surprise that the narrator's context for telling the childhood story is set against her childhood accomplice dying from cancer, and seeking confession.

There is some clever parallelism on the narrator’s part in regards to the mindlessness of the childhood killing and the mindlessness of cancer, in fact. However, the defining moment is when she decides that she does not need to confess to the priest, does not need to repent for something done thoughtlessly as a child. The act might have been horrific but it was not done with malice. It was mindless, yes, but it was not mindless in an evil sense. The narrator comes to this conclusion in the interim between visiting the church and writing the story; she haunts the narrative with a mission to do the impossible: to do something about the past, to justify or rationalize something that she has seemingly been told she ought to feel guilty about. That guilt is put to rest, however, in the story. The moment recontextualizes the past in a new way.

The moment is a moment of realization—a moment where a character or narrator understands the events that lead up to it as well as what the moment means to him or her.

But it is also, perhaps perversely, a moment of mystery that is never to be fully understood by the narrator, where realization is impossible. It exists in a liminal state—a state of being both something and nothing at the same time—which prompts the narrator to tell the story. He or she has become aware that something needs to be understood, identified, and articulated. In order to make sense of that moment, the narrator is not only inclined to provide the texture and color of the situation, but also his or her relationship to it; it transcends inclination and enters the realm of imperative: the narrator must convey his or her full experience or nothing at all. In her essay, “Writing Short Stories,” Flannery 17

O’Connor says, “the meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning” (96). In short, O’Connor is driving at the point that it is not a matter of stating what the events of the story mean, but to embody that meaning as an experience, to breathe full life into the events and arouse a full depth and complexity of meaning.

The narrator therefore becomes a part of the story: he or she is actively seeking to make something about himself or herself clear, to make some moment that he or she cannot escape from clear, but also to put that moment into perspective and give it meaning. The passing of two boys in a hallway, even two with a history and a quasi- friendship, is unremarkable; the affect of a single photograph of one's father is indescribable; the senseless drowning of a handicapped girl is unexplainable. The narrator, through his or her choice of other events, imaginings, speculations, histories and conjectures, is able to give these seemingly meaningless moments meaning. The meaning is not even embodied in his or her narrative, but actively in him or her as a narrator; this meaning gives significance to the moment, a moment the narrator continually haunts. The narrator is as complicated and flawed and complex as the narrative he or she tells; they are just as unexplainable, undefinable and, at times, unremarkable. The first-person narrator, who might otherwise be seen merely as a faux-autobiographer, becomes a part of his or her story. The narrator is not merely using the events of his or her narrative to explain one moment—though the beauty of a first-person narrative is that the narrator often believes that this is the case—but to make himself or herself manifest. This magic can only be accomplished through experienced meaning, unshackling the self from 18 abstraction and identifying a single moment that, when put into context, can make something out of nothing. 19

Works Cited

Baxter, Charles. “Believers.” Believers. New York: Vintage, 1997. 165-272. Print.

---. “A Conversation with Charles Baxter.” Interview with Marsha McSpadden and

Trevor Gore. The Missouri Review 31.1 (2008): 100-110. Web.

Maxwell, William. So Long, See You Tomorrow. New York: Vintage, 1980. Print.

Munro, Alice. “Child's Play.” Too Much Happiness. New York: Vintage, 2010. 189-224.

Print.

O'Connor, Flannery. “Writing Short Stories.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969. 87-106. Print.

20

INK

She's unhinged, is the way he puts it. Not like she's crazy, but more like if the eyes are the doorway to the soul, or whatever that saying is, that the door is broken, unable to open or close properly. Like it's jammed or the frame is crooked or swollen. He tells me that her eyes are vacuous. That's the word he uses. Vacuous. It's unsettling how he goes out of is way to find a dime-word for it. It's as if he thinks we're friends or there's some kind of fraternal history just because we worked together. As if it's an inside joke.

He's got the same ruddy but sallow complexion. His hair is still pulled up into a scraggly ponytail and he's still got the same patchy three days worth of growth that he always seemed to have, no matter the time of day. His eyes are dull but far from empty.

They look me over several times in the time it takes me to respond. He's stoned. I can smell it.

I nod and press my lips tight and look at the ground, tell him I haven't seen her since I quit. That I haven't really even thought about her, for that matter. That I've been too busy with school and my new job, though neither is too time-consuming or anything like that. I'm not even doing all that well in school. He tells me that they hired a couple of high-school kids to replace me. They're no good punks, even more naïve than I was, he says. He laughs.

I tell Vance that it was nice to run into him and to take care, but it's cold and I have to get to work, and that my new boss is a real slave-driver and a stickler about tardiness. It's not true. I don't even have to work today. I leave him standing on the sidewalk in front of the flower shop. 21

It's not the cold, it's the humanity, Vance says, smiling, even as I walk away. It's heat, I call back to him. It means it's our fault, I say. He's already too far away to hear me.

He probably doesn't know that it's her birthday soon. He’s known her for twenty years and probably doesn't know that. Not that it matters. Regardless. What matters is the fact that I remember it even though it's pointless. Details have never been my strong suit.

Not the right ones, anyway.

A year before, I was working in a little print shop on the west-side. X-Press Printing,

LLC, it was called. Commercial printing. Not a copy shop, that is, but a commercial print shop with two big presses and all that. Rob, my boss, ran the place with his wife, Valerie.

Vance, the “assistant manager,” was sort of an old-timer, like Rob. They lived and breathed printing. It was all the ozone, got to their heads maybe. They'd worked in that shop for twenty years and I think all the ink fumes and the stress and just being crazy had gotten to them.

Cameron and Caleb, or Caleb and Cameron depending on how you see it, were making fun of each other while they loaded boxes when Rob called them up front to the office. I was binding these little booklets and wasn't paying them much mind until they came back.

“Son of bitch just fired us,” one of them said. I never knew who was Caleb and who was Cameron. They were so identical. So interchangeable.

“What's that?” 22

“Rob just canned us both. Said something about sales being down, they can't afford to keep us around. We're supposed to finish the week out,” one said. “Just like that. Two years and that's what it comes down to. Just let go. Man, I got rent to pay.”

“Fuckin' A.”

“Seriously. It's about to get cold and I need to pay for gas.”

“Kinko's is hiring. Riley got a job there already. Said they hired him on the spot.”

Riley had been let go a couple weeks before.

“I'm going for a cigarette break,” the other said. “You want to come?”

His counterpart picked up a bottle of toner that had busted open at the top. It couldn't fit into a machine now, all misshapen, but we could use it to refill another bottle.

When he shook it, a fine dust floated up out of it, dark and ephemeral. A little floated down onto his hand. His hand would be speckled with black for a week. “Might as well fertilize the garden while we're at it,” he said.

I waved them off and said I was behind on the job order as it was. I never remembered to tell Val about that, the “fertilizer,” somehow. It got really complicated, so maybe it makes sense. I guess I just forgot.

Val had been trying to get a flower garden to grow around the corner of the building. She hadn't managed to make much grow over the summer, though, and with fall here and winter coming, the ground all hard and freezing, it just looked like an ugly, ripped up patch of dirt. The snow would eventually cover it up for a while, but spring would come again. She refused to hire a landscaper. Money just wasn't there, she said. But she'd been 23 at it for years, I guess. Even when there had been money. I appreciated the excuse even if it wasn't very good.

During the summer, before everyone else got canned, if it was slow, she'd tell us to keep an ear out for the phone and go out and work on it. When she'd come back in, her skinny arms would be covered in dirt. She'd even manage to get dirt on her face, which inevitably sunburned. She'd have her hair pulled up into a ponytail, which would be all coming loose and basically she looked a little crazy. But crazy in a good way, I guess.

Maybe impassioned. See, she'd be out there digging at it, weeding and doing whatever else it is that you do to make things grow. I went out to ask her questions once or twice while she was at it and she'd be doing something with a little shovel or spreading out some black soil and she would be just about the most meticulous person I'd ever seen in my life.

I'm not making this up: I went out there to tell her that there was a customer on hold for her and she was measuring these little holes she had dug for these little planters she had bought. She had a ruler out and was making sure each one was exactly three inches, like the guy at the store had told her.

“It's important,” she said. “To get things just right. Like, when things are just-so, you can feel a little bit of the universe balance out and relief spring from it. Details, you know.”

“Yes, the home of the devil,” I said.

“You know why the devil's in the details? Because it's the most comfortable place you can be, right there among the details, most often overlooked but never lonely,” she 24 said, chucking the little spade down and brushing her hands off on her jeans. She went in to get the phone call. She smelled like dirt and it wasn't in a dirty hippie way but a healthy way. It had a sweet smell that just sort of hovered underneath the stale, sour lingering marijuana from that morning.

When I came back up front a while later, she was holding her head in her hands, taking deep breaths. “Is everything okay?” I asked. Stupidest question ever to ask when you can see that they're not.

A customer had called to tell her that they weren't renewing their contract with us.

It cost too much because they didn't ever do big enough orders. She had tried to cut a deal but they had said no pretty firmly. I guess she got the feeling they had already signed up with someone else and were just being polite to call.

“Just get that order finished. Let's get out of here,” she said. I went back and started clearing the printer and assembling boxes. It was the last really hot day and I was still seeing Lisa, so I moved quickly. I felt bad about the client, and for Rob and Val, but

I was still able to distance myself from it at the time.

I imagine her hacking away at the dirt. She has planted some bed of flowers that sprouted but died almost instantly. She's been weeding and watering it, trying to force something to come out of the dirt. It's wet, middle of spring, so the patch of dirt is basically a mud hole that looks like it's leaking from the corner of the building. She digs and tosses things out into the grass. Not violently but in a hurry. And she keeps speeding up as she goes 25 along, pulling and throwing more and more. The mutterings and cursing under her breath became audible from a distance.

The little spade she has in her hand slips and she fumbles, but she keeps moving.

And then it starts raining. Just a little, light spring rain, nothing serious. The sun is still shining, in fact. But she sinks down onto her knees and starts hacking away before she turns and just starts bashing the spade against the building. She is screaming and slamming her fists at it then, when the spade slips out of her muddy hand. She is covered in mud.

The traffic on College Avenue never stops. There are no horns, nobody's pulled off to see if she is okay. Maybe some people point from inside their cars, but it's a good enough distance from the street that you can't really see what was happening. So maybe nobody knows what is happening. And she just sinks down, then, even farther into the muddy patch, among the weeds that are constant, and weeps. Her sobbing is as quiet as the cursing she had begun with.

Regardless.

Before, I could go over to Lisa's apartment after work and she would talk about her job or whatever and I could get lost in it, forget about what was going on at the shop. It was nice. Lisa accused me of not listening to her later on, before we broke up and again when she gave me the final bounce, but that's the one thing I did really well. I always listened to her. 26

I could name everyone she worked with and tell a dozen stories about each of them. And I had never even once stepped foot in the store. I had a real good idea of what they all looked like, too. And how they sounded, what their mannerisms were.

There was the girl, Lyndsay, with the “beauty mark” and bad breath. Halitosis, that's called. A solid dime-word right there. One time she came in hungover and vomited behind the counter. Jaimie, the assistant manager who always seemed to have a yeast infection and swore like a sailor the moment there weren't any customers around. I knew them vicariously. Another solid dime-word, that.

Hell, I knew more about her family than they knew about me. There was her cousin Jared, who joined the Navy, didn't cut it and came back home to sling weed and has been to jail twice. Her mother, father, brother. I knew something about all of them.

And they were all so incredibly dull. Even Jared, who seemed like he might have an interesting story was actually pretty dull.

I listened to every damn word she said because it was the most comfortable thing in the world, to get lost in her world. It was better than any movie I'd ever watched or book I'd ever read. Because it was mundane, simple, fun and conflicted and all that, but also because at the end of the day, nothing really ever happened. Which was part of what made listening to her so relaxing. I could always count on normalcy. A different sort of normal from my own. A different sort of boring.

Rob was sitting up front working on some invoices while I was getting a print run set up with Richard. This must have been just after Caleb and Cameron had finished up their 27 last week of work. I had gotten pretty good at that stuff and was able to run on autopilot by that point. It scared the hell out of me when I became aware of Rob hovering over me with his arm sort of raised up to tap me on the shoulder but not finishing the action. I think we both jumped. He pulled his glasses off and began rubbing them into his shirt and brushed his shaggy hair back and said, “Can you deal with this customer? I've got things I need to do.”

I glanced over at Richard, who kept working and didn't look back. I thought I saw him holding back laughter. Rob waited for me to say okay, and finally I did.

I was sort of grimy and sweaty and hadn't worked up front since my first couple of weeks there. I know how to do customer service, don't get me wrong. I've done it and

I'm just bad at it. I had never had much of a knack for sales. I hesitate too much, not willing to be confident about the product even though I was back there doing it mostly and knew exactly what would be delivered. I pulled my mask off and trotted up front anyway and politely greeted the customer.

He had gray hair, a mustache and wore a polo shirt. The sight of me, with my shaggy hair and looking like I had just gutted out a printer and smelled like a chemical plant didn't slow him down, though. The only reaction was in the eyes, which narrowed and scanned me for a moment. Rob had been dressed in a button up shirt and was presentable. That's why he was up front and I was in the back. Rob's kind of a doofus, like a nerdy John Lennon. Basically, exactly what the customers expect to see in charge in a print shop. Someone not exactly business-like, but still competent. Trustworthy but artsy enough so make them believe that their work will be done by someone who cares 28 about what it looks like. Regardless. I was a dirty, sweaty grunt. I mean, I did care about how the products turned out, but I didn't, or couldn't, personify that idea, even when I was all cleaned up to work up front.

“What kind of discounts do you have for non-profits?” he asked after I ran him through the basic fees. The only real discount you could count on was by ordering in bulk.

“We don't, as far as I'm aware—”

“Son, I'm with my church, and we're looking to host an event, so I was hoping you might have a discount for us.”

“I don’t think there are,” I said. I paused and then added, “Most of our clients are non-profits and I haven’t heard of anything like that.” I don't know if that's true, but that's what I told him.

“Can I talk to your manager? I'm sure we would be happy to consider this a tax- deductible donation.”

“He asked me to talk to you,” I said. I glanced back into the shop through the door and didn't see Rob anywhere. “I think he's busy.”

“I was referred here by some very good friends,” he said, looking me over, “who assured me that you would be kind of heart.”

“I don't know—what kind of order are you talking about? I might be able to pass it along to the owners and see what can be done.”

He handed me a slip of paper with the proposed order. I swear, this guy never stopped smiling. And it wasn't one of those sneaky car-salesman type smiles. He was 29 genuinely nice. Don't get me wrong. I was trying to deal with him fairly. His smile faded when I explained that I'd have to pass it up to the owners, that I couldn't make a decision like that.

“Yes, be sure you do,” he said. I stood there, holding the slip of paper, not knowing quite what to do.

“God bless you,” he said on his way out the door.

Rob poked his head in as the man left the parking lot. I told him it was safe to come out.

“They're related to Val's family somehow,” he said. “Every year they do this. Not again. Not with the slump we're in. Did he look happy?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Good,” Rob said. “I can't afford to do their stupid event this year. Not for that price. The tax break ain't worth it.”

“You said they're family.”

“Distant. Or something,” he muttered. “Hey, thanks for taking care of that for me.

You finished setting up that run yet?”

I told him that he'd interrupted me but I could be done soon. Richard actually had it all finished by time I returned. I went outside for a smoke.

I don't know what exactly happened, but somehow or another Val told me that I wasn't supposed to work the front desk anymore. I guess it got back to her and somehow they said that I was rude. She told me she didn't believe it, but Rob had played it off in some 30 weird way and what it came down to was that I needed to stay in back. It stung a little, I guess. I knew I hadn't been rude or told the guy anything untrue. I had been polite, especially when he said he was there for a church. I was raised in a church and even though I hadn't been in over fifteen years, I thought they were still good people.

Regardless.

I was okay with that, in all honesty. At the end of the day, that is. I had gotten used to just being able to work without having to deal with people all day. Val didn't mind them, though. Or could pretend not to well enough. So if the bell rang that a customer had come in, she would drop whatever she was doing and deal with them. I could be left alone to do whatever I was doing. With that one exception, Rob didn't mind them either, but he rarely left the front office. If he was there, he tended to stay up front.

Vance, I think, was prohibited from even looking at a customer, let alone dealing with one.

“I had to let Sarah go, too,” Val said to me while we were smoking one afternoon.

Sarah had been the only other person that worked up at the front desk besides Rob or Val, and she was only part-time. I had tried to flirt with her a dozen times but she'd always brushed me off.

Right about that time, Rob stopped coming in almost entirely, leaving Val to run the place. Not that he had been around a whole lot when I had started. I started closing more often. The schedules were a mess. Everyone got their hours cut, even Vance. From what

Valerie told me, he now spent most of that time at their house smoking pot with Rob. 31

Everyone in the shop smoked. Rob had even fashioned a bit of a screened in alcove behind the building where we could smoke, right by the exhaust vents so the smell would be camouflaged. Regardless. When it was slow and it was just me and Val there, we would sit out there and smoke a bowl while some print run was going.

There was some rule about not leaving the equipment unattended, but somewhere along the line, it seemed unimportant and then was either forgotten or ignored. Vance never wore his mask anymore, and if I opened in the morning after he'd been running an overnight run, there'd be empty beer bottles littered on a bench. The eye-wash station served more as a coat-rack. If something had gone wrong with one of the big machines, though, an alarm would have sounded loud enough to hear through the open door. Vance had jury-rigged an air raid klaxon to the alarms over a decade ago, though nobody had ever actually heard it go off. Val told me that she didn't think it was there for anything more than looks. Why he wanted an air raid siren if there was trouble and why Rob let him do it was really beyond me. The fact that he had managed to wire it up without burning the place down was even more surprising.

One night, Val closed up the front and left me and Vance to finish the orders and pack up.

As soon as she left, Vance stepped outside for a cigarette. That was fine by me because I needed a break anyway, too. So I followed him out and we sat on the benches, smoking.

Vance had this habit of rolling his shirtsleeves up to expose these old, gnarly looking tattoos—I could make out some skulls and boobs and script of some sort but it was completely illegible. I didn't comment on them because I didn't want to suffer 32 through an hour of explanation for each tattoo. Or the historical significance of the words he chose to make permanent in his skin. And then he would sweat out alcohol, dragging this cloud of stale body odor around with him. If I was unfortunate to work the day with him. The equipment produced no shortage of foul smell, but he overcame it.

About halfway through his cigarette, he sort of cocked his head at me and smiled.

I could see three empty tooth sockets. He didn't say anything, just kept smiling at me.

Finally, I looked at him and he said, “You want a beer?”

“Nah, I'm good,” I said. I probably would have drank a couple except for the way he had asked it. It weirded me out. The way he had smiled that gap-toothed smile at me when he said it. It was as though he were suggesting that we smoke in the boys' room in middle school, as if it would be rebellious. Like he was trying to take me under his wing, mentor me or something ridiculous. Like I was a child and he was going to let me into the grown-up world in secret.

I had drank at work in the past, sure. At a restaurant where they served it. My point is that it seemed more appropriate in those circumstances. Here, it seemed, I don't know, unprofessional. As if I considered it a profession. Vance and Rob probably did after all those years. Maybe I was starting to see it that way too.

That, and I was exhausted. A beer would put me to sleep faster than a knock to the skull. Point is, I didn't want to drink a beer with the man.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Helps this shit go by, though.”

“Is that right?” 33

“Yeah, and you're going to want to to go by. Now, it never will, not completely.

You'll be back in here tomorrow—”

“I'm off tomorrow.”

“—or the next day, whatever, and it'll be here again, and you'll be wanting to to go by again. And again. And you know what? It never ends. So you might as well have a beer or two while you're in it.”

“You think it helps?”

“Doesn't hurt.”

I guess it made sense. It's why everyone else I knew, or had known, drank, smoked pot or did something to forget about their days most nights. They had to for sanity. Maybe that's why I didn't feel so pleasant most days. Like I was getting a little down on myself about it. Because I spent almost all of every workday high anyway, I couldn't do anything but think of it when I got home and showered and laid down. I couldn't help but think that I had earned just enough money that day to make it to the next. Just enough to forget yesterday, even if I couldn't really forget it. The best I could do was to forget how the day was so forgettable, so generally empty. That it's all I would ever do and that I should be spending just a little of that money on something to make me forget that I would always be in it. That I always had been. These thoughts would inevitably lead to thinking about Lisa and I would just have to turn on the television or smoke cigarettes until I was bored of those thoughts enough for them to go away. If I could afford to go out, I did. Or had. I was trying to save up for school again, though.

“I'm going back to school,” I said. 34

“How many years you been telling folks that, now?” Vance asked behind a veil of smoke. I just blinked at him. “I mean, you said that real smooth. Like you've practiced it.

How old are you? You really think you're going to get back into school? For what?

Driving semis or being a paralegal or some shit?”

“Just need to save up some cash and I'm in,” I said. I'd tried a couple of times before, but I'd always fall short before the deadlines, not take the entrance exam and then blow the money instead. Two or three times, this had happened.

“You really expect to do that with the hours you're getting?”

“It'll work out,” I said.

I had just turned twenty-seven and was trying to get into school at Fox Valley

Tech. Again. It wasn't expensive, but I was making just enough to pay rent and all that, plus eat and drink a few beers once in a while. I felt like a traitor, I guess. Improbably.

Regardless. I wanted something more. I know that sounds dumb but I couldn't see myself still in that print shop twenty years later, dealing with the heat and the chemicals, on my feet all day, feeling dragged to death, supergluing paper-cuts and scrubbing ink off my hands, which never seemed to return to a real flesh color. I don't know why, but even still

I felt a sort of allegiance. Maybe because they hadn't laid me off with everyone else. By then, it was just the two of us and Rob and Val.

“Yeah, you've been spilling this line for a while. Maybe you even believe it yourself.” He flicked his butt into the butt pail, stood up and said, “Come back in and let's get this shit done. If you still want that beer, I've got a twelver cooling off in the fridge.” 35

I followed him in a minute later and started boxing up the orders as fast as I could in silence. You know I was fuming. He had almost, and if it wasn't goddamn verbatim I wouldn't have been so mad, repeated what Lisa had said to me when we broke up. Part of it, anyway.

Lisa had said that I wouldn't actually ever get back into school, but I would just keep talking about it as if talking about it would make it happen. She said that I was getting a real good education in lying about education. Every box I sealed up I did with a vengeance, as if it were their faces. Vance's pockmarked and unshaved face with his bulbous nose. Lisa's high forehead and smooth cheeks, the little dimple on her chin.

Eventually I ran out of boxes. I actually ran out of anger first, I think. Because I started angry and got a good pace going with it and then just zoned out. I sort of came to when

Vance turned the stereo off. He tossed an empty beer bottle into the recycling bin.

“Alright, let's get the hell out of here,” he said.

He pulled his ponytail back up and put on this ancient denim jacket that he wore all-year long. The jacket didn't look like it had ever been washed. He flipped the switches for the lights and the big room was silent, dark. There was a soft hum in there. I had never not felt that place humming a bit. It may have been a real, honest sound. The lights cooling down, whatever. When the vents were on, the place hummed in a different way that let you know that you were at work. The sort of hum that sets in and you only notice once it's gone. The sort of hum you become aware of like a record getting knocked out of its groove. The place wasn't dead, just sleeping, just resting up for the next day.

Regardless. 36

One night, me and Val were sitting out in the alcove smoking a joint before we closed up.

I was alternating days with Vance, mostly. It had started to get cold. Not real cold yet, just sort of gray and ugly and everything looked colder than it really was, which is enough to make you feel cold just by thinking about it.

“Things have been rough,” Val said and passed me the joint. “Rob's just not taking it well. It's probably better that he's at home more. I was always worried that he'd work himself into an early grave. Clients causing all these headaches.”

“You think it's healthy?”

“Do I think what's healthy?”

“Rob staying at home so much.”

“Yes,” she said. “It's better for right now. He needs a break.”

“He just seems like he'd get bored without something to do, work.”

“Idle hands? Not him. He's keeping busy enough. Breaks are necessary. I mean, we haven't been on vacation in years. No time, no money. So it's best. He just needs to hang out and relax for a while. Forget about all this for a bit.”

“Things can't be that bad,” I said. “I mean—”

“It's the Internet,” she said. “Everyone going paperless. Moving all their stuff onto the computers or whatever.”

“There are other things we can do,” I said. I hit the joint and passed it back.

“Kinko's— ” 37

“The goddamn Internet,” she said. She tapped the ashes off the end of the joint with an old hippie’s precision. Her and Rob were only ten years older than me. They were the youngish sort of hippies with 'old souls' or whatever. “What other things are there? To help people go digital? Run the rest of our clients away?”

“Kinko's can't do t-shirts,” I said. The only machine that we used consistently— aside from the two big commercial printers, that is—and absolutely had to be operated was the industrial screenprinter used to make t-shirts. And it was usually Vance running it at night, after hours.

“They do, but they're shit.” She handed the joint to me. It looked very white between my blackened fingers. “Rob's just not dealing,” she said.

We stood out there for a while longer. It was getting cool out and the day was dreary and damp, but not awful enough to talk about. Just awful enough to notice and try to ignore. The sun had been out for a while but had disappeared behind a veil of clouds. I could feel the rhythm of the big printer on the other side of the brick wall.

Richard had been let go now, too. He'd taken it a little better than everyone else.

He was older, though. Not quite as old as Rob, Val or Vance, but older. He'd rubbed his face and spat on the side of the building while we smoked after he'd gotten the news. He said, “At least I don't have to suffer through any of this crap and then go to my other job now.”

“Life can get rough, pile up on you while you're not paying attention. Suffering is ubiquitous,” I said to Val after telling her what he'd told me. She had asked me how he'd taken it, getting let go. 38

“Is that today's word? Ubiquitous?”

“Yeah.”

“Good word. Rolls off the tongue. But you're doing okay. Better than you think.”

“I'm not as invested in this thing. It's a job. You know that.”

“But you like your job,” she said. She got close to me. “You stuck around.”

“Yeah, well. Everyone else got canned. But I think I may need to start getting more hours or something soon. A second job maybe.”

“Maybe you can do a night run for Vance sometime.”

“I don't know how to run that equipment.”

“I'm sure you're capable,” she said. She was close to me. She smelled like acetone and sweat and marijuana. I pulled a cigarette out of my pack and lit it. She stepped past me and paused in the doorway. “Hurry up with that, we need to get this order boxed up.”

As she crossed the threshold, the press cycled down and came to a halt. She had known it was going to. She had paid attention and had known.

“Go ahead and finish that,” she said. “Suffering might be ubiquitous, but it's a matter of degrees. Not everyone's got it the same,” she added.

I blew smoke out of my nose and smiled. I took my time with the cigarette, anyway. I could hear her inside, moving a box. She sang while she worked. Old Joan

Baez or Bob Dylan songs mostly. Beatles if she was in a more cheerful mood. It did make the work more bearable. Her voice was bright and, I don't know, effervescent. It wasn't just bright, you know. There was something else to it. I didn't know the song she was singing. It was probably some old hippie song I didn’t know: 39

Standing on the hill, standing on that hill that day

We would choke on a pill one day, one long day

I see your part in it, your part of it and I'll give you a pill for it

Take me to the hill, take me to the hill

There was a boom box that Vance had brought in, but it couldn't overcome the equipment and ventilation, unlike his body odor. He'd play The Doors or The Grateful

Dead at a volume where it would distort. It just added to the cacophony. That was another one of my dime-words. I said it when I was trying to talk him into turning it off one day. I told him that it gave me a headache, but he refused. The stereo stayed on if he was there.

I learned to deal with it.

“A dime-word? Reckon that's a good way to sound smart. Maybe I ought to try that,” Vance said. “Radio stays on. I like the cacophony.”

I was going through a thing when I worked there where I picked dime-words to memorize and use throughout the day. Lisa had told me that I had the vocabulary of a trained dolphin. I told her that dolphins couldn't do anything but click and sputter water out their blowhole. She said she knew that. It was right before we broke up, so I guess I was doing it out of some sort of misguided self-improvement campaign. Like, I might run into her and drop some smart words on her to show her that I had changed or something.

As if a stunning vocabulary mattered. Not that I would see her again. She worked at the mall, selling clothes to middle-aged women and probably still never went out. I even conspired to go into her work at one point, tell her that I was getting back into school. But

I never did. I was always too dirty and tired to bother. Even when I had the day off. 40

“Hurry the hell up,” she called out to me. I stubbed my butt out against the purple brick wall and dropped the unsmoked half back into the box. The wind had begun to pick up, but it was neither warm nor cold. Just annoying. Just terribly mediocre. I left the back door open to let some air in. Once the machine was done, the big open room would still reek like ozone and it could give you one hell of a damn headache, ventilation or not.

This sign hung from the main ventilation duct that said, “A WRITER IS

NOTHING WITHOUT A MAN TO PRINT HIM. INK BESTOWS MEANING.” There was a name printed under it, but it was illegible. I liked the idea that we could do something like that, even if we mostly did commercial work.

“Yup, I put that up, too,” Vance had said when I started. “Gives us a sense of purpose. Somebody needs to keep the presses running.”

Vance told me that Guttenberg said it. A month later, it came from some old

Italian printer. He would attribute it to Jesus a couple months later. “Doesn't matter who said it,” Vance told me later. “What matters is that I bothered to print it one more time.”

When Peter got let go, he threw an empty bottle of acetone at it and said, “Soon we won't have anyone left to print anything. Bullshit is what that sign is.” He was the last one. I really felt like I was on the chopping block next, though Val had reassured me that

I wasn't going anywhere.

“We need to have at least one warm body around here to work these machines,” she'd said.

Val was up front, doing the invoices. I began pulling the stacks and crimping the little plastic straps around them and putting them into boxes. It's tedious work, but one 41 you can get into a rhythm with. The crimper was old and slipped sometimes, or wouldn't catch and the stack could end up spilling across the floor if you weren't careful.

Sometimes, I thought I was the youngest thing in the building. It was no wonder so many clients had jumped ship for the big shiny Kinko's. I had been there. I almost applied for a job but I hadn't. Val's assurances made me hesitate. Riley had been behind the counter and waved to me. It was clean, professional, corporate. They had a ton of computers behind the counter. The computer we had at the front counter to do invoices on was the ancient sort that had that ridiculous amber text on a black screen with a dot matrix printer that used that paper with the perforated edges that spooled up out of a box. Clients would watch it with a sort of sympathetic fascination. It got the job done, though.

The strap crimper had jammed up and I was banging it on the edge of the production table when I felt Val's hands on my sides. I had been tuned into the hum of the ventilators and trying to get the damn crimper unjammed so I could go home and hadn't noticed that she had finished printing the invoice and come back.

I tensed up. No lie. Val was pretty enough, I suppose. She was unimposing. That was the way I would describe her, probably. Unimposing. Not gorgeous, but pretty.

Small, but not tiny. She wasn't big in voice or personality or body. If anything or anyone so much as resisted her, she didn’t persist. Not that she was a pushover, but she wouldn't fight. So I tensed up and I guess maybe went still, because her hands disappeared and by time I moved, she was back over by the stacks, assembling a box. I struck the crimper on the table edge once more and it snapped open.

“You should really replace this piece of junk.” I didn't know what else to say. 42

“Yeah, probably. Maybe one day,” she said. She was methodical in her box assembly. I took the box from her and began filling it.

The next thirty minutes passed in silence. After I had stacked the last box next to the loading dock door for pick up in the morning, we locked up and went home.

“Have a good night,” she said. I told her the same and climbed into the piece of shit Cavalier I had been driving since high school. It rumbled to life, sputtering and shaking. The radio worked, though. For the ten minute drive home, it was good enough.

About a week later, Rob called and asked me to stay overnight with a big order of shirts for the Cancer Society's Relay for Life event that was coming up soon. It wasn't a rush order or anything. He thought it would be a good chance for me to learn the ropes. He seemed distracted. Maybe he was just really stoned. That's what both Val and Vance told me was going on most of the time now, that Rob was just stoned almost nonstop.

“Val will stay with you to teach you how to do it,” Rob said. We had closed the shop together twice during that week without incident. We would get high, finish up the orders and get out of there. We would be done quickly, even. Earlier than anyone else had normally been done that I recalled. I forgot that there was a lot less work and thought that we were just that good. Aside from the one thing that had kind-of-almost happened.

She hadn't said anything to me or even looked at me funny, so it seemed like it had all blown over. So the next day, I showed up at six, just as Vance was leaving. He hadn't swept or closed the shop, knowing that I would have to be there all night. He was 43 throwing empty chemical bottles and into a trashcan in some kind of game against himself.

“Toner-ball,” he said. “The only true game a man can play in a place like this.”

He clapped me on the shoulder and mumbled past the unlit cigarette he already had hanging from his lips. I couldn't decipher half of what he said. He might have been explaining the game's rules for all I understood.

“That fuckin' machine,” he said, then, clearly. He laughed and strolled out the back door. It occurred to me that he was doing it, the mumbling, on purpose. That he did it even when he hadn't been drinking. I got better at understanding him, either way.

Maybe he just stopped mumbling at me all the time.

She showed up almost forty-five minutes after he left. She was as clean and fresh as she usually would be in the morning when she got in. Her long, dark hair was up. I tooled around with the machine in the mean time. The silk-screens were stacked against the wall next to it. You couldn't make out what the picture was with just one. One per color. There were six screens for this job. Rob had begun working on them from home.

Before that, I would sometimes watch him for a minute or two, tracing out and setting the designs down. He was really good with them. It wasn't art, exactly, but it took care.

Clients would send us their design and Rob would create templates from that. Val had told me that Rob'd been one hell of an artist.

“I think it's why I fell for him,” she told me. “He was so intense, so committed.

Even after we bought this place.”

“Does he still paint?” 44

“No,” she had said quietly. “Not for a while now.”

He would paint the screen with a sort of thick paint that would leave the design in negative, filling in the gaps of the screen mesh. The ink would press through it and leave only what you wanted. But you had to be careful with it or the shirt would end up with a big blob on it instead of the carefully drawn design.

I had known I had to work all night and I had still spent the day trying to fix my dad’s lawnmower. So stupid. Regardless.

“You doing okay?” he asked me when I'd shown up. I said I was fine and he offered me a beer. I took it and we sipped on them for a minute. “So can you take a look at this lawnmower?”

He would have done it himself if his hand wasn't messed up. He'd taken some shrapnel during the war and the nerve endings in his left arm were all ripped up. He could do a lot of things. Most anything he needed to do that didn't involve tools, that is. He worked at a desk and all that. “Thank God Charlie didn't take my writing hand,” he had always said. “Otherwise, I'd never have made it through college.”

It was a big riding lawnmower. I opened the hood on it and poked around until I found the problem. Timing belt was snapped. The machine wouldn't even turn over. Took twenty minutes and definitely required two hands to get out. So we went to the store, got a new belt and went back. He insisted on driving. I've always been afraid of him driving, with his only having one functional hand. But nothing's ever happened. He's imminently capable. Intimidatingly capable.

“You still with that Lisa girl?” 45

“No, dad. We're done,” I said.

“That's a real shame. Your mom, she's waiting for grandbabies.”

“I know. Mom reminds me every time I've see her.”

“What about school? Last time we talked, you were talking about school. I'll tell you what, it's the best decision I ever made.” He never forgets to mention how Uncle

Sam paid for it, after he got shipped home from Vietnam.

“Yeah,” I said. “Soon, I think. I'm just about there.”

“Well, it'll sure beat that raggedy print shop you're working in. That can't be much fun, can it? I mean, you'll do good in school. It'll get you a good job. Then you can afford some kids.”

I nodded and smiled. He would probably pay for it, if I asked. He wouldn't offer it again, and even if he did, I would probably tell him I didn't need the money.

“Yeah, dad, I'm thinking I'm going to study computers. That seems like a good thing to get into right now.”

“Blasted machines,” he said. “Making my job more trouble. I can't type and they've got one at work now that we have to use for order processing. Ah, well. I'm a manager. I make someone else do it. Delegate's the word. I delegate that responsibility.

Saves me the trouble of having to look like a gimp, embarrass myself in front of the kids

I work with.”

When I got done with the lawnmower and was getting ready to leave, he said,

“Get that computer degree. I know you can do something with yourself, you're good enough to get that degree and a good job. Your cousin Jake just graduated, been hearing 46 rumors of a wedding. No invites yet, though. I'll make sure you know when anything happens with that, so you can come.”

“Yeah, thanks.” I hadn't talked to Jake in six years. I smiled, anyway. My cousin

Jake. The golden boy. What an asshole.

So, I was tired. Once I was on a daytime schedule, this sort of thing was so much trouble that I would just end up pushing through. So stupid. If I could get back to school I thought I might guarantee that daytime job forever. That dream job, the one that's secure and stable and doesn't kill you psychologically every day. Otherwise, I would probably have to go back to some restaurant job, working nights and sleeping all day. If business didn't pick up and I couldn't get more hours, that was.

“Want to smoke a bowl before we get started?” Val said, putting her bag down on the counter.

I said yeah and we went out back. I leaned against the wall and rested my eyes while she packed the bowl and talked about how Rob's dog had gotten into the trash and caused this big ruckus whenever she was trying to leave. She smoked, and nudged me to take it. “I'm sorry for being late, again,” she said. She had never apologized to begin with.

Not that I cared all that much. I waved it off and said it was fine. I had taken a nap while I had waited.

We smoked in the dimming sunlight made even dimmer by the high fence. The sunlight trickled away and the world took on a washed out color. The further the world around us retreated into the darkness, the better she looked. Whatever beauty she had was unobtrusive. It wasn't a pushy sort of beauty that forced itself on you. It was just there. It 47 didn’t resist the dimming light but seemed to embrace it. It wasn't the pot. I had smoked plenty of times with her and never once had it made her look prettier. I thought maybe she just looked better because she had her hair up. But maybe I hadn't paid enough attention to the light. Regardless.

The screen-printing machine wasn't really that complicated, but the machine had about a dozen damn quirks that I kept fouling up. Val laughed at me every time I pulled the lever wrong or out of order and she doubled over when I somehow ended up with purple ink all over my chest.

“I don't even know how you managed that,” she said after she recovered. My hands were covered in ink, too. “I didn't think that was possible.”

“Right. I'm an idiot.”

“No, no, no. That machine is just a real son of a bitch. Vance is the only one who really knows how to make it do right.”

“Why don't you have him do it, then? I ruined my damn shirt,” I said, moving toward the sink to get a rag. The shirt wasn't expensive, but it had been comfortable and it wasn't worn out.

Val moved with me and I collided with her, coating the front of her shirt with purple ink, too. She pressed herself against me and I didn't even have a chance to tense up. I was already sort of upset about the ink and when our lips met so I just followed through. If I hadn't already been worked up I probably would have just froze up again. 48

My excuse, then, is that I was caught off-guard. Regardless. I lifted her up onto the counter and got her pants down.

A stack of unbound reams fell to the floor and we ignored it, still groping and pulling at clothing. The ventilation that was normally so unnoticed was suddenly roaring.

I was glad for it, though. The big room echoed like a bastard when it was off. Her eyes were bright in that big, dim room, hovering in front of me, scrutinizing me. I mostly kept my own shut except to see what she was doing and if she was still looking at me. And she was, every time.

We didn't produce one damn shirt that night. Our clothes were both stained purple in splotches and hand prints, streaks of fingertips, little blobs around the buttons on the front of her shirt. On her bra strap and the cups. On her panties.

Afterward, we cleaned up the machine in silence and reset the screens. Vance would have to run it the next couple nights to get the order done. We put on a couple of clean, unprinted blue shirts from the box meant for the order. There were extras, so it was no worry, she said. My jeans would end up in the trash later that night. Before we left, I asked if we should talk about it and she said, “Talk about what?”

So I dropped it. I suppose I was concerned about Rob. But I think now that I realized that unless Val told him, there was nothing to worry about. She didn't look guilty, I guess. She could explain the ink on her clothes easily enough. And, as odd as it seems to remember this, while I was waiting for a red light to change I thought that maybe Rob knew what was going to happen all along, that he had set it up himself. 49

Which made me even more worried about my job. But I do know that I felt better, in a way. In short, I hadn't been laid in a while.

Me and Val closed the shop every other night and while it wasn't every time, most nights she would find me and we would have sex on the counter or one of the work benches. I wasn't as wound-up about everything because a sort of routine had smoothed everything over. I still felt a pressing need to get into school, to do something to move up in the world, if only a little, but it didn't have the urgency it had at first. Val seemed tired more and more often and the sex was slower as it went on, though, so maybe that's what I actually remember, but everything slowed down kind of.

“Are you coming down with something?”

“I'm fine. Things are just tough, you know,” she said. So I guessed it was just stress. Plus, I got the feeling that Rob didn't know and she was worried about him finding out. “Maybe I caught that damn head cold Vance had last week.”

I remembered how Vance had been the week before during the day we had worked together. He had looked awful. Not that Vance ever really looked well, but that was beside the point. He had had bags under bloodshot eyes. He'd been paler than usual.

But it had just been a hangover of extreme proportions. He hadn't actually gotten sick during work, but you could smell vomit around him. Bile and alcohol. Maybe he had just drank his way through whatever bug he had, but I would put money on it that he had just come off some kind of bender and hadn't gotten sick at all. It was as if his immune system had been forged in a medical waste heap and the man was impervious to general 50 illnesses. His liver will probably swell up and kill him one day, but he'll never catch the flu, let alone a cold. He had told me that, and it was probably one of the few things about himself that he told me that I actually believed. He had that old alcoholic tenacity of health. Not a goodness of health, but an ability to fight anything off so that he could get drunk again.

Me and Val would lay in the dark, silent room and listen to the machines tick as they cooled off, the wind rattle the vents and the echoes of our breathing. Then she would get up, dress herself and finish up. If Vance wasn't coming in, we sometimes stayed later, but we never talked about it. If I tried to say something, she would shush me and then get up.

I felt like something needed said, but if she didn't want it said, I would let it go.

Regardless.

I guess I started looking at Val differently so I didn't see her getting paler. She always had had a fair complexion, but looking back on it, she had started to look a little waxy, washed out. If she even had. But I remember it happening. At the same time, somehow, I remember that when I looked at her I always saw her the way she was after sex. Flushed, nose red, and glowing. She kept her hair up more often, too. I didn't ask about Rob. I didn't have to.

When we'd smoke outside, she would talk about how rough of a time Rob was having. Things weren't getting any better. He was getting depressed about revenue. He was convinced that his dog was going to die. He wanted to travel to Patagonia after he saw some documentary on television and wouldn't stop talking about it. Vance had 51 stopped coming around the house, giving weaker and weaker excuses and then not even bothering. He told me Rob was depressing to be around. Val seemed as upbeat as ever.

She only talked about how bad things were from his point of view, now. Her complaints were always prefaced by Rob's name, now. Rob didn't like the man hours; Rob didn't think such-and-such client would renew their contract; Rob was worried about losing the shop. She spoke in positives, about how things were getting better.

“It matters to me that it matters to him, I guess,” she said when I pointed it out.

“He opened it with me. He's a huge part of it, too.”

“Which is why you keep talking about it.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” She took a hit off the pipe, handed it to me and stood up. She looked up at the building and said, “I love this place.”

“Paper cuts, ink fumes, cranky clients, long days—sure, what's not to love?”

“Are you going to get your ass into school or not?”

“I'm trying to save up to start next quarter. Spring. I won't have the money for

Winter.”

“You'll do fine,” she said. “You've got a good head on your shoulders.”

“I'm old and tired,” I said.

She got real close to me and looked up at me and said, “You don't know how good you got it. Don't forget that. Never forget that. You've got it so good.”

I had thought that once, but now I wasn't so sure. I kept thinking that I would end up like Vance, still working there, living in a trailer, still driving my piece of shit car, scrounging for money to buy pot and beer until I was fifty. That I would just work until I 52 died, always trying to catch a break but never quite succeeding. That I would never be content. Regardless. I said okay and we went back inside to finish up.

I went up to the Tech and scheduled the entrance exam for a week later. I had never even taken the ACT or SAT in high school. I had taken the ASVAB but the Army guy only offered me cook or infantry, so I told him to fuck off. Not that it mattered, according to the girl at the desk at the Tech. Those scores would have expired anyway, she said.

“Not that you're old, I mean,” she said to me. “But those scores wouldn't matter, anyway. Most everyone just takes the entrance exam. It's not that hard, really.” She was probably in her early twenties. A little pudgy but cute. Blonde hair cut shoulder-length.

The red sweater she had pulled on over her blouse didn't help conceal her tits. I kept glancing down at them over the counter. I made eye-contact with her every time, as if I hadn't been. I knew she knew, but I wasn't sure if she didn't care. She was telling me about how she worked there as part of some work-study thing and that I could maybe do the same thing to help pay for my classes.

“I work like fifteen hours a week and I take accounting classes. I'm actually going for Business. I want to open my own shop. It pays pretty well and I just sit up here and do reception.”

“I was thinking about going for computers,” I said. “There's a lot of that in the program listings.”

“Math, you'll want to study for the math part. You'll have to take some classes and they're hard. I took Algebra last quarter. I'm no good at it.” 53

I was actually not bad at algebra in high school. I didn't like it, but it wasn't that hard. The brochure said that we would learn about programming, which seemed somewhat cryptic and mystical to me at the time. I imagined arranging ones and zeros into a secret language that only a few people, and computers, could understand. The most technical thing I had ever done on a computer was to make macros on Hyperstacks on the

Macintosh computers in school, and those were mostly in the form of lewd jokes.

Someone else had had to show me how to do it.

“You'll probably have to take the remedial classes and all that gen ed stuff, anyway. Everyone does.” she said. “Doesn't matter what you major in. Computers, though, that's a good one. I keep hearing good things from people. I have one—a computer, that is—and it's wild. I don't really know how to do anything on it except sign onto AOL and check my email and all that. But there's a lot of crazy stuff out there.”

“Yeah? I've never really used the Internet.”

“Oh, you'd be amazed,” she said.

“You're not being hyperbolic, are you?”

“Huh?”

“Blowing smoke up—exaggerating—never mind. I guess I'll find out, won't I?” I was flipping through a brochure that advertised some of their programs like welding and vocational stuff that would probably be easier to get a job with, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that. It seemed more like what I was already doing, what I wanted to get away from. 54

“There's a lot of programs, though,” she said. “You don't need to decide yet.

Besides, once you're admitted you'll have to talk to an advisor anyway. They'll tell you everything you need to know. Just don't let them push you around. One of my friends got talked into a program she hated. Finally she had enough and changed. It's real easy, especially if your classes are real hard. Like, English? There's only a couple you have to take for most of us. It's brutal, though.”

“I'll do whatever I need to do,” I told her. “I can read and write. Graduated high school alright, you know. Just been a while is all.”

“Well, pick something that you can do good in. That's all I'm saying.”

I said thanks and folded the brochure up and jammed it into my jacket pocket.

“Hey,” she called to me before I reached the door. I went back. “You forgot this.”

It was a confirmation of my registration to take the entrance exam. I would need it when I showed up. It said right at the top that I would need to present it, as my registration ticket, and a valid photo ID in order to take the exam. I said thanks and left.

I ran into Lisa in the lobby of the building. I had been thinking about how to come up with some pretext to “bump into her” randomly but none of them were good. She worked at the mall in a woman's clothing store. I could think of no good reason to even enter the store. So it was kind of perfect, right there at the school, where I could prove that I was doing something with my life.

“Hey,” I said. She paused at the glass doors when she saw me, but came in anyway. 55

“Hi,” she said.

“Getting ready for the quarter?”

“I have to talk to my instructor, is all. We’re doing practicals soon.”

“Cool, so you’re doing well. I guess, right? How are you? Are you good?”

“Yeah, I’m good. Great, even. Listen, I have to go meet my teacher. She'll be mad if I'm late.”

“I get that. It was nice seeing you.”

She walked past me. Her jeans were tight and her coat was big enough to cover her ass. This didn't stop me from looking anyway. She stopped and turned around. “Are you still driving that piece of shit Cavalier? I saw it in the parking lot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It's still running, so why not?”

“It's an awful car.”

“Heater works.”

“Just well enough,” she started.

“Right, underachiever. I've heard it all before.”

“Ever wonder why you hear it so much?”

“Nope,” I said. “I know it as well as anyone, don't need anyone to tell me it again, is all. Annoying is what it is, reminding me of shit I already know. You think I don't know it? I'm just playing the cards as I get them, Lisa. You know that.” Why she had gotten along so well with my parents wasn't lost on me. They might be more delicate about it, but it was the same.

“You think the cards brought you here, to school?” 56

“Only cause I played 'em right.”

“Right. It was good seeing you.” She started walking away again.

“We might catch up,” I said abruptly. “Buy you a beer?”

“Listen, that's nice and all, but that sounds too much like, you know.”

“I'm not trying to get back together with you,” I said. I remember that I said it with all sincerity. Of course that wasn't true, but I didn't even know it, so if I had admitted

I was, that would have been lying on my part. At that moment, anyway. Regardless.

“I don't know,” she said. “I just got off work and I'm beat.”

“Just a drink,” I said. “My treat. I just want to talk a bit.”

“You'd better be apologizing.”

“We'll see,” I said. I suggested a decent little bar and grill just off downtown. It was quiet enough to have a conversation in during happy hour, which was just about to start. I moved to maybe hug her and even though there was the tiniest smirk on her face, her eyes were severe. Her eyes were like a rock face, on the other hand, if that makes any sense. Impenetrable. Stopped me dead. But more to the point, they required you to do a lot of work to overcome them. Of course, that's how they really always were even if I saw them differently sometimes, and I remember them being softer sometimes, but I'm not sure that was ever the case now. It might have just been my imagination, or a trick of memory. The way memories tend to color the way we want them to, so they fit the way we want to think about them. I told her that I'd see her shortly.

I couldn't believe that she had accepted. Maybe that's what the smirk was about, the fact that I was all energized and excited when she said she'd come have a drink. Like 57 she was amused at the fact that I was acting like a kid who got told that he could go to so- and-so's house to play after being denied for so long. When we'd first got together, she had told me that part of my charm was my “childish abandon,” which I interpreted as she meant she liked my sometimes being reckless. She'd said she liked the way I got excited about things the way a kid does, like when they know Santa is coming in the morning, or that they're going somewhere special and get all antsy and can't sleep. She said it had a lot to do with my eyes. When she dumped me though, part of her reasoning was that I was “childish.” No abandon in sight. No excitement. No recklessness. None of those words came up. Regardless.

It must have been a Tuesday because they had dollar burgers and pints of domestic for a buck twenty-five for their happy hour special. I got two burgers with cheese and an

MGD. I finished the burgers and the beer and was at the bar ordering a second when she came in.

I had actually given up on her showing. It seemed like something she would do, to say okay to placate me and then just not show. I had spent half an hour running my fingernails along the grooves in the ancient wooden bar, picking debris and dried beer from around them.

So I guess that goofy kid smile had returned when I saw her smirk again. I was trying very hard to just look pleased and friendly. She got a cranberry and vodka. She took her big coat off and hung it on the edge of the booth. She wore a tan cardigan and a silk black and white blouse under it. She wasn't kidding when she said she'd just got off 58 work. She was dressed like a school teacher. I sat longways in the booth. My head rested just underneath a Billy the Bigmouth Bass. I reached up and pushed it. Its jingle rang out, much to Lisa's annoyance. Her smirk faded.

“You get a kick out of those things still?”

“Nah,” I said. “But I feel compelled to push the button for some reason. Like, it's there, so I have to do it.”

“You're impulsive.”

“No, I'm a child,” I said.

She stirred her drink and shook her head. “No, I was wrong about that. I don't know. You seem more adult than that.”

“That's a new tune,” I said. I took a drink.

“You're actually doing it, going to school. And I wasn't there to push you.”

“You pushed for four years, didn't do much good. I don't know. Maybe it was just delayed. Took a while to sink in. I'm real stubborn when I want to be.” Of course, she had only started school a year and some change before and that's when the pushing began.

She seemed to think it was this big long drawn out argument that encompassed our entire relationship. I had learned to just go along with it.

“I didn't really push,” she said. “I was just trying to encourage you. You're better than—” She stopped, took a drink. Waved her other hand off. “What are you doing? Still working at that awful print shop?”

“It's not so bad.” And she was wrong about not pushing. “I mean, it's a steady job.” 59

She shook her head. She was a couple years younger than me but came from basically the same place. We'd gone to the same high school, worked at the same restaurant, knew mostly the same people who were all somehow tied to the city just because they couldn't afford to move anywhere else.

She had been a server in this restaurant I was a cook at. We hung out at after parties and fooled around a bit, but then it got serious. I don't know how long that took or when it exactly happened, but one day she referred to me as her boyfriend, and it was so.

We both stopped working there, her first, but I knew people that still worked there, four years later. Some people had left and gone back. Word was, they were hiring if I really wanted to get out of the print shop. I could make more money, probably. But shitty hours.

I didn't much like working all night anymore.

The first time I had kissed Lisa was while we were at work. Rather, we'd just got done and were drinking in the bar. The place was empty except the closing staff. The bartender had gone home and we were close together in a booth. The other servers who sat across from us had gotten up to go snatch whatever food they could from the kitchen before it got tossed or eaten by the closing cook. She leaned in and it was as if it was always supposed to happen like that. I know calling some shit like that destiny is stupid, but you can't deny that feeling when it happens.

I leaned across the little booth's table. Lisa leaned back and sighed.

“Darts?” I said, standing up. She groaned. “Pool? You can break.”

“Weren't you going to apologize?”

“I was? For what?” 60

“See,” she said, standing up. “That's what I'm talking about. I've forgiven you, I just want to hear you apologize. Just that one little thing.”

But I wouldn't do it. I just sat back and drank from my pint and she left.

Any time I bumped into any of my old friends, especially those from the restaurant, they always talked about how I never did anything anymore, how I was a hermit or something.

They'd make jokes about how it always seemed like I'd moved out of town. So when I'd run into Paul a few days before, it was no different. We had actually been pretty good friends before I started working at the shop. He invited me to this big house party that he and his roommates were throwing in celebration of somebody's birthday. I guess most of the people still worked there, so there would be a few familiar faces. I didn't know the birthday boy, but I was welcome to come anyway.

“I'll think about it,” I said. “Works crazy and I'm just getting into school and you know.”

“There's going to be girls,” he said.

“Right. Girls.”

“Don't be a pussy, man. You're always such a pussy when it comes to girls,” he said. I opened my mouth but instead of saying anything I just started laughing. “Fair enough.”

It was true in a way, but I had always seemed to be dating some girl the whole time we'd been friends. I mean, I didn't get every girl I crushed on and it wasn't like a 61 revolving door or a parade of women or anything like that. And I had dated Lisa for four years. But I was a pussy when it came to women. Just not the way he meant it.

He took a lukewarm “maybe” in stride, though. It wasn't for another week, maybe. I hadn't seen him in a few months, probably, so it wasn't even that big of a deal. It might have just been politeness, but he still said that I should come if I could. Five bucks to help pay for the keg. And I knew he was still friends with Lisa. Well, more like they had mutual friends. He was dating one of her friends or something like that. Regardless. I knew there was a good chance that she'd be at the party. I looked at the slip of paper he'd written the address on. Somewhere up on Harris, not far from where I lived but far enough to make me want to drive.

“I expect to see you there,” he said. “We'll get stupid. It'll be a blast.”

I decided to go to the party at Paul's. I actually made the decision while Val was curled up against me. I rubbed my hand along her back and said, “I have to go. I'll see you tomorrow.” She said okay and kissed me on the cheek. After I left work, I went home to shower and change.

When I got there, there weren't many people. They were mostly all still at work.

Paul threw an arm around my neck and sort of side-hugged me. “It's been a while, bud, glad you could make it. Come on, let's get you a beer. No need to chip in, we'll let all the underage kids pony up.”

The keg would repay itself sixfold and the kids wouldn't even put a dent in it. This was an easy racket, especially if you were close to being broke and needed some quick 62 cash. There were half a dozen people milling around the kitchen and the living room, leaning against things and talking, smoking cigarettes. A bowl was being passed around in the kitchen. I got a red solo cup and filled it at the keg.

“What have you been doing with yourself, man?” Carlos said. He was Paul's roommate.

“I work up at the print shop over on College.”

“Better than the restaurant biz? You cooks had it rough back there.”

“Nah, I mean, I don't know. It's better. Less chaotic.”

“Chaos, though, brother. That's the real deal,” he said. Carlos was already pretty drunk. “Chaos is the spice of life.”

I took a hit off a pipe that was going around and passed it along. I lit a cigarette and drank the beer. It was Keystone Lite.

“How's everything with you, though? I haven't even been back over there in ages.” I said.

“Same shit, you know. People start, then they quit or get fired. So we're constantly having to train people, and nobody sticks around even though it's so goddamn easy. I don't get it. All you have to do is memorize a few things and zone out. Put on a smile if you're serving. Be ready to sweat a lot if you're cooking. But they either can't turn their brain off or they don't have one to begin with. Pathetic. We could actually use a couple of decent cooks. You could probably get your job back, even if you pissed them off when you left before.”

“Jess still working up there?” 63

“Yeah, she's still there. I don't think she's coming tonight. You still got a thing for her?”

“Jess? No, I wasn't into her. Come on, I was with Lisa.”

“Lisa's coming tonight, from what I heard.”

“Oh,” I said. I raised my eyebrows and tried to look surprised. Or dismayed. I guess I was aiming for a little of both and hoped he would pick up on whichever he preferred.

“You knew that,” Paul said. “She said she saw you recently, that you were getting into school. Good man. It's about damn time. If you'd stuck around the restaurant, you'd never have done it. That place just sucks the life out of you. Here, let's do a shot.” Paul picked up a bottle of Old Crow and set up a couple of shots.

“Yeah. Here's to getting stupid,” I said, raising the little glass and clinking it against his. We knocked them back and he let out a whoo-ha, slamming the shot glass down on the kitchen counter. I cringed as the whisky burned its way into my center and sputtered through a smile, which I think I managed to segue into laughter. I put my shot glass down and said, “It's good to see you guys.”

“Come on, let's get you laid,” Paul said. He slapped me on the shoulder and headed for the living room. “Probably ain't any damn pussy up in a print shop. You must be dying.”

I followed him in, sat on the arm of a sofa where three clearly underage girls were talking and sort of spaced out. One of them was trying to talk to me, and I kept nodding and responding in monosyllables. I couldn't quite follow what she was talking about. It 64 was something to do with a television show, but it wasn't one I watched so I couldn't really offer an opinion.

As more people arrived, many of them straight from work, I moved around and talked to people that I didn't know very well. The underage girls eventually just set up camp around the keg for a while and kept filling my cup for me before disappearing. The dirty green linoleum in the kitchen was almost black with all the mud and grime people were tracking in.

Paul and I did some more shots with some people I kind of knew from the restaurant. They might have started right before I quit. They had familiar faces, but I couldn't remember their names, even after they told me. Somebody was trying to sell me some coke or acid and I couldn't afford it even if I had wanted to do it. Somehow, I felt like I was too old, too. As if I was past all that.

Lisa showed up and sort of said hi from across the room, but didn't come over. I kept talking about the restaurant to these people that I didn't know, who barely knew of me. They were talking about pranks they pulled on the managers during the dinner rushes. I had been there, done that. They were clever, though.

One of them told me about how he had battered and deep-fried a pair of metal tongs, garnished the plate and put it in the warming window. The manager almost sent it out to a table, thinking it was a fish platter. It almost made it out to the dining room, he said. He'd had to chase the waitress down and stop her from delivering it. 65

Lisa was talking to Paul and they came over to do a shot. I declined when he offered me another. I was already almost too drunk to handle the room. I don't think I had really said much for a while. Somebody kept trying to offer me drugs, but I kept saying I didn't want any. I was staring a Lisa. Leering might be a better word. I didn't want to be, but I was. Probably. Regardless.

Somehow I ended up doing a shot with Paul and Lisa and she grabbed my arm at the bicep and asked me how I was doing. I said I was good, it was good to see her again.

“You were a real shit the other day, in some kind of a mood,” she said.

“I don't know, maybe. I don't know what I was thinking with that drink—”

“That's not what I'm talking about,” she said.

“Let's not talk about that. I'm sorry, again,” I said. She got it out of me, the apology. I might have even been sincere about it.

I had run into her at a bar about a week before seeing her at the Tech. I don't remember what inspired me to go, but it was right after work and I had just got done screwing Val and I stopped for a beer before I went home. Anyway, what had happened,

I guess, was that Val had tucked her head against me and started playing with that cross and I took it out of her fingers and started laughing a little bit when I thought about it, and

I asked her if she thought she was going to hell.

And Val had just moved her head slightly so she could look at me and said no, in the flattest, angriest tone I'd ever heard from her. She snatched it back and put her head back down. She had hummed a tune for a while before she asked me how come I didn't ever say anything to her about us. 66

“Because you always shut it down before I can really say anything,” I had said.

“You need to, anyway.”

“I don't know what to say,” I had told her. I put an arm around her, pulled her in closer and she sighed.

“Is it that complicated for you?”

“It's only as complicated as you make it,” I said. She sighed and pulled away to get dressed. I kept thinking that I should tell her that I loved her, but I wasn't sure if I would be lying or if I would be saying it because she wanted to hear it. And I kept thinking that it was exactly what she wanted to hear, but it was exactly what she was afraid of hearing. Like she was asking me to stick my head into a lion's mouth because she knew the horror that would ensue. Like she wanted me to say it so that she could reject it.

So I had gone to get a drink. Which is when I had run into Lisa, again. She was out with some other girls, at the bar. They were just drinking and bullshitting after work or whatever. I hadn't even seen her when I sat down, I was too wrapped up in thinking about Val.

But she came over and said hi, sat down next to me and we talked. She was laughing and we talked about some good times we had. I kept telling her that her friends looked upset that she was sitting with me, and she said it was cool, not to worry about them.

Of course, after my third beer I had leaned in to kiss her. Not like peck her cheek or anything, but full-on kiss her. She was already leaning into me a bit, laughing about 67 something I had said. She had actually, at first, kissed me back. Her lips and mouth tasted like cranberry and cigarettes. It was a warm, familiar place. But after a moment she pulled away and narrowed her eyes, her mouth pursed up but didn't quite frown.

“Dammit,” she had said. “No, it's not like that. It can't be like that.”

I had thought for a moment that she had tasted Val on my lips, but then I couldn't remember if Val had even kissed me. She said something else about a mistake and went back to her friends.

“It's cool,” she said, now. She acted as if it hadn't happened, as if it was just some fluke not worth tallying into the scheme of things. She lit a cigarette. “I don't ever know what to expect from you, is all. You're all over the map.”

“See, that's just it,” I said, lifting myself away from the counter and stepping away. “I'm not. I'm not all over the map. I'm like a monument. I'm fixed, not moving.

Your frame of reference for me, though, is all over the place.”

“I don't even know what that means,” she said. She accepted a joint that was handed to her, took a hit and passed it to me. “Maps? Frames of reference? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing, don't worry about it.” I passed the joint and went over to the keg and to fill my cup again. The keg was starting to float a bit.

I don't know how many beers later it was, or how long had passed but I was keeping my distance from Lisa. Not really being rude or anything. She didn't seem mad at me anymore, just confused. Maybe upset, sure, but not mad. I was mad, though. And then 68 some guy, another guy who looked familiar, but only in that way that I've seen a thousand guys just like him, like he was some kind of clone or popular model that every city was issued so many of just to fill in population quotas or something, showed up and put an arm around Lisa. He kept his arm there for a long time, even after he'd gotten a beer. He only moved it to shake someone's hand. He had this white baseball cap on backwards and wore a novelty t-shirt. Clean shaved and baby-faced, he might have been twenty-two if he was lucky.

And I don't know why, but I wasn't really that upset. I just started laughing. Paul came over and asked me what was so funny and I just laughed some more. I poured a couple of shots and I said, “here's to December.” He took the shot but asked me what I meant, and I said, “So that's Lisa's new boyfriend?”

“Yeah, he's kind of a tool. Nice guy, but yeah. Kevin or something, I don't know him. I think he works with her.”

“Doesn't matter,” I said. And it didn't. I did think about punching him just because, but I didn't. Paul asked me if I wanted to do something stupid and I said that the only stupid thing I wanted to do was get more stupid and poured another couple shots out, finishing the bottle off.

Val was recalcitrant, I guess. Taciturn, maybe. She was being kind of bitchy, whatever the fancy word is for that. The next day, after the party, she had that severe look that Lisa had given me when I'd run into her at the Tech. The one she really always had, but it was new to Val. There was an overall stoniness to her. Except, there were moments when it 69 was gone. It didn't melt away or fade or anything. It was just gone and she was soft and warm again. I caught glimpses of it in the afternoon. It was just my hangover bleeding into reality, making everything sour.

I had both presses running and was shuffling between them to pull the prints out and stack them up to go into the binding machine. Val was up front. I'd approached the door once to see if I could grab a break but I heard her on the phone. I don't know who she was talking to but it didn't sound like a client, so I just went back to stacking and prepping.

The press ended its run without incident. The ventilators were humming so I hadn't noticed that I was, too. It was some old tune that Val had been singing, but I was sure I was butchering the melody. And I was just humming the same four or five notes anyway, so it must have sounded like I was talking to myself behind my mask. Once the run ended, I took the mask off and rubbed at my stubble. I hadn't bothered to shave that morning when I woke up.

“What's all this? Growing a beard?” Val had come back while I was moving the last of the prints over. What she said was friendly, but there was no laughter in her voice.

“Something like that,” I said. “Why not? I might look distinguished, you don't know.”

“It gets in the way of the mask,” she said. “Not that you can't have one.”

“You have any aspirin?”

“Yeah, I'm sure there's some over by the fridge, in one of the cabinets. With all the first aid stuff. Where you'd expect to find something like aspirin.” 70

“Yeah, thanks,” I said.

“You just about done with this order?”

“About to get the binding going, shouldn't be too long,” I called back from the so- called kitchenette that was tucked away behind the staircase that lead up to the front.

“Number two was acting up a bit, I had to keep an eye on it.”

“What was going on with it?”

“Thermostat was spiking. I had to let to rest a couple times, but it cooled itself off.

Probably needs to get looked at, though.”

“Right,” she said. “Broken thermostat.”

I washed the aspirin down with a swig of Gatorade. Then I chugged half the bottle down. The cold flowed down into my core and I noticed sweat pricking out everywhere. I wiped my face off and shuffled back out onto the floor.

“Let's smoke a bowl before I wrap this up,” I said. “My head's killing me.”

“Listen,” she said. She uncrossed her arms and then put them back. “You know what? Yeah, okay. Nevermind. Yeah. I'll go get my coat.”

I got my coat off the rack and went outside. It wasn't too bad with the door open in the alcove. It was dark already and the cold felt good. The day had been overcast, but the clouds had moved on. Not that there were many stars to be seen inside the city limits, but a few could be made out. I packed my pipe and leaned against the building. Val came out and stood against the building next to me. We smoked and passed the bowl back and forth until it was cashed.

71

I had laid out one of the foam pads that was used for packaging and we were laying on it under the glow of the secondary lights, the ones that stayed on all night. The shadows of the machines were always pretty gnarly and that night I kept thinking they were moving with us, somehow.

“Listen, I'm sorry,” I said. I had my arms around her.

“No need,” she said. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

“That's what I think I mean,” I said. “Maybe. I don't know. I think—”

“No,” she said. “No, I don't think you do.”

“This is important to me,” I said.

“I know you think it is. But, I don't think you need to say it. Whatever it is.

Because I think you want to more than you actually do. You really do want to and that's enough. Just don't,” she said.

I laid my head back and hugged her. Her expression was grave, if that's even an appropriate way to describe it. But then she reached up and rubbed my stubble. “You're all scratchy,” she said. “It suits you. Scratchy.” And she giggled.

My face itched. I hated not shaving.

Me and Vance closed up the shop the next day. It was awful outside. First real brutal weather we'd had since the summer had ended. Rain, wind, cold. You could hear it plinking against the garage door at the loading dock, the gusts of wind making it shudder and bang around against its railings. There weren't any windows but we didn't need any to know how bad it was outside. The alcove wasn't much protection, so I smoked a 72 cigarette inside the loading dock. Vance came back there with a beer and lit one up, too.

He squatted up against the wall. We still had about forty-five minutes of work left, if we hurried. More than that if we bothered to set anything up for the next day.

Val came back and found us. She said, “You're not supposed to smoke in here.”

“Have you looked outside?” Vance said.

“Have you?”

“No,” he said.

“Yeah, well,” she said. She pulled a cigarette out of her pack and lit it. “I guess it doesn't matter much, then.”

“Sounds bad,” he said. I nodded.

“It is. How are you getting home?”

“Bus,” he said.

“You're going to wait in that shit for the bus?”

“Not if I get out of here quick enough. I figure I'll just make it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Hurry up with those, then.” She crushed her butt out under her foot and went back up front. I snubbed mine out on the cement wall and brushed the ashes off it as best I could. I tossed the butt in the trash.

I followed her up front, leaving Vance to finish his smoke. He took a long pull from his beer as I was walking away.

“Hey,” I said. The front was dark now. She'd already killed the lights, the computer, the open sign. There was just a glow that somehow sneaked in from the big sign on the front of the building, above the windows. 73

“What's up?” she said. There was nothing in her tone that resembled affection.

“It's cold out there,” I said. I had forgotten what I wanted to say when I heard her voice. She was digging around in her purse behind the counter. “Looks like it's getting worse.” The rain was coming down in sheets against the glass, each with a scatter-shot effect. Like a shotgun every few moments.

“Sure is,” she said. “Hey, could you give Vance a ride home? I know he won't ask for one. He'll catch pneumonia or something. Nobody should have to deal with that crap out there.”

I opened my mouth to speak but couldn't think of anything to say. She leaned over the counter and looked up at me. She said, “I don't care, but he's really good friends with

Rob, and, you know.” Her voice had a lilt to it now. Her eyes searched my face. I said okay and leaned in toward her.

She dipped back down and grabbed her coat. Her car keys jingled from her left hand. I wiped my hands against my smock and shuffled back to the door to the production floor.

“Hey,” she called. “You're closing day after tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. She nodded and said goodbye. She sailed past me, brushing her hand against my groin. Blood flowed there quicker than I could think.

“Alright, make sure you get this place cleared out, guys,” she hollered. She was out the door before either of us could respond. Vance was next to the packing table, crimping stacks of pamphlets together. 74

“Yeah, yeah, we got it,” he said. He picked his beer up off the shelf above the table and took a swig. “Come on. We gotta hustle.”

I figured Vance would just turn down any offer for a ride home, but he said, “Yeah, okay, partner, if you insist,” before I had even closed my mouth from having offered. The wind was really screaming outside, so I don't know why I expected him to politely refuse. I don't know that he would have died or anything. It just would have been miserable. And I was getting to the point where I wanted to see Vance a little miserable, even though I knew he was probably about as bad off as you could get without being homeless.

Vance's trailer was out in the country. Technically, it was a trailer park and within the city limits, but there were few trailers there that were actually occupied. Or so it looked. I guess I don't really know. It was desolate, trash strewn about. Rusted bikes leaned against trees. There was a picnic table in front of his that didn't look safe. The mailbox sat on it instead of being attached to a post. Next to that was a grill propped up on one side with cinder blocks. The wind was whipping through the trees that surrounded it. Beer cans tumbled around in a yard that was more or less a patch of dirt with some fallen leaves stuck to a few clumps of weeds and crab grass.

I had grown up in what had been the suburbs fifty years before but was now virtually the middle of town. We hadn't had big lawns, but they were actual lawns, nonetheless. Hell, the house my apartment was in even had a lawn. And nobody who lived there took care of it but it still looked decent. 75

I parked in front of the trailer. I didn't move to take off my seat belt or kill the engine. The whole ride had been miserable. My windshield wipers were torn up and needed replacing but I hadn't gotten around to it because the weather had been good. So it was hard to drive, and then Vance had been monkeying around with the radio, trying to tune in the Classic Rock station, which had a preset if he had just asked. Once he had tuned it in satisfactorily, he wanted to talk the whole way. In his mumbly hick way.

“You know what you need to do is get out of this town,” he said. “Ain't nothing here but paper mills and rich folk nowadays. Unless you know someone who can get you into a mill job, that is. Shit hours but you can't beat that union pay.”

“I don't,” I said, hoping he would drop it.

“Well, I did. My whole damn family. Mill rats. But I couldn't be bothered to do that. I had to go and be a printer or whatever. You ought to listen to me, I've been working for twenty-five damn years at this and you know what I've learned?”

“What's that?”

“Every year, it takes longer to get to the point where you're money actually is yours, where you've passed the point where your income is greater than your taxes. You'll die paying those goddamn taxes doing work like this.”

“It's a good job, Vance. There's a lot worse out there.”

“That there are,” he said. “But this is still pretty bad. You'll never get ahead, printing shit for other people.”

He lit a cigarette and tried to roll the window down a crack. The rain was too much for even a crack, so he put it back up. 76

“What we should do,” he said between puffs, “is print our own damn money.”

“Counterfeiting.”

“Hell yes,” he said. “We could get out of the yoke of these rich sons of bitches.

Stop having to slave away for a goddamn meal. You could get into a better school than the Tech.”

“I don't want a whole lot,” I said. “I just want to be comfortable.”

“See, that's your problem. Comfort. What kind of damn comfort are you going to find with some college degree and college job? Ain't you been comfortable most of your life?”

“No,” I said. “I haven't.”

“Yes you have, you just don't know it. You don't know what comfort is.”

“What is it then?”

“Hell if I know. But I can tell you what it ain't. It ain't working nine to five in an office, saying 'yes, sir' and 'yes, ma'am' all day and drinking coffee and taking an hour lunch that ain't paid, and dying under some little florescent light slowly just so you can pay off a new car and a credit card bill.”

So when we got to his place, Vance was all worked up and talking about wage slavery and about how politicians just want us to work ourselves to death. I won't lie, I couldn't disagree with what he was saying. I wanted to, though. I was getting into school so I could do exactly what he was talking about, rise up a little bit within the lowest ranks and run in a little fancier of a wheel. 77

He didn't get out of the car right away. I knew it didn't matter with a beat up old car like mine, but I didn't like his greasy head resting against the upholstry. He really stank that day for some reason. Maybe it was the close quarters is all.

“Tell you what, you come in and have a beer and smoke a bowl with me. For the ride and all. You can park right here. Maybe wait this thing out,” he said waving his hand about toward the sky. The wind was gusting pretty hard and the rain had picked up a bit more.

“I'm good,” I said.

“What, you gotta work tomorrow or something? Come on. Let me catch you a buzz for your trouble, giving me a ride.”

I relented. What exactly convinced me, I don't recall, but I agreed to join him. The inside was the way I expected. It wasn't filthy, just cluttered. And not with trash, but with stuff. Like he didn't know when to throw things away or what to throw away. He cleared a stack of magazines and some jeans off the sofa for me to have a seat then shuffled into the kitchen to get some beers.

The walls were this rotting yellow color. But once I looked up behind my head I realized it was just cigarette tar, nicotine stained. He handed me a can of Miller Lite and sat in the recliner.

“Here, you'll dig this I think,” he said. He picked up a remote and turned on the stereo. Some psychedelic rock, sounded a bit like the Dead but not quite. It wasn't bad, but nothing that struck me as amazing. It was okay. I don't even remember who it was. 78

Geronimo something, I think. It was okay. Mellow. But it clashed with the howling of the wind and the slapping, plinking sound of the rain on the roof.

“You like it? Yeah, this is the good stuff. I don't know why I don't make a tape to bring into work.”

“It's okay,” I said. I popped my beer. It was cold, at least.

“You probably think I'm full of it, right?” He was packing a bowl. The rain wasn't letting up. If anything, I was going to have a harder time getting home, but I somehow felt committed to it now. Even if it was a bad decision. They're always easy to commit to once you've made them, though. It's easy to keep saying Yes even when you know better.

It's just that first one that's the trouble.

“Nah, man, it's not like that.” It was exactly like that.

“I have a degree,” he said. “Economics and PoliSci. From UW Oshkosh. But I didn't want to wear a suit and tie, and Rob was opening the shop and it was cool, you know. It was a heavy time, you know. We were going to bring something new to the business.”

“You went to college?”

“So hard to believe? I know what I'm talking about, most of the time. I don't blow smoke up your ass. I might not have amounted to much, but I'm smart, goddammit.”

He handed me the pipe with a lighter and said, “go on.” I took a hit and handed it back. 79

“You know, Rob and Val went to school with me for a while. I knew Rob in high school and, shit, even before that. We weren't friends until college though. It was wild times, you would have liked it.”

“Right, the three of you in college together.”

“Yeah, until Val lost the baby. Real shame.” He stopped and squared his face up to look at me. “I shouldn't have said that. Val can't have kids. It was this whole mess.

Don't mention it to her. I don't think she ever got over it. I don't know that anyone could.”

“I won't,” I said. “Besides, what does it matter to me?” I thought about how my father had mentioned that my mother still wanted grandchildren. I hadn't spoken to her because she'd been at work the last time I was over there, but I'm sure she would have asked me herself. I think my dad was just as concerned about it as she was.

“Yeah, thanks. The shop's their baby, then. Surrogate. It's a good place, just a bad job. You'll never get ahead working for other people, is all. But it's a good place. You won't really get ahead anywhere working for someone else, is what I'm saying. And going to school is going to just open up a realm of places where you'll get even less ahead, and be forced to smile through your misery while you do it. While you make other people money.”

“You never used your degree.”

“I realized that I didn't want to. Now, look at my empire,” he said, waving a hand around the room. “I've got everything I've ever wanted. I'm comfortable. No, it's not the

Ritz. It's mine, though. I'll die here, a happy man.”

“Lonely, though.” 80

“Lonely?” Vance let out a burst of laughter. “Lonely? All that means is that you think I want more people around me. I've had plenty of that. You know I'm divorced? I have a kid. The kid is great, does good. Smart. I see her once in a while. I don't need anything else. I'm just paying dues now.”

There was child support and alimony, but that wasn't what he was talking about.

The dues were being taken out of him indelicately by the world at large. He was paying for a past life, he said. That's all he would say about it. He was paying his dues and we all have to, he said.

“Even those rich fucks in Washington. Everyone,” he added.

“Listen, though,” he said as I was getting ready to leave. “Rob and Val are— complicated. Val—well, shit, you know,” he said, grinning through a plume of smoke,

“—but Rob—Rob has predilections. You can keep that as one of your dime-words, right there.”

“Yeah?”

“Free and clear.”

“Vance—”

“No, really. I don't need to be there or see anything. You stack those packing pads back where you found them. I've been working there a long time, bud.”

I stared at him and I thought about violence. A whole lot of violence.

“You really think it's luck that you're the one that didn't get canned with everyone else? Man, I won't say anything. Trust me, it's not my concern. Like I said, I've been working there for a long time.” 81

I slammed the door shut behind me and went home. The rain had gotten worse instead of better.

The day after that, Rob called me at home. I was watching television and napping the day away. I felt good so I didn’t care too much about how I was squandering it. I had squandered a lot of time since graduating from high school and found it satisfying. Carpe diem my ass. Carpe Assum. I had two days off in a row. A “weekend” of sorts.

“How short are you on that tuition business?”

“Hundred and fifty,” I said. The Tech was cheap. I didn't qualify for student loans or any financial aid and five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks when you got rent and bills, even if you make a decent money. I had taken and passed the stupid entrance exam.

That part had been easy. I don't know why I hadn't taken it before. That test score would be good for a couple years. I still only a hundred short, give or take. I rounded up.

Regardless.

“Okay, I've got a little job, if you're interested. Hundred and fifty will work.”

“Just—it's private. Not a word gets out.”

Outside of some pot, I had never heard of Rob doing anything remotely illegal.

Maybe he had cheated on his taxes once. That's the kind of guy he was. So I said okay again.

“Come over around nine, tonight.” 82

After I hung up, I flipped the television off and puttered around for a while, thinking about actually going outside. My hands were still black from work. Eventually, I sat back down and turned the television back on, smoked a cigarette and dozed off again.

The house was a squat brown and tan ranch style just on the edge of town near the airport, with small chunks of woods sporadically inhabiting spots between homes and neighborhoods. Rob and Val had mentioned the planes once or twice, but they claimed they had lived there long enough that it no longer bothered them. The grass was longish but not overgrown, covered in wet, dead leaves. The front porch light was on.

“Hey bud, come on in,” Rob said at the door. He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans. I had expected him to have fully retreated into wearing a robe and not showering by this point, honestly. The living room looked as though half a dozen people half their age occupied the house. There were bright, psychedelic flags on the wall, a bong sitting on the coffee table, afghans spread over the couch. The house smelled like incense and freshly brewed coffee. And it was warm, as if they had the furnace on full-blast.

“Want a beer? Have a seat, I'll grab you one.”

I nodded and sat down in the living room. I didn't see Val around, which made me nervous. I thought that maybe he would try to poison me. I thought about Vance. Maybe if she had been there, I would have felt better. Maybe not. It was really warm in that house. 83

Rob came out of the kitchen with two bottles of beer. The caps were still on.

When I tried to twist the cap off, Rob laughed and apologized. He went back into the kitchen and returned with a bottle opener.

“I don't drink many of them, myself. I always forget.” He handed me the opener and I popped it off. Rob took the bottle cap from me and opened his own. “Cheers,” he said, extending the neck of his bottle towards me. I clinked it.

“Nice place,” I said. It was nice, even if it was decked out in pseudo-hippie. It was too clean to be legit hippie. I didn't see any sign of a dog. No dog hair. No bowl. Nothing.

But I didn't know what else to say, so I said, “Did your dog get better?”

“Dog?”

“I thought you had a dog. That got sick.”

“Nope.”

“I must have confused you with someone else. Sorry. Nice place, though.” I was rambling.

“It's okay,” he said. “Comfortable, anyway.”

We sat for a minute drinking the beers. I didn't want to bring the job up, but I said,

“So.”

“Yeah,” he said, leaning back. He was smiling, but he seemed distant. “Okay, so do you know how to operate a camcorder?”

“Yeah, sure, I suppose” I said. I took a drink. 84

“Thing is, I guess, I need to be completely honest about this. This whole thing.

Okay? I don't want you to be weird about it. I like you. I trust you. I think you're probably the only guy I've ever hired that didn't steal from me.”

I hadn't stolen anything because there wasn't anything worth stealing. I don’t know that I would have, even still. I’d like to think I wasn’t. But I guess I had.

Regardless.

“Want to smoke a bowl first? We should probably smoke a bowl first. Yeah, let's do that,” he said. He spoke very quickly. “Calm down a bit.”

I said sure and he packed the bowl on the bong. We both took a big rip each and he leaned back. The smile was much further away now, but he seemed better overall. He picked up a remote control and turned the stereo on. Some bluegrassy music began playing.

“So,” he said.

“What's the deal then?”

“It's Val,” he said. He did that thing where it's hard to tell whether or not a person is chuckling or sobbing. “Man, it's Val. I need your help. I don't know.”

“Listen, I don't—”

“They said she's only got a couple months, probably. It's bad, I guess. Something like five percent chance of survival. And that's for a year, probably.”

I shut my mouth and sat back. I took a drink. My mouth was all twitchy and dry. 85

“She's dying. It's cancer. Eating her alive. Been going on for a while now. I don't know how she does it, going in to work, still. I don't know, man. It's been killing me, too.

I can't face the world, you know.”

“Oh,” I said. “Wow.”

“We're dealing,” he said. “In our own way.”

The music kept playing. It was bright and fun and twangy. But mellow. It filled the room where we couldn't. Where it shouldn't have. Rob leaned forward and laughed a little. He took a drink.

“But she wants me to have something. Something to remember her. I can trust you,” he said. “Right? I, I mean, we, want you to hold the camera. Camcorder.”

“For what?”

“We want to record ourselves—intimately.” He looked down at the space between his feet. “Can you do that?”

“Rob, they have tripods—”

“No, no. We tried that. Couldn't get it to look right. It's always been a huge part of who we were, together. And she wants me to keep that part of us. After she's gone.”

I couldn't think of anything to say.

“Are you okay with this? I know it must sound crazy. I think it does. But Val,” he said, waving his hand off. “I would do anything for her. Do you understand?”

I was looking at the space between my feet now. He took another rip off the bong and held it out to me. I shook my head no.

“Take a minute,” he said. “It's pretty heavy stuff.” 86

“Okay,” I said after a minute. I mean, I was stoned but it made sense in a way.

Not in a happy way or in a way you can explain. Just that it seemed to fit. It made a lot of sense if he knew that I was sleeping with Val and was okay with that. As if it was to go unspoken that I was paying my dues, or penance or something. I don't know if he ever found out, though. I couldn't bring myself to ask Vance later. Regardless.

Rob fetched the camcorder from the dining room table where it was plugged into the charger. He flipped it open and showed me the controls. Zoom, light, et cetera. The thought of Val naked wanted to give me an erection, but the cancer thing was interfering.

Plus, I already had a mental image of her and Rob, which would be replaced with the real thing. None of it was pleasant.

Regardless. I went up the stairs with him. Rob isn't fat or ugly or anything. I wasn't thrilled about it, but if it was what she wanted, then I guess I would do it. No, I guess I did kind of want to see it. Otherwise I would have said no. I sort of thought that he would have asked Vance, seeing as how they’d been friends for so long and that maybe it was Val's suggestion to ask me. I was familiar, at least. And what we had, whatever it was, wasn't love. Not for her, at any rate, I could tell that much. And I guess it wasn't for me, either, but I know that that was getting complicated in my head. I was so overwhelmed that I didn't put up any resistance but it wasn't so abrupt that I froze, either.

That Val might be an even more sexual creature than I had thought just a couple weeks before wasn't so far fetched anymore. I just accepted it. 87

So. I went up those stairs with him. He stopped in the hall and said, “You stay quiet. It's already enough to have another person in the room, but for you to talk—you know. It's a thing, but everything is cool unless she says the safe word. Just—keep an open mind.” I don’t remember what that word was now, though. It seems silly to think about it, but it seems like something I should remember. For some reason, I remember thinking that it would make a good dime-word.

I nodded and followed him in. The lights were all off, the room lit solely by some candles sitting on a nightstand. On the bed lay Val, her arms and legs tied to the corner posts with red scarves, her eyes blindfolded. She said, “This has gone on long enough,

Rob.”

“Helpless,” he said. He pointed his finger at the camcorder, that I should start filming. I pushed the rec button and pointed it at Val, naked on the bed. She shifted her legs, flexing the knees as much as she could and arched her back up. She already had some welts on her hips and breasts. I had never seen that on her body before.

“Untie me,” she said.

Rob took his shirt off and knelt by the side of the bed. He slapped her left breast then her right, leaving red marks behind. She groaned. Not a sexy groan, but more like a spilled coffee on paperwork groan.

“What could you have possibly done to get yourself so tied up? You must have done something,” he said. He smiled. He ran a hand across her body and looked right into the camera lens. “Have you been bad?” 88

She groaned again and said, “Seriously, Robert. Untie me. We're done.” I zoomed in on her face and then back out to where Rob was running his hands down over her crotch. He slapped that, too. She yelped and shuddered and whined. “Robert! I said I was done.”

“I don't believe you,” he said.

I kept the camera running but I was thinking about her and me in the print shop. I could smell toner, ozone, acetone, and ink. Every paper cut on my hands burned. My dick swelled up about half way. Rob hadn't looked at me, but at the camera. He really acted as if I wasn't there.

“Do you love me?”

“You know I do—”

“Then you'll do this,” he said.

Rob was teasing her and dripping wax on her. A smile did eventually grow on her face. She writhed and made terrible sounds. I decided that her smile wasn't genuine, that when it faded for her to make some sound, I was seeing her real expression. I wanted her to say the safe word and end it. Stopping it seemed like a bad idea. It was fucked up, but that's how it always is finding out about people intimately. Even when you find out they're boring, vanilla, whatever.

I sort of just let the camera do the work and tried to keep it steady. I tried to think about what program I would enroll in with the money. About how I would prove Lisa wrong. He waved his hand at me to come closer, change the angle of the shot. Then he pointed at a chair for me to sit in. 89

He straddled her. I had to get up and hold the camera at an odd angle but he was very insistent that I get it right. She squirmed and moaned and pulled against the bedposts. It wasn't like a thrashing, though. Just a flopping sort of movement, like a shopping bag snagged in a chain-link fence on a windy day.

Whenever he finished, he got down off the bed and nodded his head toward the door. She was panting and sputtering, shaking her head. I walked out at an angle in a sad attempt to conceal the now full erection I had. I went back down into the living room and set the camcorder down on the coffee table next to the bong. I turned it off. My beer wasn't finished but it was warm. I drank it anyway. I adjusted myself and tried to think about something else. She had been saying, “you son of a bitch,” to him when I had left the room.

A few minutes later, Rob came down, dressed again. He offered me another beer, which I unconsciously accepted. I was sweating and held mine to my face between gulps.

I was glad to have it for that alone. He looked shameless. Not innocent or without guilt, that is. I'm sure there's a dime-word for that, but I don't know it.

“If you don't mind, I should probably pay you and get you on your way. I'm sure you have other things to do.”

“Fine,” I said. “Yeah, I do.”

He produced the bills from his wallet and handed them to me. It was a hundred and fifty bucks all right. What else could he think I had to do? Rob was smiling. He seemed to be holding back. I wanted to punch him. I imagined doing it but nothing would change. 90

“Remember, not a word of this. To anyone. She doesn't have much time left and I don't want that to be—you know.”

“Yeah, I got it,” I said.

“Don't spend it all in one place, bud” he said at the door. I tried to smile and said sure, tried to act cool. But I wanted out of that house. The cold stung on my clammy skin, where the sweat hadn't completely dried. I jammed the money into my pocket, climbed into my car, lit a cigarette and tried to breath.

The car took six tries to turn over. I panicked and hit the steering wheel, sounding the horn. The car started though, right after that, and I backed out and booked it home. I thought maybe that I saw Rob looking at me from the front window of the house as I left, probably wondering why in the blue textured fuck I was still sitting in his driveway, having a freak-out in my car.

And no lie, I jerked off when I got home. My heart had slowed but my erection was still there. My mind was filled to the brim with her image and I couldn't do anything else. It was imperative and furious and angry. It wasn't fun. And again, no lie, I think I cried after.

When he had explained it to me, all I could say was, “She's dying?” as if it was already proven and I just had to accept it. He wore a very made up strained sort of face, that looked like it was hovering somewhere between guilt-stricken and greedy. He had kept his face turned to the floor, mostly, only making eye-contact with me as to punctuate a statement. It was as if he were trying to act as though he were already grieving when she 91 wasn't dead yet, when she was still tied up upstairs and waiting for the cameraman.

Maybe it was the tone of his voice, but I didn't really notice any smile on his face until he paid me. But it had been there the whole time, like a dog baring his teeth.

“That's what they said. The doctors. They try to be nice about it, but they have to tell you, and it's not something they can really sugarcoat that much, you know. Ovarian cancer. It's all inside her, hidden. She's been doing the treatment thing and there's supposed to be a surgery. Some kind of experimental deal. But it's a long shot, you know,” he had said, elaborating on the cancer. The smile had been there, hiding under the furrowed forehead, under the teared-up eyes. The eyes, though, were searching. They didn't gaze into mine in the hopes of making a sympathetic connection. They had been looking for doubt.

“This is kind of an—insurance. A keepsake,” is how he described the video. It was a memento for later, for when she'd be gone. But it wasn't a memento of her, not the way he made it out. It was a record of something. Just not what he said it was.

“Sure, Rob. I'm sorry,” was really all I could have said, and I did. I thought about the way her heart beat and I could feel it through her wrists after sex. I thought about the way she used one hand to move my head without grabbing my hair. Just guiding it, not forcing it anywhere. I thought about smoking with her in the alcove, about her garden. I thought about the gold cross she always wore. I thought about the fact that she had no children. And I said I would do it, even though I wanted to turn away and forget the fact that she would be dead. I could have said no and left. Regardless. 92

“Thanks. Like I said, we're dealing,” he told me. It was always coming back to dealing, how to get by, how to just mitigate the suffering just enough. It was always about that when either of them talked, but somehow, with Rob it wasn't the same thing. I don't know how to explain it, but it wasn't just dealing. It was stacking the deck, maybe.

Or making up a whole new deck to play with.

Regardless. I had the money to go to school. I just had to go pay and fill out my registration paperwork. I could do that in the morning. I could get on with my life, get some training and a better job. I could do what I told my parents I would do. I could prove Lisa wrong. All in exchange for that one hour of my life.

I think that I dreamed about Val that night, but I probably didn't. Looking back on it, it makes more sense if I did. In the dream, I was in the shop. Val was there, hiding behind something. I could hear her voice, but I couldn't find her. Then, went through the door into the reception room and it was their bedroom instead. She was tied up on the bed in the same way, with the same red scarves, with the same blindfold on. And she was struggling against the restraints. I untied her, telling her it would be okay. And we were then running from Rob, through the shop and then in cars. Then a hotel, hiding out on the lam, as it were. Regardless. I rescued her, saved her. Rob had become evil, psychotic, brutal, savage. He wasn't out to simply kill us. He was going to pulp us up and make paper out of us, printing pornography. 93

At the same time, he was cancer. He infected and grew inside of people. They helped him to track us down. Each infection was another soldier in his army. I was protecting her not just from a sex maniac, but from death.

In the first few minutes when you wake up, dreams do this thing where they get more elaborate as your brain gets going. You may wake up with just an impression and an image that's little more than the afterglow of the whole dream, but after a few minutes, you've got a whole goddamn novel worth of material—intricate plots, the works—built off of it.

And by the time you get to your first cup of coffee, it disappears as quickly as it seemed to have been remembered. But I recall this dream happening. I don't know how many times I have recalled it with clarity. Maybe it didn't. But it makes more sense if it did. I think I know how my mind works. I guess I just have enough sense to question it, even if I still believe it anyway. Regardless.

I woke up mad at Rob. Not just mad, but vicious. Mean. I didn't ever want to look into his loathsome beady hippie eyes again. His very calm demeanor, part of what made him seem like a good boss was suddenly just a sham. But I managed to talk myself out of that idea.

There was almost certain knowledge that I wouldn't have to see Rob at work for a while probably, if ever. I would have to see Val, though. Which sucked. And I was pretty certain that we would have sex again. It had sort of become a routine. No lie, that excited me more than it had before. But I didn't know if I could look her in the eyes again.

Regardless. I had things to do. I felt like maybe I had bought a ticket out of the crap soup. 94

The next day back to work went like this: I had felt fine when I had my coffee, but when

I got to work, I felt heavy. Stupid too, yeah. It was as if I had totally blanked on what I was walking into until I was in the parking lot. When I did manage to get out of my car and shuffle up to the building through the cold, it felt mechanical. It seemed like this had been what I was avoiding all those years. I felt like I was exactly the sort of moron Lisa had said I was because the moment I saw Val through the front window, Lisa's warming up to me the day before became a cold pit inside me.

“Morning,” Val said when I got in. “We got some big orders this morning. Should keep you busy. None of that slacking off like you've been doing.”

“Okay,” I said. I avoided her and went into the back to get my smock. I found the templates and orders posted up and went straight to work.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “I guess I'm just a little worn out.”

“Have a good weekend, then?”

“Busy, yeah. I got my school stuff all done. Took forever.” I talked quickly, as if it would make the conversation end faster. Val came up behind me and, when I turned around, gave me a hug. “It's done, though.”

“Congratulations. I'm sure you'll do great.” She let me go and went back to one of the machines. “And I'm sure we can swing a raise for you, if business picks up. If the new clients we got last week stick around, it might be possible. Keep you fed while you're in school, all that.” 95

“Thanks,” I said. “I was thinking about maybe taking up videography. Being a cameraman. Maybe do video production, all that stuff.”

“Yeah, you've got good sense for how things should look, for how they come together. I can see that,” she said, walking away. She was smiling. “You probably insisted on shooting all the home movies as a kid,” she said. She laughed. And I guess that's all it took for me to settle any concerns I had. I thought it was really slick, a way to see if she knew. It didn't matter what he knew.

We worked all afternoon without talking after that. The orders we were working on were pretty big. Sometime around four or so, once we got a chance to take a break, we went out back to smoke. I rolled a joint while I waited for her to put up the “management will return shortly” sign and lock the front door. When she came out, she was singing another old hippie song that I didn’t recognize,

I went out to the garden and my heart, it wouldn't harden,

a slip of the tongue, a slap on the bum

A heart that just needed a garden

and I'm waiting for the day I'll see you in the garden.

I lit the joint, took a toke and handed it to her. She held it between her fingers, looked at it and smiled before she took a drag and passed it back. It was interesting to me how she examined it, looked at it before she hit it, how she knocked the ashes off the tip so delicately without disturbing the cherry. She had an eye for that sort of thing. An appreciation, not just an attention to, detail. I never did. Still don't. Except maybe in hindsight. Except when it no longer matters. And maybe not even then. 96

“Nice song,” I said.

“I don't remember who it's by,” she said. “Some old thing that got stuck in my damn head.”

“Things have a habit of doing that.”

“Pretty sure I made up half those lyrics, they're all wrong.”

“I liked it anyway.”

“Well, what's in our heads is what really matters, right?”

“I hope not,” I said. I thought about the sign that hung from the ventilation duct. I hoped that what was printed was what mattered. For some reason, I hoped the record was what would matter. I leaned against the bricks. They were cold against my back, but it felt good.

“Listen, I know money's tight. I don't need a raise,” I said.

“It's not that bad,” she said. “Really, I mean, it's not great, but.”

“Okay,” I said. “We'll see.”

We stood, passing the joint back and forth for a minute. Then she got out her pipe and packed a bowl. She sat down on the bench and stared at the fence. I sat down next to her and lit a cigarette.

“Do you believe in God?” Val asked me.

“Never really thought about it,” I said. “I mean, I guess I did. But I don't know. I used to, I mean. Then I just didn't. I don't remember when or how, but I didn't. One day I realized it and I felt okay with that. All this world and there's nothing that just made it. I guess. I don't know. Maybe it's just chaos. Chaos and order and all that crap.” 97

“You've been talking to Vance.”

“Talking to Vance about God? No, no, someone else told me that bit about chaos.

Does sound like something Vance would say, though.”

“So you don't know, then.”

“My parents would tell you that it's an indisputable fact. They're good church- goers. I just don't, though. I don't know, and I don't know why, but I don't.”

She lit a cigarette.

“No point in arguing about it, I guess. I think I know where you come down on it.”

“Do you?” She took a drag of her cigarette and blew it out and laughed. Her face looked almost rosy in the dim light.

“Okay, fine. I showed you mine, but you don't have to. It's cool,” I said. I stubbed my butt out and stepped toward the door. “I'll get this order finished up.”

“Leave it for the morning,” she said. “Let Vance take care of it.”

I only then noticed that the equipment was all powered down and that the humming was just the phantom hum I felt every night until I fell asleep. Val followed me inside, came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me, pressed her face into my back. She worked her hands down and turned me around to face her. I lifted her up and laid her on the counter, pushing aside stacks of training manuals printed up for some

Rotary thing.

I was rough, I guess. I had never been rough with her before. I pulled at her clothing and moved her hands to where I wanted them. Only she resisted and pushed 98 away from me. I don't know what I had expected to happen, actually. I had imagined she might resist, but only playfully, for some reason.

“Slow down,” she said.

“Right, I—”

“Just, slow down. Christ. You're soft. Be you. I need you to be you,” she said, pulling me back in, tucking her face into the crook of my neck. “Be you.”

I don't know why I had thought that she'd want it differently than before. Like, I was trying to compete with Rob. After that, it was gentle like usual. I could say we fucked a lot, but it wasn't fucking. It wasn't love-making, though, either. I've had girlfriends tell me there was a difference, but I guess I only sort of got a grasp of what that was right then. And what we did was somewhere in-between. It was sweaty and electric, but it wasn't mechanical or tough. It wasn't labor. But it wasn't some sort of romantic meeting of souls either. And that it was regular made it even more difficult to figure out what it was. Regardless.

I ran my thumbs over the welts. She didn't say anything about it and neither did I.

Rob was there the one afternoon when I got in. This was probably a week or so later, I'm not sure. I hadn't seen or heard from him since the time at his house. He was cleaned up, drinking a cup of coffee and sitting in the front office, going through the books. I heard

Vance cursing in the back. I said hi and went back to the floor. Just that made me feel dirty. He had that same predatory smile that looked so normal before. He didn't just lie, 99 he was a lie. He certainly didn't look guilty or anxious, even if he said he was suffering from anxiety.

Vance was running some prints and had the orders laid out in a way that I could figure out. He just grunted at me and nodded toward the front.

“You're in school now, I hear.”

“Soon,” I said. “I'm signed up, anyway. Doesn't start for a couple weeks.”

“Number two's been giving me some problems.”

“Thermostat's been buggy.”

“Yeah, I know. But I don't know why.”

“Because the thermostat is broken,” I said. “It's not overheating, it just thinks it is, then it does because it can't cool itself off because it doesn't know it needs to.”

“No, I think there's something else going on with it. I don't know what though.

I've kept that machine running its entire life. There's something wrong with her.”

“I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe something else will hork up and we'll figure it out.”

“Yeah, maybe. Sometimes these things don't want to be found. Sometimes they just want to break and they want it so bad that they won't let you see what's wrong until it's too late. Machines have their gremlins, you know. They breed in 'em.”

“Yeah?”

“They have minds of their own, bud. Their own way of being.”

Rob called Vance up front. I went about sorting the orders. Half an hour later, they came back, told me to keep an ear out for the phone and took off. Rob said he locked the front up and put the “out to lunch” sign up and not to worry about anyone coming by. 100

“Hold the fort,” he said, stepping out the back door. As soon as it swung shut, I killed the stereo and went out for a cigarette. We had half a dozen really small orders that might take up half the rest of the afternoon, and it wasn't anything I couldn't handle on my own. Halfway through my smoke, the phone rang inside. Rob had turned on the loudspeaker for the ringer in the back. I tucked my cigarette into a crack in the concrete bench and went in to answer it.

“Is my husband there?”

“No, he took off with Vance.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working through the order slips.”

She told me to have Rob call her when he came back in. Two hours later, I did. I almost didn't, and I kind of wish I hadn't. Rob said, “Thanks, bud,” and went up into the office. It wouldn't have made any difference if I had told him that she'd called, really. It didn't matter that it was insignificant or stupid, but it had the potential to be a secret. Not that those were rare, exactly, but somehow they seemed more important than they had used to. More important than lies. More important than the truth. There was something inherently valuable in the secrecy itself.

“Can you make a delivery?” Rob asked, coming back to the production floor. The thing is, we didn't really ever deliver anything. It wasn't part of the deal. FedEx came every morning to pick up our shipments and that was that. He stood on the stairs, above me. I was forced to look up at him. He gave me this closed-mouth smile and tilted is head back. 101

I wished he'd just stayed at home and rotted in his “depression.” He looked happy now.

Healthy. Capable.

“I guess, but that's not—”

“Yeah, it's a little different. But I promised this, and I can't go myself. I've got to get the tax stuff done, the books are a mess. Here's the order slip, I think it's been boxed up already.” He handed me the slip. “I'll toss you some gas money when you get back.”

I looked at the slip. It was for the evangelical church who'd wanted the miraculous discount and Val's family was involved in. I looked up from the slip at him.

“Vance isn't around and I've got a lot to do,” I said.

“Don't worry about it. You know where that is?” I had never been there, but I knew the street well enough to know that it was out in Grand Chute. Maybe a ten minute drive.

“Okay, Rob, yeah. I can take care of it,” I said. I didn't know when the order had even been done. Vance must have done it one night with another order. There were three big boxes of t-shirts. How much they paid wasn't on the slip. It wasn't the full order that

I'd seen, but it was still pretty big. It felt like a dance or a routine that we had to go through. As if being civil to one another was just an act but could also never be anything but an act. As if we all knew everyone else was lying about something even if we didn't know what. If my part was to deliver some shirts to maintain that equilibrium, so be it. I felt like we were competing with our lies and I was determined to keep up.

102

I found the church easily enough. It was right out on a major street at a big intersection.

Took maybe ten minutes to drive over there, even in mid-afternoon traffic. The front of the building was desolate, not a car in sight. Around the back was more of an office entrance and a smaller parking lot for the staff, and the lights were on, so I went in that way.

“Ah, good man,” the gray mustached man said when I came in with the first box.

If I hadn't been so confused about what was going on, I might have actually thought about how out of place I looked. I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and my coat had rips in it. Everyone in the office was dressed as if it were Sunday. Every day was Sunday for them.

“Val's a good girl, sending this over like this. I'm glad we could get this done.”

“I've got two more boxes,” I said. “I'll just be a minute.” I really did expect him to come out with me and grab the other box. He just smiled and thanked me again. He signed some kind of receipt and handed it to me when I brought in the third box. He kept his hands tucked into his pants pockets and followed me around, talking about what a blessing it was. I tried to smile and be polite.

It may have only taken me five or six minutes to do the whole thing, but it felt like thirty. I couldn't imagine what anyone would do at a church in the middle of the day if they weren't a priest and there was no service going on, but there a bunch of people milling around in the offices, doing I don't know what. Regardless.

“My nephew, Jason, he's going to come up there and work at that shop of yours, I heard.” 103

“Oh,” I said. “Sounds good. I hadn't heard anything about it.”

“He's a good kid. Could stand to learn something about hard work, though.”

“Sure, yeah,” I said.

“God bless you, son,” he said, shaking my hand as I made for the door. I told him it was just my job, nothing special, but he insisted again. I didn't know what to say, so I said, “You, too.”

“I don't want any part of this,” I said one night. “Not like this.”

“What?”

“Nothing, never mind.” I wanted to tell her still. I could have during one of those moments. But looking at her now made that same thought curl up and hide. Like a child who wants to run from the bed to the door but can't because he's scared of the dark, I guess is the best way to put it.

Classes had begun. I had two in the morning before I went into work. It was about the same time I was used to getting up to go into work, but it was every day now. I didn't work every other day anymore, but every afternoon, six days a week. It was a little different, but easy to adjust to. It was stable, which I liked.

Only, I was used to kind of coming into work and going on autopilot. You could look at the orders and get into a rhythm, or even a groove maybe, and only snap out of it when you had hit a point where you knew you'd finished something. I couldn't seem to do that at school. 104

“How's school?” Val asked me. “You enjoying it?”

“Algebra is a pain in the ass. And there's this basic computer class I have to take.

But I don't know how to even type, so it's really a pain in the ass. They assume we know something about these things already. But I don't know anything. I know enough to punch numbers into the machine up front or put in an order. All crap I memorized like a monkey. But it's cool, I guess. I'm learning a lot.”

Which I was, but I kept feeling like I wasn't learning half of what I was supposed to. The math, that was just tedious. The computer stuff, though, that was alien to me.

“That's good,” she said. “Sounds like fun.”

“It's really not. I think I may switch over to something more hands-on. But I'll have to wait until next quarter.”

“Video,” she said.

“No. I think I've done enough of that for a lifetime.”

“Stick it out, then,” she said. “That's half the battle, sticking it out.”

My dad called me up on a Wednesday night. It was pretty late. For them, anyway. I had only just got home from work. I was glaring at my Algebra book and flipping through channels on the television, smoking a cigarette.

“Hey, your mom was wondering if you wouldn’t come to church with us on

Sunday,” he said. It was the most casual of statements, but that late at night and him relaying the message were enough for me to know that it wasn’t a suggestion or a question, but more of a demand. Not that they were in any position to demand anything 105 from me, aside from some sort of hereditary right that they presumed. “It would mean a lot to your mom.”

“You told her about how me and Lisa broke up,” I said.

“I did.”

“There are a lot of nice girls at church,” I said. I didn’t use a mock-mother voice. I didn’t need to.

He chuckled. “Yeah, she said that. Would it be too out of the way? I mean, I know you don’t go in for the church stuff much these days, but—”

“Yeah, dad, I’ll be there. Do you still go to the early service?”

“We sure do. You’ll be there? I was expecting to have to convince you.”

“Did you have a lecture ready?”

“No, but I figured I might say some stern things about eternal damnation, going to hell, all that jazz. I was kind of looking forward to it.”

“We’ll let Pastor Prescott do that,” I said.

“Oh, he’s retired. There’s some new guy. He’s kind of liberal, but I guess he’s okay. I think he might be a communist or something.”

The pastor started with a joke. I had only ever seen Jacob Prescott delivering the sermon.

He’d been there since I was a kid, for as long as I could remember. And this guy had a different style.

“So, Harold is cheating on his wife with a girl named Clearly. He’s conflicted and can’t see right from wrong, obviously. But then his wife dies, and at her wake he says, ‘I 106 can see Clearly, now.’” There were some hesitant laughs, but mostly people just shifted in the pews. My mother reached out and held my father's hand.

“But it’s a serious matter. And not one we should be so ready to laugh at.

Adultery, rape, fornication. These are not laughing matters. They’re just as much sins, and just as damnable as idol worship or murder. The litany of sins is as long as your arm, and each is equal in the eyes of the divine. Do not think that just because it is common that it is acceptable.

I’m not worried about you, but I worry for you. Many of this congregation are married and happily so, and with good Christian moral effort will continue to be so into the Kingdom of God. Matthew 9:16: So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. And even before that, in Genesis

2:24: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. It is a holy bond, my friends. It is not to be taken lightly.

And it is not to be violated, for it is in Him that we have our salvation.

“I’ll direct you to Ephesians 5:22-23: Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and

He is the Savior of the body. Husbands, I’m going to tell you right now: this applies to you to. For those of you who are not married yet, remember that it is entering into a union not a contract. It is not to be looked at as a matter of ownership. For just as we work with

Him to be good, to save ourselves and to worship him, a marriage is the same; for while one is at the head, it is not a position of superiority. It requires generosity and magnanimity. It requires understanding and working together. Look to Ecclesiastes 9:9: 107

Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of the life of your vanity, which he has given you under the sun, all the days of your vanity: for that is your portion in this life, and in your labor which you take under the sun. It is very important to understand that you live with them, not for them nor to be master of them. It is a partnership, a partnership as equal and important as the one you have with Him.

“You must cherish and strive toward moral living. Marriage cannot be taken lightly because to enter into marriage under false pretenses or to find that you are unhappy will only lead you down the path of temptation. And once on that path, it will be difficult not to succumb, for the unhappiness will seem greater than anything that He can prevent or repair. Like the covenant, your marriage can determine the fate of your everlasting soul. Look to 1 Corinthians 6:9-10: Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

“Fornication and adultery are ranked among the worst of the worst, friends.”

He went on for a while more and then he lead the congregation in some hymns. It felt like a trap, that my parents knew what the sermon would be about and had gone out of there way to get me into a lecture. No, they knew. He would have told them what the topic was going to be the week before. I was thinking about how my mother had hugged me in the parking lot before the service began. It had been a while since I’d seen her. I shook my fathers hand. Technically, she's his second wife. I don't know what happened 108 before that. It was before I was born. They'd only ever mentioned it in passing and never elaborated. If the woman was alive or dead, I have no idea.

“You look good,” he said. “You still clean up nice.” He indicated my sports jacket. I felt over-dressed but I wasn’t.

“It’s such a shame that you and Lisa didn’t work out,” she said.

“Mom, I’m fine. It just didn’t.”

“You must be so lonely,” she said. “It’s important to have someone.”

“I’m an adult, mom. I’ll get by. There are a million fish in the sea.”

“Oh, hush. You only need one fish.”

“It’s not like he’s an old man, Marie, give the boy a break,” my father said. “He’s got plenty of time. No need to rush.”

I was just paying dues, I told myself. I was buying myself a year of peace, a year without being harassed. Somehow, they’re still able to treat me like a child. And I’m somehow able to let them. I don’t want to, but I do anyway. I don’t know if my mother knows or even understands that I don’t believe in God. I’ve told her, quite vocally when I was a teenager still. But I don’t think she understands it, thinks it was just an angry phase.

I’m pretty sure she’s unable to conceive of it as a real possibility, even.

“The beard looks good,” she said. “Your father used to have one. Must run in the family.”

He rubbed his face and said, “Oh?”

We stood out in the cold and talked for a few minutes. People passed by and said hellos to my parents. Some looked at me and nodded. I knew most of the names and 109 faces. It was like slipping on an old glove. The glove might have holes in it or be completely useless at keeping your hand warm, but it’s worn-in and perfectly fitted for the hand after a lifetime of use. You may not want to wear it, or like it, but it’s comfortable, natural. Which seems to trump all at the end of the day.

I sang the hymns from the book dutifully, even though my voice is awful. Most people in the congregation were actually pretty awful on their own. But together it was impressive. It was not just that they could come together to actually produce such a lovely sound, but the fact that they would even bother to do so that impressed me. The willingness to join into an endeavor, even if I thought it was pointless. It made me feel better about being there, as if I was no longer wasting my time. Because listening to a sermon that told me I was going to hell didn’t seem like much of a way to spend my time.

But adding a voice to the hymns, that was really something. To join in and be a part of something, even if it was only for a moment.

And that’s what it was that I was looking for with Val. I think there were moments when I found it, even if it always managed to slip away from me. I understood why she kept the cross on her necklace. It had nothing to do with fire and brimstone, nothing to do with hell.

The next day, just as I pulled into the gravel parking lot around the back of the building, the air rattled. The air itself turned into mush, sloshed around and hummed. Then silence.

Then it happened again. You could almost see the air, the same way you can see ripples rise up off hot asphalt in the summer. Except it was everywhere and all at once for a few 110 seconds. Then it would stop and before you could think about it, would rise back up again.

Vance's air raid siren was going off. I covered my ears and ran inside, through the back. Val's car was in the parking lot. The walls seemed to ripple under its influence. I couldn't hardly see. I grabbed a pair of the industrial ear muffs that hung by the door. We were supposed to wear them all the time, really, but I'd never seen anyone even touch them.

Val was pounding her fist at the control board on the number two press, the one that had been acting up. There wasn't any smoke that I could see, but I could smell it. I pulled her away from the panel and reached for the access panel on the side of the press.

It was too hot to touch, like a steering wheel in summer. You had to pull the latch out and twist it to make the panel open. I used my shirtsleeve to get it open.

Sure enough, when I swung it open, there was the smoke. I couldn't see any fire really, just a lot of smoke coming from inside the guts of the machine. Val was trying to turn the press off but it was still going. I could feel it cranking with its usual thrum, but there was a sputtering and thunking sound, too. Val wasn't wearing ear muffs. She shook my shoulder and I realized that she'd been yelling at me to pull the power on it. There was a breaker on the wall with a lever around back. Whenever I threw the switch, the klaxon stopped, too. The machine spun down to halt. I pulled the ear muffs off and came back around. Val was spraying the fire extinguisher into the machine.

“That's enough, it's good,” I said. I put my hand on her arm. “Fire's out.” 111

I was screaming it, really. My ears were ringing. Neither one of us noticed the beeping from the regular smoke alarms going off. We didn't have a sprinkler system because it would just as likely cause the fire to spread or start a new fire as put one out.

But there was a smoke detector.

We didn't even know it was going off until we were outside and saw the fire department arriving. Somebody in a house across the street had called them when they heard the klaxon.

“What kind of god awful alarm is that?” one of the firemen said, looking up at the horn.

“It's a World War Two air raid siren,” Val said. “It's been up there for years, I had no idea what it really sounded like. Or that it even worked.”

“Jesus, lady. We actually heard it down at the station, but we didn't know exactly what it was, let alone where it was.”

“Sorry about all this, it was just an overheated gearbox, nothing worth your time.

I'm sorry you had to come out like this.”

“No worries, ma'am. I'm just glad you're all alright.”

The firemen left. The ventilation had actually cleared all the smoke out before they'd even arrived. Once we'd killed the press it was pretty much over. I stood next to her and looked into the machine. Heat was still coming out of it.

“Should have replaced that damn thermostat.”

“Vance said he had,” she said to me. My ears were still ringing a bit.

“Maybe he did. Maybe something else was wrong with it.” 112

“I'll have him get on it tomorrow. He does nothing else until this machine is running again. Did he tell you he'd fixed it?”

“He said to keep an eye on it. I figured he either had or was going to.”

“Let's get this mess cleaned up,” she said. “And go. We can take care of it tomorrow.”

Vance's landlord was being a pain in the ass about repairing something, so Vance was being a pain in the ass about repairing the press. He was mad that we hadn't wiped out the extinguisher foam or done anything except kill the power. He was bitching and moaning about it the moment I walked in the door.

“Plus, I have to fix this, and my schedule's all out of whack,” he said. I didn't know what else he had to do but I also didn't bother to ask.

Vance knew that machine inside and out, it was true. And he could repair just about anything on it. Once you could get him to shut up. Only he wasn't shutting up and we were still down one press. He had parts and tools scattered all around the production floor, extending away from him like an explosion.

“I should open my own damn shop,” he said. “Yeah, get out of this craziness. Get some of those new machines that don't have all this crap. You're lucky you can still get out of here before you catch the crazy, too.”

“Like you?”

“Like me? Shit. I'm patient zero, man. Quarantined. You can use that as one of your dime-words, right there. If I was you, I'd be looking for a new job.” 113

“Don't you love these machines, isn't that what you told me?”

“Just because I love 'em don't mean they're good for me. That's the bitch of it when it comes to love. This beauty here, she's really something, though. Just as sweet as can be when she's running. You don't know because you've never seen another press. If you'd only ever seen one woman in your whole life, you'd probably think she wasn't anything special, even if it was Aphrodite herself. Get your hands on another press, then you'd miss this one, even if she did try to melt down one time.”

“Is that so? I like number one, myself. She's been pretty good.”

“You don't even recognize that there's a difference between the two.”

“I guess I don't.”

“And you really don't know what I'm talking about, and that's what's wrong here.

It ain't the machines. The machines are fine. It's that they're not loved. I guess I'm as guilty of neglect as anyone, though. Should have checked out that overheating problem when it first cropped up.”

“Probably,” I said.

“Point is, you can love something that can hurt you. You can love it even if it's been choked or,” he paused and I distinctly remember it was a searching sort of pause,

“poisoned, dying, dead. And after a long enough time, it'll pass that right along to you.”

“You know what they say, don't you, Vance? 'It's not the heat, it's the humanity.'”

“That's clever,” he said and grunted a little laugh. “I'll have to remember that one.”

114

Vance had got the press running again. I had two runs going and Val was breezing around the production floor singing,

Ah, baby, make the mystery sweet, ah baby baby

put the clues there, right where we can see

Ah baby, you'll make a Holmes out of me

Ah mmmm mmm ah baby, let's find a mystery to solve.

Every now and then, she'd slap me on the ass or slip in really close to me and sing in my ear or kiss me on the cheek. She was so cheerful she made me feel younger. And we were still working quickly—don't think we were stopping every ten minutes to make out or anything like that. I was smiling and humming a similar, but butchered melody. Her singing was mostly drowned out by the ventilation but enough of it got through, especially when she got close.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked me when we went out to smoke.

“That's an awfully personal question.”

“I want to know. I don't know that much about you.”

“Sure you do,” I said. I rattled off a dozen things she would know from having worked with me for a while.

“No, I mean the real you. The inside you.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Heights. Snakes. I hate snakes.”

“That's not what I'm talking about. I mean, what do you fear most?”

“Failure,” I said.

“I don't believe you,” she said. “But it's a start.” 115

“Don't believe me?”

She stubbed her cigarette out, got up and said, “Of course not. Everyone's afraid of failure. I asked you what you were afraid of.”

One night I suggested we go back to my apartment instead. There was no reason why we shouldn't, I said. She had her shirt half-unbuttoned. Her bra was visible under it and her hair was down. She dropped her hands when I suggested it.

“Why?” she said.

Because the packing pad was awful. Because he wasn't around and there was no reason to do it at work. Because I wasn't happy with the way it was. But also, and I didn't say it, because I was falling in love and all of those other reasons made it feel like it was part of the job.

So we went there. She didn't object except to ask me why, which wasn't so much of an objection as it was a hesitation. I guess I could have invited her back to my place any time since it had begun but I hadn't. I was embarrassed by the fact that I had a mattress without a box spring on the floor and a futon that hurt your back and a television that had ghost colors that made it hard to watch sometimes, and the whole apartment basically looked like I was still nineteen and just moved out of my parents' house.

Later that night, we were laying in my bed. The apartment had actually started to come to life, little by little as we moved around in it. I had recently cleared out a ton of junk that 116

I'd accumulated over the years. Cleaned it. The place looked spartan. If I was going to get started with reevaluating my life, I figured it was at least a start.

“A clean slate,” is what I called it. She smiled at that briefly.

“A clean slate is like a hospital bed,” she said. “It's all clean, and perfect. It's so clean that it doesn't feel right. But more importantly, a hospital bed isn't yours. It's just where you get stuck when you're hurt. And then you soil it and it's still not yours.”

“I didn't mean—”

“No, you're right. I'm just not used to it.” She got a bottle of wine out of the kitchen and uncorked it. “This is more, I don't know, than I had thought it would be. It actually feels like a clean slate. Even if your carpet is messed up looking.”

We sat in the living room on the old carpet, against the wall and listened to the radio. The futon was pushed aside, dismantled. I was going to get rid of it. It had been

Lisa's originally and I wanted it gone. She put her head on my shoulder and her hands on my leg.

“You know all that stuff about the devil in the details is just a mind fuck, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“It's a mind fuck that the world has played on itself.”

“A rat-race.”

“Yeah, kind of like that, I suppose. Maybe. Something to keep us busy.”

“You like details, though.”

“I do,” she said. “You keep your fingernails trimmed. They're always clean.” 117

She took one of my hands in hers. I had never even looked at hers. They were lacquered but otherwise natural looking. I had always assumed that they were painted. I actually recalled them being painted different colors. Because I had never actually took the time to look.

“I'm too busy looking for the big picture,” I said.

“So you do believe,” she said. She propped herself up and drank some wine.

“You're too busy trying to put it all together to worry about the details. Can't see the forest for the trees, as they say. The stars for the sky. Details for the devil.”

“I don't know, is all. I guess I should take 'detail-oriented' off my résumé, then.”

“I think you see the ones that matter. Because you're looking for puzzle pieces, not just any old detail. You've got an idea, even if you don't know it.”

“So what about it just being a mind fuck?”

“Who said that was a bad thing?”

I drank from the wine bottle. She pulled herself closer into me. She reached up and touched my beard.

“I'm glad you decided to keep the beard,” she said. “It suits you.”

“It itches like the devil,” I said.

“Itches like the details.”

“Is that right? That goes away, huh? I suppose you get used to it.”

“Acclimate to it, yeah. You get used to it.”

“Acclimate. Good word,” I said. “I guess it's not so bad with the cold weather. My face is warmer, I guess.” 118

“You wanted to know if I believed in God,” she said. She was twirling the cross around in her fingers. “Before.”

“You don't have to tell me,” I said.

“I want to,” she said. She twisted her head around to look up at me. “I want to believe, but I don't know how. It's such a beautiful thing, belief. It's comforting and balances the doubt, the inevitably persistent doubt. Like one of those Chinese symbols.”

But it slips away, snakes through the cracks between your fingers. It’s fleeting, as they say. I hadn’t wanted to believe in God for a very long time. But I understood, because it was the same thing I felt with her.

“A ying-yang.”

“Yeah, like that. Only one of the sides has eaten the other. I like the idea of believing so much. It makes so much sense to, but it's also ridiculous. It's silly, I guess.”

“No,” I said. “I get that. If you think you do, you do.”

“I just think I want to, maybe. No. I think I want it to be true whether or not I believe, and I can't have that. So I just want. That's all I can ever have, is that want. I can see people happy with their belief, even when it makes them awful, and I have to be jealous. I have to see people who know how to do it the way I used to be able to.”

“Since when?”

“A long time,” she said. She turned around again. “I don't know when. But I realized one day that I didn't know how to anymore, and it was like I had forgotten how to ride a bike. Something so incredibly simple and I can't remember how. I tried praying and it just—it was just words. It was just me talking to myself.” 119

“You think it's beautiful. Belief.”

“I do. But I don't think anyone has ever really believed in anything. They just think they do. They believe that they believe.”

“I'm afraid of disappointing my father.”

“Your father?”

“Yeah. Ever since I was a kid. He's got this mile-long streak of protestant work ethic in him. He's never failed at anything he put his mind to in his life. Survived

Vietnam, went to college, got a good job, got promoted. He always knows what to do, somehow. Like, he can make snap decisions and they're always right.”

“What about you? Is he proud of you?”

“He's—patient. So patient. And I don't know. But I am really scared of letting him down. I'm a grown man. Is that normal?”

“My family's very religious,” she said. “You get over it.” I could see the cross lying on her chest.

“Maybe. I'm even more afraid that I have already let him down and he hasn't told me,” I said. “But I don't think so. Not yet. There's time.”

We lay in the dark for a while longer. Neither one of us was asleep. I listened to her breathing. If she was dying, I thought it made sense that she'd be concerned about believing, worried even, especially if she remembered that she had been able to. As if she was worried that the her that had been able to believe was still somewhere, back in the past, looking at her and judging her. 120

“I'm getting divorced,” she said. “Rob filed for it, I just found out—got served with the paperwork—yesterday.”

“Divorce? I thought he was worried about your cancer—”

“What cancer?”

“Rob told me—before. I don't—”

She had been playing with the cross that hung around her neck, turning it around in her fingers. I had never seen her do that before. Rather, I never noticed. She actually did it all the time and I never stopped to notice. She sat up and faced me.

“You don't have cancer? Ovarian Cancer.”

“Cancer? Rob—” she started.

“Okay,” I said. “Divorced, though? For what? I thought you'd be leaving him.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“Month or two back? It was a while ago. Before—I don't remember what it was about, why he said it to me,” I said. The words tumbled out as if they were honest, confident. “I guess he was pulling my leg or something.”

“It's not very funny.”

“It really isn't,” I said. “But boy did he get me good, huh? I really don't know why he told me that, but I didn't remember it until just now.”

“You're a terrible liar,” she said.

“It was before we did that goddamn video,” I muttered.

“What? What video?” 121

“The video thing, you know,” I said. “I thought that it was your idea. Because you had cancer. I was kind of ambivalent about talking to you about it. Vance said—and I thought he knew—”

“Now's not the time for your fucking fancy words. Ambivalent. Fuck.” She sat up.

I tried to put an arm around her, to hug her. “Vance? You—” she said. She shrugged me off, pulled away from me. I leaned up and reached for her. She slipped out from under the sheets and stood next to the bed. She pulled the comforter up and wrapped it around herself.

“You son of a bitch.”

“Val, I—”

“No,” she said. “Christ. You son of a bitch.”

I tried to get her to sit down or talk, but when I reached for her she slapped me and said, “Get away from me. Don't you dare touch me.”

She got up and got dressed. She just stood and watched. I couldn't say anything because she would just start cursing me.

“I don't know what—I mean, he told me—”

“Told you what? And you believed him? You don't think I would have told you?”

“He said—oh, fuck—I was doing it for you, but then—”

“Apparently not.”

When I looked at her, I saw her old eyes for a moment. The ones that cared, scrutinized. And I knew that she was lying to me. That she had been lying to me about something. I didn't know what it was but it didn't matter. Regardless. Her eyes weren't 122 scrutinizing me anymore. They saw me, but I don't think they were looking for the details they used to. Thing is, I didn't think it was that she was an empty shell, or was broken or anything like that. I thought I that she saw me as the broken one. And I thought she was right. I thought I saw pity in her eyes and I welcomed it.

She slammed the door behind her and walked out to her car. I could see her from the window. She was still holding onto the cross. She sat in the car for a minute and I thought about going down and asking for a chance to explain. Instead, I just watched her drive away.

I probably would have just stayed home, too. Just stayed at home and been upset in that way that causes a headache and all you can do is think about how much something hurts but the real hurt is not knowing why it was inflicted or why you did something so stupid or hurt someone else. The sort of upset where you can't sleep, but just replay it in your mind over and over again like you can alter it or remember some vital thing that will change it.

Instead of staying at home, I went to the bar. I think I knew Lisa would be there, with her new boyfriend. I'm pretty sure I knew that before I even left the shop, though I don't remember who told me. It was the same bar I had tried to kiss her in before. Maybe she'd told me that they go there a lot and I got lucky.

I ordered a double shot of whisky and a beer. The bar was fairly empty. Lisa and

Kevin, or whatever his name was, were sitting in a booth with another couple. I didn't recognize the other couple. 123

I took the shot and drank some of the beer. I watched myself in the mirror. I mean, it was just my reflection. I didn't look any different than I ever did, except that I was maybe in a bad mood. I didn't look there to look at myself, though. Maybe I hoped that looking at myself would convince me to go home.

“Hey, bud,” Kevin or whatever pulled up next to me at the bar. “You were at

Paul's party, right? Yeah, one of Lisa's old friends.” He turned to get her attention.

And that's when I would hit him. I would jam my fist into his ever-loving jaw and knock him off the barstool. He would be fast, of course, and be quick to grab me and actually pull me down to the floor. We would fight for all of thirty seconds and we'd both have black eyes and bloody lips and I would get thrown out of the bar, yelling “you fucking faggot” at him.

And then I would go home and jerk off, still thinking about Val but also still feeling the adrenaline of having gotten punched and having punched someone. Numb in certain places on my face where I couldn't feel much except for my heartbeat. And I would hold a frozen bag of peas to my face and fall asleep in my clothes.

Then, at school the next day, the instructor would remark on “one hell of a shiner”

I had. It would still be red and puffy but not really come into its own yet, not yet a dark bruise. Half my face would have a tide of pain washing over it, in and out. Vance would, of course, say the same thing to me when I got to work: “that's one hell of a shiner you got there, son.” 124

“I fell down some stairs,” I could say, to deflect the injury with humor. I would have it ready as a canned answer.

“Right, that's pretty funny,” Vance would say, even though he probably wouldn't think it was funny at all. Or even clever. “You got those stairs back, right?”

“Sure, Vance.”

“Good,” he would say. “Because that eye's going to look fucking awful in a week.

Not that chicks won't dig it. You may have even done yourself a favor. Fuck man, with that beard, you look like a goddamn hockey player.”

Val would be less impressed. I don't know how to describe her expression but it would be a mixture of compassion and exasperation. More of the latter than the former, and in the way you feel bad for anyone who looks like they're in pain, where you're compassion comes less from feeling bad for them but more from imagining what it feels like. Like a sympathy you have for someone who's fucked up the same way you have in the past. It would be an expression of remembrance, not nostalgia. Not even really sympathy, just conflicted understanding.

“I didn't think I was that rough,” she would say.

“Thanks. Yeah, feels great. I'm doing fine.”

She would shake her head at me and go back up front. I would take some aspirin and an early smoke break and Val would come out and light a joint. She would tell me that she had forgiven me. I would take the joint and squint at it through my left eye because it wouldn't be completely swollen shut. I would notice what I wouldn't normally 125 and I could appreciate it. I would tell her that I wanted to explain and she would tell me to shut up.

“You got into a fight with your Algebra textbook and lost?”

“I really don't want to talk about it. And I taught that textbook a lesson or two myself, you should know.”

“How manly of you.”

“It was talking shit.”

“Did you deserve it? Were you being bad?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bad. And stupid.”

“Bravo. You don't think you're going to be busy fighting tonight do you?”

I would shake my head. I would feel like I had half of a hangover. I would think about her and the fight, but then she would kiss me and I would see her the way I had before. She would be unassuming but strong, and I would be able to see it in her eyes.

And she would tell me she was sorry. I would explain myself and tell her that she didn't need to be.

But what kind of an asshole goes out to a bar and starts a fight with his ex's new boyfriend? I thought about it, seriously considered it for a few moments. I still think about it. I maybe think I should have. Maybe it could have turned out that way if I had.

Lisa came over and Kevin, or whatever his name is, bought us a round of shots.

He was friendly enough. I occurs to me now that I wasn't looking at Lisa the same way anymore. I didn't want her. 126

“You're out drinking alone?”

“I just got out of work,” I said. “It's not a thing.”

“We're celebrating,” Lisa said. Lisa was graduating and they were moving to

Milwaukee. Her and Kevin, or whatever his name was, were looking at apartments down there. She had finished her cosmetology program and had gotten licensed and everything.

She was looking at jobs down there, and if she couldn't find anything with hair, she'd just find another retail job.

“He's just so ready to move out of this town,” she said. “And so am I. There's too much bullshit here, everyone knows each other. Everyone's fucked someone you know.

It's getting weird. I want a new scene. He's graduating from UW Oshkosh and looking for jobs down there already. He's got a couple of interviews lined up.”

“It's not a bad town,” he said. “Just so small. I've been itching to leave for ten years.”

“That's really great,” I said. I guess we'd—me and Lisa—talked about moving somewhere, too. Only I had only ever seen it as a daydream, that it was impossible. I couldn't leave town, the history and everything that had happened to me there were like anchors. I felt like I'd just be floating, completely alone. Even if my memories and associations weren't great, or even happy, they were a part of the landscape. They made me a part of the landscape.

“Who's all over the map, now?” I said. She smiled and I told her I hoped everything would go well for her down there. 127

“Whoever she is,” Lisa said, before she walked away, “I hope she's good for you.”

Lisa had always told me that she could read me like a book. The only problem was that she didn't realize that what she read was in the past tense. I laughed a little through my nose and forced a smile.

“I'll be fine,” I said. “You be good. Say hi if you're ever in town.”

I didn't go to class the next morning. I didn't sleep through it. I just didn't go. I woke up and stared at my alarm clock and turned it off and stayed put. I still had to go to work in the afternoon and I hadn't heard from Val. I didn't know if I would have a job when I showed up, though that seemed less bothersome than trying to figure out what had happened.

I kept telling myself that I had done nothing wrong, that I should feel righteous indignation about anything she might say to me. I couldn't get the coffee bag to open. I kept gently tugging at the folds in its top but it wouldn't open. It was too early to have to deal with a bag that wouldn't do what it was supposed to do. I gave it another yank and the bag jerked and split down the middle, sending a cloud of coffee grounds all over my kitchen. I threw the bag against the wall.

I sat down and lit a cigarette. It was the wrong end and I got a lungful of burning fiberglass. I tossed it into the ashtray and lit another properly. I was shaking. After a few minutes, I stepped through the black mess and scooped enough out of the carcass of the bag to brew a pot. 128

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. You know how that goes, where you have no idea what to do and then even the things you know how to do, and have done a million times, don't go right.

I tried calling at her home, of course. And the shop. There was no answer, but I hadn't really expected one. I tried rehearsing apologies. I couldn't quite figure out what to apologize for, though. Not exactly. It just kept coming back to “for everything that happened.” As if I had created the whole situation. As if I were to blame for Rob's—well,

I wasn't to blame for that but I apologized for it anyway. Over and over, to my wall.

I stopped in at the restaurant and talked them into giving me my old job back.

They were really hurting for competent cooks, and I was still familiar with the menu. I needed out. They said they’d put me on the schedule as soon as I was ready to start. I told them to put me on right away.

I didn't go to work. I got a check in the mail for my last pay period a couple weeks later.

But that wasn't the last time I saw Val. It must have been a few months after that, when I was driving down Wisconsin Ave toward the Tech one morning. I was going to be late for class and I was hitting every red light on the way. It was spring and while it had warmed up, it was wet. I remember that it was raining because she didn't have an umbrella. She just had on this sweater and a pair of jeans, walking down the sidewalk toward I don't know where. But I didn't see her at first. 129

I only noticed because she stopped to look at this one seemingly misplaced rose bush that stood in front of this Chinese buffet place that had closed down. There was a

“For Rent” sign just over her head. But it wasn't really the sign that made me look. It was that there was only one rose on the bush and she had stopped to look at it. And I only recognized her because she looked around suddenly, when she was looking at the flower.

It was one of those white roses, I remember. I always thought it was strange for the restaurant to have them planted out front like that, pressed right up against the sidewalk, choking on exhaust all day. I thought about how she had kept digging at that garden.

Weeding and watering it, trying to force something to come out of the dirt, anything except weeds. But the entire place was so soaked with ink that nothing could grow anymore, let alone flowers, let alone meaning.

I almost stopped to say hi, ask her how the garden was going, ask her how she was doing, to say something, but I didn't. I just watched her looking at that rose in the rain. It was raining pretty good. She must have been soaked. I watched as she reached up and stroked the petals, dropped her hand down, looked up at the real estate sign and then began walking again. No lie, the car behind me honked because I didn't see the light change. And I think she looked over at me, but I don't know if she saw me. Regardless.

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