The Blind, the Willful A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES

Will Carper

Pitfalls…………………………….5

Guest No. 8057………………….27

Boil……………………………...40

Glimpses (a ghost story)………...62

Elysium…………………………79

Pitfalls

The tiger threw its head to the side and roared as it crossed the confines of its home, stepping over its sisters and brothers to reach the highest rock in the pit. Mindy felt an immense amount of pity for it and the other animals below her, but she knew what

Crystal would say if she were to say so. They were still sitting on their bikes, their sneakers barely reaching the pavement. On their raised seats, they could see down into the pit. The edges underneath the tropical foliage were sunken in swaths of pitch black, but the smooth stone basin where the tigers lay was fairly illuminated by the walkway lights, and the moon above them. The tiger reached the high rock and fell to its stomach, pressing itself against the wall and eyeing the middle of the pit cautiously, where the acrid smoke from an M-80 rose, drifting in random patterns that reached the girls’ waists.

“See, I thought up a little test,” Crystal said, and the near glee in her voice pulled

Mindy back. “I’m going to make it so we can prove ourselves to each other, and to that fucked up world I was telling you about.”

Mindy looked up and met Crystal’s urgent, angry eyes. It wasn’t too much like looking into a mirror, not anymore. Their faces were almost identical, sure, but there was

Crystal’s snarl, that coldness in her eyes. Mindy had known from the beginning what her sister was like. Call it intuition, but after all, they were twins. 6

Crystal reached into the tan leather bag she took with her everywhere and rarely ever opened. Mindy’s mind flashed through all of the possibilities, but she knew enough by then to know that there was only one thing it could be. Her stomach had already begun to sink when Crystal removed the small chrome handgun. Her whole body fired up with the desire to run, to swipe the gun out of Crystal’s hands, to act, to do something, but she stood still, frozen, like always.

“Firecrackers are one thing; just think what this’ll do.”

___

Two weeks before, Mindy stood in front of the Francis Bacon painting with her hands folded behind her back. She remembered how her father stood, taking in every detail of the piece before him, following his own clock, indifferent to whether his wife and adopted daughter were ready for the next room, and tried to absorb the image before her with the same attention. But no matter how hard she tried to grasp this deep, distant level of awareness, she still only saw a horribly deformed priest sitting upon a throne, mouth open like a gateway to Hell.

She checked her watch. Seven minutes past the hour. She had arrived at the

MOCA a full hour before the agreed upon time, in case Crystal wasn’t into the paintings.

Truth be told, Mindy wasn’t hugely into many of the paintings herself, but she felt that she should be and spent that hour acting as if she were.

Mindy looked at her watch again, but the minute hand hadn’t moved. It was as she was looking up from the white gold of the watch face that she saw Crystal.

Underneath the make-up and hoop earrings, the off-kilter spaghetti strap, Crystal was her—no amount of preparation could have readied Mindy for that, and she had prepared. 7

Crystal had entered through the other end of the gallery devoted to Bacon’s work from

1944 to the late 50s and had not yet caught sight of Mindy; she was looking up at the same triptych that had caught Mindy’s eye upon entering the room. She stood below the three paintings, holding onto the straps of her backpack with both hands, one foot scratching the heel of the other.

Mindy smiled. Had she not been trying to mimic her father’s tried and true museum stance, she imagined that she would look much like Crystal. She crossed the space between them, squeezing through a pair of babbling German tourists, and tapped

Crystal on the shoulder. Crystal turned, and although she smiled Mindy could tell that she wasn’t quite prepared for the sight of her own face staring back at her, and so close.

“Jesus,” Crystal said, laughing. “I didn’t think it would be so jarring, seeing you.”

Mindy said that she knew how Crystal felt, trying hard to mask her own disbelief.

“Just what kind of place did you choose for us to meet at?” Crystal asked. She motioned to the three burnt orange paintings behind her. “I haven’t been here since elementary school, but I sure don’t remember this room.”

“I thought that it would be nice to see the new exhibit,” Mindy said.

“Yeah, and grossly disturbing.”

Mindy agreed that it was strange, and said that she’d never seen it before, either.

Crystal stepped towards the center image in the triptych. “It’s cool. I like it. Like demons. Like they’re all in pain.”

Mindy peered at the triptych as a whole, at the agonized purplish figures that seemed to writhe beneath the orange and burning atmosphere of their hellish world. “It’s certainly visceral.” 8

Crystal laughed again. “You talk like you’re a writer.”

“I do write a bit.”

“No shit, me too—poetry mostly.”

“I’d love to read your work someday.”

“Sure, someday.” Crystal released a hand from one of the straps of her backpack and reached it towards Mindy. “I feel like we should do this. Shake, I mean.”

Mindy gripped Crystal’s hand; they shook fiercely, more so on Crystal’s end than hers. Mindy couldn’t help but smile, and she felt a measure of relief. She’d been nervous, and she’d worried far too much, after receiving the letter from the sister she’d always known was out there somewhere—if only packed underneath Vietnamese soil. Crystal looked back to the paintings and snorted. “So how are we even supposed to be interpreting something like this?”

“I’m sorry,” Mindy said. She almost never interrupted, and doing it then made her uneasy. “How did you find me? I never even thought to—”

“I know, I was pretty vague in the letter,” Crystal said. She let her bag fall and reached into its mouth, pulling out a pamphlet, which she handed to Mindy. The pamphlet read Children Are the Future, Inc. – International Adoptions, Made Easy.

Beneath the text was a picture of a white mother holding a sleeping Asian baby to her chest. “You know the orphanage we were adopted from? This place, Children Are the

Future, right here in LA, has strong ties to it. Lots of Vietnamese babies being peddled into Cali through the place.”

Mindy raised an eyebrow. “I hardly think we were ‘peddled.’” 9

Crystal nodded curtly and wrinkled her nose. “Well, anyways—I thought, why couldn’t both of us have ended up right here in LA? The lady at the agency was all for helping me once she learned I was a twin, even if it meant bending a few rules. We should both keep that in mind. Twins have power, real power. We’d be fools not to use it.”

Mindy nodded as if in firm agreement, but she had mostly missed that last part.

She was struck by all that Crystal had done, all too aware that she hadn’t been the one to do it. Crystal touched her arm and led her to one of the benches in front of the triptych.

“Tell me,” she said. “What’s there to know about Mindy Kaufman?”

Mindy had been dreading this. She hated talking about herself; she never felt that she had anything interesting to say. But Crystal wanted to hear. The way Crystal looked at her, Mindy couldn’t turn away, couldn’t hide behind a nervous laugh or some other misdirection. She had to speak, she knew it, and so she told everything, all that she could think of. She was surprised at how much there turned out to be. At how much of what she said actually surprised her, even if the surprise was just in hearing certain things spoken.

When she was done, she let out a long breath, and only then became aware of the heat on her face and skin. She hadn’t realized she was out of breath. “How about yourself?” she added at the end of her spiel.

“Next time, all right?” Crystal said. Mindy was about to try and see if she couldn’t get something out of her twin when Crystal narrowed her eyes and asked, “You ever think of our birth mother?” 10

“Not much,” Mindy said, taken aback by the suddenness, but not enough so that she didn’t give the answer she usually gave. “I did when I was younger, but my parents have been really good to me, so I don’t—”

“No, neither do I. What’d she ever do for us?”

Mindy tried her best to look unfazed. She thought of pointing out the kind of economic situation their birth mother had likely been in sixteen years ago, but looking into Crystal’s glare, she thought against it. “You know, I’m so glad you found me,” she said.

Crystal laughed. “Yeah, and look what it was that I found. I mean, you’re practically Amy fuckin’ Tan with a bad dye job.” Mindy brought her hand to her bangs, dyed fuchsia just last week, but Crystal grabbed her wrist and pulled her to her feet.

“Forget about it. Bad joke. I’m glad I found you, too. I really, really am. Walk me outside, will you. My boyfriend’s waiting.”

“But I said in my email that my mom is going to pick us up in half an hour. My dad’s baking haddock.”

Crystal laughed. “I don’t even know what that is.” She took Mindy by the arm and led her from the room.

“My parents will be so disappointed,” Mindy said, her voice made small by confusion.

“Can’t have that. I wanted to see if you were cool. And you are, okay? I just didn’t want to be stuck at this museum for too long if you weren’t. Let’s meet at the mall this weekend, have some fun.” 11

In the lobby, Crystal said to her, “Don’t look so sad. We’ll see each other again soon,” and softly punched her arm. “I’ll call you, okay?” Crystal jogged down the museum steps and hopped into a Mustang that had pulled onto the sidewalk. Mindy sat on the steps and watched as the Mustang pulled off.

After the taillights disappeared she turned her attention to the bizarre, monstrous work of modern art mounted on the concrete to her left. As her eyes moved over the twisted metal she thought back to Crystal standing before the Bacon paintings, staring into a vision of a fiery, torturous Hell. Suddenly she got something—about the paintings, about Bacon’s hellish visions. He didn’t just paint—he had created mirrors. And both of them, both twins, had on some level been intrigued when faced with those terrible reflections. She didn’t know what it meant, but she felt in herself a new strength, and knew how much of it was owed to Crystal.

Her mother’s blue Audi pulled to the curb. She got up, jogged down the stairs, hopped in. Her mother smiled and touched her cheek, but a look of mild surprise came over her face and she asked, “Where’s Crystal?”

“She has better things to do,” Mindy said, a smirk crossing her lips.

___

Mindy rarely ever went to the mall—she had always thought them crowded and kitschy—but being with Crystal imbued it with a new sense of meaning. Here, they were sisters, spending the day together, learning each other’s lives, seeing how the other walked and talked, interacted, lived. They window shopped, sometimes going into stores to try things on that they knew they couldn’t afford, not even Mindy. The staff always spoke coolly to them and were loathe to assist them if asked. Mindy knew the same 12

would not be true were she alone—if it was just her in her tasteful Macy’s sweater and not-too-tight jeans. So she’d grab Crystal by the wrist and pull her towards the most expensive item in the shop, glancing over her shoulder at the employees, who would stiffen and jerk towards them, feigning politeness. Mindy could tell that Crystal was also getting pleasure out of the torturous effect she had on the many shop girls and this heightened Mindy’s own sense of transgression.

After they had gone through all of the stores, Crystal led Mindy to a bench, where they both collapsed. Mindy did not realize how tired she was, even though they’d only been out for a little over an hour. Crystal smiled and squeezed her wrist. For a while, they watched the people pass in front of them. Families and loners, groups of friends and browbeaten mall cops. Though Mindy knew it was silly, she couldn’t help but imagine how easy all their lives must be. How only she and Crystal were on the cusp of some strange new beginning.

Mindy grew uncomfortable in the silence and turned to Crystal and recounted how her mother had actually packed her a snack on her way out the door that afternoon, telling her what a joy it was that God had seen fit to bring her sister back into her life.

She was laughing, hoping Crystal would laugh, too.

Crystal raised an eyebrow and laughed, but her laugh held more derision than

Mindy had when she told the story. Mindy looked back to the people of the mall, and sat quietly as Crystal spoke.

“You want to talk about mothers?” Crystal said. She relaxed her shoulders and sunk into the arch of the bench and eyed Mindy from behind lazy eyelids. Her voice was high and nasal, and there was a nastiness to the impression that followed. “‘Darling, don’t 13

you know I fucked the Stones during the Beggars Banquet sessions?’” Crystal laughed.

“Like having sex with horny rich dudes is an accomplishment. She’s a night nurse now.

Mom went from prostitute to the stars, to housewife, to an underpaid nurse working the graveyard shift—some trajectory. With dad gone she leaves me be for the most part.

Sometimes she doesn’t even leave money for food.” She looked off and a sly smile crossed her lips. “My dad, he’s free. He travels all over North America and sends me things. I got a bottle of Mexican tequila in my bag, Spanish text on the label and everything. I’ll show you when there aren’t so many mall cops around. He sends postcards, too—from all over the place. Never to my mother, only to me. Sometimes he’ll throw in a mention of whichever girl he’s screwing. He has to know she reads them. I mean if I know, so does he.”

Mindy tried her best to copy Crystal’s sly, cruel smile, but inside she felt sorry for

Crystal’s mother and had an urge to say so. Crystal grabbed Mindy by the arm and pulled her to her feet. “I said we should meet at the mall so we could have some fun, and we’ve barely done anything. Let’s try changing that.”

___

The ass of the mall cop hit the first step of the escalator and despite his all around doughyness, the thud and the crunch that followed sent a splatter of nausea through

Mindy’s insides. Before the cop even started his first somersault, Mindy turned and ran, her leg muscles working harder than they ever had in all of the sports she picked up and tossed aside with astounding regularity. She looked back as she neared the stairs opposite the escalators, just then remembering that she hadn’t been alone. Crystal’s pace had only just begun to quicken. Her face had taken on a hardness, a cruelty that Mindy had never 14

imagined would mark features so much like her own. She passed through the doors and into the stairwell, but the hardness on those features stuck with her even as the door closed behind her.

Outside, after she had dashed through the first floor of the mall and burst through the set of revolving doors at the front, Crystal found her in the parking lot, panting as she leaned against the side of a minivan.

“You run fast, girl. What you so afraid of?”

“I’ve—I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“That asshole deserved it.”

Mindy began to laugh. “You stole those earrings,” she said amid growing fits.

“And you—you pushed him.”

“We’d be locked up right now if I hadn’t slowed him down.”

Mindy’s body shook now, but her laughter had abided. Her fits were bodily now.

She’d run faster than she had in a long time. She felt newly energized, electric.

As Mindy regained herself, Crystal eyed her curiously. “Do you know what that’s like, being locked up?”

Mindy shook her head. “Do you?”

“Sure I do. All the shit you have to deal with from everyone as soon as you get out . . . Having to prove yourself all over again for shit you never did, in ways you never could have imagined. And what I had to go through with my mom . . .”

“I thought your mom doesn’t care what you do.”

“She cares when she has to get out of bed for court dates. She cares when the world sees just what kind of mother she is.” Crystal’s arms tightened at her side. “I’m 15

done explaining myself to you. I’ve done enough of that today. I know we have a lot of catching up to do—sixteen years worth. But—let’s just go, okay?”

The confusion on Mindy’s face fell away and she nodded. They began to walk toward the bus shelter at the edge of the lot. Mindy’s father had driven her, but she was all on her own the way back. Something wretched crept through her. It was a long time until she would be home.

“I would love to read your poetry sometime,” she said.

Crystal laughed. “We’ll see about that. But you got to promise me something first.

Running away like that . . . Don’t ever do that again. I know we’ve had different lives— that we were both dealt different hands, and yours happened to be a fuckin’ great one.

But you don’t do that to me.”

Mindy felt a burning beneath her skin. She looked away and her hands clenched at her sides. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”

“This is a fucked up world we’re in,” Crystal said. “We didn’t have any say in it.

The only way either of us will make it is if we face it. Every day, with conviction. We can’t decide the terms but we can choose how we meet them. And we—we can choose together. I always wanted a sister, and I always knew I had one out there. The agency kept the records and they still split us up. We were babies then. We had no choice, no say.” She let her voice drift off. That same hardness as before was across her features.

“Look at us. They’ve caged us—you especially, in that high house on a hill. In those clinging, expensive clothes. But we don’t have to stay caged. You believe me, don’t you?

I’m not just crazy here?” 16

Mindy didn’t understand a word, not then. She knew that she didn’t feel powerless. Directionless, sure, but not powerless. But she was also aware, however peripherally, that Crystal’s world was different than her own.

“Wow,” she said. “Is this what your poetry is like?”

___

Mindy sat alone in her bedroom, among all of her stuffed animals, big pink things—elephants, bears, dinosaurs—that held onto crimson hearts, or were angled (by her mother, every morning after Mindy had gone to school) so that they held each other.

Her mother and father had gone to bed. It was only nine, but they were old for parents of a sixteen-year-old. Early to bed early to rise, her father liked to say. She used to find it funny, but she could just see Crystal’s reaction, her sneer, and knew that it was about time she grew up.

She reached for the phone next to her bed. It was shaped like a cat, and when it rang, it meowed. She scowled at the stupid smiling face sculpted into the cradle, but she dialed the number anyway. At the first ring, she hung up.

Over the last three days, Mindy had looked at the paper each morning, searching for any news of the mall cop Crystal had pushed down the escalator, or of his assailants being caught on camera. She didn’t think the cop had died or anything, but seriously injured? That didn’t seem so far off. Neither thought had occurred to her until she’d returned home from the mall. When she was with Crystal, there didn’t seem to be any consequences. It was as if they were tied to each other, by a bond even greater than family. Maybe being apart for so long had a silver lining. They had so much to learn from other—at least, Mindy felt as if she had much to learn from Crystal. 17

She’d left the phone resting in her lap. The cop was fine. Each morning she read.

Each morning she found nothing. Maybe he’d been short of breath for a few minutes. He probably had some bruises. But he was all right. There would have been something about it in the paper.

Mindy picked up the phone and dialed.

___

The third time they met it was at an arcade, this time closer to Mindy’s home.

Still, Crystal said she left at eight in the morning, rode her bike in all the way from the city. Her calves were slender but looked as dense as baseball bats, and Mindy felt a small amount of hope for the softness she hated so much about her own body.

“I got you something,” Mindy said after they sat down in the food court. Mindy had bought a salad and decaf; Crystal, chicken wings and French fries. Mindy reached into her purse and removed a small, thin box wrapped in a single sheet of turquoise paper.

“Here,” she said. “It’s nothing. Just something small.”

Crystal tore through the paper and opened the box. She held the glinting fountain pen in her fingers, leaving the inkbottle in the box. Mindy could see her distorted reflection in the gold pen tip. Her face thinned into a smear at the point, and she saw that

Crystal noticed the same thing with her own reflection.

“What’s this for?”

“For your poems.”

“I don’t have any paper nice enough for this.”

“I’ll get you some.” 18

Crystal’s brow furrowed. “Don’t.” She put the pen back into the box and closed it, and then put the box into her bag.

“What do you keep in there?”

Crystal stiffened and she gripped the bag in her lap.

“They say you can learn a lot about a woman by what she keeps in her bag.”

Mindy was smiling. She hoped that Crystal would smile back. The best she got was a thing between a smirk and a grimace.

“Trying to get in my pants, you pervert? Don’t go looking through my bag.”

“I won’t. Um, hey, didn’t you want a drink?”

Crystal stood. “Yeah—I’ll get my own.”

When Crystal sat back down, her sullenness had gone. She seemed charged, energized by something bursting inside. “Listen, I got an idea for next week. You got me something, after all.” She grinned. “So. Just how long’s it been since you went to the zoo?”

___

“Take an M-80,” Crystal said after they halted their bikes upon reaching the tiger pit. She held a small red cylinder in her palm, the fuse between two fingers like a cigarette, but it slid out of her hand when Mindy took it.

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“Light it and toss it in the cage,” Crystal said. “Give these big feline fuckers a scare.”

“Won’t it alert security that we’re here?” 19

Crystal’s eyes rolled. “I got us in here with what was left of my weed, didn’t I?

That dumb motherfucker with the stare is stoned out of his mind by now. It’s a big zoo. A few loud bangs he’s too far away to hear anyway won’t get him up out of his chair. You can be so naïve. I can’t believe we came from the same womb.” She looked right at

Mindy when she said that, and it hurt the more for it. But then she cracked a smile that until two weeks ago Mindy had only ever seen in photos and reached across her handlebars and tapped Mindy’s shoulder with her fist. “I’m just playin’, Min. Do you get called that? Some assholes call me Cris.”

“I don’t get this,” Mindy said. “Why do you want to scare them like this? They’re just animals. They haven’t done anything to you.”

Crystal snatched back the M-80 and closed it in her fist. “Because it’ll be funny.

Don’t you ever have any fun? I mean, I got white parents, too, but who are yours? The

Westboro Baptists?”

“It’s—it’s animal cruelty.”

Mindy knew how she sounded, and she wished she would just shut up, but something wouldn’t let her.

“Fuck it,” Crystal said. She took a lighter out of her bag and lit the fuse. She tossed the little red cylinder high and it spiraled up into the air, catching the tigers’ attention. In fact, most of the jungle cats’ yellow, reflective eyes hadn’t left the two girls since they’d pulled up to the edge of the pit. Only the cubs paid no mind, and it was one of the cubs that the firecracker landed next to. The cub leapt up at the sight of the flame and ran to its mother, who stood and growled, prancing back and forth before the funny 20

burning thing. When it exploded, the pit erupted. Only Mindy could hear Crystal’s laughter over the roars and the crying of the cubs.

“Here,” Crystal said, handing Mindy another M-80, “you gotta try it. See, none of them got hurt. It’s just good for a laugh. Think of them as the dumb animals they are— you think they’d show your skinny ass any mercy in the jungle?”

Mindy took the M-80 after a moment, and then smirked. “My skinny ass is your skinny ass,” she said.

Crystal laughed. The roars had died down, but the cubs and even some of the adults were still whimpering. “See, girl. I knew I’d rub off on you.”

Mindy felt sick, but she lit the fuse and tossed the firecracker anyway. Again, she felt a charge from doing as Crystal did, but the sickness, the vague but writhing dread, almost negated it. As the little cylinder tumbled, she thought of when she had gone vegetarian, and managed to stick with it for a year and a half. She’d told Crystal all about it, in what had felt to her then a grand moment of confession. It had been freeing, telling

Crystal about herself in such detail, but the freedom had been fleeting, and now it was far behind her.

She had always held certain notions if not convictions of animal rights, and those notions culminated in her eighteen-month experiment. But without conviction the experiment ended, her notions were realized as such, and she succumbed to her mother’s pot roasts and hamburgers just as she always knew she would. The same had happened with her all-too-brief passion for Californian Native American land claims and, more innocently, with things that never required any more conviction than simply showing up: her high school’s lacrosse team, sculpture classes, the gardening club. All eventually fell 21

to the wayside. She felt shame whenever she thought of these aborted attempts at meaning, and that shame became a slow burning, directionless anger if she ever considered it too long. She was unsure which she felt as the firecracker fell right where it was meant to, but the tigers had wised up and moved to the edges of the pit, beneath the trees. The bang elicited only a few nervous roars.

“Well shit, that just lost its allure,” Crystal sighed.

“What do you want to do next, girl?” Mindy said, forcing that last syllable to sound as natural as possible.

Crystal’s smile was knowing at first, but her eyes darkened and the smile became like a knife slit in a face now dissimilar to Mindy’s own.

“Do you remember what I told you at the mall?” Crystal asked. “I felt that way— powerless—for a long, long time. But one day I thought, what exactly is stopping me from finding her? And I could only come up with one answer.”

Crystal’s glare had become too hard for Mindy to meet. “I remember,” she said.

“Nothing was stopping you either. You just never looked. Life was too sweet, I guess. Do you want to know why I really brought you here?”

Mindy nodded again, though she felt sick to her stomach, and Crystal told her of the test and the fucked up world they had to prove themselves to, and then she reached into her bag and took out what was inside.

Mindy stiffened at the sight of it. She shook her head, just barely.

“You’re really worried about those stupid cats,” Crystal said, incredulous. “This ain’t no jungle. We’d be doing the poor animals a favor. I’ve done right by you, but you 22

haven’t proven anything to me yet. I’m giving you a chance. I don’t give anybody chances, but I’m giving you one.”

“I—I can’t. I’m not—”

“I know you’ve had a great cushy life out here, but all of us aren’t so lucky. The way of the world is blood and those things down there—they know that. We’re prey in their eyes and they expect the same treatment. You know they got tigers where we come from?” Mindy’s hands were perspiring and her knees could barely hold her up. The edge of her vision had begun to blacken and everything in between was teetering on that same edge. “Those tigers down there, even if they don’t remember home, they know something’s wrong. They have to. We do, too. At least I do. Can you really say that you don’t?”

“I—I have a great life. And whatever you say, yours can’t be that bad—”

“Don’t tell me what can and can’t be. It doesn’t matter what our lives are. We could be royalty and it still wouldn’t have been our choice. That’s what was taken from us, but here is where we start to take it back. It’s a chance none of those animals will ever get. If you need to see this as mercy—if that’s what it’ll take for you to accept how things are—that that’s you in that cage, and there’s only ever one way for you to get out—then help me go Kevorkian on these cats. Just one. It’ll make us sisters, for real. Cut away the dead, the part of you that’s locked up. That never got to choose. We have to move past ourselves if we’re to be anything but what we’ve been told to be.”

“We are sisters for real,” Mindy said.

“No, we’re not. We share blood, but we weren’t born in it. But now here’s our chance. I’m not crazy. We have to do this. I know you know that we do.” 23

“Where did you get the gun?”

“The world only asks a single thing of you, Mindy, sister . . . and that’s conviction. Denying that’s just no way to live—”

“How do you—”

“And those cats down there know it. And I know it. And I’m trying to help you know it.” She offered Mindy the gun. The features of her face and even her grasp around the gun barrel had taken on a softness that Mindy almost recognized. But seeing that softness in someone that was her and wasn’t, was like seeing her own skin wrapped around a double that only shared a basic shape—some awful sci-fi horror.

“Are you going to take a stand or are you going to do what you always do and do nothing?” Crystal asked.

“No,” Mindy said quietly.

“Which one is it?”

Mindy stepped off of her bike and let it clatter to the ground. She walked a few steps, her back to her twin, and crossed her arms. “We’re not doing this,” she said.

“Look who’s all authoritative all of a sudden.”

Mindy turned, and she hated the look she knew she wore and the sound of her voice. “Please. Can we please just go?”

Crystal jumped off of her bike and onto the concrete foundation of the fence surrounding the pit. She rested both elbows on the edge and peered down the gun sights.

Mindy felt the air rush out of her, but she was running towards her anyway. Her flip flops slapped against the pavement, Crystal turned, and the gun was now pointed squarely at her chest. 24

“Just you stand there and watch,” Crystal said.

Crystal turned back to the pit. She fired quickly, and the little gun bucked in her hands. Mindy clenched her eyes shut, the only action she was capable of. The air filled with bellows and the scattering of padded feet. When Mindy opened her eyes Crystal beckoned her to come. Mindy crept to the edge and looked in. The animals had retreated underneath the trees—all except one, who was limping in circles, one of its paws smearing dark liquid on the stone. It didn’t make a sound except for the nearly silent rustling of damp fur on rock.

“Got it! You sure you don’t want to take a shot? . . . I guess by those tears in your eyes it’s a ‘no,’ huh?”

Mindy had never hated anyone so much.

“Keep on looking at me like that and I might have to put one of these in your leg, too. Conviction, girl. Guess you’ll never have it.”

Mindy’s ears were ringing from the gunshot. She barely heard Crystal’s taunts.

She was focused on one thing—holding in those wet beads blurring her vision, obscuring her twin into a phantom.

“If you’re not going to take the shot, I will. We should be heading out soon, anyways. Stoner boy’s shift is almost up.” Crystal lined up the sights of the gun once more.

Part of Mindy was only vaguely aware of Crystal’s blurry visage growing closer, of the movement of her own legs and the mad dash of her outstretched hands. The other part had made a choice. The gun went flying through the air, but its descent was faster than that of the firecrackers’, and it landed with a clatter. 25

Mindy was on the other side of Crystal now, doubled over, heaving, her elbows on her knees. She was trying not to vomit. She knew that Crystal was standing behind her. She looked back through the crook of her arm and saw her standing there, looking into the pit.

“That was my boyfriend’s gun,” she said finally. “He doesn’t know I have it.”

“Look, I’m sorry—”

Crystal turned, fury twisting her face into something else entirely. Mindy tried to get away, but Crystal grabbed her by the hair and threw her onto the ground. She straddled Mindy’s chest and reached into her bag, which was still across her shoulders.

When she removed her arm, her hand gripped the fountain pen Mindy had given her. The wet black of the inkwell glinted in the zoo lights.

“Don’t—”

“Looking into your face is just like looking into some fucked up, sugary sweet, dayglo hell. A fucking suburban girl next door nightmare. Satan’s mirror. Good grades and pom poms, and no I don’t care if you never did cheers. I look at you and I feel sick.

So let’s change that, you and me.”

Crystal stuck the pen tip into the skin of Mindy’s cheek, then dragged it down, slowly at first. Mindy sobbed silently, but she didn’t resist. She was frozen by what she’d already done, and although she couldn’t put words to her desire, part of her welcomed the pen tip, the blood, if it meant she didn’t have to look so much like Crystal anymore.

When Crystal was finished, she did the same to the other side, then stood up and tossed the pen into the pit. She hefted Mindy’s bike over her shoulders and did the same. 26

“It’s funny we’re at the tiger pit, you know?” Crystal said. Mindy could barely see her. She was on her bike now, but her face was a smudge on top of an eerie, quivering form. “I mean, look at their coats. Black and orange stripes. Each mutually opposed, facing each other down, like on a battlefield—neither ever giving an inch. Well, tonight one of us gave a little. And one of us took. I’m sorry you couldn’t step up. That you’ll never be worth it, and you’ll never learn.”

Mindy’s hands were pressed to her face. The pain wasn’t so bad; Crystal hadn’t cut deep. But she no longer wanted to see what looked at her.

“You tell anybody anything with me in it and I finish what I started. Got that, sister?”

Mindy waited until the sound of Crystal’s tires over the pavement was long gone, then she rolled over, pressed her bloody, sticky hands to the ground, and pushed herself to her feet. She wavered, but stood in the end.

She walked over to the edge of the pit and looked in. The tiger Crystal had shot was lying on the stone and had been joined by three of its pack. One was licking the wound; another rested its head on its wounded sibling’s heaving chest.

She smiled. “Same fucking coat,” she said, and whether she laughed then or cried, it sounded the same.

27

Guest No. 8057

He’d been lying in the bed for maybe half an hour, for when he awoke he’d felt dizzy and somewhat nauseous. Both feelings were passing, but still, he was groggy. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed. The floor was cold, and he didn’t see any socks or slippers.

He realized that he couldn’t think of his name.

He hadn’t taken in his surroundings when he awoke; instead, he’d curled into a ball and hoped for his nausea to pass. He saw now that he’d never been in this room before. Its walls were a pale concrete and there were no windows, except for a small square opening above the bed, perhaps a foot in both dimensions. The window let in a measure of sunlight, but the room was mostly illuminated by a glaring fluorescent light set into the ceiling. A slender steel door was set into the opposite wall, and there was a window in that, as well, but it was blocked by a steel shutter. A flatscreen television protruded from one wall, but he saw no remote. The last thing he noticed in the room was a large metal dresser. He was wearing pajamas—stark white and recently pressed. He hoped that there were more clothes—and socks—inside, but he did not move to look. He had remembered his name. His name was Aaron.

With his name came a multitude of things. He remembered that he was from New

York City. That he lived in a small, ratty apartment in the West Village that hadn’t been 28

very ratty when he moved in, and that his mother sometimes helped him with the rent.

His father had passed away almost a year ago and the funeral had been the last time he’d left Manhattan. Most weeks, he didn’t go beyond the five blocks between his apartment and his job at the comic book store. He’d take as many shifts as he could, a rare show of ambition, though his motivations went beyond money. He liked to spend time with

Dante, the owner’s son and shift manager. They’d tell jokes—well, Dante would tell jokes—and horse around. Work was the most fun part of Aaron’s week. When he did venture out, it was with Dante and Sara, his best friend. He didn’t expect for them to fall in love, and when they started dating he told himself it was doomed. Dante was just confused, and Sara was still broken up over her last relationship. But they stayed together—had been for over a year, and in a month they’d be married. Not long ago

Aaron resigned himself to the knowledge that he’d missed his shot, if he’d ever had one.

His period of unmemory seemed to him now like the distant past. He remembered more. He remembered everything except how he came to be in the room.

He stood up and found that his legs were weak. He thought that he might have been drugged. The thought didn’t seem all that scary, perhaps because it offered an explanation—an idea of how came to be in the room. He sat back down on the bed, and he caught sight of something he had missed. A covered tray rested in front of the door.

He realized that he was quite hungry, but his weakness prevented him from doing anything about it for the time being.

He sat, staring at the tray. His fear had plateaued and he could do little else with it. He had long ago learned to accept the things he knew he could not change. He focused on his breathing, as Sara had taught him the night he had been mugged, when he went to 29

her apartment, just a block from where it had happened, and she put ice on his eye and urged him to go to the hospital to see that nothing in his face had been broken. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t wanted to know.

After what felt like half an hour of sitting in silence, counting and controlling the depth of each breath, he tried to stand again. His knees wobbled, but he took a step and remained standing. He walked over to the tray, careful with each step, and when he was standing right above it, he bent at the waist; his fingertips brushed the top of the tray cover. He tried to bend further, but his body would not let him. He grit his teeth and tried bending at the knees. His legs buckled, each knee shooting outwards, and he crashed to the floor, sending the tray skidding across the floor to where it clattered against the nearest wall. Aaron propped himself up on his elbows and saw that the cover had come off. The tray contained an assortment of food. Pork chops and mashed potatoes with a copious dressing of gravy. Corn on the cob. A fat slice of apple pie. Steam snaked into the air, twirling off of each item and drifting towards his nostrils like in some twisted children’s cartoon. He began to crawl. He was starving.

At the halfway point, he stopped. Had he heard something? He waited, and he heard it again; this time he was sure. The only opening in the room was the window above the bed. He heard it a third time. A voice. He couldn’t make out the words, but he knew it was a voice. A man’s, it sounded like. He started to crawl towards the bed, frantically, not like before. He grabbed the edge of the frame and pulled himself upwards.

With his chest on top of the mattress, he grabbed the opposite edge of the frame and pulled the rest of his body up. His legs were weak, but he somehow found the strength to swing one over and onto the mattress, followed by the other. He knelt, using the wall for 30

support, and slowly brought himself to his feet. Standing, his eyes were level with the bottom edge of the window. He could see blue sky; that was all. But the next time the voice spoke he could make out the words.

“Aaron,” he said as loud as he could manage. He was surprised to find his voice was hoarse.

“Miguel.” The voice was muffled, but he could pick up some Brooklyn in its accent. “You just get here?”

“I just woke up.”

“Yeah, but did you just get here?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Thought so. Legs ain’t working too well for you, are they? Damn clatter woke me up.”

“I’m sorry.”

There was a laugh, a scratchy, desperate-sounding thing. “Don’t be. Can’t be helped. Your strength will come back, but whatever they use on us to get us in here—it takes a while to wear off. Give it a few hours; you’ll be fine.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

Another laugh. “I’m not the one to be asking. They ain’t either. You’ll see. Like talking to a brick wall. Which, heh, I guess both of us are doing right now.”

“Why are we here?”

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t know at all?”

“Got theories.” 31

“Tell me.”

“Maybe later. Get down now. I can hear them coming. Get down and shut up.”

“What? Who’s coming? Miguel.”

There was no reply. Aaron slid down the wall and huddled in the sheets spread out on the bed. They were the same white as his pajamas. He heard muffled sounds through the door, and could make out the intonation of Miguel’s voice. Miguel seemed to be singing, but there was a nasty, mocking edge to it. The other muffled voice was low, but feminine. The muffled voices went on for a short while, and then there was a slam, followed by footsteps making their way to Aaron’s door. As the footsteps grew closer, he could picture the heavy boots behind each footfall. His heart had begun to beat at an incredible pace, and the hands holding the sheets up to his chin were wet with perspiration.

The door to the room swung open. A large man stood in the doorway, wearing an androgynous silver facemask, the sculpted lips open in an approximation of a breathless

50s starlet. The rest of the man’s attire was nowhere near as striking. He had on workman’s boots, khaki pants, and a khaki shirt that opened on a sleeveless undershirt, straining over the considerable paunch underneath. He was breathing heavily, as if he had had to climb many flights of stairs. The man wasn’t armed, and despite the matching khaki, he didn’t seem to be wearing any kind of uniform. He reached for a black box strapped to his belt and pressed a button on its surface. Out of an opening in the mask’s sculpted lips came words. A woman’s voice. A recording, Aaron realized.

“Welcome,” spoke the recording. “You are guest no. 8057. You may think of yourself as your original name if you like, but this is how you will be referred to by the 32

caregivers of this facility. The man before you is a caregiver. He is here to care for you.

You will come to trust him and know that he has your best interests at heart. He loves you. Never forget that you are loved. Your every desire will be catered to. But we must insist that you do not leave. You made the decision not to leave long ago.”

“I never agreed to this,” Aaron shouted, though he did not move from the bed.

“I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“If you want to know what you’ve done to deserve this, the answer is simple. You have done nothing wrong. This is what you have been telling us you wanted from the very beginning of you. We sincerely hope you enjoy your stay.”

The recording ended with a slight whirring sound. The caregiver reached into a pocket and handed Aaron a thin, black rectangle. Aaron asked what it was. The caregiver remained silent, his outstretched arm firm.

Aaron took the rectangle and saw that it was a television remote. The caregiver turned, but stopped at the door. He bent, picked up the open food tray, and handed it to

Aaron. Aaron took the tray; the caregiver left. The door closed slowly until clicking shut.

The caregiver’s back had been turned to him and yet Aaron had tried nothing. He would make a move when he had figured out what was going on. Anyway, his legs were still weak. To try something now would have been foolish. Still, he thought his chances were all right, at least against the caregiver. The caregiver wasn’t armed, and though he was a big, burly guy, Aaron thought that he could take him. He would use the tray as a weapon.

He turned the remote over in his hands, then pointed it at the television and clicked. The television screen flickered to life. 33

His favorite show was on.

___

He dozed off halfway through a daytime court show. When he awoke, he could make out stars in the sky through the square window above the bed. He crawled onto his knees and stood up and craned his neck so that his mouth was closest to the opening. His legs were stronger now and he no longer felt like he’d end up sprawled on the floor if he took his hands off of the wall—but he supported himself just the same. He called for

Miguel.

There was no answer. He grew impatient and called again.

A gust of wind blew against the very top of his forehead and rustled his hair. He smelled something foul. Chemicals, but he couldn’t tell what. He vaguely wondered where his new home was exactly. He heard a voice in the wind and called Miguel’s name again.

“I’m here,” a faint voice said hurriedly. “What do you want?”

“I just woke up,” Aaron said. “I dozed off sometime in the middle of the day. Do you know what time it is?”

“No clocks in here, man. Turn on your TV and find a news channel.”

“No, that’s okay. I wanted to talk to you.”

“Who else you got to talk to? Won’t get much out of the caregivers.”

“I wanted to know. . . . Who was in my—my cell before me?”

“Why?”

“Just tell me.” 34

“Some lady. I think her name was Mariana. She seemed nice. Not much for conversation. Spent most of her days and nights crying.”

“What happened to her?”

“What do you mean what happened to her? She’s not here anymore, that’s what happened to her.”

“Where did she go? They treat us like guests. They say we can’t leave. Did she try to escape? Did they—”

“You ask too many questions, man. I don’t know any of this stuff. One day she was here, one day she wasn’t.”

“Okay. You said you had theories . . . So what’s your take? Why are we here?”

“Yeah, and thinking about it will drive you crazy. It ain’t good for the heart, mind, or soul, the questions you’re asking.”

“What do you remember about things before you were brought here?”

“Everything, man. I ain’t no nutcase.”

“No, right before you got here. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“It’s been a while. Hell of a long time.”

“You have to remember.”

“Yeah. I remember. I remember . . . a man. A man in black. He held a thin, silver rod. His face was covered . . . That’s it.”

“I don’t even remember that much. Tell me your theories. You’ve been here so long, you’ve got to have some ideas.”

“Let me ask you a question.”

“Okay.” 35

“Humor me.”

“Okay.”

“What do you remember about before you got here?”

“I don’t remember a man in black with a silver rod.”

“No, man. The last real thing. But not just—taking a dump or going to the

Laundromat. Something significant. A conflict, something that stayed with you. And how you reacted to it.”

“You mean something that could land me in here? In a prison?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Aaron had a feeling like something hot was wriggling underneath the skin of his face. His eyes started to water, his head became light. “I’ve never done anything wrong,” he said. “I don’t break the law. Not even when I was a kid. I’m a—an upstanding citizen.

I don’t make anybody’s day worse than it already is. I don’t step on any backs; I don’t throw anyone under the bus. I’m a good person.”

“I believe you.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never done anything wrong. I shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s okay, man. Hey, you got anyone outside, in the real world?”

“What?”

“A girl? Family?”

“No girl. My mom’s still kicking, but I don’t see her that much.”

“Yeah. Me neither. I had a wife, way back. I wanted kids, but she—she said she didn’t want kids with me. She said I didn’t try hard, that I was content with the way 36

things were. And I guess she was right, because when they got me, I was working the same shitty assembly line job I was when we were dating.”

“You don’t have anyone else?”

“Nope. Not anyone that would really miss me, anyhow.”

“I think—I think I have people.”

“Yeah? Well maybe you’ll get out of here one day.”

“Tell me your theory, Miguel. Why did you want me to tell you something significant, a conflict?”

“I don’t know, man. It could be nothing but it’s all I’ve got. Mariana and me were the same in a lot of ways. She didn’t really have anyone, just a guy she saw, on-and-off.

She worked as a waitress at diner. Nights, mostly. I don’t know what she did with her days, but I got the impression it wasn’t much. She really liked this guy, though. She cried about him a lot. Not being away from him, but—but not being able to tell him how she felt before they were separated by this damn place. I realized—I realized that neither of us really tried—you know, in life. I let my wife walk out. I stopped calling after the first week or so. Figured she wanted it that way, but . . . Who knows? Maybe we’re here because we never make that move. We never go for what we want—not just with the people we love—I didn’t get a raise for five years, man. I never thought a thing of it, long as I could cover the lights and the cable bill . . .”

Aaron didn’t say anything back. The water in his eyes was now trickling down his face. He had slid down the wall and was holding his knees to his chest.

“It ain’t so bad, though,” Miguel said, his voice barely registering. “Once you get used to it. You’ll see.” 37

The slot in the bottom of the door to Aaron’s cell opened and a covered tray was shoved through. “Enjoy your dinner,” said the same recorded woman’s voice through the steel. Aaron spoke to Miguel no more that night.

___

Aaron had trouble falling asleep. Dinner was a curry, the best he’d ever tasted.

Curries usually made it impossible for him to sleep, but that wasn’t it tonight. His stomach was fine. He had moved beyond nausea.

He couldn’t sleep because he couldn’t stop thinking about the last time he’d seen

Dante and Sara, at the comic store. He and Dante were working late, talking about cable shows and that week’s books, and Sara stopped by to spend the last hour of their shift with them. Aaron had started the close out process early so they could all leave a little earlier, and while Aaron counted coins, Dante chased Sara through the racks of comics and toys. Neither of them ran very fast, but they carried on as if it was the most charged, exhilarating moment of their lives. It was as if Aaron had disappeared, or had never been there at all. He watched them run, listened to them laugh, and knew he wasn’t a part of it.

They both liked him. And he loved them both. Theirs was a strong friendship. But there were some things he had never been a part of, and he knew he would never be part of them. To attempt would be to destroy everything. He knew that.

He watched Dante run, playfully grasp at the ass of Sara’s jeans, and pull her in.

Dante had long, strong arms and they maintained a constant warmth that he was sometimes teased for, other times not. Every time he clapped Aaron’s back or hung an arm over his shoulder, Aaron felt as if he were being simultaneously crushed and kissed by little embers. Those moments took on a rhythm. Anticipating the next beat could be 38

maddening, and too many nights he went home unfilled, an unfinished melody, perhaps great, but who would ever know?

He passed his gaze onto Sara. His eyes lingered on the small curves under her breasts and the vase-like outline of each of her thighs. He did his best to suppress the hatred he felt towards her in that moment. He knew that he loved her. She was his oldest friend. But he hated her then, and he wished he was anywhere but there, witnessing the very thing he knew he could never have.

Had that moment been significant? Would Miguel have provided any valuable insight had he shared it? He couldn’t know. He just knew what he had felt then was a frustration he felt all his life. Witnessing, never taking part, never making the attempt. He knew how the world worked, and he knew his place in it.

It was late. He didn’t know how late, but it had been hours since he’d talked to

Miguel. He vaguely wondered if the cells were bugged. He imagined so. But what of anything he or Miguel said to each other could possibly be of interest to anyone?

He thought of Mariana, the woman who had been in the cell before him. Had she escaped? Had she been executed? Had she stood up and left? He thought to check the door handle, but he was too tired to move. Too comfortable. He we would try in the morning.

It was a wonderful room. He couldn’t deny it. Much cleaner than his apartment— any apartment he’d lived in. He was nearly thirty, working a job that paid the same as any he’d had in high school. As he drifted towards sleep, he had a strange thought—that perhaps he’d caught a break. The thought amused him, and he smiled. 39

The door to his cell opened and his smile faded. It swung slowly, and a thick, hairy hand stopped it before it touched the wall. Aaron pretended to be asleep. He heard heavy boots cross the floor of the cell, and then felt a weight on the bed next to him. The mattress sagged. The hand stroked the back of his head, the skin of his cheek. This time, the voice was not a woman’s, nor was it a recording. The voice sang:

Hush little baby, don’t say a word

Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird

And if that mockingbird won’t sing

Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring

When the song was finished, the weight lifted from the bed, and the boots once more crossed the room and softly shut the door.

Aaron’s eyes, once clenched tight in the façade of sleep, were now shut loosely.

His whole body relaxed; it seemed as if he were sinking into the mattress. The last things he remembered before he fell asleep were the warmth of the bed, the tenderness of the hand that had stroked his face, the feeling of his knees against his chest.

When he woke, he went to the door. He brought his hand to the handle. It was cold and its edges were sharp. He squeezed it gently, and it turned in his grasp. The door clicked and came loose, swinging forward along an arc. He stepped back and it swung past him. The air in the hall was cold. He stepped back until the backs of his knees were against the bed. He sat down. After a while, he leaned back until his head rested against the wall. A man dressed in the same garb as the caregiver from the day before walked past the open doorway. The caregiver stopped and looked in, then went on. Aaron had looked at him and felt almost guilty. He moved onto his side and reached for the remote. 40

Boil

But when I held that 9, all I could see was my mama’s eyes

- 2Pac

Boyle opens his eyes to the sounds of a six-year-old crying, a little dog yapping. It’s become more common than he’d like. Deshaun comes home from school in tears and

Mari abandons her book, or chopping vegetables, or one of her damn telenovelas, and starts comforting, soothing the boy, as if it’s all alright, as if it’s okay her son is a little pushover. And through it all, Buddha, Mari’s rodent of a terrier, just keeps yapping, jumping at the both of them until it sees Boyle’s leg.

Boyle groans, rolls over, puts his feet on the cold floor and stands. It’s 3:30. He knows that Mari has been up all day. He vaguely remembers her telling him to get up when the red numbers on the clock face read 10:05. He remembers telling her to go away and getting a pillow to the back of the head for it—and not in a nice, playful way. It didn’t hurt or anything, but he knew she threw it angry. That had been the start to his morning, and he’d decided then he was going to sleep through the rest of it. Besides, sleeping means he’s not thinking—aside from dreams—and a stop to thinking is something he prays for most days. 41

He grabs the pair of jeans slung over the back of a rocking chair in the corner of the bedroom, pulls them on over his skinny white legs, goes out into the hallway. The kid’s still crying, but Buddha’s shut up.

“What’s wrong with you, Champ?” he says, entering the tiny foyer-slash-living room of Mari’s ground floor apartment. Mari cuts him a look but he ignores it, just smiles and says, “You’ve got to chin up. You ain’t a four-year-old anymore. Time to learn how to defend yourself. What happened this time?”

“Tommy took my new Transformer and said it’s his now,” Deshaun says, stroking

Buddha’s fur, holding onto the dog as it squirms toward Boyle. Boyle grimaces. He was the same as a kid, always going to his mother with his problems, not learning to deal with shit on his own until he was older, much older. The kid looks up to him, and not only because he’s the only man in the kid’s life. If Mari lets him, he’s confident he can teach the kid a thing or two.

“I’m going to call the school,” Mari says, standing. She sighs as if she’s dealing with a crying son and the school’s uselessness for the hundredth time. The truth isn’t so far off. “This is the exact kind of shit I’ve been talking about. The nuns at St. Mary’s would have this shit nipped in the bud already.”

“You can’t keep babying the kid,” Boyle says. “Do you want him to always be depending on you?” He reaches for her arm but she snaps it away.

“He’s six, Sean,” she says, looking him in the eye like he should know better than to question her, and to grab at her when she’s made up her mind. “I’m calling the principal.” 42

Mari steps into the kitchen, takes the phone off the wall. Deshaun reaches for her as she leaves, like a baby grasping at the hem of its mother’s dress. Boyle hears Mari say,

“Hello, I’d like to speak to Principal O’Keefe,” in the other room and he decides he’s had it. Only been up five minutes, and he’s already had it, with her, Deshaun’s crying, the dog, this whole goddamn day. He steps into the kitchen, Buddha at his heel. He’s a word away from furious as he pushes down on the receiver. Mari stops herself midway through an explanation of her expectations as a school parent and the school’s responsibility to protect her baby, everyone’s babies, and looks at him. Just looks at him. There’s no surprise or anger on her face, not even disappointment. “Deshaun is my child,” she says.

“I’m the one who decides how to deal with his problems. Not you. You’re not his father, not the way you act. I’m not saying I want to know what you do, but—I don’t know what you do. And that’s fine. You’re a big help, you know that. But Milton was a cook. There wasn’t any mystery . . .” She sighs, looks away, swipes at her nose. “You’ve probably got somewhere to be, don’t you?”

“I do,” Boyle says, his voice drawn low to mask what there’s no point in masking, not now. All it takes these days is the word ‘father,’ a mention of Milton. “I might be back tonight, late. And I’ll be going out again after, back for good even later.”

“Whatever,” Mari says. She’s holding her elbows with her hands and she’s bent over a bit like she’s queasy. She used to try keeping him around when he’d leave right after waking up, but she hasn’t in a long time—not in months, not since he started interfering with how she’s raising Deshaun. But he’s been staying with her for almost half a year and he can’t sit by as she turns a good kid into a sissy. 43

He goes around back of the house and pushes in the basement door that jams so bad there’s no point in locking it. He goes to the stairs leading up into Mari’s home and the apartment above, and checks underneath, where Mari would never look. He’d be out on the street with his clothes strewn across the lawn if Mari ever saw the case, but he couldn’t hide it with Dan. Dan’s living with his sister and his sister knows what to look for.

Boyle opens the case and counts them again. One, two, three, four. Four jet black

Glock 9mm’s, each with its own chrome silencer. Silencers are shit for accuracy, but if

Tray doesn’t know that, Boyle sees no need to tell him. He runs his fingers over the guns, then shuts the briefcase, latches it, shoves it back beneath the cobwebs and shadow. He’s done this same routine each day for the last week, sometimes four, five times a day.

Three thousand for four pistols; he can’t help but grin. One of the biggest single transactions he’ll have made in five years, and on top of that his buyer this time isn’t some wannabe who listened to too much hip hop as a teenager and has assembled a crew of likeminded idiots—Tray is the real deal, not like any of his and Dan’s regulars. Dan’s cousin Mike tried to double-cross Tray a few years back and to show for it he has a patch of scar tissue where most people have a right ear.

Outside, Boyle starts towards The Dive in Uphams Corner, the other side of

Dorchester. It’s cold for October, even late October, and he wishes he’d worn a jacket over his hoody. The bus will take him within a block or two of The Dive; Dan will be there, waiting outside the bar with his spare piece, like Boyle asked. They have a sale a half hour from now in a motel across the street from The Dive. Nothing big—real minor, 44

actually—just an ammo sale—but it’ll be good for him to start the evening with business instead of alcohol.

Mari’s words run through his mind as he walks toward the bus stop on Chestnut.

He hears her voice first, but it’s not long before her voice transforms into something so unlike Mari that he’s infuriated all over again. Why can’t he get her right? Why does he always build her up into something so formidable? And what will be the thing that finally impresses her? He cuts through the alley that runs behind the convenience store on

Norfolk Ave, hops over a turned over garbage can. The three thousand will help towards getting Deshaun into St. Mary’s, the private school in Roxbury that Mari’s been eyeing for the kid. But it won’t be enough, not even with all Mari’s saved, and of course she might not take it. She lets him cover her share of the rent on months she comes up short, but she knows his money’s dirty. She never fails to make a face when he buys Deshaun a gift, like the toy racecar track he bought the kid after selling a pair of Austrian machine pistols to that sinewy meth head banger in Lowell. She’d known Boyle had been gone all day, that he’d returned with a sandwich bag full of wrinkled fifties and an enormous, rattling box that had him and her son up past midnight.

He sees the bus stop across Chestnut, cuts between the line of traffic in the right lane. Mari wants Deshaun to get into that school, wants it so bad it keeps her up at night, grinding her teeth like he tells her not to or she’ll end up with lockjaw like his great uncle

Charley. She has a cousin who teaches at St. Mary’s. She knows for a fact there are openings for the next semester, but they’re filling up fast. Considering the situation, he can’t see how she wouldn’t take the money. And if she does, he’ll tell her, make her understand. 45

There’s a woman at the bus stop, face like a weathered boot, holding enough pink plastic bags that her head looks perched on top of them. She gives him a look, he gives her a sneer. Even if Mari does accept his money, he doesn’t know—he can’t know—how far it will go toward making up for the stupid shit he keeps pulling. He thinks of how he keeps overstepping things with Mari and Deshaun, why the need to overstep is always so urgent, so overpowering. How hard would it be to swallow his pride, his anger, the conviction that he’s right, that he knows best, and be the man she needs? That one he knows the answer to. He’s powerless in the face of his rages, his depression.

He spits his questions and self-loathing out on the sidewalk. The bag woman wrinkles her nose and takes a step back. Mari always does this to him. Makes him doubt himself. Brings up Milton, Deshaun’s father, a muscly black guy, he’s seen the photos.

Milton’s been gone a while but he’s still a presence, one that never fails to make Boyle feel little, a drifter through Mari and Deshaun’s lives. Boyle loves Mari, he knows he does. He’ll love her and be there for her until she kicks him to the curb. He’s got nobody else. His own sister won’t talk to him, and mom has been dead over a decade. Sure, there’s Kate, but the way they left things a few weeks back . . .

He looks up the street and sees the bus stopped at the light. It’s a long light, takes a full minute to change. His gut begins to slide down, down, like it always does when he can’t stop going over things with Mari, all the shit they put each other through. He can’t muster any rage. He fucked up. He is a fuck up. He’s so damn lucky to have Mari and he worries—no, he knows full well he won’t be having her much longer. Milton will come back from wherever the fuck he went off to, the happy family will be reunited. Milton will even marry her. And Boyle will be left alone, more so than he already is. There will 46

be no warm body to touch in the middle of the night when sleep won’t come. No one to talk to, to vent to, to help him go through all the shit he has to deal with, day in, day out, and what the hell does Mari even know about that anyway? Sure, she’s a single mom, but has she ever had her life threatened? Has she ever had to duck cops, sell a .38 to a smacked out banger? No, she’s got a safe, comfortable little life in comparison. She feeds off him, off what he provides, which for the last few months has been more than half of their mock household. Feeds off him, doesn’t appreciate him. Nobody does. Not her, not

Dan.

Fuck her, Boyle thinks so he doesn’t have to think the thoughts that come next.

Fuck Mari, her asshole of a baby father, her shitty little apartment, the way she bites her bottom lip when she’s oh so close to coming. And fuck it for never happening. Fuck fuck fuck the way she fakes it.

He’s snarling as the bus pulls to a clunky, hissing stop in front of him and the bag woman. He catches his reflection in the glass of the door before it swings open, and his palms get clammy. He’s not usually this pissed off before a sale; he’s got to get himself together before tonight. He takes a deep breath and steps onboard.

___

The motel room smells like old sheets and Windex. The owner lets Boyle and

Dan use the place in return for a nice little discount, but he doesn’t promise a nice room.

Boyle forces a smile as the buyer this afternoon, a hulk of a guy named Peter Sanchez, weighs the two boxes of ammunition in his hands, opens the lids, takes out a cartridge of each and, boxes squeezed in his armpit, holds the rounds between thumb and forefinger 47

like he’s some kind of connoisseur. Sanchez cracks a grin. “.357 is the kind of ammunition Clint Eastwood uses, right? In Dirty Harry?”

“No, .44,” Boyle says, sighing, shifting on his heels.

“Magnum, though,” Dan says through a mouthful of French fries. He’s sitting by the windowsill, peering through the blinds although he doesn’t need to. There’s half a chicken cutlet sub in newspaper in his lap, but he lets it sit. “There was that sequel.

Magnum Force. Remember it?”

Boyle scowls. Dan is always dragging out sales with asinine conversation to mask how nervous he gets, even with a regular like Sanchez. Although it’s good to be a little nervous in their line of work, most times it just serves to put Boyle on edge.

“You’ve got a .357 snub,” Boyle says to Sanchez, cutting in before Peter and Dan can go on about movies. “I mean that’s the piece you’re re-upping for, right? The .357 I sold you last month?” Peter nods and closes the cartridges in his fist. “I’m telling you, and this ought to tell you the kind of guy I am—the Special’s cheaper. They’re nearly identical rounds, the .357 and .38 Special. No need to waste your time on the .357. I mean I’ll sell it to you, no problem. This is just my recommendation, as a businessman.

The Special will give you a lower muzzle flash, recoil, even less of a bang.”

“Oh yeah?” Peter hands back the case of .357 and drops the free cartridge in

Boyle’s palm. “Okay then. .38 Special it is. How much for two boxes?”

“Fifty,” Dan says. There’s tomato in his teeth.

“Aw, don’t you guys like me?”

“It’s not sixty because we like you,” Dan says. He laughs and Sanchez follows suit. 48

“Asshole,” Sanchez says, smiling, and he starts to dig for his wallet.

After the boxes of .357 and .38 Special are filed away in the trunk of Dan’s Saab, they head over to The Dive. Boyle buys a round and when he looks for Dan, he finds his partner at a booth by the pool tables. Dan’s terrible at the game, but always says that if he watches others play there’s no way he won’t absorb their skill. To him that whole section of the bar is a kind of champion’s sauna.

Boyle eases into the leather cushion like he’s had a hell of a day, like he wants for nothing like he wants the sun to set on the whole damned thing. And he does. If the day’s over and he’s on the other side of it, then he’ll have succeeded. Not just him—Dan, too.

That’s something that’s been eating at him today. Sure, he’s got his own issues, but

Dan—he’s got a penchant for being careless, and more than a little annoying. If he’s to rub someone the wrong way—someone other than Boyle—then who’s to say how their evening will unfurl?

Boyle brings the beer to his lips and chugs half of it, sets the glass down hard. To his right he sees a wrinkled paper bag on the bench, all crunched up at the top. He peers inside, sees the scuffed handle, the chamber’s glint, then looks to Dan. Dan’s watching a group of men and one woman playing pool, but as it’s the woman’s turn, he’s not paying attention so much to the game as he is her ass bent over a few feet from his elbow.

“Thank you kindly,” Boyle says, attempting a grin.

Dan looks over. “Could’ve just given it to you tonight in the car, guy.”

Boyle bends forward and slides the piece into his waistband. The bar is dark and everyone’s either looking into their drinks or watching the pool game, but The Dive isn’t the kind of place where the patrons would bat an eye at the sight of gun. “I had the 49

feeling Mari would be on my case today,” he says. “That’d she go and set me off. I always feel more like myself with something in my waistband.”

Dan laughs. “What gave you the idea Mari’d set you off today? . . . Every other day?” He waits for a reaction but doesn’t get one. He switches gears, scowls a bit. “What happened to your .44, anyways?”

“Christopher, over in Stoughton. He was in town, said he’d give me 350 for it.”

“This before we set the meet with Tray?”

“What do you think? Sold it to Chris before Tray even put the word out.”

Dan smiles, shakes his head. “Christ, Sean. Tray. Fuckin’ Tray . . . Big time.

Well, for us.”

“Yeah, that’s what you keep saying,” Boyle says coolly. He leans into his elbows and scans the barroom. The bartender, a sour-faced old man named Arnold, hasn’t moved from his spot at the bar where he’s wiping down glasses in the same half-assed way

Boyle does, the way that never fails to set off Mari. Boyle wonders if it does the same to

Arnold’s wife, if he has one at home. Two or three regulars are stooped over their glasses at the bar, and even from behind Boyle can picture their sad, ruined faces. The group at the pool table is still at it, with two solids and four stripes left on the green. The woman in the group is gorgeous, doesn’t look a thing like Mari. Whereas Mari’s short and curvy with hair like black satin, this woman’s tall, thin, blonde. She reminds him of that girl with a laugh like an air horn who sat in front of him in tenth grade, his last year of high school, remembers how much he wanted her. He’d thought of asking her out, but when the time came, when she was at her locker and there wasn’t a soul around but him and 50

her, he chickened out, walked right by her and got a textbook from his locker he didn’t need.

Boyle looks back to Dan. Dan’s looking at the blonde, sipping his beer, trying real hard not to be obvious. Finesse has always been a problem for him. Lucky the girl’s focused on the game and not her admirers. Boyle smirks and brings his beer to his lips.

It was Dan who got Boyle started in the business. Dan has a cousin in the trade down in Baltimore, who introduced him to the underground market. By the time Boyle got involved, Dan had pieced together a network of stores in Vermont, New Hampshire, and central Massachusetts that wanted to tap into the street and were willing to claim a crate or two of semi-automatics as stolen each quarter. Dan liked the money, the outlaw life, the opportunity to talk guns, match the piece to the customer, but he was less partial to other aspects of the trade. He didn’t like dealing with clients he didn’t already know from high school or the neighborhood, didn’t like worrying whether or not the man buying from him would pay and leave, or try sticking him. It’s the reason he brought

Boyle along those first few sales.

For his part, Boyle liked the distraction. When he was watching Dan’s back he didn’t have to think about his sick mother or his temper, and afterward, once the sale had gone down without a hitch, he’d feel high, larger than life. He discovered then that he liked guns, too, but in a different way than Dan. One squeeze of the trigger, one bullet.

Five years later, he’s still struck by the simplicity, how a gun makes sense to him in a way his anger never has. The money’s good, too, of course. Before he partnered up with

Dan, he was lucky if he could make rent and afford Chinese in the same week. 51

Boyle slides his finger over the rim of his glass until the entire ring is smooth and wet, then he tosses his head back and downs the last of it. Dan has been going on about his sister, how she and her husband are threatening to throw him out unless he starts paying rent. “It’s not Diane carrying on that gets me, though,” he says. “It’s that cocksucker Robert. Who’s he to tell me what I ought to do? He acts like he’s hot shit because he’s got this accounting job downtown. Like he’s better than me, ‘cause I’ve got a hard life. You know, real life concerns.” Boyle nods, gives a grunt. Dan ducks in close to Boyle and says through his teeth, “Don’t get pissed at me for saying, but . . . he’s a black guy, you know. Rubs me the wrong way, him getting on my case like he does . . .

And in front of my nephew, too . . .”

Boyle doesn’t listen, not much. He looks again at the blonde at the pool table, stares down her tank top as she leans over the table to make a shot she can hardly reach.

He’d like for Dan to shut up, but if Dan needs to get it all out now, then he supposes that’s for the best. He thinks that he shouldn’t get too drunk considering the meet. But

Dan keeps talking . . .

___

By the time Boyle and Dan get outside, the sky is all but black, the streetlamps are on. The two of them stand in the alley behind The Dive and since the bathroom inside is out of order, they piss along the back wall. Both of them are drunk, but not drunk enough not to remember to put a good six feet between them.

Boyle looks over at Dan when he’s done, sees that his partner hasn’t finished, or even started. He reaches underneath his jacket into his waistband, removes the .38, aims it at Dan. “Can’t make water under pressure?” he says, laughing. He can’t help but find it 52

funny. The gun in his hand, the meet with Tray later that night. Just how big a chance is there they’ll both be dead by morning?

Dan looks over. “Put that thing away. Give me a second, that’s all.” Boyle moves the gun down so that the barrel lines up with Dan’s cock. “Okay, you’re really pushing it.

Put that fucking thing away. It’s my own piece. I’m just lending it.”

“Use it or lose it,” Boyle says, and he can hardly hold on to the piece for the laughter.

“You’re jealous. I don’t blame you, not after seeing that crooked little stick insect you got down there. Now put my fucking spare away.”

Boyle keeps the gun where it is. “Say that again.” He’s not laughing anymore.

“Come on.” It’s plain to Boyle that all the mirth—there’s a word he had to dig for—Dan had in his voice a few seconds before has drained right on out. But Boyle, he’s fine, still has that nasty grin on his face.

“Say it again.”

“Are you going to let me take a piss or not?”

Boyle drops the revolver an inch and fires. The bullet smacks off the pavement somewhere on the other side of Dan.

Dan yelps, falls onto his ass, hands grabbing at air, junk flailing.

Boyle can’t help it. He laughs so hard he pukes.

___

He finds his cell in his jacket pocket; the meet’s in two hours. Before they split ways, Dan said he’d pick Boyle up from Mari’s at 10:30. But Boyle doesn’t make his way to Mari’s, doesn’t even get on the bus. He has a hazy, ill-formed thought that a walk 53

in the cold is the only thing for his drunk, and goes with it. He doesn’t know why he pulled the gun on Dan. All he knows is that in that moment, he had to. He couldn’t have told that wild, manic part of himself no if he’d wanted to. He better smarten up before the meet with Tray. The walk will help.

He’s stumbling in a direction predetermined before he realizes it. He doesn’t realize until he’s outside her house, that rundown, marked up single-family six blocks from The Dive, the same place where they played house as children, where they made a loving home out of sheets and couch cushions, clung to each other’s fingers, pretended they were the happiest couple in a neighborhood of knitted rug patterns and the feet of her parents.

“Kate,” he calls. There’s a light on in her window, but he’d have called her name anyway. “Kate!”

He sees a shadow disturbed, up on the second floor. A body moves in front of the window. He can see the glint of her grandmother’s locket in the light coming from the streetlamp keeping him upright.

“Kate!”

The window shade descends all the way down to the sill. The shadow behind disappears. Boyle feels himself begin to sink, as if a wave is crushing down on him, pushing him into the cement, the earth below.

“Kate!”

___

It doesn’t take much more than an hour for Boyle to sober up. He’s still buzzed, but his head’s no longer spinning. All he needed was a good walk to clear his head, allow 54

the liver to do its job. His mother would laugh and say the Irishman was built for processing alcohol whenever he’d come home drunk as a kid, before he started drinking with a different crowd and he found himself without a home. The same was true of his grandfather, all his uncles. Dan, too. Boyle wouldn’t even think of getting into a car with him any time that night if it weren’t.

He’s standing outside of Mari’s. He wants to go in, see her, Deshaun. Maybe he and Mari can fool around a bit if the kid’s asleep, but he knows how it’ll be. Mari will still be all cold from the afternoon, Deshaun will be in bed. He won’t be welcomed except by Buddha’s yapping. But he remembers that Mari’s is where he told Dan to pick him up and heads inside.

“I think Deshaun is awake in his room,” Mari says when he walks in. She’s sitting on the couch, a Psych textbook in her lap, a recorded telenovela playing on the TV, the volume so low it might as well be on mute. “Can you go check on him? I’ve got to finish this chapter.”

“Sure,” Boyle says. “I’ll go check on him.” But he stands there a second, looking at her, the way she’s tucked her legs under her ass, that beautiful ass, what he chased in that nightclub a year ago. He had managed to impress her against all odds with swagger that came so suddenly, so inexplicably, that he would have been too confused to run game if not for the Bacardi, the ecstasy.

Mari catches him looking at her, rolls her eyes, throws a couch pillow in his direction. Her throw is half-assed; the pillow doesn’t make it past the far end of the couch. “Go,” she says, and Boyle goes into the hallway, keeping his back from her as he passes through the arch. In the hallway he sees light coming from under Deshaun’s door 55

and smiles. He pushes open the door, but Deshaun must have heard his footsteps for the kid’s sprawled out on the bed, on his stomach, head in his arms, breathing heavily, his action figures and stuffed animals scattered across the wood flooring in some intricate design. There’s a bright orange Reese’s wrapper crumpled in his fist, a bit of smeared chocolate on his pillow. Buddha is standing amidst the toys and for once the dog doesn’t bark, just runs to Boyle, circles his legs.

“You’re not fooling nobody, Champ,” Boyle says, shutting the door. He sits on the edge of the bed, picks up Buddha, and sets the dog down next to Deshaun. “Your mom sent me in here to make sure you go to sleep.”

“I’m sleeping,” Deshaun says, but he shows his hand in how hard he makes himself mumble.

“Where’d you get the chocolate? You can’t wait until Halloween?”

Deshaun rolls onto his back, smiles, lets the wrapper fall to the floor.

“Come on, sit up,” Boyle says. “I’ve got something to show you.” Deshaun pushes himself onto his knees and stumbles across the bed before falling against Boyle’s shoulder. “You have to answer a question first, though.”

“Okay,” Deshaun says, wiping his eyes. He yawns, a real one, stretching his arms above his head, as far as they’ll reach. The kid is so small it breaks Boyle’s heart, but he’s got a lesson to impart.

“Who’s the strongest there is?”

Deshaun giggles and he drives his finger into Boyle’s sternum. “You are.”

Boyle smiles, throws his arm over the kid’s shoulder. “And do you know what it is that makes me so strong?” 56

He reaches into his belt and takes out the .38. Deshaun reaches for it but Boyle smacks the kid’s hand away. “You know better than that,” Boyle says harshly. “You never touch this. What I want you to know is that I’m here and I’ll protect you.” Deshaun looks up at him, eyes wide. He looks like he does on Christmas or his birthday, like he’s just been opened up to some new experience, be it a toy, a special food, a relative he’s never met or doesn’t remember. “I’ll teach you to protect yourself. It’s something only I can teach.” Boyle slides the gun back into his waistband. “Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

___

“Dan will be here soon,” Boyle says to Mari, standing in the arch between the living room and the hallway.

“Are you sure Deshaun’s asleep? You were only in there a few minutes.”

“Yeah. He was up, but pretty tired. He’ll be asleep soon.”

“Where you headed with Dan?”

Boyle cracks a grin. “I thought you didn’t have an interest in any of what we do.”

“No, you’re right,” she says, turning back to the textbook in her lap.

“Just as long as I keep the refrigerator full, the lights on.”

A series of long beeps from a car horn disrupts the silence.

“Dan,” Boyle says. He doesn’t wait to see if Mari says anything, smiles or gives a wave. Outside, he slaps the hood of Dan’s piece of shit Saab and runs around back of the house, pushes in the cellar door, grabs the case from under the basement stairs, runs his fingers over the shining black metal. He smiles, nods, hops to his feet, and slams the case shut. The case feels good squeezed in his palm. Heavy. It will make things right—well, closer to right—for him, for Mari and Deshaun. He won’t screw things up. He can’t. 57

___

The two of them arrive at the location of the meet, a lot behind a line of boarded- up thrift stores and nail salons in Quincy, and as soon as they see the two black SUVs, brights on, five or six men standing in front, the look that passes between them says everything that neither of them can say. Things that should have been said ages ago, as soon as they made their first sale—before.

Dan slows to a stop a few yards from the SUVs and the two of them step out.

Boyle does his best not to tremble, sees Dan doing the same. His hand tightens around the handle of the case.

“Hold it,” the biggest of the six men says, putting up his hands. He turns to the the short guy standing next to him and barks, “Frisk them.”

The smaller man approaches them, one hand reached behind his back, the other held out in front of him, cautioning. Shit, Boyle thinks. None of his and Dan’s other buyers ever frisked them. None had ever been big enough for that kind of foresight. The small man frisks them, finds the revolver in Boyle’s waistband, the chrome-topped Sig

Sauer in Dan’s shoulder holster, the piece that he says makes him feel like a European superspy. Gun in each hand, the small man dangles them in the direction of the big man—Tray.

“You trying to flip things around here? On me?” Tray says, grinning, his legs spread the length of a baseball bat, hands somewhere behind his back. “The fat one, the one in that hideous jersey, you’re Mike Shaughnessy’s cousin, are you not? Fixing on earning yourself a mess of scars to call your own, are you, Dan? Or maybe I should have my boys eliminate you right now, send your whole bloodline a message.” Dan starts to 58

shake. Boyle makes as if he’s going to speak, but Tray puts up a hand. “No. No, you two are far too stupid for a play like that. Look at you . . . Not that making it would mean you’re any smarter . . . What I’m thinking is, the two of you simply assumed it was all right to bring your own heat.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Boyle says darkly. He’s trembling as bad as Dan, but not with fear—at least, not only.

“Give them back their guns when we’re done here,” Tray says to the short man.

“They’re just a couple of lowlife whiteboy goons who by pure, mad luck stumbled onto something I’m in the market for. Now . . .” He lowers his chin, stares at them over the brims of D & G shades. “If what I’m looking for is in the case you’re holding onto like it’s mommy’s skirt, would you care to remind me of the sum you and my man agreed upon?”

“Three thousand for all four,” Boyle says. He clamps his hands behind his back and squeezes. He feels like he did when he had the .38 trained on Dan’s cock, but he’s edgier. He thanks the lord his piece is in the short guy’s hand and not his.

Tray beckons to Boyle, but puts up his hand when Dan jerks forward. “Run some things through with me,” he says, turning back to Boyle. “I want to know about accuracy, range, anything that would affect the very specific job I have in mind for these.” He cracks a smile, but it’s not the same grin as before. It sets Boyle at ease, just a little.

“Who knows,” he says. “This could be the start of something here, you prove yourself.”

___

She’s sleeping with one leg free of the covers, a pillow between her knees. The window’s open halfway and the blinds sway slowly. It’s not as cold as it was before. 59

Boyle stands in the doorway of the bedroom watching the moonlight on her skin. He’s trembling again. He couldn’t stop the whole drive back. He was silent as Dan whooped and yelled, despite Dan’s cut only being a grand. It was Boyle who put the meet together, took the case off of a pair of sailors who’d broken into a shipping container, and he took the bigger cut without argument from Dan. He sat slumped in the passenger seat, holding

Dan’s revolver in his hands, watched the pink of his flushed skin swirl in and out of the contours of the gunmetal with every turn of the Saab, every jostle.

Boyle sets the paper bag with the two grand inside down on the dresser and goes into the hall. The air in the hallway is cold and he realizes he left the front door open. He shuts it, takes the revolver from his waistband, opens the closet, and drops it into one of his winter boots. He slips off his jacket and hangs it on the back of the closet door. He sees a glint of orange plastic inside a canvas bag, stuffed into back of the closet behind

Mari’s winter boots. He looks closer, sees it’s a bag of mixed candy Mari must have hidden there for Halloween. It’s in what, a week? He grabs a Reese’s cup and pops it into his mouth.

He drags his feet across the floor of the hallway, puts his hand on the wall for support. Outside, he and Dan had passed a joint back and forth. Sat on the hood of the

Saab, flicked the ashes into the gutter.

“Fuckin’ nigger thought he was such a big man,” Dan had said, breathing smoke down onto his belly. “But those Glocks were only worth two grand, maybe two and a half, tops. Not so smart, is he? Right? . . . Said not so smart, is he? Sean?”

Boyle snapped the lit joint onto the street, crushed it under his heel and started up the stairs to Mari’s. “Tray threw us a bone,” he said, turning back. “Look at us. We just 60

spent the last twenty minutes flipping out over an act of kindness.” The look Dan gives him is almost heartbroken. “But it’s all okay. Everything went down like it was supposed to. We’re richer men than we were yesterday. You can move out, I can help Mari with

Deshaun. That’s the best we can do, right? At this juncture.”

Boyle crawls into bed next to Mari, rests his hand on her hip, slides it underneath the pair of loose boxers hanging off of her waist, boxers he doesn’t recognize as his, that look old. She stirs, asks him what time it is.

“Late,” he whispers, “or early. Really early.”

“Just lay here,” she says, reaching her arm behind her, taking his and wrapping it around her waist. “Lay here with me. Okay?”

He squeezes her, digs his nose and mouth into the back of her neck. “You end up calling the principal again?” he says into her ear.

“Going in for a meeting with Deshaun and Tommy and Tommy’s parents next week.”

“That’s good,” he says. He kisses her neck. “Really good.” He reaches a hand to her shoulder and strokes the soft skin there. “Check the dresser when you wake up.”

“What’s there?”

Boyle smiles and gives a little laugh. “I’m not telling.”

Mari starts to snore after a few minutes. As he lays there, Mari in his arms, Boyle is struck by the feeling, almost a certainty, that he’ll be more in control from now on. He feels great, can’t imagine feeling otherwise. He imagines the smiles and laughter when

Mari sees the money in the morning. She’ll accept it from him and then he’ll tell her what he does and she’ll accept that, too. He’ll explain how smart he is about every sale, how 61

there’s nothing to worry about, how good the money will be for the three of them. He’ll promise to go straight soon as Deshaun gets into St. Mary’s and he has enough saved away to maybe look into night classes. They’ll kiss and it will be like it was when they were first dating, before he moved in, when every time they were together he’d joke and she’d laugh, squeeze his hand, lean her head on his shoulder, ask him how he can be so sweet to her when everything else about him is so rough. That’s the kind of guy he is— rough, but he looks out for those he loves.

He’s still surprised how at ease he feels, but he’s not going to question it. For the first time in a long while, he doesn’t want to be asleep, or drunk, or feel the hairs of his arms stand on end as he’s looking a jittery, wild-eyed buyer square in the face, telling the bastard to pay up, to stop dicking around. He just wants to lie there, next to Mari, awake.

He wants to think about how lucky he is and not feel bad about it. He wants to be awake for every single moment he gets to share with Mari, with Deshaun.

Still smiling, he rolls onto his back. The taste of the Reese’s is still on his lips. He thinks about going to get another, but decides against it. The cool autumn air drifts over his skin. It’s so nice.

62

Glimpses (a ghost story)

Theo only liked to brush with Colgate. He always brought a tube with him if he knew he’d be gone more than a day or two—he couldn’t bear the taste of anything else.

Michonne remembered that about him and tasted her own foul breath. She trudged over the frozen tundra in her snowshoes, dragging the sled that carried her dying husband. It was almost nighttime and she hadn’t yet found the white tree and she was nearly out of food. She saw that there were little cracks filled with red in the skin of her exposed wrists, and an ashen color had crept into the brown of her skin. She had left too quickly, too desperately. She cursed herself out loud for there was no one to hear her.

She went on like that until night, when she took the flashlight from her coat and held it in her teeth to light her way. But the circle of light it provided was small, and she missed a rocky protrusion in the frozen ground below her that caught under the sled and threw Theo to the snow.

She threw the reins to the ground and ran to Theo and knelt in the snow beside him. She hadn’t checked his vitals since the river; she hadn’t dared to, couldn’t bare the thought of it all being for nothing, of never finding an answer to the question that kept her trudging through the snow beneath the trees. But instinct took over once she was at his 63

side, and she tore off her gloves to check his pulse and feel for air under his nostrils. Yes, he was alive.

“Thank God,” she whispered. “We’re too close for you to die.”

___

The man named Lee had visited Theo’s hospital room six days before and

Michonne had been desperate and mad ever since.

He had told her his name at the door in a thick, graceful accent. “Please allow me privacy—with Theo,” he’d said.

Michonne asked how he knew her husband. She hadn’t thought anything then except that although this man was polite, he needed to introduce himself a little before she left a complete stranger alone with her comatose husband.

“Please,” he said, putting his hand on her arm in a way that she felt could soon become a grasp. “I have come all the way from Beijing. I only wish to be with Theo. A friend has told me his time is soon.”

“A friend? What friend?”

“Please,” he said. “Theo is very dear to me.”

Michonne maneuvered herself in front of the door. “I’m sorry, but Theo would have mentioned you.”

“Please,” he said sternly.

“We didn’t keep things from each other.”

But Lee had already pushed past her into the room. “I have come a long way,” he repeated. He looked at her like her mother used to when she had misbehaved, before her mother’s own time came. 64

Michonne was too tired to argue. She did not normally feel weak, and had not felt weak for most of the time Theo had been sick—on the contrary, she had been, and still was, angry—at God, at the world and fate and luck and whatever she could think to blame—but she felt weak then. She would be taking Theo home the next morning. She was taking him home to die. He hadn’t been able to speak to her in over a month.

Through the glass, she watched Lee with Theo. Lee was impeccably dressed, gold cufflinks, silk tie. She wondered what he did for a living, how he had heard of Theo’s situation and why he hadn’t been able to come until the end. Lee sat and clasped Theo’s hand, his pale skin contrasting with Theo’s deep brown, so full even in sickness. He brushed the skin of Theo’s cheek with the back of his hand and Lee’s whole body sagged as if a great weight had been put on it, or as if something inside him that had been filling him with strength had left. Although she couldn’t say why, Michonne felt then as if something tangible and heavy were slipping away from her as well. Lee spoke a few words to Theo in Mandarin. Theo had tried teaching her Mandarin when they were first dating, but she’d never been good at picking up languages.

After a minute or two at Theo’s side, Lee stood, smoothed the creases in his suit, inhaled, and walked to the door. He nodded curtly, thanked her, and left. Michonne was sure there were tears in his eyes when he looked at her. She went over to one of the chairs in the hallway and sat down, gripping the armrest, for she needed to. Lee had stroked

Theo’s cheek, held his hand.

Michonne tried to contact Theo’s university friends whom she’d met or remembered him mentioning, but the ones she reached hadn’t studied with Theo in

Beijing, and none of them knew any of the friends he’d made abroad. She went through 65

Theo’s address book, but none of the names were Lee’s, and all of the Chinese names were of people they both knew, right there in Prince George.

What had begun slipping away from her as she watched Lee with Theo was completely gone by the day she brought Theo home, and by then she could name it. Theo had kept a secret from her.

Lee loved her husband; that much was clear. Loved him enough to travel halfway across the world to see him in his final days, for that was what was left—days, a week or two at the most.

All that she and Theo shared had been founded on trust. “Honesty, above all else,” she had said to Theo on their third date, when she felt that what they had could become more. “Or else nothing we share will mean anything at all. Don’t you agree?”

After taking Theo home from the hospital, Michonne washed him, made sure he was fed, that the machines she paid for were doing their job. She sat with him, held his hand, fluffed his pillows, played his favorite Miles Davis albums, and fought at the fear growing in her belly. She felt as if the only thing she knew any longer was that there was something about Theo she didn’t know, that she’d never been told. She needed to know why; she needed to know what Lee meant to Theo, if in keeping Lee’s existence a secret—at the very least, unknown—he had been keeping something real from her, and himself.

So, a mere three days after Theo had been home, she found her father’s maps, stored away in the bedroom closet, where they’d been since he willed them to her, and found the one that pointed to the lonely white tree, the only place where she thought she might get an answer, even if it was from a ghost. 66

The tree was close. Within a hundred miles of where they lived in British

Columbia. Her father had moved to the States, to Florida, with his second wife, and he died there, in the sun near the sea. His second wife did not wish for him to be brought to the tree as his first wife had. She liked thinking of him the way she did. His second wife hadn’t believed in the white tree’s power before, but perhaps watching another husband die made it real. She had no desire for ghosts, and her wishes were respected. Theo hadn’t believed the stories of the tree either, and when he was healthy, there was no reason to push it.

It was tricky getting Theo into the Jeep, which they’d driven together since grad school, four years before. He was heavy although he’d thinned over six months of sickness, for he was always much taller than her. The coats, heavy clothing, and blankets she had wrapped him in did not help. There were so many layers he hardly fit into the back seat, and she struggled to bend his knees to his chest.

She held off on applying layers to herself until she drove to the place where the river forked, where she could drive no more for the frozen tundra. The Jeep had barely made it through the wilderness. She stepped out onto the snow by the frozen river and layered up, then put on the snowshoes. She was a triathlete and lived for demanding physical experiences—but she had not gone snowshoeing since she was a girl, since her mother had died.

She went to the back of the Jeep and dislodged the sled. Then, after checking his vitals as she had done once every two hours for the last week, she struggled with Theo until he was firmly attached the sled. 67

From the point where the river forked, she only had to go due north for fifty kilometers, over the hills, through all of the pine and firs, until she found the tree, where she’d watched her mother die and then, once the last spark of life had left her mother’s body, met her mother’s ghost.

She took out the compass. She kept it around her neck for of all the things she brought with her, it was the most important. After finding north—uphill just as she remembered—she slung the reins of the sled over her shoulders and started walking. At first, she found it difficult to find a pace—the appropriate level of power with which to move her legs, to bring each snowshoed foot down on the snow. Theo and the sled became like two forces pulling her back towards the river, towards the car and the road behind it. With each step, Michonne felt as if she were on the brink of toppling backwards down that first hill. A few times, she came close. Her legs screamed, and it felt as if the snow beneath her was working against her, sliding underfoot. But she was an athlete. Since she was fifteen years old and had tired of the love handles, she’d committed herself completely to eradicating every shred of weakness and fat from her body and mind. Exercise and diet became her religion. Until Theo, those things, and school, were all she cared about.

Once she reached the top of the hill, she knew enough about the snow and the strength of her own legs and the weight of Theo and the sled to move from that point on with steady, slowly increasing momentum. Each hill presented a new hurdle, with new inclines, new patches of powdery and slippery snow. But with each hill the difficulty lessened, Theo and the sled becoming like vestigial appendages hanging from her shoulders. 68

___

It was night, and Theo had fallen out of the sled. Michonne struggled with his massive, blanketed form, pulling, straining, trying to get him up from the snow and onto the sled. When she had moved him from the Jeep to the sled it had been simple. Gravity had been on her side, and she only had to make sure he did not slide out of the backseat too quickly, too hard. But the sled was higher than Theo was now, and even though it was only a difference of a few inches, moving Theo still seemed an impossible feat.

She had been trying to lift him from the side, but that had proved impossible. She would feel him begin to roll and she’d stop and let him fall back. She thought he might suffocate if he was on his face too long, and she didn’t trust herself to roll him onto his back quickly enough.

“Too many damn blankets,” she muttered, before moving to where his head lay nestled in wool. She lifted his head into her lap and drove her legs under him, so that her legs formed a kind of ramp. The sled was behind her, digging into her back. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders—he was completely covered, so she could not lift him under the arms—and pulled, digging her gloved fingers into the fabric surrounding him.

His torso came up on her, and she leaned, shifting him onto the sled, and pulled harder, channeling him through the ring she’d made with her arms. More and more of Theo came onto the sled, and finally his weight lifted entirely from her legs and abdomen.

“We’ll stop here for the night,” she said to him through heavy breaths. “Halfway there.”

She had more blankets in her pack, as well as matches and kerosene to make a fire. She arranged a circle of stones upon the frozen ground and filled it with some of the 69

firewood she had strapped to the bow of the sled. Theo had taught her how to make a fire, to sleep in the snow without a tent. As much as she loved the rush from exercise, the thrill of new physical experience, Theo loved the outdoors. Being in nature inspired his art— sculptures as colossal as the rocks he found for them to climb. Nature cleared his mind so that it could be filled with the beasts and demigods that he then wrought from clay and stone and metal.

Michonne lay beside him. Being near him did not comfort her—she hadn’t thought it would—but she thought it might somehow comfort him, wherever his mind was, if it was anywhere at all. She still felt too much doubt and fear and, although she hated herself for it, a throbbing sting of betrayal that showed no signs of abating.

Theo knew of her bipolar 2 and the eczema that sometimes came to her elbows.

He knew about the time she’d been arrested for drunkenly urinating on the sidewalk outside of a rock club, and that she’d been banned from flying Air Canada for screaming that everyone onboard her flight was going to die when the plane hit a patch of awful turbulence. Ever since, booking flights had been a nightmare.

As much as he knew about her, she had always believed that she knew an equal amount—all there was to know. She knew equally embarrassing stories. Equivalent taboos, such as his experimentation with cocaine and methamphetamines while a disaffected undergrad, before he shaped up and graduated, two years later than all the friends he’d made as a freshman. She knew about his strained relationship with his father—who, ever the asshole, refused to see his son in sickness, even during his final days. And although he wouldn’t let his own mother see him work, Theo always let 70

Michonne in his studio, beginning with their fourth date, when they returned after rib night at the local university diner and he sculpted her face onto a sphinx.

She remembered her own mother, and the same trek she’d taken over fifteen years ago, as a girl of ten. She and her father and her mother’s brothers and sisters accompanied her mother to the tree. She knew she didn’t have long left, and she wished to share an unprecedented and final closeness with her loved ones. Her great-great-grandfather had discovered the tree and all his descendants knew of its existence, its power. She’d been there for her own father and grandmother when they passed, and wanted Michonne to be there at her time.

When Michonne saw the last gasp of life leave her mother, it came almost as a relief. They had been singing her mother’s favorite songs, even after she closed her eyes and breathing became a struggle. But the air was cold and their throats and lungs ached, and each of them, even Michonne, knew it was nothing compared to the pain she had suffered for nearly a year.

Michonne’s wiped away her tears when the final wheeze escaped her mother’s lungs. They did not have to wait long. A hazy visage grew above her mother’s body, growing more defined until she realized it was her mother, but younger, happier—and naked. Although the ghost of her mother seemed to be in conversation—not with the people around her, at least not in their present forms—no others were visible. All any of them witnessed were her mother’s body and voice, the things of hers that were hers alone and could never be fully grasped by anyone but her. Michonne and her father and her aunts and uncles were witnesses; that was all. Witnesses to the most emotionally charged moments of her mother’s life. 71

Her father and mother had explained what she would see, but they could never have explained how she would feel. As her mother’s ghost shifted between youth and middle age, fury and tenderness, Michonne felt as if she were a ghost also, caught in her mother’s aura until their two spirits were one. Since then, she had longed for that closeness, that uncompromising honesty, with another living soul.

In the morning, she realized that she had already gone through more than half of the food she’d brought for herself. She’d also brought IV bags and lines for Theo, and she had stopped twice the day before and rested and ate as she stood over him holding the bag to allow the nutrients to flow into his bloodstream. She still had a bag and a half in her pack, but she’d left the rest of her food in the car, maybe at the house.

She cursed herself, and had only two bites of a power bar for breakfast before she picked up the reins and began to walk. This time it did not take as long to find her pace, and she did not encounter another hill until the end of the first hour. Her surroundings, white and glimmering and now without trees, became like an extension of her self for they changed so little. She seemed to be part of a static tableau and she couldn’t shake the idea that she wasn’t moving at all. Her breath grew short; her legs pumped faster.

By the time the sun began to set, she was feeling faint. She finished the power bar she had started that morning, then took a swig of ice cold water and wolfed down another bar, her last for the day. She knew that she needed the rest of her food for the trip back and couldn’t risk having any more. She tasted her awful spit and again remembered Theo and his Colgate. She remembered the scar on the heel of his foot that he always said he got from a dog bite, but really, he’d fallen off of his mountain bike on an early morning ride and slid down a rocky hillside, losing both his shoes. She remembered the way he 72

read up on each movie he watched. If it had been a good one, he would often commit cast, director, and screenwriter to memory. She remembered how he liked to cook breakfast naked because it reminded him of when he first lived alone.

She was so lost in thought and her movements had become so mechanical that when she came upon the white-barked tree, she almost didn’t recognize it. Until she stopped, she didn’t realize how short her breath was, how her throat and lungs burned and her belly ached.

The tree was about a hundred yards off. The sun shone brightly as it descended behind the mountains in the distance, but if she shielded her eyes she could make out the pink and green and violet lights encircling the tree’s branches, just as she remembered.

She hitched up the reins of the sled and began to run. She fell to the ground the moment she reached the tree, and her knees hit the ground hard. The sled continued to slide and it thudded against her back. She pushed herself to her feet and threw off the reigns and went to Theo. She knelt at his side and began pulling away at the layers of wool surrounding his face.

“We’re here, my love,” she said.

His skin looked paler now. She tore off one of her gloves and held her hand under his nostrils. Her fingers were mostly numb, but she collapsed her head onto Theo’s chest anyway. She remained like that, holding him, crying into his blankets. When she could cry no more, she rested her face against the skin of his cheek, then slid her arms around his shoulders and pulled him off of the sled. She dragged him to the base of the tree and propped him up against the trunk, then collapsed beside him. Every muscle in her ached. 73

Her skin burned underneath layers of clothing, begging her to strip and fling herself naked into the snow. She rested her head again on his chest, and closed her eyes.

“Mother. Mother, please. Read me another story. Just one more.”

She looked up wearily. A wispy, crackling child hovered above her, above Theo.

Colors swirled around the child, a boy, and occasionally streams of pink or electric blue would reach out and disappear into her skin or the bark of the tree.

“But I don’t want to go to bed,” the child said. He closed his fingers around something level to his chin and then threw that thing away from him. He laughed with youthful glee and then disappeared, his small, naked form morphing before her eyes into the man, strong, full of life, she had fallen in love with.

“Say there,” he said smiling, his eyes sparkling. “I’ve noticed you on campus before, nose always in a book. I’m Theo.”

Michonne found new tears, and she reached her hand into Theo’s blankets and clasped his hand.

“Theo,” she said. “I remember this.”

The image of her husband changed again. This time he was a teenager, still so handsome, and he had his hands balled into fists.

“I’m warning you,” he shouted. “Stay the hell away from me or I’ll pound your face in!”

Something caught under his nose and his head snapped back. Glimmering red droplets hung suspended before his face and then disappeared as the next change began. 74

As Theo morphed, from child to young man to the man she knew and back again,

Michonne spoke, her voice weak, but consistent in its weakness. It cracked, and sometimes brought her pain, but still she spoke.

“We were so young,” she said. “We still are so young. You’re part of me. You will always be part of me, but you’re dead, and so that part is, too. So what do I do with it, that—that rot inside me?”

Theo’s ghost smiled and reached out his hand.

“Quit fooling around and come on out of the water, you big dummy,” he said.

“We’re late for lunch, and grandma and grandpa have to leave in an hour.”

Michonne’s hand passed through the ghost of Theo’s and she felt a tingle of electricity.

“We were so close,” she continued. “So in love. I knew you like I knew myself— better than. You always told me the same was true for you.”

“I never lie! Don’t dare accuse me of that—I’m not that kind of person. But you, you tell me that you’re going to pay for school, see me off, be there when I need you, and then where are you?”

Michonne wiped at her eyes. Her heart beat faster as if she were trudging across the tundra again, pack on her back, sled and dying husband behind her.

“Who was Lee, Theo? Did you meet him in China? Was he another student? You never told me any names from your time abroad. But he came to see you die. He held your hand and touched your face.”

“Aw, you don’t need to know about that,” the ghost said, a teenager again, laughing. “I never kiss and tell.” 75

“Please, Theo. I knew—I thought I knew you so well. Were you ever that man?”

Theo’s ghost was a man again this time, but younger than when she’d known him.

He had a vulnerability in his eyes that she had never seen before, not even when he’d learned of the cancer, not even when he accepted he was going to die. He sat down, on what, she could not see, and his arms wrapped around a waist she also could not see. He looked up, fearful, something else she didn’t recognize, and when he spoke, it was in

Mandarin. He spoke for a long time, and when he finished, he rested his head on the stomach of whomever he spoke to, and then stretched onto his back, his arms still wrapped before him in a circle, his head and mouth reaching upwards, his eyes closing, his tongue reaching out.

Michonne’s head fell. She hadn’t understood or recognized a word. Her arms trembled, and then she threw herself onto her husband’s body and began to pound the thick layer of blankets and the skin and bones beneath, hoping that he felt the blows, somehow, wherever he was.

“I do agree,” Theo’s voice said behind her. “Honesty’s something we should certainly aspire to.”

She spun around, ferocity in her eyes and heart.

“You already know me so well, Michonne,” said his ghost.

“No I don’t,” she shouted. “I don’t know you at all, I never did.”

“I’ve never been so close to anyone. I don’t tell you this often, I don’t show it— but sometimes what we have frightens me. I thought I was in love before. It ended badly, and for a long time, I never believed that I’d love again. Then I met you.”

“But you—you couldn’t even be honest with me.” 76

“If we are to be honest, above all else, then that is what you need to know.”

“Stop,” Michonne said.

Theo reached forward. She remembered the feel of his hand on hers, how his touch was always enough to pull her out of a funk. He smiled and said: “I cannot wait for all the things we will do.”

Theo’s face, smiling despite the tremor in his voice, dimmed and then vanished with the rest of him. His last words had sounded as if they’d needed to travel over the same snowy hills she’d just crossed. Before dimming, his eyes had been sad, fearful, vulnerable. Before, she had only remembered the strong man, the charismatic man, the world traveler, the artist with terrible vision. The man too strong for cancer, too big to die. She hadn’t allowed herself anything else. She remembered the other sides of the man she loved, and she saw that he’d shown her all that he could, all that she could have asked to see. There were secrets, but not secrets he’d kept from her. She’d taken the trip to learn fact, cold, hard, and empirical, but it seemed to her now that what she had gained was something more, as precious as the man who lay dead beside her.

She smoothed out the blankets covering Theo’s body and touched his cold face.

She stood with shaking legs, walked to the sled, and in both hands took the rest of the firewood from the bow. She no longer needed it. Without Theo to carry, she was confident she would reach the Jeep in half the time it had taken her to reach the tree.

She walked a few paces from the sled, remaining in the shadow of the tree, and arranged the firewood in a dip in the frozen ground that she thought would hold Theo.

But when she was done, she realized that it was not enough. The array of sticks barely reached the length of Theo’s body, and she could see through to the snow in many spots. 77

She looked out to the skeletal brown treetops off in the distance, but she knew they were useless. She hadn’t packed enough food, and she hadn’t brought an axe.

Something tickled the back of her mind, and she went to the tree and stood beneath one of its branches, a low-hanging monstrosity that snaked off into a dozen little white, bony digits. A string of pink light came out of one of those digits, and whirled through the air before disappearing into her chest. She reached for the branch and took it in both hands, and when she pulled, it came off as if it had been attached with a thin layer of glue. A cloud of flaky white pieces of bark hung for a moment where the limb had been and then fell into obscurity. She went to the dip in the tundra and knelt by its side.

She took a knife from her pack and carved off the tiny branches that snaked off from the main limb, and added them to the firewood she had already arranged. Then, when the limb was smooth, she laid it diagonally across the arrangement of sticks, brown but now with a streak of white, and stood to observe her work.

She went to Theo’s body. He looked as if he was asleep, and she felt a new wave of mournfulness. She removed the blankets and lifted his near-skeletal form under the arms and brought him to the dip in the tundra, where she eased him onto the array of sticks. His body arched over the white limb of the tree. Splayed over the limb like that, she was reminded of when she would find him in the morning after a bout of restless sleep, an arm, sometimes even the top of his head hanging over the edge of the bed.

She went into her pack and found matches and kerosene. She emptied the kerosene onto the firewood on either side of him. She stopped and looked over the body of her husband one last time, and was struck by his beauty, even in sickness, even in 78

death. She lit a match and dropped it onto the wood. Almost instantly, Theo was engulfed in flame, flames that burned pink and green at its ephemeral tips.

The flames died down by morning, until nothing remained but smoke. She did not wish to see what remained of her husband. She stood and wiped the ash from her face.

She held the ash in her hand, and then turned towards the wind so that it blew from her palm.

She was rested, ready. She had a day’s march ahead.

79

Elysium

Hey, it’s me.

Please don’t hang up on me. I’m sorry I haven’t called, or written, or done any of the things people do to stay in touch with the people they care about. I know you felt betrayed when I left. Sisters shouldn’t turn their backs on each other.

I want to tell you a story, Clara. It’s the story of why I’m calling you. I hope that you’ll listen. It’s—Clara?

Shit.

___

Clara—please listen. I didn’t call you yesterday because I wanted to give you time to think. Even if you feel the same, it means a lot that you picked up. You’re not saying anything . . . I assume that means you don’t want to. Maybe you don’t have the words.

That’s okay. It took me two years to find mine, to even know I was looking. I’m going to keep talking, okay. Please don’t hang up on me.

The story that I need to tell you begins with a box. I’d been receiving boxes just like it for about three weeks, but I knew this one was different from the moment I saw it.

The box glimmered in the fluorescent light of the hallway. It was practically smirking— like it knew as well as me that it was going to ruin my day. It was a little bigger than the 80

others, but it was made of the same, strange metal that gave me a headache each time I looked at it. I had been receiving boxes like this one sporadically for three weeks. I’d been ignoring them for two, but this time the box wasn’t sent to my apartment, it was sent to my studio, my place of work. When I was at my apartment, when I’d just got up, I was still Julia Mercado, and I was susceptible to the boxes, and the recordings inside.

Recordings of a mad old woman who claimed to be from the future. She’d talk about us,

Clara. She knew things about us no one else could know . . .

I was at my studio, so I was more Francesca than Julia, and you know enough to know that Francesca is never fearful, that she has no doubts. I wasn’t as afraid as I had been finding the boxes at my apartment. I took the box inside and opened it. I’d opened the door to see if my four o’clock was waiting in the hallway. I was expecting a timid guy, slight, shifting sheepishly from shoe to shoe as he mustered up the last ounce of courage to rap on my door. The only name attached to the appointment was ‘E,’ but I had no way of knowing if he was in fact a ‘he.’ With an ungendered pseudonym I tend to assume it’s a man, though I really shouldn’t. I have plenty of female clients back in

Detroit, though not as many as I did in New York, where the breakdown was nearly even.

Female clients usually make it known they’re women, though—I think because they want me to adjust my expectations for the play accordingly.

There was no one in the hallway. It was twenty past, so I was ready to chalk ‘E’ up as a no-show. But then I saw the box at my door, with an E painted across the top in metallic paint. I could’ve smacked myself for being so stupid. The old woman in the recordings called her future Elysium, after the Greek’s idea of Heaven. 81

I took the box into my studio’s adjoining office. There was enough of Francesca in me that the box’s presence filled me with indignation instead of doubt. There was something rolling around inside, which explained the size. The others opened when I pushed down on the lid, and so did this one. There was a disc like in the others, but there was also an orb, completely seamless, smooth, about the size of a ping-pong ball, and it looked to be made of the same metal as the box. I didn’t look at it long.

I would’ve tossed the disc and the box into the incinerator if I were completely

Julia. But I put it into my disc drive. It had only one file, as I’d come to expect. It wasn’t compatible with any of the software on my PC, but it opened on its own a few seconds after I clicked on it, making the incompatibility notice irrelevant. I was shown the same old woman as before, smiling at me knowingly over the silver rims of her glasses. She didn’t seem crazy, but that was because she hadn’t started talking. When she did, it was more of the same—Elysium, empathy, a near-utopian future society built on Hobbit farts and naiveté.

When she finished, she looked at me—I mean, she was ‘looking at me’ the whole time, but now it was like she was really looking at me, like she’d found me in a crowd.

Like she was sitting across from me. She said my name—Francesca’s, not Julia’s—and told me that she was sorry. She explained that she sent the other boxes—through whatever time warp space-hole technology is available seventy years in the future—to ensure that I’d open this one. That it needed to be me who opened this one, not Julia. She said that she knew me well, that the history, the mystique, attached to the boxes would make this one irresistible. She wasn’t wrong. There was sorrow in her voice, but I also sensed a measure of pride, like she’d figured me out, delivered the killing blow. Ever 82

since the first box there had been something familiar about her—her voice, the way her eyes burned—but she was always in shadow.

She said I was pure of motive—‘pure of motive,’ like she was knighting me—and then she talked about things that happened in New York, when we were living together, when I was just Julia. She’d said it all before, and all of it was true. She spoke of it all in such intimate detail. She described what it was like for me, living in that apartment two years ago. She used the words ‘suffocating,’ ‘overpowering’ . . . Didn’t I use those same words when I told you I was leaving? I would’ve suspected the old woman was some trick of yours, but she’d already proven that impossible.

When she finished feeding me my biography, she said what she always said—that

I needed to find you. That I would. Then she made a face like she was watching a dog die and apologized a second time. “But for that to happen, it’s time you receded,” she said.

She meant Francesca, of course. She bothered me so much because she spoke as if the future was written, as if there was nothing I could do to stop what she spoke of from coming to pass, no matter that I sure as hell didn’t want it to. But she didn’t scare

Francesca. Francesca knew that if the old woman was for real, there were decades separating us, and those decades weren’t the old woman’s—they were mine.

I caught a glimpse of the old woman’s wrinkled sagging neck as she reached over the camera, and then the video cut out. I cracked the disc between my fingers, and let the pieces fall into the waste bin. I’d tired of the whole thing, this prank or whatever it was— of the doubt it put into Julia’s pretty head. I didn’t know who was sending this shit or who she thought she was, but I was done. I was about to do a search on escaped mental patients in the state of Michigan when I saw it, the orb, hovering at eye level across the 83

desk. It flashed a blue light that enveloped the room. That hurt me, my eyes—my thoughts. The pain was like the pain from the box’s metal but worse, like something was pinching the inside of my skull. I couldn’t help it, I started to scream. The edges of my vision blurred and went black. The last thing I saw was the orb shooting towards me, spinning and crackling with blue-green electricity.

The next thing I knew I was awake, in a house half-familiar. Some of the things inside I recognized from childhood. Things mom and dad had lying around, decorations they put up. Toys left in the living room, the kitchen.

The sound of a crying infant filled the house. At first I thought it was my own, but

I touched my fingers to my face. The skin was dry, bone dry.

As I moved through the house searching for the crying child I recognized more things, but I also saw that there were many things that I had no recollection of—things that I couldn’t even name because they didn’t belong; not just in my memories or dreams, but in anyone’s of this earth—this time. Tall, spindly things of silver. Globular things that hovered and changed shape.

I didn’t know where I was but I felt different, like I wasn’t quite used to standing.

I looked down at my feet, but they were hidden beneath floppy woolen slippers. The ground looked closer, and I felt as if there was a weight on me—a weight my body couldn’t quite take. I brought my hands to my knees and massaged them. Through the fabric of my pants—drab, gray pants like I’d never wear—I felt that my skin was loose, hanging from me in folds. My hands—they were wrinkled, sallow, and brown spots were woven between coarse, gray-red hairs that stuck out at random. The nails of my hands were long, jagged, caked under with dirt. I wanted to feel sick. I wanted for it all to make 84

sense, but it didn’t, no matter how much I tried forcing it to. Nothing was real. I was in an old woman’s body and I felt like I needed to shit. Her bowels were weak, trembly. I didn’t know if I could contain whatever was bubbling in me.

The crying wouldn’t stop. It was a near wail now, and sounded so afraid. I went out the back, through the same loose screen door I remembered from mom and dad’s house. I remembered getting the same door slammed on my fingers. I clutched my fingers in my hand and held them to my chest, and tried to ignore its sagging.

Sunlight touched everything outside. Nothing was in shadow. I felt like maybe I had a pair of sunglasses inside, but I didn’t go look. I saw something sitting on the porch—a pink, shivering form. I picked up the baby. “Hey there,” I said, and the baby laughed. I held him close. I hadn’t held a baby in so long. He was beautiful. Can you believe that? I thought he was beautiful. I didn’t know who he was, but his face, his laughter, it was all familiar. I’d cut myself off from any kind of love, convinced myself that I didn’t need it, that life would be better without it. But I couldn’t imagine feeling anything but love for this baby. I held him close to my chest and said, “Thank you. Oh

God, thank you.”

I awoke on my back, sprawled on the floor of my office, the hem of my dress folded up onto my stomach so that everything was showing. I remember thanking God that I locked the studio after bringing the box inside. I didn’t see the orb anywhere, but the box was still on my desk, the pieces of disc still in the waste bin. I tasted blood in my mouth and I spit into the bin to be sure. Red flecks hit the reflective surface of the shattered disc and I knew from the smell that this was real. I had to fight not to keel over and vomit. Francesca wouldn’t have allowed herself to be quite as shaken, even if her 85

entire world had been turned on its head, as it had been. I mean, dreaming of a damned baby? I’ve never wanted kids. Francesca and I were both always in firm agreement on that.

I didn’t want to know what it was I saw. Myself as an old woman, the baby—I knew that I couldn’t think of either, that if I did, something in me would break. The old woman had said Francesca’s name, not mine—but we’re the same person and anything done to her would be done to me. The dream, or vision, came from the old woman, the orb. That was obvious. I couldn’t doubt any longer that she was speaking truly. I’d seen the orb hover and fly towards me, and somehow, it had projected something into my mind before flying off or self-destructing, like in a spy movie. The vision was meant to shatter Francesca in some way. My only defense was to ignore it. So I changed out of the black lace, leather, and spiked boots I’d worn in anticipation of ‘E’ and threw on the clothes I wore on the way over, and headed over to the coffee shop down the street from my building.

I was hoping that having something to drink would ease my mind. I had a second session that I knew was for real in an hour, with Hector—a regular. I ordered a mocha latte and sat by the window. My throat felt warm and raw even before the coffee. I let the coffee sit and cool off. Of course, my thoughts drifted back to the vision, but each time I caught myself thinking of holding that baby, or remembering how it felt to be so withered, I closed my eyes and took five deep breaths. It’s what I tell my clients to do on the occasion that part of our play triggers something buried, an old memory or phobia. 86

It was the old woman’s confidence that freaked me, that made me feel as if I was trapped in some design I didn’t have the words to describe. It’s why I stopped looking inside the boxes and listening to the old woman’s communications.

The first communication I received was no bigger than a videocassette tape. It weighed about how much it looked it should weigh, and its metal felt like the same steel of my refrigerator. The wrinkled lines of the old woman’s neck were taut and white, almost deathly. She cleared her throat and said in a ragged voice that she was speaking to me from seventy years in my future. I could’ve laughed but there wasn’t a trace of doubt in her voice. She laughed and a fleck of blood hit the screen. She brought the heel of her palm to her mouth and when she spoke again she’d grown wistful. She talked about my childhood, and she knew things that only I could know, that I barely remembered myself.

I thought that if she really was from the future, she must have met me, or ripped the knowledge from the mind of my future self with some kind of frightening technology.

The old woman leaned her head to one side and smiled despondently. She told me that she knew I wouldn’t listen, but that it was imperative I find my sister. She knew all about you, Clara. She said that she’d realized something in her final days—that she’d needed help to get to where she was, to accomplish what she’d accomplished. I didn’t know what she meant, but now I think I have an idea, and I’d love to know what you think—if you believe me, that is. I know it’s crazy, but it’s all true, I swear.

The old woman told me that something would be reignited in me. That this thing would burn from me into you, Clara, into everyone we meet, and from them, it would burn outwards, consuming everyone. She said that she spoke to me from the world that rose from the ashes, a world called Elysium. The future she described was—will be— 87

idyllic and united, and it won’t come from a system, or systems, but from individuals working in concert, consciously or not.

She said that she knew I’d find you. She laughed a raspy laugh and said she was from the future—she should know. She laughed until the screen went black and the disc ejected. I tossed it in the trash, but that wasn’t enough; it still looked up at me. I threw it out of the window and saw it land in the dumpster in the alleyway between my building and the next, but I was still on edge.

I felt that if I saw you again, I would lose the freedom that I’d found in Detroit, and if I wasn’t free, if my choices weren’t my own, then it could be said that I didn’t exist—that I was nothing more than a link in a chain that went millennia beyond me in either direction. The person I’d become would be no more meaningful than the one I thought I’d left behind. They’d each be steps in an arbitrary path towards oblivion. But as much as that scared me, I was equally, if not more so, scared by the prospect of finding you again, of regressing, of losing hard won confidence and the thick black lines between me and everybody and everything else.

You were so electric. I didn’t know the woman you’d become until you came to live with me. When you came to crash, I didn’t know what to expect. I felt the same love and protectiveness that I felt when we were girls, and you looked to me to protect you, to teach you about the things you didn’t understand. But now you didn’t need protection.

Now you were the one who was teaching me. Sharing a place with you was thrilling until it got to be too much.

When you came back that night and told me what Spence had told you, I thought you’d finally seen him for what he was. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on a rant about 88

Spence—you’ve heard it all before. But when you tried explaining to me that he was right to stop you from talking to other men—that you were wrong to storm out on him in the bar—I realized that I couldn’t stay, not anymore. I already struggled with confidence—I always have—and I felt, I feared that if I stayed, that struggle would become so much worse. We always shared such a special relationship. We never seemed to fight, not before Spence. I don’t know quite how to explain this, but I—I could always feel what you felt. If you were happy, so was I. When you were pissed off, feeling reckless, I was right there with you. And if you were scared, depressed, or heartbroken?

I’d see your pain and feel it in me. So when I saw how willing you were to defend him, to change for him, I thought that maybe I had it in me to do the same, for someone else— maybe even for this new you. As much as you loved him, I loved you a thousand times more. I didn’t want to stick around to see if I would grow to understand a mind like his, like yours had become. Don’t hate me. I know you’ve changed. I’m just trying to make you understand the place I was in when I left—when I ran. In the two years since I left, I learned what it was like to be my own person again. I couldn’t lose that.

I watched the next couple of recordings when they came, and it was more of the same—the old woman urging me to find you, telling me things no one but I could know.

I decided I would catch whoever was leaving them—maybe some agent of the old woman’s—and figure out the whole thing. I hid an old webcam on the underside of the stairwell railing and pointed it directly at my mailbox. I didn’t leave my computer screen for a full day—I took it into the bathroom with me, skipped showering. The feed cut to static for about fifteen seconds at five in the morning. It was the only thing out of the ordinary that had happened in the twenty hours since I’d switched the camera on. I ran 89

downstairs, but there was no one in the lobby. I remember the air smelling of cobalt. I went to my mailbox and pulled down the slot. A box looked up at me. I stopped watching the recordings after that. I’d dump them in the trash and do my best not to think about them, though my best wasn’t enough, most days.

When I finished my coffee I saw that the barista was checking me out. I was wearing ill-fitting jeans and a Depeche Mode T-shirt that had seen better days, and I must have looked about as bad as I felt. But she kept glancing over anyway. She was cute, young, probably just out of college. Around the age you were when you first started crashing with me. It was so much fun at first, wasn’t it? Before Spence—that user, that hipster misogynist—

No, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry . . . I—you’ve hung up, haven’t you?

___

Hey, Clara. I hope you get this message. I don’t have a whole lot of time. I didn’t need to be so blunt yesterday. You’ve already heard what I have to say about Spence.

When Sara gave me your new number, she said you two weren’t together anymore. So there’s no need to mention him, though I suppose you’re still upset that I—that I left you with him. I know that. I’m sorry.

We left off at the coffee shop, didn’t we? I smiled at the barista before I left, but that was it. No point in getting her hopes up. But maybe—maybe it wouldn’t hurt to give her a shot. I mean, if she works up the nerve, if she’s only looking for something casual.

Perhaps something meaningless would do me good. Most of the time, though, the release, the hour or so of forgetting, that I get from Francesca is enough—for me and her, and 90

where we meet in between. I think that now—now that I’m trying to get back in touch with you, maybe it would do me good to reach out to others, you know?

There’s maybe a ten minute walk between the coffee shop and my studio. I contemplated Francesca as I walked. Her coldness, her unshakeable confidence. They say to contemplate the Buddha is to become the Buddha, and I’ve found the same is true with her. It makes the transition smoother when it comes. I thought back to what the old woman had told me, and about my future being written. I knew how Francesca saw things. There’s nothing else present in making a choice—nothing else you’re aware of, I mean. It’s just you and your decision. I don’t know, maybe you’d disagree—but that’s what I felt and still feel to be true. If the old woman was for real, and not some sick prankster, then logically, she would only represent one possibility out of many. One string—one that didn’t have to be my own. Whatever the old woman said, whatever laws of physics she’d violated, she had no influence on my future. She could suggest, sure, but

I didn’t have to be reunited with anyone. Francesca didn’t have to recede, and paradise needn’t rest on my shoulders.

A gust of wind swirled around me a block or so from my studio. The air was warm and dry, and the wind felt good against my bare arms. I felt better myself. I breathed in and realized how little outside air I’d had in the past two weeks. I had locked myself in my apartment and canceled all my appointments, but all staying home did was trap me with the old woman’s words, and the weakness her words uprooted. So no matter what had happened that day, it was good to be outside, to know that I had another session to take my mind off things. 91

I didn’t notice him until he was right next to me—then I could smell him, the subway grime and stale liquor. He was a grungy, wild-looking guy, either homeless or really good at playing the part. I call him Spiderhead because he tells anyone who will listen that there are spiders living in his brain, chewing up gray matter to make room for their babies. He roams the blocks surrounding my studio; sometimes even makes it out to

Royal Oak, my neighborhood. One time he grabbed me and started jabbering about how he goes to the library each day to read through the dictionary, word by word, hoping he’ll find the magic word that will set him free.

He smiled, showing teeth straight but yellow, a few almost gray, and asked, “Do you think my word could be loquacious?” He paused and then shook his head and began scratching his scalp with jagged, brown fingernails. He gave a laugh that was nothing but tragic and said to never give up hope, that he never would and it had done him well for sixty years. He started to hum and scratched at his head until wisps of gray-blonde hair fell from his scalp. I felt a manic rush, like I needed to run—but not without him. Maybe that sounds familiar to you. I wanted to take him by the wrist and take him someplace better than this, but I stopped myself because I knew that I if I was to prove the old woman in the recordings wrong, I had to hold my ground. Spiderhead howled like he had dropped something heavy on his foot, and though I didn’t look back, I felt a throbbing in my head like a cacophony of spindly, hairy legs—spider legs. All my life, I’ve empathized too strongly, and when the madness or desperation is too much, it’s suffocating—I lose myself.

The building that holds my studio is an ugly thing, a big beige block sticking out of a network of interlaced, mostly uninhabited streets. It’s not in a nice part of Detroit— 92

yes, you’ll find that there are nice parts in Detroit—but the sun was out and there weren’t many cars around so the air was clear. My migraine was fading. On some level I must have known that trite emotion wouldn’t help me.

The first thing I noticed in my studio was how well the torture rack was polished.

The office cleaners—who I pay extra to wipe down my implements—did fine work, like they always do. It’s only me on the second floor, so apart from the hallway my studio is all they have to clean. When I first moved in to the building, I had a neighbor—some

New Age yoga masseuse-slash-herbal tea pusher—but she booked after learning what it was I did. Didn’t matter that I’d gone to the trouble of soundproofing. One day I came in and the nameplate outside her office was gone, along with the scent of incense and the reed wall hanging of the thin, smiling bodhisattva on the door.

Though the headache was all but gone, I still felt a bit off from the Spiderhead encounter. It was like I was back in New York, in that apartment. It was hard to keep everything out all the time, and Spiderhead’s madness was particularly suffocating.

My costumes are hung up behind the dressing screen next to the stainless steel rack. I could have just thrown on what I wore in anticipation of ‘E’—it was a fine ensemble—but something told me that I should start fresh. So instead, I chose the red dress with the see-through lace; the crimson leather bodice and matching knee-high boots; blood red nail polish and lipstick. No need for panties. There’s never any chance of sex in my work and going pantieless is the joke I pull on all my clients—the joke only

I know is being pulled. The last thing I put on was the wig. No matter what the ensemble,

I always wear my Bettie Page wig. It’s not that I don’t appreciate mom’s red curls, but the change aids the transformation. My little joke with the panties, or lack thereof, was 93

the first sign. A sense of humor is the first thing Francesca brings out in me, even before she’s taken root. I saw how silly my situation was, how it wasn’t even worth thinking about, much less the worrying and existential dread I’d been cycling through like I was going for an award.

After my session, I planned on taking out the bottle of Chardonnay I keep in the mini-fridge under my desk, resting my bare feet on the tabletop, putting on a mix of late-

80s New Wave—and forgetting in a fleeting way not at all similar to what Francesca offers. My throat still felt raw in spite of the latte, but it wasn’t too noticeable, just was a tingle, perhaps a sign I was getting sick, which would be just my luck, after taking so many sick days. I sat and stared at my computer screen and waited, hoping all the while that I wouldn’t have to spend another stretch at home in bed.

Hector wasn’t late. He never is; he’s too considerate. Our first session, he brought me flowers, and while I told him that wasn’t necessary—making it clear as subtly as I could that his gesture didn’t line up with the way I did things—they were gorgeous flowers. I figured he was another unsatisfied boyfriend or husband with a taste for the taboo. He was sweet, so I hoped that whoever he had back home was good to him, even if she—or he—wasn’t what he wanted in bed.

I’d felt so dull clicking through online catalogues waiting for him to arrive, and hearing his knock heightened everything. I felt like I did having the vision—as if I’d entered a world similar to my own, but stranger, more distinct. I leapt on him after he was through the threshold and put him in a headlock, squeezing his Adam’s apple with my forearm. Our contract and safeword—‘bananas’—were established long ago, so now we move right into the play. He trusts me completely and because of that trust I can intuit 94

what he likes. With each session I ferry him through the experiences he’s familiar with, that drive him wild, and if I’m struck by inspiration midway, I bring him someplace new, someplace I know he’ll like. He’s not into the typical stuff—the whips, being tied up, body blows and blooding. In fact, he hates blood, especially his own. No, Hector’s thing is breathing. He likes me to tighten his windpipe, fill it with water, until he’s at the brink of passing out.

Like I said, it was warm day and he’s a big guy, so he was sweating more than usual. I wanted to keep the sweat on his chest and neck off of me as much as possible, so

I figured I would cut straight to the drowning. I took him by the hair and led him to the bathroom. He was squealing—he’d been squealing since I’d jumped him. He stopped with the squealing for a moment and asked me, “Already?” I yelled at him to be silent.

He stumbled into the bathroom and started to pull off his shirt, but I yelled again and he stopped, knowing I hadn’t given him permission to disrobe. ‘Disrobe’—that’s the kind of word that runs through my head when I work.

I stopped and smelled the heavy air of my studio, detected the rose petal spray I use to mask the scent of human sweat. The studio was clean in more than one way—it was a blank slate with which I would paint the woman I felt I should be. Enough sessions and maybe she’d stick, I thought.

Hector apologized, calling me ‘domina,’ and bowed his head. His voice is high- pitched, like a child’s, and in that way the squealing makes sense. Francesca likes to think of him as the Great Lakes’ answer to Ned Beatty in Deliverance, though when I demean him it’s with permission. 95

I told him to disrobe but to leave on his pants—who knew what the heat had done down under. He stripped and I told him to kneel. He put both hands on the seat of the toilet, and eased down onto his knees, one at a time. He looks about forty, but he moves slow, and kneeling always presents a little trouble. Our first session, when we were establishing rules, he asked me not to talk about his physicality when berating him, how slow he was, how his joints creaked under strain.

Hector was somber about kneeling that day, like he was every session. To him it was a ritual. He lifted the lid and I could see his pink, sweaty face in the water beneath.

He found my face in the water and smiled. It gets me, telling you all this—how sweet of a guy he is—and I hate what happened next. What I guess had to happen.

I didn’t mean to, but I took in my reflection for a second or two. Usually it takes the client’s first few moans for me to become Francesca, but not then. I saw how my eyebrows came together in practiced disgust, how my upper lip snarled almost on its own. My body language, my physical self, had become something entirely other, and witnessing it, I was transformed. I was Francesca. Julia, all her weaknesses, all her doubts, were gone—walled off in some deep recess of my brain. It seemed a mystery why I’d let myself be so affected—by Spiderhead, by that ridiculous dream, the box outside my studio door.

I dug my nails into the back of Hector’s fleshy neck and held him under the water of the toilet bowl. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. His legs kicked and he slid his hands along the edge of the bowl. I thought of his lungs straining, of his head getting light as his body yearned for air. Giving another pain, physical pain—it’s an experience unlike any other.

The client wants to be punished, to be brought to new locales of sensation, pain, and 96

bringing them there is like closing a door on parts of yourself. Locking all empathy and human feeling behind impenetrable iron walls so that action is all that matters. It’s not that you’re a sadist—I would never call myself that, and I think I’m pretty self-aware.

But being the source of another’s pain gives you access to that animal side, the side most people try to ignore about themselves. You learn things from the animal. You see that it doesn’t make sense to be meek, or to let yourself be swallowed up in another—another’s self, not when you’ve got grown men begging you to make them bleed and cry. I’m not giving you a pitch, but it’s important you understand what it is that Francesca does.

I never hold Hector under longer than sixty seconds. We took the drowning-play slow at first, tested it. The only time I took him past sixty, he nearly knocked me over, thrusting up out of the water. He vomited and left the session early, didn’t say a word.

But he didn’t cancel our next session; he showed up on time, all smiles. The only thing he said was for us to avoid a repeat of the last time. Yeah—no kidding.

Ten seconds or so into the next round, Hector started slapping the side of the bowl. I remember hating him a little bit, thinking it was pathetic how low his limits were.

I berated him for his weakness as he sucked up air. When his breathing and sputtering even out, I pushed him under again, locking my arms so his forehead was pressed against the bottom of the bowl.

Hector went a few more rounds with the toilet bowl and then we took a break.

Breaks were something I implemented after the vomiting; he agreed to them emphatically. He sat on the bathroom stool that I use to hang the shower curtain whenever it slips off of its rungs, and I leaned against the doorframe, looking off into the studio, tracing the outline of the steel rack over and over. 97

It surprised me when he spoke, water dripping from his nose and mouth and the wisps of hair on the sides of his head, because he usually got off on me ignoring him. He fumbled over a few syllables and then said that he still didn’t know a thing about me—if

Francesca was even my real name. I looked over at him wearing a smirk that came natural and asked if he was really asking me that. A look came over him like he was frustrated but didn’t want it to show. He laughed, running a hand over his smooth, wet scalp. “No, I get it,” he said, putting up a hand. “No details. You’re like an actress playing a character. But come on,” he said, “I’m a nice guy. You trust me. I mean, you must, or else why let me into your dungeon?”

“Studio,” I said—sharply. I don’t suffer any illusions about how most people, including many of my clients, see my profession, but to me, someone who’s been doing it for close to six years, I know that, along with everything else, it’s an art form, one I’m very, very good at. That’s one thing you always understood, back when I’d first begun.

Hector put up both hands and stammered that he didn’t mean any offense. He forced a smile and said, trying his best to come off casual, that it wouldn’t hurt to tell him where I was from—that he couldn’t do anything with that little information. He looked so earnest I had to fight back a smile of my own. The warmth I felt toward him made me see that I was wrong—I was not Francesca, not fully. I decided to lie. I told him Philadelphia.

He said he loved Philadelphia—‘Philly,’ he called it, with a grin like he was about to chomp down on a cheesesteak—and that he would go there for work back when he worked for a big car company. Then he asked if I had any family back in Philly.

He said Philly, but I heard New York. It was my own fault for encouraging him.

He was right in front of me, but all I could see was your tear-stained face the day I told 98

you I was leaving. Remember how you clung to me, flung yourself at my ankles? You were always so theatrical, always oscillating between introversion and manic, dangerous highs. I’m not trying to be mean, but—but you sucked me into your fractured world. Do you understand what I mean? You’d pull me along on shopping binges neither of us could afford. Leave it to me to see us both home safe after starting fights with drunk, temperamental guys you’d tired of flirting with, before Spence, before the schedule he kept you to. We’d get home most nights at three, four in the morning, and I’d let you crawl into my bed, even on nights I wanted to sleep alone. You’d apologize for that night’s turmoil and I’d forgive you, always. We’d lie in bed together as night became day and you’d ask me about our childhoods, things only I was old enough to remember. I’d tell you about how mom let me bathe you, feed you; how I would carry you to my room and show you all the things I’d give you when we were older.

Hector looked like maybe he’d realized what he’d done. Something caught in my throat, like there was something was pushing up out of me. “Break’s over,” I said sharper than I intended. It was all I could do to keep my voice even.

He sighed and pushed himself onto his knees and knelt before the toilet. He hovered over the water, and when I stood over him, I saw his eyes were shut tight. I knew that I should’ve been happy he’d been so clearly discouraged, but I felt what I’d done to him. I was foolish to think he had a girlfriend out there, or a wife. Most times, I felt good showing another the walls I’d put up around me. But Hector wasn’t nosy, he wasn’t presumptuous. He wasn’t trying to fuck me. I mean, it didn’t seem that way. He was and is a sad, lonely man, and he thought he could make himself a little less of each by reaching out to me. 99

Listen, they just called my flight. I’ll finish my story tomorrow. There’s only a little left. Maybe once you’ve heard it all, you’ll want to talk. Thank you for listening this far. Goodbye, Clara.

___

Hey, is listening to this story piece by piece as maddening as it is telling it that way? We’re at the last bit, though. It’ll be done soon. I hope that you can hear me well enough. It’s kind of loud where I am.

When we left off, I’d just ruined Hector’s day, hadn’t I? After Hector’s session I was too tired and depressed for the Chardonnay, so I got on the soonest bus home. It was a little past seven-thirty and dark, and the bus rumbled through barely visible streets. This was how every day went since the first box—a constant bipolar struggle between what I felt to be true and the fear that I was wrong, that my future had been written long ago and its end was unavoidable, unchangeable. That the future belonged to the old woman. If I could pity Hector, if I doubted the righteousness of the things I’d learned from Francesca, then what would stop me from hunting you down?

I felt the back of my neck tingling. I looked up and saw that some guy towards the front of the bus was staring at me. I wouldn’t normally mind—I might have even been a bit flattered, seeing proof that at thirty I could still catch the eye of a good-looking, college-aged kid like this guy—but when I meet his gaze, he kept on staring. He didn’t look away or show any sign of embarrassment. He sat there, looking at me from behind his boxy black sunglasses, and I could feel his stare on my legs, moving upwards. I hadn’t change before I left. I’d slipped on panties and an overcoat, grabbed my purse and left. My heels, my calves, the bit of my thighs that show—the kid was taking them all in. 100

I didn’t know what to do at first. It took me a few seconds to even think to shift my legs out of the kid’s view. I wasn’t panicked or anything. I was shocked by his brashness, his complete disregard for me. It was insulting, and when I was insulted, she took over. It’s not that way now. Some cabdriver hollered at me on the way over and all I did was flip him the bird. But she was in my middle finger, and she’s in me now. I don’t think I could string these words together without her.

I turned to the kid and leaned forward, like maybe I was interested. I looked right at him and smiled, but not so I showed teeth. I smiled like I smile after I’ve made a man howl my name in pain. It was a pleased smile, but not satiated. The kid’s face got so red he looked like a playing card with those square black shades. He squirmed in his seat and tugged at his sleeves, and looked at the back of the bus driver’s head like he’d never seen a perm before. He stared at it and his sneakers for the rest of the ride.

The bus let me off a block from my apartment. The drug store on the corner was open and the streetlights were flickering on, so even without checking my phone I knew it’s nearly eight. The wind had picked up. A caved-in beer can rolled past me like a tumbleweed in some desolate ghost town.

My street was empty but for a pile of white and black trash bags by the steps of my building. Still, I felt like something was off. I hurried towards my apartment. I wouldn’t say it was fear, not with Francesca so close, but I felt something ominous hanging over me. Considering my day so far, it didn’t seem too crazy.

When I came upon the pile of trash bags something blue caught my eye. I stopped and noticed a pair of jeans sticking out from all the white and black heavy-duty plastic. 101

Francesca wouldn’t have stopped, but she was already slipping away. She never got her chance to come through completely that day. It was all false starts.

I followed the motionless blue jeans up towards a familiar body, a familiar face.

Spiderhead was bleeding from a small gash in his hairline and there was vomit in his beard and a big wet stain on his shirt. I could smell the bourbon from where I stood. I jostled him a bit, but he didn’t stir. I shook him a few more times, hoping that he was all right, that I didn’t have to be the one to deal with this if he wasn’t. Finally he jerked his head up, shaking it a little as he came to. I’d have breathed a sigh of a relief if I’d been able to exhale. He mumbled something about spiders as I handed him band-aids and antiseptic wipes from my purse. I’d meant to restock the medicine cabinet at my studio, but with the box and my vision, I hadn’t gotten around to it.

I asked him if he was lucid and he gave a little nod that could’ve easily been from the liquor and not in response to me. I asked him again and he started to sing the first few bars of “Personal Jesus.” He sang it well enough. He thanked me as he rubbed the wound on his head with one of the wipes. It wasn’t a deep cut, and I thought he must have gotten it from scratching.

I asked him if he knew the drug store and he nodded again. I told him to go inside and ask to use the bathroom there to clean up. The owner was a nice old guy who’d been giving me free toilet paper since I moved in down the street, and he’d be sure to help.

Spiderhead smiled and thanked me again and told me to never give up hope. He got to his feet, but he tipped and I steadied him. I saw a half-full bottle of something brown poking out of his coat pocket and I grabbed it and shoved it into my purse. He turned towards the drug store, walking in a slow, stooped kind of way. This time my smile was for real, and 102

all my teeth were showing. But I didn’t have time to think this feeling over, for I felt something else. Something small, something round, pushing itself up out of my throat.

This was more than emotion. I tasted metal.

I made a run for the stairs to my building, losing one of my heels in the space between two blocks of sidewalk. I tucked my leg under me, tossing one shoe off, then the other, and bounded up the stairs barefoot.

I made my way straight to the bathroom. I didn’t have to make it to the toilet, much less kneel before it. I wretched over the sink. Nothing came out but blood at first.

But I felt it there, its metal nearly inside my mouth. It crowned and I gave a cough—one of those coughs that feels like a knife inside you—and it fell out of me, scraping against the tops of my teeth like the worst dentist’s tool ever imagined. It sparked, shooting blue electricity towards the faucet, the drain, and zipped around, bumping up against the edges of the sink. I saw bits of pink and red stuck to its round surface. Bits of me. It sputtered, made a shrieking sound like dial-up, then sparked a final time and died.

I couldn’t think of anything. There was pain, but not much, just as there hadn’t been much blood. Mostly I felt numb. I looked into the mirror but as I hadn’t turned the lights on, all I saw were my nose and the edges of my mouth, thanks to the light coming through the bathroom window. Something happened in me, but I could only feel the edges of it. Dull edges that would take time to smooth.

I picked up the orb and held it before me. It was slimy and warm to the touch. I’d never seen anything like it. This was the thing that had given me the vision of the baby, of myself as an old woman. It traveled through time to show me my past and future. It was meant to break Francesca. I closed the orb in my hand and wondered if it succeeded. 103

Now that I have some distance the order of events is clear—well, clearer. The orb left me after I’d helped Spiderhead—after I’d felt good helping him. I think it was the realization that it felt good to help another, that I could reach out to another and still retain my self, my distinctness, that signaled to the orb it was time to leave me, that it had done its job. Once I’d opened myself up to what I’d walled off, I was able to see things differently. The entire day—the entirety of the last two years.

I said that Francesca kept me sane, that she helped me feel separate from the world, from other people, from you. After I moved on from webcams to BDSM, I found that the character I created for myself didn’t feel for others at all, and when things got to be too much, I threw myself into her. It was you who made her solid. Right after I’d had the vision, I was too afraid to accept what I’d seen, but with the orb in my hand, I saw it so plainly. What was the only thing that threatened Francesca?

In all the sunlight, and with an old woman’s weak eyes, I couldn’t tell that I’d held this baby before. I thought it had been a baby boy, but I’d bathed this baby, fed her.

She looked just how she had when mom and dad brought her home and I held her for the first time.

I was grinning ear to ear. I drank, swishing the water around in my mouth. I still tasted the orb and my blood, but I was grateful for it. All the ambivalence, the doubt—I didn’t feel it anymore. I remembered it well enough, but it seemed trite now. I laughed and massaged my throat, then laughed some more. I laughed because I realized the old woman had beaten me. But really, I suppose all she did was show me something I’d known a long time and felt, deep down. The old woman was me. I mean, she will be. Her voice had always sounded familiar, and when I saw myself in the mirror, the room all 104

dark, I realized that I’d looked at the same dark reflection each time I’d watched one of the old woman’s discs. When she first spoke your name, you became real again. It’s why

I was so upset, so scared—I thought wanting to see you again was a sign of weakness, proof that I’d regressed.

I was so afraid of the old woman’s future coming to pass. I thought that it would mean I was nothing but a puppet—a robot programmed to complete a task. But I see it differently now. Our choices are all we know. It’s choice that makes us who we are. If our choices are the product of unknown impulses, of things outside us, then that’s just what choice is—it doesn’t render us arbitrary, or make us robots. There’s no dichotomy between where we’re met by the things that form us, and us. We can imagine as many possible routes as we’d like, but we’re still only going to choose one. My life will lead me to the old woman—because it’s the route my life will take. I’ll lead myself down that route, with each choice I make. Choices, fate—or whatever it was I was so afraid of— they’re indistinguishable, inseparable. All this to say that I can’t wait until we’re reunited.

I’m standing under the bus shelter outside your new place. The cab left me off here. Can you hear the rain, the cars? I’m the only person out here. I see you peering out the window. Can you see me? I’ve been watching your head against the windowpane. I don’t need to come in if you don’t want me to. But it’s nice to know that you’re listening.

Maybe you need to play this message a few times—that’s okay. I can wait, and I think you should do what you think is best for you. You see, I was grinning ear to ear because I remembered what it felt like to love you.

The old woman said that Elysium is born in our reunion. That something will burn from us into the rest of the world. I didn’t know what she meant until now. I ran 105

from you because I empathized with you so purely. The orb didn’t show me little baby

Clara—that was just me filling in the gaps. I think the thing it showed me was Elysium. I think that empathy is Elysium. Empathy and compassion form its foundation like two parts of an equation. The orb revealed to me that math, somehow distilling Elysium into a concept, into the human elements that give it meaning. What I saw was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I think either of us have ever seen . . . but how does one see a concept? You can feel its edges and sense its meaning, but I couldn’t picture it. I filled the unseeable space in my thoughts with the one thing, the one person in my life who ever came close to such beauty. So even if you rip up the tape or delete the message or whatever it is you do—I’m going to fight. You can make your decisions but you can’t shut me out, not your sister. If you’re angry with me, fine. We’ll get it over it together.

I’m here for you. I don’t know a thing about how your life is now, but you’re going to tell me. I’m going to be the big sister I should’ve been. I’ll teach you what I’ve learned . . . the things I will learn. Together, we’ll lift each other up. What comes after I’ll have to see with my own eyes, but I know it will be every bit as beautiful as the first time I held you.

If you want to let me in, then come down, please, and let me in. I’ll be out here until the next bus comes. But if you need time—and it’s okay if you do—then let me tell you where I can be reached, all right? Okay. Grab a pen.

All right, are you listening?

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For inspiration:

Grant Morrison Junot Díaz Cormac McCarthy T.C. Boyle Paul Auster Toni Morrison Martin Scorsese Steve McQueen & Abi Morgan David Lynch Quentin Tarantino Tunde Adebimpe, Dave Sitek, Kyp Malone, Jaleel Bunton, & Gerard Smith Tupac Shakur Björk Louis C.K. Vince Gilligan David Simon Alan Ball Peter Milligan David Lapham Alan Moore Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso Jason Aaron & R.M. Guéra Tim O’Brien Flannery O’Connor Kurt Vonnegut Sartre Gautama Buddha

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Thanks:

My committee – Eric Sanders & Ernie Alleva, couldn’t have done it without you My professors, fall 2011/spring 2012 – Michael Lowenthal & Nell Arnold My Div II committee – Jeff Wallen, Deb Gorlin, & Ellie Siegel My mentor, spring 2011 – John J. Clayton Mom, Dad, & Jane (and Duncan, my rock) Fellow workshoppers! – Elora Pindell, Jake Eichner, Molly Seeley, Gregg Bothwell, Ellie Gordon, Thom Sullivan, Joe Aranda, Scotty Gillmer, Ben Franks, Scott Bremer, Eric Marshall, Michael Samuels, Nadia Ogbor, Eve Bernhard, Casey Moir, Libby Goldstein, Maggie Hart, Senti Sojwal, Andrew Greene, Freddy Fluchel, Michele Mirisola, Ari Burton, & Kiyara Leis My friends/extra sets of eyes – Max Miller, Yohannes Chambers (--my honest-to-God brother!), Seth Toles, Hannah Haskell, Omri Bernstein, Erika “Perin” Held, Amanda Lynk, Kristina Walker, Grace Donahue, Ricardo Guillaume, & everyone else who frequents 63 and/or came to my reading! Inspiring people from my youth who helped put me on the path – Ben Berman, Natasha Trivers, Irene Balakrishnan, Diane Scott, Doreen Kelly-Carney, Kate Glendinning, Michael Knight, Jonathan Diamond, Clement Ampadu, David Wood, Ian Frederick, Ben Frederick, Heather Frederick, & Jason Milligan