If you were hired by Classics Illustrated and told to choose a book—any book!—to adapt into a comic, what would it be? Why that book? What would it look like?

The responses dig into the problems of transforming work from one medium to another with wit, sympathy, and just a touch of sarcasm. We’re very pleased to present new work by Kevin Cannon, Pascal Girard, Melissa Mendes, Andrea Tsurumi, and Noah Van Sciver.


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A “CLASSIC” IDEA
by Kevin Cannon





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By Pascal Girard





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MEDIUMS
by Melissa Mendes





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THE PEEP OF DAY (1836)
by Andrea Tsurumi





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SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS
by Noah Van Sciver





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Kevin Cannon wants to be an important businessman, but mostly he just draws comics, such as the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Far Arden, and the much-lauded mini comic Beard Hero. In his free time he listens to professional hockey on the radio and collects first-edition Arctic narratives on eBay.

Pascal Girard was born in Jonquière in 1981. He received his interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts from the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi in 2004. He lives in Montreal. His book Bigfoot won the best book of the year at the Doug Wright Awards 2011.

Melissa Mendes is a cartoonist and illustrator living and working in Hancock, MA with her best beau Charles Forsman and their best cat Bruce.

Andrea Tsurumi is an illustrator and cartoonist living in Astoria, Queens. She’s also currently an MFA student at the School of Visual Arts.

Noah Van Sciver, a native of New Jersey, was born in 1984 and is currently located in Denver, Colorado. He draws a weekly comic strip for the Denver alternative paper Westword called “4 Questions” and is the creator of the much-loved comic book series Blammo. His work has appeared in Mad magazine, Mome, The Comics Journal, Best American Comics 2011, and numerous other comics anthologies. He has recently completed his debut graphic novel about a young, melancholic Abraham Lincoln called The Hypo for Fantagraphics Books.

Marshall goes crabbing
First and second cognates
plague/pilgrimage
     crab/wish

The summer he turned thirty, the only task my husband Marshall could stand was setting nets for crabs off the Santa Cruz pier. The simple hauling and suspense of the enterprise appealed to him — he was far too clumsy and impatient to fish. Crabbing was like casting pennies into a wishing well, only what he wished for actually surfaced when he drew the rope back up.

On his birthday, Marshall left his wooden cabana next to the boarding house he managed and descended into town. He could hear the tubercular barks of the burgeoning sea-lion colony nearby. He took the shortcut by the river, through the tent city where homeless people camped. Sea lions had swum upriver, and they crowded now among the garbage and sleeping bags. They hobnobbed atop the flattened tents and nosed through rags and bicycle parts. A small, dark-eyed female found a bell and stroked it with her nose. It rang — a brittle, shivering sound. The rest of the sea lions fell silent. She rang it again. They all gazed at Marshall. She rang the bell a third time, solemnly, and the nylon tents fluttered. Marshall shouldered his crab hoops and kept on.

Sea lions dozed alongside junkies under the railroad bridge. On the other side of the river, a cluster of pinnipeds obstructed the sidewalks. They left steaming, ropy scat on the thoroughfares. They sunned themselves in the crosswalks, oblivious to pedestrian curses, revved engines, and car-horn blares. At the post office, they preened on the steps, proliferating like junk mail. From the public fountain their gleaming heads rose, snorting and spouting. They hauled themselves over the fountain’s lip, they lolled in its spray, combing their ears.

On one corner of the square, a quartet of junior-high boys played homemade marimbas. A gang of sea lions humped toward them, barking and sniffing the air. The boys scattered. Planks splintered and PVC pipes lollopped across manholes, skidding into the street, providing hollow accompaniment to the sea lions’ disconsolate cries as they nosed the remains. Marshall, intent on his course, failed to notice a gang of sea lions attacking a sushi pushcart. As he progressed toward the pier, swinging his bag of fish guts and humming apprehensively, the sea lions overturned the cart and sent the vendor running. They ate everything, even the rolling mats.

At the foot of the pier, a group of rubberneckers gave interviews for local TV.

“I’ve seen some of them cruising the boutiques,” remarked one surprised onlooker. “Which is weird, because they don’t even wear shoes.”

Behind the TV crew, demonstrators waved signs that read “Santa Cruz for the Sea lions!” and “Animals are people too.” A spokesperson bullied her way in front of the camera and demanded that the local government erect a shelter and provide aid for the stranded animals.

“They’re no different than any other refugees!” she shrilled.

Looking out at the seal-clotted waves, another local remarked, “Unreal, man. They actually outnumber the surfers.”

Marshall, preoccupied with his own mortality, paid no attention.

*

“Only the deathless believe in death. The thing that peeks out of the eyes, that struggles in its envelope of flesh knows otherwise—”

Ah, hell. The Tinfoil Dude was out today.

“—but the boneheaded body, which believes so little, is firmly convinced by death.”

Marshall set his sack of fish guts on the pier, sighed, and dug into his hip pocket. The Tinfoil Dude adjusted the silver photographer’s umbrella above him, then smiled.

Marshall fished, but the coins in his pocket refused to bite.

“Gimme a break, it’s my birthday,” he said.

The Tinfoil Dude, by way of reply, put on his sunglasses. He had covered one lens with new foil.

The mendicant pelican, Happy Jack, sidled between Marshall’s feet and darted at the bag of innards. A tourist lobbed French fries at the bird, but Happy Jack was no tame opportunist, no voracious and undiscerning seagull. He was still young, a yellow-feathered purist. Happy Jack tore open the bag and dragged out a fish skeleton, which had hooked a roll of intestine, which was in turn tangled up with some rubbery blue organs. Happy Jack whisked it all along behind him like ticker tape. The pigeons and seagulls and cormorants made it a parade.

Marshall chased after the pelican with a half-irritated sense of camaraderie. Tourists, bored with the bobbled backs of sea lions on the beach, stumped after the bird, too, snapping pictures and making the boards shake with their fat city feet. Marshall did his best to ignore them. He had his wish to catch.

More sea lions sheltered under the pier. They looked like large, unappealing women with mustaches, Sicilian perhaps, round and rubber-coated, bowling-pin shaped, with huge liquid eyes, helpless and somehow Catholic, filled with too much soul for Marshall’s taste.

He settled a crab hoop on the pier and cocked an ear to the distant splashes and consumptive barking of the sea lions. They lummoxed into the water, bobbing down and shooting back up. Jesus, there really were a lot of them.

Marshall rummaged in the hefty sack and picked out a ripe, green-headed crappy. He strung stiff yellow twine through a gill, avoiding the baleful glare in the fish’s scuffed eye, and tied its head to the center of his net. He peered down through the crack in the boards, certain the sea lions were watching him. Thirty feet down, in the shadowy water, a pair of eyes met his.

“Stay away from my catch,” he said — adding, since the eyes looked hurt and knowing, “please.”

Before he could lower the net into the water, a flash off the Tinfoil Dude’s semaphore blinded him. The Tinfoil Dude caught up with Marshall and resettled his lawn chair and reflective umbrella next to the bag of bait. The sunlight spattered like hot grease off the crimples in his foil suit. He cocked his head and looked at Marshall through a lone black lens.

“The sea is a sieve, and bottom feeders inherit what lasts long enough to sink. The drowned, the bony, the calcareous, all drift down alongside ingots and amphorae, where crabs dwell. Those bone pickers, those rag and bottle men engage in daily congress with old dreams. Whatever humans wish on and lose and hope to recover; those things they consign to oblivion. The coins and rings, the crumpled cans, syringes, tied-off rubbers — they all fall to the crabs. The crabs trim anything essential enough to decompose, and strip wishes to their simple, everlasting bones. What do you wish? The crabs will offer it up to you. What do you wish? Claws relinquish what hands cannot keep.”

Marshall shivered and turned his back. He lowered his first net into the water. A fisherman watched him from a few feet away.

“Fool’s errand. Only a jackass’d go crabbing during a spell like this. The sonsabitches will take your bait before it hits the bottom.”

The fisherman tossed his cigarette into the water, watched it hiss out. A seagull dove for the butt. Marshall looked vaguely at the man, who held his rod and reel across his chest like a bayonet, his shoulders squared for a fight.

“Well, you’re fishing, aren’t you?” Marshall asked mildly.

“Hell no. I’m trying to hook the sonsabitches in the eye.”

Out along the break, a young surfer caught a wave. He sheared back and forth along the glassy curve. A sea lion crested alongside and tried to climb onto his surfboard. She knocked him to his knees, and the wave folded them both under. The young man surfaced, gained his board, and paddled furiously toward the beach. The sea lion followed. She swam placidly but steadily, gaining on him. The surfer ran his board aground, shouldered it, and dashed through the surf toward the high-tide line, then tripped on his leash and fell. She was almost upon him. He scrambled upright and pounded up the steps to the pier, where he collapsed at Marshall’s feet.

Marshall and the fisherman unzipped the prone man’s wetsuit to give him some air. Tattoos covered his upper body.

“Couldn’t shake her, dude. It’s like she’s in heat.” The surfer panted, scrubbed a hand through his hair, and dashed the salt from his eyes. He sat up and looked at the circling sea lions.

“Where are the males?”

The waves were packed like bleachers — tier upon tier of dark-eyed lionesses on the swells.

“Strange times, my man. Strange times,” said the surfer. He considered the sea lions.

“I lived through a plague of caterpillars once, when I was a kid. Big black mothers. Really sick, and I don’t mean in a good way.”

He dislodged a pebble from his great toenail and flicked it into the sea.

“But the butterflies that year were something else.”

More semaphore, and the Tinfoil Dude’s cockeyed black gaze was upon all three of them.

“Humans have souls that show in our eye whites. Our bodies are frail and unpeeled, and yet we are strange shelled beings all the same. Divinity reinforced in flesh. Only the most vicious and primitive — the cold-bloods, the sharks — mistake men for animals, for food, for seals, for themselves. Captive orcas will drown their trainers, but that is war, and they are prisoners. The spermaceti kill men, but only in self-defense, and that is allowed because men (cold-blooded, vicious, and primitive) kill them. But the other creatures know men as terrible angels, mammal-ethereal. Cousins of the cetaceans and pinnipeds. Like birds, we stand upright. Our souls, they say, have straightened us. Where wings (or fins, which are only wings for water) should be we have hands. Hands! Those double agents. The soul’s other seat.”

The Tinfoil Dude picked bits of foil off the lens of his sunglasses and chewed thoughtfully on the pellets until the fisherman gave him a cigarette in hopes of discouraging further transmissions. Marshall edged away. Suddenly even looking at other people required such an effort that he could feel the muscles in his lips start to twitch. Hopefully they thought he was smiling. He fled to the other side of the pier.

The first net came up empty. He moved to the next station and pulled it up, straining to catch sight of crabs beneath the sunlit and shifting water. When the net burst to the surface, it held nothing but the remains of his bait. He came to the last net and stood looking down for a long time, following the line with his eyes. He fingered the twine. It chafed his fingers pleasantly. He adjusted it so it fit into the notch worn into the railing by countless other lines. He reeled it up, hand over hand. The net rose swiftly. He could tell from the weight that he’d caught something. The silver hoop broke the surface, and he saw a nest of crabs, three of them — a decorator, a Sheephead, and a rock crab — scooting along and overlapping one another as they tore contentedly at the fish head. Relief loosened his grip. Beneath the water’s surface, a dark, oblong shape skirted the net, turned, swooped, and spread a pair of shadowy wings.

“No, you bitch!”

He hauled. The sea lion’s head rose and threw off water. A quick nudge flipped the net. The crabs spiraled down. She threw him a coy look and sped under.

Waves chopped against the pilings. Marshall leaned against the rail and let the net string dangle. Happy Jack gripped his way sidewise along the railing toward Marshall. He shook himself, raised his crest, and clapped his bill.

“Get out of here, Happy Jack.”

Marshall sighed and dragged up the net. It clung briefly to the skin of the water, dripped and swayed, and left a rippling bull’s-eye.

The pelican launched, wheeled once, arrowed into the water, and came up with a fish.

Marshall could hear the sounds of salsa music and laughter from the beach out beyond the empty roller coaster in its drop cloth of mist. It started to rain. Tourists squawked, zipped up their sweatshirts, and herded their kids toward the parking lot. Happy Jack’s head appeared and disappeared above the railing, like a gas flame. Marshall brooded over the water, which was still the clear dark green of a wine bottle. The mist pearled down. A small dark head turned liquid eyes up at Marshall, apologetically. He saw something come-hither in her glance. A mute appeal; an invitation. Her nostrils dilated. She snorted once and disappeared.

Some pocketknife-wielding kid had carved a pair of blocky initials into the railing and, lacking the ability to fashion a heart, boxed them in with a square. Marshall traced the letters with a fingernail. He peered down through the tatters of mist, but could see nothing.

Had she winked at him?

The Leap
Third cognate
suicide/courtship

She surfaced again and combed out her whiskers, beckoning. She executed a neat flip, pointed her toes (flippers? flukes?) at the sky, rolled like a hoop. She came up and offered him her bottomless eyes. She was flirting with him. He let the hoop drop. It curveted on the boards and beat to a stop. He smoothed his mustache. He looked over his shoulder. The pier behind him was all mist. Even the pelican was gone. He turned back to the water and there she was, swimming steadily toward him, with a smiling wake. Peace lapped at his stomach. He considered the drop. She waited for him, stirring the water with her foreclaws, writing a message on the surface.

Come on in. The water’s fine.

Marshall plucked off his sweater and cast it on the pier, heeled his shoes free, stripped his socks, unzipped and shucked and stood with the mist stippling his bare skin. He set an instep to the lower bar of the rail, mounted, and stood, wavering, his arms flapping slightly, above the pier. It was a long drop. She cocked her whiskers at him with the coquetry of woman hiding a half-smile behind a swept fan.

He leaped.

His body knifed the water, and the water winded him. The wound his body made on the skin of the ocean closed instantly and left no scar. He was under, plummeting true. He flipped and kicked down to meet her. Her fur brushed his skin, rough and frigid as she swept the length of him. He reached for her, but she bristled through his fingers, eluding him, like a fish. Another desperate flutter and he caught up with her, hovering over her sleek swimming back. He locked his arms around her neck (her breast?) and scissored his pale legs around her midsection. His whole body felt bone-hard. She was cold, all cold, and surging through the water with powerful lateral strokes. They left long bubble trails in the water. A spike of desire pierced him. As if he could boil the sea to steam.

Marshall lunged at her. He had almost come to the end of his air. She bucked beneath him. He held her, but she began to rise, carrying him. They approached the sea’s upper skin. He pressed himself against her. They broke the surface. Delicious shafts of air punched into each lung. His head felt as though it might explode. She was serene, floating beneath him. She ferried him, slung across her back, all the way to shore.

Marshall lay propped on his elbows on a stretch of beach. The pier was faintly visible now. A cow-nosed ray that had washed ashore stirred the sand feebly. He watched its quiet death, feeling sad but oddly contented. He lay back and fanned out his arms, making an angel in the sand. One palm happened upon a piece of sea glass. Still new, and jagged. He gripped it in his fist.

She humped out of the water, dragging her cumbersome body toward him. She passed the dying cow-nosed ray with indifference. She loomed over him. Her gassy breath enveloped him. The sound of the sea enclosed them. He realized, looking at her ears, small and neat like moth antennae, that he had always been lonely. He looked at the trembling fibers of her whiskers, at her liquid eyes, which gazed at him with desire and sympathy. Joy exploded within him. She barked, and as he looked up at the vault of her mouth, at her clutter of teeth, he laughed and reached for her.

The puddle of her former skin
Fourth cognate
undress/flay

The sea lion rolled over, her vast belly pearled with grit. He sat up and moved to straddle her, but her sharp, nipping bark checked him. Marshall fell back on his haunches. She lifted her head and looked at him hard, then tucked her muzzle and tore herself open just below the throat. He watched the shaft of her eyetooth ease into the fur. It made a small popping noise as it broke the skin. Blood flowed down. She drove into her throat more deeply, worried and mumbled at the skin, her eyes starting. Her chest heaved, and she beat her bottom flukes against the sand. Marshall’s own eyes stung. The sight of his tears seemed to spur her, because she expanded her vast ribs, thrashed her tail, and hitched her jaws down sharply, unzipping the skin. The sound was moist and ragged. Fur and flesh parted, and she hitched again. She fought the layers of hair and fat, sometimes coaxing with her tongue, sometimes gnawing violently, until she had opened a seam from her neck to her sternum.

Her flukes thrummed a quick tattoo in the depression she had dug while she struggled. She gasped in quick spurts, like a beached fish, and he feared she was drowning in her own blood. But she was barking, or trying to bark. He could hear it now, a soft aspiration of the glottis. She nosed his fist. He pulled back. A stripe of blood on the back of his hand and the chilly spume from her nose.

Marshall opened his palm. She barked again — a horrible, hacking sound. He understood.

He brought his piece of sea glass to her breast, jimmied it into the tear she had made, and gutted her.

There was no spill of intestine. Instead, something white and slippery moved between the lips of the gash. He pried back the folds of seal skin, looking for viscera to pull free, for tendons and ligaments to cut. Something moved inside the skin, distended it, poked through, withdrew. Her lap was so bloody. The head continued its noiseless barking, and something struggled to emerge. Small and pale, it poked through the gape. He grasped it and pulled. It felt wrinkled and delicate, an arch that fit the cup of his hand. He squeezed, it kicked. He had it by the instep. Again he pulled and his hand slid up the sole of the bloody foot and gained an ankle. A pair of legs slid free, oiled with blood and yellowish foam — lipids, or sea curd. The skin opened further, disgorging its contents. Thighs emerged, and when they parted, he saw that it was she.

The sea lion sat up, her navel a goblet of blood. She thrust free of her lower flippers, which crumpled, diminished, on the sand. She raised her upper flukes and pushed her entire head back, as if it were a hood. The sea-lion skull hung down her back, whiskers trembling beneath stretched and vacant sockets. She shrugged off the rest of her hide as casually as a woman divesting herself of an opera cloak. She shot her cuffs and sat, triumphantly naked and blood-streaked, on the puddle of her former skin.

When she discovered her hands
Fifth cognate
hand/soul

Her hands lay in her lap. Blood inked her palms. She stared down at them, her hair hanging and her face inscrutable. She fanned her fingers inward, beginning at the pinky, then flared them back out, testing the muscles and joints. He caged one of her hands, then the other, and their fingers meshed. He could feel her delight at the hook and eye of thumbs, at the flat fit of their cupped palms. She turned his hands over. She stroked him again. Her fingers shook.

He grazed her knuckles and saw goosebumps flash up her arms. Hands socked together, twining and sliding, clasping and twisting. Wrist rested in palm, hands closed around wrists. Fingers collapsed on fingers and gripped (here is the church), fingers tented (here is the steeple), fingers dove and plaited and turned. Padded fingertips rolled like rain, straying down the inner skin of forearms. It came to him that this is what hands were made to do. Digits knit. Pulses kissed. His palms grew slick and still she urged him on, her hands untiring, devouring his. At last, when all his senses drew to a point in his fingers, she released his left hand and set his right hand flat on her neck. Using both hands, she guided it down her vulnerable breastbone, along the line of symmetry, between her ribs, over her navel, and down, until it encountered crisp hair and heat.

She looked at him, pressed his hand, and let go. His third finger didn’t pause. It plunged and carved out her last vestige of skin.

And thus were we married
Sixth cognate
her/I

Carved out of follicles, shedding the beast, she joined with him. His soul entered her through his hands. He breached her new (true?) skin with his fingers, groped the channel. His fingers pierced her heart, drove and pressed until her own soul stirred, cried out, then cried again. I cannot say if this was pleasure. I had no idea it went so deep.

I drew more soul from his mouth, and he gave without knowing what he had to give. I thought he did. (I thought you knew! I thought you knew what you were doing.)

And last of all, the animal part of him found its seat.

And thus were we married.

Imagine me undivided
Seventh cognate
moon/migration

I was the last of our exodus. I’d gone about it singly; unlike my sisters, I knew better than to frighten the men. Such marriages cannot be bullied. I simply waited in the water, watching men’s hands, seeking out the one who would recognize me beneath my skin. I observed their hands, the passes that they made, lowering our food into the water. When one scratched his nose it was a miracle. Another tied a shoe. I felt a yearning so deep for those hands, to be under those hands, that I had to marry. I am translating all this after the fact, because at the time, of course, I neither spoke nor thought. I had muscle-knowing, and scent-knowing, and belly-insight, and instinct, and fear. And, of course, the longing for men’s hands, for what they could give and do. Imagine me, then, undivided, muscle and buoyancy and bone.

What was it, why did I hanker for a human husband? I would betray myself if I put it down to dumb curiosity, to the witless drive to investigate oil slicks, to swallow tin, choke on flannisters or mistake balloons and floating bags for jellyfish. It was in truth the sweetest yearning. I bore its clutch inside me like a shark’s purse, and one evening as I dove, it hatched. A new creature swam inside me; it fit close like a membrane. It wasn’t hunger. It wasn’t estrus. A desire to rise to the upper air, to escape the pressure of that skin and the skin of the water around me. It moved me and thousands of my sisters. The barking started with the sickle moon. Call it instinct. We abandoned the colony and arrived in one single-minded surge of longing.

It afflicts some of us — the females only, of course. There exists no love (strange word) between the bulls and us in the hot press of the harem. The turbulent schools of us, herded on the rocks. The cormorants. The ripe piss and fish. It is a kind of innocence, in your tongue. In your way (now mine) of looking at it. We have no word for it at all. Why can’t I remember that life as I was? Now that I’ve put off that skin, I’ve lost my old inabilities. Who would have thought one could lose a lack, or miss a deficiency?

That world is closed to me.

She almost loses her skin
Eighth cognate
fur (noun)/(untranslatable abstract verb)

When they rolled apart, sweating, Marshall looked up and saw that the mist was beginning to clear. The scrimshaw quality of the light told him it was almost sunset. She lay on the sand, looking up at him. Her eyes were already losing their luminous, animal quality. But the look she gave him was deep. He turned away from it; he felt joyous and disgruntled. He pulled her to her feet.

“I guess you’ll have to come home with me.”

She stumbled against him. Her legs were not supporting her. Marshall felt a flicker of pride. Her breast brushed his bicep and she looked into him again, with worship. He returned her look, half afraid he might glimpse some lingering shadow of Nothingness, because her eyes, when she’d beckoned from the water, seemed bottomless. Instead, he saw his own reflection flicker on the skin of her irises.

“Come on.”

She didn’t budge. She looked over his shoulder with the same intense focus she’d trained on him. He turned and followed her gaze and saw the ocean encroach on her cast-off skin. She gave a small cry, pulled free, and dashed back toward the waterline. She ran awkwardly, the toes of one foot catching the heel of the other; her soles clapped together and she fell. The tide swooped in. She pulled herself forward on her elbows, dragging her legs behind her. In this position she was astonishingly fast. A wave flooded over her abandoned skin, lifted it, and sucked it into the surf. She floundered after it. Another wave cast the skin back, relaying it to a new wave, which drew it further away. She cried again. The skin floated beyond her reach. She thrashed into the water, gained it, clutched it to her chest, and tried to stand.

Marshall saw her go under, and he ran. The brine lashed at his claves, and by the time he reached her all he could see was the billow of skin atop the waves, anchored by the determined grip of her hand. The sea flashed around her narrow wrist. Marshall dove and dragged her up by the hair. With the skin she was twice as heavy, but she would not let go. He carried them both back to shore.

She gasped, coughed, clung to him, clutched the skin that was pressed, clam-like, between them. He guided her back to softer sand. She looked over her shoulder at the crepitating waves, shivered, and tightened her grip on her skin. She dropped to her knees and spread it out. It was drenched and faintly steaming, lapped in old juices. It reminded him of a moldy raincoat. A crab scuttled out of one eyehole. Marshall looked away. She smoothed the skin gently and wrung the water from the empty flippers and cloven flukes. Then she rolled the sodden rug into a tight bundle and gathered it in her arms. She might have been carrying a papoose.

He propelled her inland. They were both still naked, but no one bothered them. A gaggle of sea lions parted on the bridge to let them pass. She strode by them, her legs still unsteady. A sea lion nosed the crack of Marshall’s behind. She barked, and it pulled back. Cars honked. Marshall led her home.

I should have left it to the sea. If I had abandoned it there, I might have entered our marriage absolutely. But stripped of it, I’d felt so cold and insubstantial. No fat, no hair, just a sparseness pulled over an arrangement of bones. When I watched my bloody, abandoned shell unfurl on a wave, I saw for the first time the true shape of my self — the speechless, instinctive part of me; the swimmer, the fisher — torn free and taking its leave. I had shucked it too eagerly, and so I ran — even in panic wondering at the jarring bounce, the novel impact of each foot, the alternating rise and fall of breasts, and the shortness in my chest. When I held it, I felt whole again.

Fur Elise
Ninth cognate
Muzak/music

She had no name, and did not know how to speak. Marshall called her Fur Elise, then explained the pun. She had already learned to shrug. So he produced the tune for her by calling up his credit-card company and having himself put on hold. He pressed the receiver to her ear, and she jumped, at first, at the sea of sounds that broke through. Then the music gathered itself into a melody and cycled, achingly, over and over. She held. Marshall’s wrist began to throb, but he was already too much in love, too puzzled and amused to break the connection for her. He had never in his life encountered anything as strange as this: sitting cupping his phone to the unshelled ear of a naked woman who sat on hold with Visa, rapt and absolutely mute.

Some other things hands can do
Tenth cognate
Tears

We put the skin in Marshall’s deep freeze and lived naked off one other for three weeks. I learned about the temple and frigate that is bed. Marshall’s tenants jammed their rent checks under the door, and his machine picked up their cries of lost keys and faulty plumbing. Oh why is love the hardest to translate? Is there anything so consuming as the first flush of physical love, which feels, which is, intensely holy? Perhaps there’s too much seal in me to tell it clearly. We had three weeks of sexual bliss so deep I mistook it for marriage. It disturbed appetite and sleep. Our souls shot to the surface of our skins and leapt back and forth between us, crackling. And then it just — becalmed. We sat, with sails flat, on the surface of a dull mirror.

I admit part of that was due to me. A soul made the world more bitter, cold, and breathtaking than I expected. After the first flush of wonder wore off, the world slapped me like a wave and wet me through. Marshall couldn’t understand it. I suppose he got used to it in childhood. But for me every moment felt like snapping awake — and freshness hurts; I was constantly agasp, aghast. I was drowning.

Words from that time: Kaleidoscope. Churn. It was a kind of seasickness, a disease of the inner ear — or of that spirit function which corresponds to the inner ear. I never quite regained my balance. My soul slopped within me. I could feel it dashing itself against the cliffs of my body: it spiraled into eddies, moved in tides, rose, fell, climbed the walls, and tried to reach the moon.

“You need to learn tears,” the Tinfoil Dude told me.

“Every human born on this earth learns to cry, first thing. Before they open their eyes, they open their lungs and let fly. Tears come before language. Tears become language — that’s all language is — just an elegant form of tears. You’ll settle down some if you learn to cry — it’s just that your soul’s too new, and too big for you — that’s what hurts — it’s kicking against its confinement. Learn to shed tears — they’ll let some of the soul leak out of you, ease the pressure on your valves. Get your husband to teach you tears.”

Tears. Love’s glue and love’s solvent. Oh, I learned to cry.

The memory of pleasure knits itself closed, like the memory of wounds.

The first time I peed, outdoors, naked in the starlight beneath the redwood tree, he thought it was sexy. But later, when, in my innocence, I chose a corner behind his TV, his whole aspect flashed white, and his anger caught me in the sternum. “STOP!” he yelled, towering above me — but of course I couldn’t — and so he grabbed a newspaper, furled it, raised it, dashed it over my head, and beat my face and chest until my skin was a smudged series of headlines. It didn’t hurt my body. Between the flash, the swats, the blur of paper, and the confusion, I watched the beautiful curve of his hand.

The color left his face and he let the paper drop. He reached for my chin and pulled me up, but still, I saw he had to suppress his disgust, and he didn’t answer my eyes when he explained it all to me in the room where the stainless eel came out of a flat coral wall coughing saltless water. Marshall showed me how and where to do it, how to clean the mess, and he washed the printer’s ink from my skin. Although I marveled the whole time at the gentleness and dexterity of his long fingers, it was too late. I’d glimpsed the other things hands can do.

That night he made me sushi with those hands. They were so sure, slicing the fish, a fascination of knives, the blades as fingers, more precise than a tooth. How bright they were, his hands, how strong and bony, directing the silver to slice the flesh. Shaping beds of rice. He fed me by hand that night, too, and I overcame my disgust at the dead food by tasting the tips of his fingers first.

That night I slept beside him, and in my sleep, I slipped. There is the song we sing inside our skins, when we slip over the skin of the rocks and into the skin of the water. It is a song of warm blood in cold water, of darting light and fish, of salt.

Basking; she is basking. The sun brushes tips of my fur; it opens pores and heats blood. My heart beats slowly and steadily, and my breath overlaps with the sea’s. Occasional spray lashes up around the rock, but the rock takes most of the wetting, and the water that hits me is so fine it only causes an ear to twitch, brings on a sneeze. Fish blood still lingers on her tongue.

Turn and slip into the water — its green folds part around (me?) and bear (her?) up. The water pares warmth, languor, heaviness from her as I dive. How strong she is: a circuitry of power and awareness, of decision, reaction, speed, and force. The long muscles of her body propel me forward, down, sideways, and her broad forefins thrust aside the water. She arcs, I twist. We fly. We angle and roll, we make quick turns and darting sallies. I draw her belly along the sea floor and shoot to the surface. We blow two sharp reports from each nostril, expand our lungs, and plunge. A rock cod darts past. She charges after it, dives, and catches it. I had forgotten the stark vitality of a live fish. She bobs, draws air, and leans back on a wave, her flukes treading the water. We are not at all tired. We dive and surface, muscling through the water, light and vigorous and singular and enclosed.

*

At the touch of sheets, I awoke. Marshall straightened the bedclothes. His hands gripped the sheet and pulled it taut. He smoothed a stray crease with his knuckle. What a weird naked pink bone. What mean little patches of hair. I kicked off the sheet. The cotton felt too dry, too light. She stood on my funny little feet and went to draw a bath.

The cold-water faucet stuck and I couldn’t turn it. I wrenched a tendon in my hand, struggling with the tap. She didn’t want to sleep in hot water. Ugh. I pulled the plug and stood under the shower. But she couldn’t sleep standing up.

*

In this dream I walk naked out of the house, along the highway, over the bridge, and down to the shore, to lie on the rocks as I used to. But the rocks are sharp, and the air is cold, and I have no fellows.

*

Night/day. Dream/wake. Woman/man. A world stitched from opposing skins.

*

In this dream, I am standing on the beach. The sea throws a cold mantilla about my ankles. The tide goes out, bare stretches of sand gleam. My footprints fill with water, the heels sink, the arches recede. The ocean reads, then smoothes over, our passing. That house, and that woman’s body, and her husband, lie in the distance behind us, but here, at the edge, they are impossible to believe in. The sea unearths trivia and casts it at our feet, and suddenly the smallest stone, wet, looks promising, and a sand dollar, half broken or buried, seems a coin we can thumb into the slot of — what?

Only here, at the boundary between water and land, do I feel the possibility of wholeness. Least confusing of refuges, this beach, with its contradictions. Here at the tide line. This is our first and last home. Where it begins and ends differs with the tides; this narrow strip of country shifts constantly, and the sea itself (fertile, sterile, salty) threatens to both claim and withdraw from me, take me or leave her, as it takes, and trades, and leaves the wrack of empty shells, of dead and dying things.

It hands me a bottle. Or rather, casts one at her feet. A green one, long-necked and hippy. I upend it and tip out the thread of gray silt and fumble with a forefinger in its throat and take out a letter that’s thick and wet and sticks to itself, a letter that shreds into tears when I try to unpeel it. What is written there matters terribly. But I remember, waking, that she can’t read.

*

In this dream she is back in the colony, surrounded by her kind. It is raining, and her fur sheds the rain. They press together for warmth. Against every part of her own skin, I feel another pulse beat.

She wakes and finds my breasts unaccountable.

*

In this dream, she is diving under the docks. In the shadow beneath the pier, the water is colder but calmer. A current thrills along her body, and I outstrip the falling crab net easily, plunder it and swim away, up and out of the water, looking over her shoulder at the bipeds that shake their fists and bark in their feeble way.

*

Marshall shook me awake. (She turns in the water and surfaces.)

“I was scared,” he said. “You weren’t breathing.”

“It’s morning. Take us to the beach.”

*

Her heart beat and I bounced from foot to foot while he shouldered our towel and checked the locks. My palms and armpits were damp, and I felt all her muscles gathered and ready, felt her inhabiting this foreign body. We could taste the ocean.

In the car I closed my eyes and called up the flex of her spine through the water. We sprang out of the car before Marshall could pull the parking brake, tearing off my clothes and turning them into kites that the wind cast onto the footpath. Mommy that lady was naked!

We sprinted toward the ocean and it was good, that first sight of the water. The waves ran high. They beat the surf to thick cream. I stumbled, laughing, through the foam; she barked and we dove under a breaker.

A terrible burning flooded my chest and lit up my brain, seizing her with confusion. She had expected to be sealed, water-tight, but the liquid invaded our skin, filled our mouth and nose, drenched our hair, licked our eyes, and seeped up high between our legs. The wave tumbled me and she tried to dive under it, but this body would not obey her. Instead of pulsing steadily, my legs thrashed, and her foreflippers pawed feebly at the wave; the wave flooded between my fingers, then brushed them aside, and she couldn’t move forward at all. She struggled, and the wave threw us to the bottom and ground us against the sand. She fought to float and I to stand, but the wave insisted. Although she could hold her breath, my lungs wouldn’t expand. She inhaled a wave and (oh, like knives) more waves (she cleared them so easily) dragged her down. I collapsed, but she, stronger, gave one last surge. She beat her flukes inside my feet. But had forgotten how to swim.

On the beach where we were married, Marshall blew into my mouth and kindled himself in me once more. I lay listless in his arms with my face turned away from the water, looking up at the sandstone cliffs, at the young fossils embedded there. Clams, mostly, their living meat caramelized to cold yellow crystal. The rock beneath me cased old bones. I traced them with my hand, the phalanges of the fins of my ancestors. Along the cliff above me, a green-lined shore crab sat in the stone concavity of a fossil clam. Thrown there by a storm, the crab crouched, legs drawn up, eyes revolving, taking in the lap of bones, the distant sea, its native country, my husband, me. Strange kernel, this castaway in its multiple casks of shell and stone and cliff. It sat, too wise or too small or too stupid to feel otherwise than at home.

When I felt she could walk, we headed for the car.

We almost stepped on the dead cow-nosed ray. Half-rotten, half-mummified, humming with flies, it lay above the high-tide line, among the cast-off skins of condoms shrunken in the weeds. The ray’s tail had shriveled to a turtle-stub, and its tear-thin skin had sunk over its gills, giving it a strange, sealed-off smile. The cartilage around its wings had gone soft. It was the color of road dust, dried up and ripening but still beautiful.

“Oh, Marshall.”

He detected a smell and wanted to move on. I squatted next to the ray and inspected the fruit-peel skin that had drawn back from the creature’s head.

“Don’t touch it honey, it’s dead.”

But she reached out to move it, and he could tell she’d need help. It was big, five feet from wing to wing.

“Don’t touch it, Lise.”

She picked at one edge and turned it. The death-smell blared — a more-than-fish smell. She gasped as they beheld the insouciant maggots at their feast.

Now she was crying, really crying (Elise, who never cried, who didn’t know how), saying Marshall please, please. We can’t just leave it, please, help me.

He wrapped it in their towel, averting his face, then jogged the dead ray down to the water. He dumped it on an incoming wave.

The waves carried the ray out. Water licked the animal so it gleamed, and the waves lifted its wings. It tumbled in the breakers, flashing its white belly. The surf returned it again and again to the beach. Marshall dragged the ray out further, but it kept coming back. Finally, he swam it into the deep water, where the waves closed over it, and it sank.

Marshall and I didn’t talk on the way home. My whole body itched with caked salt; my lungs felt scoured. I was colder than I had ever been. And the need to get to my skin, to feel it, to handle it with my naked hands, shook me.

Her skin came between them
Eleventh cognate
rot/comfort

When they arrived home, she marched to the deep freeze and pulled out the package of foil. She picked it free and shook the frost out of the old thing and held it to herself, stroking it and smelling it and singing.

She let it defrost and brought it into his bed. It stank of wet compost, and then of a rendering plant. The skin buzzed with sand flies and sea lice. At first clammy and placental, it grew tacky and stiff. The sawed edges where they’d parted it cured into sharp points that scratched him in the night. The bloody inner membrane dried black and flaked off, revealing nasty jaundiced buckskin beneath. Each morning he found flecks clinging to his skin. The shafts that held the claws loosened their grip, dried up and drew back. And the claws themselves, brittle keratin, began to break down. The crease of his sheets collected splinters, and curved quills embedded themselves in the sleepers’ unprotected skin. He would awaken to find one of his fingers protruding from her former nostril, and once (he shuddered at this), his undiscriminating penis inserted itself, during a nocturnal reverie, into a vacant eye socket.

She trailed the skin behind her like some freakish transitional object. It became baubled with growths — buboes of chewing gum, tar, wax, and something unidentifiable and sticky (varnish? semen? sap?). It left damp patches on the sheets. Its soft bits got softer, and its hair seemed to grow. It provided all of death’s textures: the coarse, the spongy, the rank, the friable, the dry, the powdery, the black.

He left the bed.

*

I missed him. I did. If I could have, I would have clawed an opening in him and put him on like a second skin. I wanted so badly to inhabit him.

He left the bed, and I was cold, colder than ever, and he was sealed off from me.

I grew fearful for my skin. What was there left to put on?

*

He found her trying to refasten the torn belly. She closed and reclosed it stupidly.

“Stop this. You stink. This stinks. Take off that goddamn thing.”

The head no longer fit her snugly. The eye sockets gaped over her cheeks; he felt discomfited, addressing those drooping, blank patches of skin.

“I can’t even see your eyes, Lise.”

He swallowed hard and steeled himself to adjust the head. The muzzle sagged onto her chest. Its upper lip snagged an eyetooth. He noticed the gums were turning black, and the teeth looked dead. When he adjusted the head, the sea lion’s tongue fell over his hand. It felt like very old flypaper. He looked into her eyes. Against the stiff fur they stood out, moist and healthy, with pale blue whites.

“Let me get this off you. You can’t breathe in that thing.”

She hugged the skin more closely.

He abandoned tenderness.

She didn’t respond.

Took it up again.

Nothing.

He braced himself and then, as a last resort:

“I love you.”

The head slipped down and lolled to one side. A tuft of her hair poked through an eye socket. The snaggled mouth curled a derisive lip.

“You have to choose. Right now. Me, or the skin.”

The sea lion shook her head.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Me? Or it?”

She said nothing.

His hands pressed mine, then ground the bones together. I felt how strong his hands were. They knew so many things I might prefer not to learn. He crushed my hands between his, but the skin kept away the pain. I filled my sinuses with my sweet smell, the smell of my skin. I rolled it over my taste buds and drew it into my lungs. His fingers squeezed mine with sharp impatient pulses: press, release, press, release. It began to hurt. I ignored it. And then the pressure left, his hands left, and I heard him brush them together in disgust. Then I heard them rummage through a drawer. A rustle of plastic, and his footsteps, advancing.

He slipped one blade of the scissor into her left socket and brought the shears together. Half of the face fell down onto her shoulder. He hewed through the second eyehole. Her other head emerged, eyes utterly black and astounded. She saw that he was crying. He grasped the halves of her head in his fists and tore them apart. He stuffed the rotten rags of flesh and fur into a garbage bag. She beat at him, but her hands had no effect on his. He went on tearing her skin into strips. He broke her jaw over his knee and tossed the tinkling bone and teeth into the bag. He ripped the skin from her shoulders and bared her chest. His nails scored the flesh, and he plucked and picked and pulled, and the blood matted under his nails and he shredded her skin into gobbets, stripped the mitts from her hands. As she bent over to save the scraps, he attacked the hide on her back and stripped her down to her bottom fins. She held a last large piece in her fists. He tore it from her, and she was left with a slick tag in either hand. He shoveled the last of the skin with a dustpan and dumped it in the bag.

*

I stood at the railing of the pier and watched him tie my skin to his crab hoops. A crowd of dark-eyed women and their husbands gathered around us. The women nodded at me and steered their husbands away. The husbands looked over their shoulders at us, their eyes eager and bright.

Marshall drowned the hoops of my skin and drew up crab after crab. He put them in a wicker basket lined with seaweed.

“Dinner,” he said.

“Now open your hands.”

“No.”

“Open your hands.”

He pried away the last two pieces of my skin and flung them out, hard and high over the water. One piece fell to the bobbing gulls. Happy Jack caught the other and bore it away.

My husband took my face between his hands, and I could smell myself on him.

“Lise, now you have to stay with me.”

His hands felt how she, inside my skin, turned away from him.

His eyes were red, and wet, and pleading. But his hands knew.

What could I do? I took his hand.

The seal wife, having dismantled her skin
Twelfth cognate
together

We sat alone on the beach, our hands spread out on the sand beside one another, not touching. We sat together, quite alone. People do not herd. Even in groups they remain upright and isolated. Something about their (our) bipedal symmetry suggests it: marked stanchions of loneliness.

The sand pressed my feet comfortingly. I burrowed in past the ankles. A line of pelicans dipped low and skimmed the surface of the water, as though ironing it with their flight. I watched the dorsal drift of a sail as it passed the point. There must have been people on board, sunning, watching the water, yet at that distance the boat was just another solitary creature making its way.

How would it be to simply sit and let the tide come in around me? One wave broke like a woman winding curlers; another opened out in a fan. Some swirled, a sidewise fleeing of individual channels; some drew straight lines of retreat. Others met on the bias, a careless film, a cast, a drag. Taken all together, a great cold shrug of sea.

A surfer emerged from the ocean and flicked the water from his tattoos. He joined his group of sunburned buddies where they’d pitched camp beneath the rock wall. They were stoned and full of the air and the sea, sore-muscled from bracing their boards, cutting through waves, riding them sweetly in to shore.

“Two blondes were on opposite banks of a river,” I heard one say.

“The first blonde yells to the second blonde, ‘How do you get to the other side?’ The second blonde hollers back, ‘You are on the other side!’”

An explosive chorus of barks, resonant, overlapping. It sounded so strongly of grief that my own chest swelled in sympathy, my throat opened, my glottis vibrated. The human in me heard sorrow, but the other remembered how it felt to make that sound with her fellows, and had no memory of grieving.

The seal wife, having lost her skin, looked toward the rocks, where the remains of her colony pressed together, basking, chewing fleas, arching their backs with their noses to the sun. She remembered that wet-dog press of haunch and shoulder, the way touch defined their borders and yet connected the close-crowded bodies of her former colony — how it was to be a center in a crowd of centers.

I miss the comforts of pressure. My body’s is the loneliness of a body released — the too-light freedom of the air. Now I am a floating element, unmarked by the press of rock, or belly, or fellows’ hind feet. I even miss the colder, absolute pressure of the sea. I swam in that vast and singular tear without knowing it, inhabited the soul of the world, which was better, far more free and painless, than having a soul inhabit me and express itself in drops, tiny and sterile, in which nothing swims but salt.

—

Amy Parker is starting her second year studying fiction at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is a Teaching Writing Fellow.

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Roger hates open casting calls, but the network is being a pain in the ass about casting “real kids” in the Life According to Liberty pilot. “Viewers should look at these kids and see themselves,” says the first in an increasingly inane series of memos. “Avoid overly polished child-star types.” They use the words “fresh,” “natural,” “organic,” and “raw” so often, you’d think they really just want to open a restaurant in Silverlake.

Roger hates a lot of things—rush hour traffic, the 405 any time of day, people who mispronounce “Hermès,” the smoking ban in restaurants, most of America east of the Harbor Freeway—but he especially resents wasting a workday on an open call, because, for the most part, he doesn’t hate his job. He does it damn well, too: if you have kids, they’ve probably clocked half their lives watching his shows. Superpants? That was him. Second String, Friendship Heights, Passing for Paranormal—all Roger Knox productions. It’s thanks to your kids that Roger owns a penthouse in the Hills, drives a black Maserati, wears a different suit every day (Armani, Zegna, Tom Ford, YSL, maybe breaking out the Hugo Boss when he doesn’t mind looking like a slob), and gets his shoes shined once a week even though he doesn’t walk enough to scuff them. He’s been here long enough that he no longer feels like he’s evading when people ask him where he’s from and he answers, “Hollywood.”

At the casting call, though, Roger is forced to interact with people who aren’t from Hollywood, people who even smell like the real world—babies, church basements, cafeterias, grocery-store shampoos. If there were just one or two of these people in here, it wouldn’t be so bad. When he’s vastly outnumbered like this, though, he sees himself through their eyes.

“My son really wants to break into the industry,” says one father from Rancho Palos Verdes. “Do you have any pointers for him?”

Roger turns to the boy and says, “It’s never too early to run away from home. Worked for me.” He can say shit like this to people he’ll never see again.

Today they’re auditioning boys, all good-looking in the same generically nonthreatening way, all reading the same generic lines for the same generic scene in which the generic heroine, Liberty, first meets her generic crush, Jonathan. “So you’re Liberty Larson?” each boy recites. “Hey, I think I know your brothers—Life and The Pursuit of Happiness!” They’re videotaping the auditions, so Roger will have to watch them all again later; he doesn’t look forward to hearing his own hastily written quips a hundred more times. “Thanks for coming in,” Roger says, all day long. “We’ll let you know.” It’s like a hundred one-night stands in a row.

“Kill me now,” he whispers to the casting director when the network people go out of earshot.

“Just one more,” she says, “and then we’ll break for lunch.” She hands him an improperly formatted résumé with a school-picture headshot and just one acting credit: “Pasadena High School, Cabaret—Master of Ceremonies (Lead).”

“What the hell kind of high school does Cabaret?” says Roger.

The casting assistant brings Peter in. Roger takes one look at the kid and knows immediately that he is, to put it tactfully, no Jonathan. Jonathan’s eyelashes wouldn’t be so long and feathery; Jonathan’s hips wouldn’t sway, not even slightly, as he walked into a room. Jonathan is the captain of the football team, and he would not be so slender that Roger could easily knock him to the floor and hold him down and snap his neck with one hand. No, this swishy little proto-twink could not possibly be less of a Jonathan.

But he’s memorized his lines, and his frumpy mother drove him all this way, so they might as well let him do the scene. Roger’s assistant reads aloud: “Interior, school hallway, day—Liberty runs down the hall and crashes into Jonathan. Her books go flying.”

Peter mimes the collision. “Oh!” he cries, flapping his hands (flapping his hands, like a goddamn drag queen, and Roger tenses with a mysterious rage). “Let me give you a hand. You’re Liberty Larson?” Beat. “Hey, I think I know your brothers—Life and The Pursuit of Happiness?”

Roger takes a sip of coffee as Peter says that line, and on “The Pursuit of Happiness” it’s all he can do to suppress a spit take. The kid lisps. He fucking lisps. Not a full-retard “Purthuit of Happineth” lisp—just a slight, delicate sibilance, the kind that no amount of speech therapy will ever straighten out.

So much for Peter’s career, Roger thinks as he says, “Thanks for coming in.”

“How did I do?” Peter asks eagerly.

The casting director’s no moron—her gaydar must be pinging hard enough to crack her skull—but she’s a pro. “We’ll let you know,” she says with bland optimism. The network people don’t say anything at all.

Roger looks down at the boy’s sad résumé. Poor Peter Lane. Lewdly or tenderly, he’s not sure which, Roger thinks: Oh, Peter Lane, they are going to eat you alive. You have no idea, none at all, how much you are about to take it in the face from the world.

The maid is gone by the time Roger gets home, but he can tell she’s been here. The Vanity Fairs are fanned neatly across the glass coffee table, the recycling bin invitingly empty and free of wine bottles. But the real giveaway is the guest bedroom, whose every surface has been wiped clean of L.A. soot. That’s how you can tell a maid is really top-notch: She knows that the dirtiest room in your house isn’t the one you’re in most often, but the one no one’s ever used.

Roger contemplates whether it would be less depressing to watch the audition footage on his plasma screen or on his laptop. He chooses the TV so he can drink without fear of spilling on his keyboard. He slides in the DVD, opens a bottle of pinot noir, and sits on his sectional to watch.

When Peter Lane’s audition comes on, Roger fast-forwards through it. Even sped up, the sight of Peter—the thought of Peter—puts Roger on edge; he doesn’t actually think of San Antonio, but he senses San Antonio slithering around the edges, rattling like a snake. He pours another glass and the rattling stops.

He watches the rest of the auditions and makes a note to call back Tom Devroye, a dark-haired dreamboat who’s done a few Canadian soap operas but doesn’t have his SAG card yet. He’s twenty-four, older than Roger would prefer for Jonathan, but he can pass for high school and he’s got the right look. Tween girls will cream their panties for him. With that settled, Roger can go to bed. Instead he rewinds back to Peter Lane’s audition.

“Hey, I think I know your brothers—Life and The Pursuit of Happiness?”

Peter’s esses are even airier on the recording. Stop it! Roger wants to yell. Can’t you hear yourself? He feels self-conscious, suddenly, sitting in his living room watching this kid in high-def with that embarrassing voice blasting through the speakers. He switches the DVD to his laptop and carries it into his bedroom, along with what little is left of the wine. He sits on his bed and plugs in his headphones, and now Peter’s voice—”Let me give you a hand”—is so clear and close and real, it’s like it’s originating in Roger’s head; and while the video plays, Roger unbuttons his pants, not to jerk off, but just because it’s the end of the day and he’s already in bed; and then, since it’s the end of the day and he’s already in bed and his pants are unbuttoned, he jerks off anyway, so quickly that you can’t really say it’s to anything. When he’s done, he opens his eyes and there’s Peter Lane, still onscreen, still unharmed, still a kid. Fresh and natural and organic and raw, he’s the exact fucking salad the network ordered.

All right. Roger will humor them. Without even getting up, he opens up FinalDraft and creates a new document: LIBERTYPILOTrewrite.fdr. He gives Liberty a wisecracking twin brother, Lyle Larson, just for Peter Lane. There: now they’ll have a real kid on the show.

***

The network picks up the pilot, and the scramble begins: writing team assembled, contracts signed, storylines mapped out, impossible deadlines set, legally mandated tutors hired for the underage cast members, theme song commissioned for the show’s star, Annie Braddock, and her upcoming album. Everything teeters constantly on the brink of disaster and it feels like home to Roger.

Peter Lane, the adults all agree, is a total sweetheart. Everyone adores him. He’s good, and not just kid-actor good, not just hit-your-marks, take-your-direction, don’t-forget-your-lines good—not just Roger Knox Productions good. He sells the jokes (“Liberty, if I ever see your ferret in my room again, I’ll pull a Cruella and trim my coat with him!”), so that even the feeblest one-liners (“Don’t make me do it—fur is so last season!”) earn their uproarious canned laughter. The directors marvel: He actually varies his line readings from one take to the next—he’ll be bitchy in the first take, awkward in the second, wistful in the third—which is unheard of among the kids in Roger Knox Productions.

The results come back from the first focus group: more Lyle. The kids love Lyle. They think he’s funny. Lyle should have his own storyline.

The writers groan at the news. They’ve already plotted out every season arc on the blackboard in the writers’ room, and they’ll have to rework the whole season to fit in a storyline for Lyle. Roger stands in front of the blackboard, chalk in one hand and eraser in the other, as the writers call out suggestions.

“How about when Liberty accidentally becomes a teen paparazzo? We could give that to Lyle instead.”

Roger studies the blackboard. “But then how do we set up Liberty gift-of-the-Magi-ing her camera in the Christmas special?”

“Oh, shit, you’re right. Could she give away something else?”

“No, the network specifically requested a Nikon.”

“Lyle could find a puppy. When in doubt, bring in a puppy, right?”

“But Lyle hates animals, remember? We established that in episode two.”

“Maybe we could just retcon it?”

Roger’s waiting for someone to point out the obvious, and someone finally does: “We could give him a love interest.”

There’s some nervous laughter at that.

“Not a real one. Like, a girl is pursuing him and he rejects her. Maybe Kiana.” Kiana is Liberty’s black best friend. “We could play it for laughs.”

“Fantastic,” says Roger. “N-double-A-C-P Image Awards, here we come.”

“No, no, he doesn’t reject her because she’s black, he rejects her because…” But she’s already given up.

“Poor Peter,” someone murmurs.

“You know what?” Roger snaps. “Go home. All of you. Seriously. I’ll take care of the Lyle thing myself.” He slams the eraser onto the shelf, and the room is empty before the chalk dust has cleared.

Assholes. He didn’t mean it.

He swings by the set to check on things. They’re shooting Liberty reaction shots. On cue, Annie Braddock giggles. Annie Braddock gasps. Annie Braddock winces. It’s a smooth operation; they don’t need Roger here. The prospect of free time sends him into something like a panic, and he’s considering just driving home and starting the evening’s drinking at five in the afternoon when he notices Peter Lane walking out the door. Impulsively, Roger comes up behind him and puts a hand on his shoulder.

Peter jumps, turns around, sees who it is, jumps again. “Whoa, hey.” He rubs one foot against the other. His feet are surprisingly big, like a puppy’s. “What’s up?”

“Relax. You’re not in trouble.” Roger knows how much he intimidates the kids on his shows, and he’d be lying if he denied getting a kick out of it. “You done for the day?”

“Yeah, just hanging out till my mom comes to pick me up. She doesn’t get off work for like an hour. She’s a social worker, so—”

“That’s bullshit. I’ll give you a ride.”

Peter does the “Oh, no, you really don’t have to do that! Really? Really? Are you sure?” thing for about ten hand-flailing minutes, even on the way to the parking lot, even as he buckles himself into the passenger seat of Roger’s Maserati. Then he repeats the performance on the phone with his mother. He’s so well brought up, Roger wants to smack him.

“Duh,” says Peter on the phone, “obviously I’ll be home by then! Have I ever missed our Idol date?…How about pad Thai?…Awesome! Love you!”

“You’re too nice, you know that?” says Roger, nodding to the security guards as he drives off the lot. “You’re going to be a TV star. You need to practice being a diva.”

Peter giggles and takes too long to formulate his response. “Yeah, well…” This would be dead air on a talk show. The kid needs media training. “I’m totally gonna use that,” he says, “next time my mom tells me to take out the trash or whatever.”

The 101 is going to be its own circle of hell, Roger realizes as he pulls onto the entrance ramp, and the 110 will be even worse. Sure enough, the traffic is bumper-to-bumper, miles and miles of red brake lights blinking like hungover eyes through the greasy shimmer of rush hour exhaust.

“Actually, my mom would probably love that,” Peter is saying. “She’s always going, ‘Honey, share your feelings!’ and ‘Express yourself!’ and—oh, lame.” He’s just noticed the traffic. “This sucks.”

“What can you do?” says Roger. There are no police cars nearby, so he takes one hand off the wheel and one eye off the road to plug his iPod into the stereo. “Pick a song,” he says, handing it to Peter.

Peter studies the iPod long enough for the silence to become uncomfortable.

“You’re overthinking this, Peter.”

Peter laughs. “Sorry! I’ll just put on a random playlist, okay? We’re gonna listen to…’Workout Mix.’”

And Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” fills the car. Maybe it’s just the unexpectedness of the choice—there was plenty of Top 40 shit for Peter to choose from, Roger always stays current on what the kids are listening to—but from the first metallic chord, Roger is Peter Lane’s age again. He’s pressed up against sweaty dancing guys in the most crowded room of the most crowded city he’s ever seen; the music is so loud it pounds in his chest instead of a heart, filling his body until nothing else is left inside it, jerking him back and forth like a hand in a puppet.

“Hey,” says Peter, listening, bobbing his head along. “I actually really like this. Like, for real.”

“Oh, please.” Roger wonders if the other cars can hear what they’re listening to. He lowers the volume. “Nobody ever liked this shit. Not even at the time.”

“No, seriously, I’m so into this,” says Peter, rocking cutely from side to side, his seat belt holding him back from actually dancing in his seat. “Maybe it’s like the gay gene or something.”

Roger’s foot twitches against the accelerator and the Maserati lurches forward so fast they almost hit the moron in the Corolla crawling ahead of them. “Sorry,” he says. “The pickup on this thing is insane.”

Stop the presses, right? It’s not like Peter’s disco-loving DNA is news to Roger, or anyone in the world, probably. But Peter announces it so lightly and serenely, like it’s nothing at all, nothing that could get him tortured at school or beaten up by his father or kicked out of his house or condemned to hell. He is how old again? Are they all like that nowadays? Just the ones from Pasadena? Just Peter Lane?

Roger looks over at Peter, who’s sitting there strapped into the passenger seat at groping distance from Roger, humming along, his eyes closed and his legs apart. It’s strange to think that Peter is the same age that Roger was when he ran away from San Antonio, and that Roger is now older than the guys who fucked him back then. Peter would never expect to be fucked the way Roger was—no, Peter expects to be loved, and why shouldn’t he? Peter was born to be loved.

How easy it would be for Roger to drive home instead, talk Peter into coming inside, pour the kid a drink and sweet-talk him and undress him and then pound him into the mattress so hard he’ll never smile that trusting smile again for the rest of his life. It scares the shit out of Roger, how easy it would be and how much he must not let it happen, never, not to Peter Lane.

Roger glances at Peter, who is still nodding to the song, oblivious, saying, “If I were rich, I’d throw ridiculous ’80s theme parties all the time.”

Roger pulls out the cigarette tucked behind his ear, lights it on the dashboard, sticks it into his mouth. “Stick with me, kid,” he says around the cigarette, enjoying how trite he sounds, how exactly like a caricature of a Hollywood producer. It’s one of those times he knows he’s succeeding at appearing the way he wants to appear. Raising his voice over Laura Branigan’s wail, he says, “I’ll make you a star.”

Eight hours later, after dropping Peter off and driving home, after two Red Bull vodkas and a time-release Adderall and half a pack of unfiltered Camels, Roger sends out an email to the team: the teen-paparazzo storyline will go to Lyle instead of Liberty, and instead of a single episode it will be a five-part story arc. They’ll have to rewrite the whole season to accommodate it, but Roger’s got it all worked out.

The plotline: Mr. and Mrs. Larson don’t approve of their son being a teen paparazzo. After a blowout fight with his parents, Lyle runs away from home.

He hitchhikes, and in every episode he gets picked up by a new character. In one episode it’s an ostrich farmer; when the man’s prize ostrich escapes from the truck, Lyle catches it, and in his gratitude the farmer names it Lyle. In another episode it’s a barbershop quartet whose tenor just quit; Lyle learns the part and steps in for him just in time for them to win the big competition. For drama’s sake, Lyle does encounter a villain at one point (an unhinged beauty school reject determined to give Lyle a makeover), but a friendly policeman quickly comes to the rescue, because nothing truly bad can happen to Lyle. No one lays a hand on him. No one makes him do anything he doesn’t want to do. Wherever he goes, people are kind to him and treat him like the lost boy he is. “You shouldn’t hitchhike!” they all tell him. “It’s dangerous, and you belong at home! Aren’t your parents looking for you?”

They are. It was all just a misunderstanding, and they’re distraught about it. Liberty’s garage band writes a song for Lyle (“We Love You, Lyle” is Roger’s filler title until they can get a real song commissioned) and makes a music video that goes viral on the Internet. Soon, the entire world is begging Lyle to come home, and in the Christmas special, he finally does. It’s a joyous reunion.

The network calls on Monday afternoon to discuss the rewrite. Roger is already driving home. “The scene where Lyle runs away—it’s a little dark, isn’t it?” says the exec.

That’s a note Roger doesn’t get every day. “You think so?”

“For a Roger Knox Production, yeah.”

“I can change it,” Roger starts to say, but the exec is still talking: “But I like it.”

The sun has disappeared below the horizon, and though Roger thinks it’s stupid to rave about the sunset as if there hasn’t been one every day since the beginning of time, you’d have to be blind not to notice this one, which is so intensely pink it looks like CGI. He takes off his sunglasses and says, “I like it too.”

***

Life According to Liberty airs, and it’s a hit in the demo: Roger Knox has done it again. The network renews it for another season, and the team panics. They haven’t even written the second half of season one. What should they do—a message episode about body image? A Twilight parody episode? Maybe a celebrity guest spot for the role of Kiana’s mom? And what about the finale?

“It’s hard to give a shit,” Roger says, surveying his scrawl on the blackboard—School prank war? Going green? Puppy???—”when it’s all so fucking stupid.”

“That’s the whole point of kids’ TV,” the writers say. “You’re always saying that!” Which is true.

At night, Roger watches the dailies on his laptop in the bedroom. It feels like drinking, and not just because he’s doing that at the same time: Peter Lane is intoxicating.

“I can’t go home,” says Peter, as Lyle, in today’s scene. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Give me a chance,” says the friendly policeman. In this take, an over-the-shoulder shot, Roger can see only the back of the actor’s head. “Whatever you say, I promise I’ll listen.”

Unlike the other kids on Roger’s shows, Peter understands the power of stillness; his face, as the policeman talks, is as motionless and marble-white as the moon. When did he become so beautiful? “The camera loves his face,” the DP said the other day, and it’s true. The camera lingers on Peter’s face, holding it, caressing it: the camera is madly in love with Peter’s face, and he becomes lovely in its eye.

“I want to go home,” says Peter. “But I’m—” He pauses. Roger didn’t write a pause into the script there, but it feels completely right, and he’s dizzy with power: Peter is taking his words and making them real. “I’m scared,” Peter says and begins to cry. How does Peter weep so convincingly, so effortlessly? Most people have a hard surface layer (or two, or a bunch) to conceal what’s underneath, and most actors have to learn to strip theirs away, but Peter just doesn’t seem to have one at all. He reddens and glazes and sniffles and trembles until Roger wants to seize him and carry him away and hide him from the world, even though he knows that Peter has never really suffered a day in his life and never will, that no one will ever touch him except to worship him, to kiss him and stroke him and lick him and just pleasure him every way he wants, when he wants it, like he deserves…

And then it’s light outside and Roger’s forgotten to sleep. He takes an Adderall and orders three shots of espresso in his latte. He arrives at the studio with just enough spare time to meet with Peter and thank him, privately, for the job he’s doing with Lyle. He walks to Peter’s trailer and knocks.

He hears laughter inside it, and Peter’s voice: “What, do they not have the Circle Game in Canada?”

Another voice: “I don’t think they have it anywhere except your school! It sounds bizarre!” It’s Tom Devroye, the soap-opera pretty-boy who really is too old—who are they kidding, he’s about a decade too old—for the role of Jonathan. Tom and Peter have been pretty inseparable lately, Roger realizes.

“No, it was the best part of Diversity Day! The whole school would stand in a circle in the gym, and the leader of the Diversity Club would hold the microphone and go, like, ‘If you identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, step into the circle,’ and a bunch of kids and teachers would step in, and the leader would go, ‘How does it feel to be inside the circle? How does it feel to be on the outside looking in?’ We’d do it with all the minorities. I thought it was fun.”

“Yeah, no shit you did! You were the leader of the Diversity Club!”

More laughter. “Yeah, I guess mostly I was just into having a microphone.”

The laughter softens, and then the voices fall silent altogether. What the fuck are they doing in there? Roger knocks again, harder.

Peter opens the door and Roger smells the stale air inside the trailer, so warm and thick with boy sweat it could be a steam room. “Look! It’s Roger!” says Peter. He and Tom crack up anew, and Roger wonders if they’re laughing at him, if they were talking about him earlier. But they barely seem to see him; wherever Roger is, they’re worlds away.

At home, there’s a sick, unhappy frisson that runs through Roger every time he types the letter L into his browser, because its first suggestion is always Los Angeles Craigslist > Personals > Casual Encounters > m4m. God knows what quirk of programming is behind this; Roger doesn’t actually do the Craigslist thing that much, and he’s sure he visits the Los Angeles Times online (his browser’s second suggestion) more frequently. He needs to have his assistant show him how to clear his browser history—this is what he thinks every time, sometimes even writing it down on his to-do list—but he never brings it up with her. There’s such a cold authority to the computer’s verdict, he can’t quite bring himself to contradict it.

He scans the first page of ads—discreet nsa no recip ski-friendly you host—and feels himself degenerating into the creature his computer already thinks he is, something low and dumb and in heat. He scrolls through, comparing photos of naked flesh like so much raw meat, dashing off so many emails that when he gets one back, from a guy who signs off as “Steve” but whose Gmail address identifies him as “Ian Chase,” Roger can’t even figure out which ad was his. He gives Steve or Ian his address anyway, and Steve or Ian says he’ll be over in forty-five minutes.

Roger mixes a martini, hoping to time his drinking so that by the time the guy gets here, Roger can have exactly one more drink with him and then be drunk enough to tell him what he wants. What does he want? He paces around the living room, thinking that he wants this guy to hurt him, smack him in the face and then come on it; that he wants this so much he might come right now, just from thinking about it; that he’s lucky to live the kind of life where he can have what he wants on demand.

But then Steve or Ian shows up, and maybe Roger fucked up the timing of his drinking, but suddenly he doesn’t want it so much anymore. He’s disconcerted and turned off (as he always is when he does the Craigslist thing, he just forgets, every time) by the shock of this guy’s realness—the human smell of him, his various individual freckles and scars, the strange sadness of the hairs growing out of the places he’s waxed. They’ve barely sat down on the sectional before Roger starts kissing him, just so he can close his eyes and not talk to him; and he already knows, with exhausted resignation, that he’s not going to come.

While they fuck, Roger thinks about Peter Lane. He’s sure Peter’s never done this shit before, but how much longer can it stay that way? How has he made it even this long?

“Sorry,” Roger says afterward. It’s the first thing either of them has said since they went into the bedroom.

“You’re really not gonna get off?” says Steve or Ian. “Isn’t that frustrating?”

“Not really,” says Roger. “Not for me.”

It’s only a few days later that Peter Lane shows up on set mussed and blushing and so bruised on his neck, so luridly, obscenely bite-marked, that Roger’s first reaction is panic—can they sue for damages if the makeup department can’t cover those up?—and then a few minutes later Tom Devroye deigns to show up, fucking struts onto the set, smirking and wiping the back of his hand over his mouth and theatrically buttoning his shirt and yes, okay, Tom, everybody gets it, the boys are hooting and the girls are squealing and a couple of disgusting teamsters are applauding and at this rate it will be midnight before Roger can restore order on the set. Roger watches it all from the director’s chair in the shadow of the camera, braced for some kind of shitshow—for someone to recoil in horror or use an FCC-prohibited word or take a swing at Peter, for Peter’s face to collapse and then go blank and then harden forever.

“Up top, dude!” a guy shouts, high-fiving. “Peter and Tom for the win!”

“You guys are adorbs!” (What the fuck is “adorbs”? Is that a thing the kids are saying, or is Annie just being precious?)

And from the other girls: “So much hotness!” “Can I watch next time?” (Is that a thing now?)

Roger feels so old these days, he’s not sure how he’s even still alive.

“Tom,” says Roger. “Hit your mark before we waste another million dollars waiting for you.” Tom does. “Action!”

Annie says her line: “Please, Jonathan! It’s for a good cause!”

“No way, Liberty,” says Tom. “I’ll have a bake sale, I’ll go door-to-door, but I draw the line at auctioning myself off for bachelor in the charity—I mean, bacheloring myself off for—crap! Auctioning myself off for charity in the…” Tom laughs. “Sorry, Roger! Can I start over?”

“No, you can’t,” says Roger. “You’re fired.”

And so Tom Devroye is written off the show: after getting caught plagiarizing a school report off the Internet, Jonathan is expelled and sent to military school. The writing team is ready to stage a blood-in-the-streets revolt for all the last-minute extra work Roger just saddled them with, but tough shit for them. Kids, don’t plagiarize.

“Why?” everyone asks, and Roger’s explanation is that Tom was difficult to work with—chronically late, always stumbling over his lines. “God knows I’m not one to judge,” says Roger, “as long as it doesn’t affect your work…” That’s all. It suffices.

And Peter Lane is safe. On the freeway, in the shower, in his sleep, Roger comes back to this incredible thought: Peter is safe because Roger protected him. When he chooses not to touch Peter, it feels better than getting laid; and when he does touch Peter—harmlessly, always harmlessly, his fingers stroking Peter’s hair lightly to preserve continuity, his mouth against Peter’s ear as he whispers “Good job today”—it feels even better, so good that Roger wants to fall to his knees and cry out: What can I do, Peter Lane? What can I do for you?

“I’ve figured out the season finale,” Roger says at the next writers’ meeting. “Lyle comes out.”

“Of the closet?” The writers snicker. They think he’s fucking with them. “Was he ever in it?”

“I’m not kidding,” says Roger. “I want to do a big coming-out episode for Lyle.”

The writers stare, first at Roger and then at anything but Roger. None of them wants to be the one to say what they’re all thinking, of course, but someone finally speaks up: “You really think the network will go for that?”

“Jesus Christ,” says Roger. “I said a coming-out episode, not a Lyle-gets-reamed-in-a-bathhouse episode.” He hears a few writers cough pointedly, probably mocking him: Saving that for season two? He talks over them. “Heartwarming G-rated shit. Mom, Dad, I’m—you know. Mom and Dad tell him they love him, they’re proud of him, blah blah blah, tears and hugs all around, twelve million viewers and a GLAAD award. Bam!” He snaps his fingers. “Dibs on writing it.”

The writers exchange glances and fidget. This is the downside of hiring a team of agreeable suck-ups: they’re all so fucking passive-aggressive when they disagree with you. “Has there ever been a gay kid on this network before?” they ask. “Has there ever been a gay kid on an American kids’ show?” “Have you talked to the network about this?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Roger pulls out his phone, calls the president of the network and leaves a message: “Roger Knox here. The good news is, I’m about to make television history with the Liberty finale. And the better news is, you guys are gonna let me.”

He snaps his phone shut and turns back to the writers’ table. “Happy now?”

The writers gasp and applaud. This is the upside of hiring a team of agreeable suck-ups: it just blows their minds when you pull a stunt like that.

He visits the set and takes Peter aside to tell him.

“That’s awesome,” says Peter, beaming. “That’s just so totally freaking awesome. Oh my god!” His hands are an animated blur. “I’m gonna have such a hard time not tweeting this! Can I tell my mom, at least?”

Roger used to sleep with this tree-hugger type who once dragged him along on a mostly hellish eco-cruise trip to the Galapagos Islands, and though he’d rather forget that whole vacation, he suddenly remembers the mockingbirds he saw there—the way they hopped into his hands, their claws light and sharp on his open palm, and regarded him with bright, curious eyes. That’s what Peter Lane is, Roger realizes: some wild island creature that hasn’t encountered humans before and doesn’t know to be afraid of them.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” says Roger.

The season finale is a huge production, with the entire cast (minus Tom, of course, and minus Annie: in the B plot, Liberty accidentally gets locked in a supply closet—get it?—and stays trapped inside it for all of Diversity Day) crammed together in the gymnasium set with about seventy trillion extras, all standing in a circle. Kiana stands on top of the bleachers with a microphone.

“If you identify as white, step into the circle,” she says. “How does it feel to be inside the circle? How does it feel to be on the outside looking in?”

They shoot infinite takes of this, from infinite angles, first with the white extras and then with the black extras and then with the Hispanic extras and then with the Asian extras. Normally Roger would be worn out by now, but instead he’s edgy, hyperfocused: he drums his fingers and jiggles his leg compulsively and then, when it’s time for the money shot, just stands up because he can’t sit still in that director’s chair for one more second.

“If you identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, step into the circle,” says Kiana.

Complete stillness on set, just as Roger’s script calls for. The silence lasts maybe fifteen seconds—Peter is really dragging this out.

Roger can hear himself breathing and hopes the boom mic doesn’t pick it up. He’d have worn his gym clothes if he’d known he was going to sweat this much today.

Lyle takes a tentative step into the circle, Roger’s script says, and at last Peter does. He looks terribly small as he separates from the crowd, taking anxious little steps at first and then longer strides, drawing up his shoulders, raising his chin, finally standing all alone in the center of the circle, still scared but defiant and proud and breathtakingly beautiful in the overbright lights.

It might be a full minute—it might be an hour for all Roger knows—before one of the kids nervously breaks character and glances at Roger, who finally remembers that this is the end of the scene and he’s supposed to yell “Cut” and then shoot more takes, more coverage, more angles, but he can’t bring himself to do it just yet. He needs to keep Lyle in that light a little longer. Just another moment. Just another second of this.

Roger hears sniffling and turns around. It’s the gaffer with the fauxhawk. (Laurie?) There are tears running down her face.

“Oh, grow up,” Roger whispers to her, but when she smiles at him he can’t help smiling back. Then he calls out: “Cut! Let’s do it again.”

***

Six months later, it’s hard for Roger to remember a time before he was, as Out magazine puts it, “a pioneer in the final frontier of American entertainment: children’s television.” Pre-Lyle, you couldn’t pay the press to give a shit about him or his shows; by now he’s been profiled so many times, he gets recognized in restaurants. (“Are you Roger Knox? I’m obsessed with Life According to Liberty! Lyle kicks ass!”) The magazines can’t get enough of Roger—and not just Out and the Advocate, but real magazines like Entertainment Weekly and Vanity Fair and even a feature for the New York Times magazine, which ultimately gets killed, but Roger doesn’t have time to be pissed off about that or, really, about anything else these days. “I’ll take any excuse to talk about myself all day,” he jokes, though this isn’t true: he talks only about Lyle Larson.

All the reporters want to know: who will Lyle’s boyfriend be?

“You’ll just have to tune in and find out!” says Roger, and then, automatically, he rattles off the name of the network and the day of the week and the time (plus Central Time) that Life According to Liberty airs. It’s a habit he can’t break after a decade working in TV, but it’s hardly necessary with Life According to Liberty. The network crunched the data for the Season Two premiere and discovered that the show had become a DVR hit—not just with tweens, they reported breathlessly in the email, but with “the 18-to-34 cohort.”

“Glad to hear it,” Roger wrote back, in the breezy, almost flirty tone of someone who’s started to get laid a lot. “That’s always been my favorite cohort.”

Nielsens don’t tell you everything. But as Roger’s publicist remarks, “We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.” That’s the subject line of her email, which contains a link to the New Yorker‘s website. It’s Nancy Franklin’s latest On Television column.

“Much has been written, most of it using words like ‘overnight’ and ‘meteoric,’ on the popularity of Life According to Liberty,” it begins. “Its rise to the rank of Cultural Juggernaut—its swift passage through the preliminary stages of disposable tween bait, parental guilty pleasure, and hipster cult favorite—has rival networks rending their garments. Even as I write this, they are no doubt conducting their own analysis of the phenomenon, attempting to replicate it under controlled conditions, with the kind of urgency (and financing) once associated with the study of cold fusion. But even a child can tell you that Life According to Liberty owes its success entirely to the character of gay teen paparazzo Lyle Larson—and he is sui generis.”

How, the reporters ask, does Roger account for Lyle’s cult following?

“Who wouldn’t want to follow Lyle?” says Roger. “He’s fearless. He’s funny. And his fashion sense is impeccable. How can you not love him?”

Has anyone objected to Roger’s decision to include a gay character on a children’s show (they ask, feigning concern, palpably aching for controversy)?

“You know, that’s what I expected,” says Roger. “But it’s been a huge surprise to me—nothing but support from the network, nothing but encouragement from the viewers. It feels terrific. If I’d known it would be like this”—Roger laughs—”I’d have done it years ago!”

Some reporters dare to ask: is Lyle based on Roger himself?

“No,” Roger says. “Lyle is all Peter Lane. I created the character just for him, you know.” Yes, they know. Peter Lane’s audition and Roger’s subsequent last-minute rewrite of the pilot have become the founding myth of Life According to Liberty, the Annunciation and Nativity story of the Lylephiles (as the fans call themselves).

Roger’s kept the promise he made to Peter last year, that day in the Maserati: Peter Lane is a star. If you’ve opened a magazine lately, you know who he is, whether you watch Liberty or not. T magazine styles him to look like James Dean, shadowy and haunted in too much hair gel. His spread in Out is Bowie-themed: Ziggy Stardust Peter, ethereal and luminous with lightning painted across his face; Man-Who-Fell-to-Earth Peter in a fedora and designer tweed; Thin White Duke Peter, exquisitely frail in a black vest and white collared shirt, his palms outstretched to mime being trapped in a box. “OH, YOU PRETTY THING,” says the headline. He looks more butch in the Men’s Vogue spread, which is Village People-themed and uninspired: cop Peter, Indian Peter, cowboy Peter, biker Peter, construction worker Peter, G.I. Peter. New York goes edgy, with a shirtless Peter spread-eagled on a sequined cross, his bare chest gory with disturbingly realistic puncture wounds. “THE NEWEST GAY ICON,” says the headline. (A mini-controversy erupts when some Christians think the photo is mocking Jesus; the magazine’s defense is that it’s supposed to be St. Sebastian.) Paper goes flat-out porny, dressing Peter as a schoolboy in plaid shorts and a jacket and tie, giving him a cherry Popsicle and photographing him mid-suck, his lips red and wet and swollen. Roger keeps a copy of that one, but it’s hard to keep track of the rest, the infinite different Peter Lanes as seen through infinite different eyes in infinite different fantasies, none of which ultimately have anything to do with the real Peter Lane, Roger’s Peter Lane, Lyle Larson.

Peter Lane is the first actor in television history to be nominated for an Emmy for a children’s program. Not a Creative Arts Emmy like the one Roger already has for Superpants, but a Primetime Emmy, a real Emmy. Roger’s never been to the real Emmys before. He thinks, as he steps out of the limo, that he could get used to it.

It’s easy to find Peter on the red carpet in front of the Nokia Theatre: you just have to follow the screams of the Lylephiles. There are hundreds of them, little girls and dirty old queens and everyone in between, holding up their cameraphones, throwing themselves against the barriers, shrieking and weeping with love. Or pain. Roger can’t tell.

And there he is, sleek as a dolphin in the silvery Dior suit Roger picked out, wincing at the flashbulbs and the crowd noise. Squirming away from the leathery lady with bleach-sautéed hair who’s trying to face-fuck him with her microphone, Peter waves Roger over. “This is the guy you want,” Peter tells her. “This is Roger Knox. He’s the real Lyle Larson. I just play him on TV.”

“Don’t be so modest,” says Roger, snaking his arm around Peter’s waist and drawing him near, for the cameras. “You’re Lyle too. We’re all Lyle, every one of us. Lyle lives inside us all. Like Jesus. Uh-oh, did we just piss off the Christians again?”

The reporter emits this practiced “ha-ha-HA” TV laugh. “Peter,” she says, “how does it feel to be such a huge star all of a sudden? I mean, you’re only, what, seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” Peter says, rubbing one foot over the other; Roger gently taps his own foot against Peter’s, silently warning him not to scuff those thousand-dollar shoes. “I just turned eighteen.”

“Ooh!” The reporter turns to the camera. “Hear that, guys? He’s legal!”

Peter stiffens and stammers and visibly colors, and Roger, in a surge of affection, gives Peter’s waist a protective little squeeze. Then another reporter swoops by and snags Roger, and he doesn’t see Peter again until they go inside for the ceremony.

“Big plans for tonight?” Roger asks as he takes his seat next to Peter’s. He observes and then quickly un-observes how ashen and twitchy Peter looks.

“I don’t think so,” says Peter. “I don’t really go out.” Peter’s moved out of his mother’s house in Pasadena; he lives in West Hollywood now.

“Smart kid,” says Roger. “Stay out of trouble.”

“No, I mean, I can’t go out.” Peter makes a nervous, high-pitched sound that’s sort of like a laugh. “You know. The Lylephiles…”

The house lights are already going down, and Roger isn’t really listening. It’s the closest his life has ever come to being perfect, and what makes it so sweet is the feeling that things are going to be perfect, that he’s about to get what he wants and that when that happens he will, at last, be happy.

“Don’t be afraid,” he murmurs in Peter’s ear as the Emmy theme music begins to play. “They love you. Everybody loves you.”

Peter, for his part, manages to act almost relieved when he doesn’t win (for that performance alone, he deserves the Emmy), but apparently the camera catches Roger sneering or grimacing or something, because the next morning he gets some shit on the blogs for being a sore loser. Several people helpfully send him the links, so that’s the first thing Roger sees online the next morning. The next thing he sees is the email from Annie’s agent:

“Annie Braddock will not be renewing her contract for a third season of Life According to Liberty.”

There’s more, but Roger has already jumped out of his chair and grabbed his phone. “What the fuck?” Roger yells, even before the agent has finished saying hello. “What the fucking fuck, Kathleen?”

“It’s Annie’s decision,” she says, with that infuriating earth-mother calm of hers. “My client feels underutilized on Liberty, and she’s ready to explore—”

“Underutilized? For fuck’s sake, it’s her show!”

“Oh, Roger, come on,” says Kathleen. “We both know that’s not true anymore.”

This line of thinking doesn’t go over so well with the network when they find out.

“What do you want me to say, Roger? The show is called Life According to Liberty. How can we renew it without Liberty?”

“Change the title,” says Roger. It’s been a while since he last found himself in damage control mode; he’s out of practice. “Or don’t. The kids won’t even notice Liberty’s gone. They’re not watching for Liberty. They love Lyle.”

“Not as much as you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying,” says the exec. “If you wanted to do the Lyle show, you should have pitched Life According to Lyle, instead of screwing around with Liberty and pissing off our cash cow.”

This is meant as a rebuke, but it gives Roger an idea. The exec will not shut up—”Yeah, sure, Peter brings in the awards, but it’s always been Annie bringing in the revenue. The Lyle merch just doesn’t sell like the Liberty merch. The kids love Lyle, but they want to wear Liberty, and that’s what matters. You know how the system works. You practically invented it”—and Roger is nodding into his phone, saying “Uh-huh” during the pauses, but he’s already brainstorming the Lyle Larson spinoff. It can be about Lyle’s paparazzo career—that way it doesn’t have to end when Lyle ages out of high school. They can call it The Lyle Files.

Roger doesn’t even need Adderall to write the Lyle Files pilot: he gets it done in one espresso-fueled weekend. He looks forward to writing more episodes; he’s already making a list of celebrities to call for guest spots. (Roger’s outdone himself with The Lyle Files: the celebrity guest spots are built right into the premise!) He wonders what the magazines will write about him when it airs. If he was a pioneer just for including a gay character on a kids’ show, what will he be for giving that character a show of his own? He’s Christopher Columbus. No, Neil Armstrong.

When he gets the call from the network, he’s on the lot. He circles outside the soundstage, humming “We Love You, Lyle,” to take the call.

“It’s a great pilot, Roger. We had a lot of fun reading it.” The exec pauses. He sounds uncomfortable. “But ultimately, at this point, I don’t think we can afford to risk it.”

“I know, the locations will be expensive,” says Roger. “But after the pilot we can just rebuild them on top of the Liberty set. And you know Peter Lane works for chicken feed—”

“It’s not about that.”

“What is it?” Roger paces around the lot. He can never stand still when he’s on the phone; he should just replace his workout mix with a recording of a network notes call. “Hit me with it.”

“I hate to say it like this. But I respect you, so I’ll be honest with you.”

This is ominous. No network executive has ever had to utter the words “I respect you” to Roger Knox before; it’s always gone without saying.

“It’s the gay thing.”

Roger stops walking.

“Yikes, that sounds bad, doesn’t it?” The exec laughs. “Look, a gay supporting character is one thing. It’s great. We’re all for diversity. But an entire show about a gay kid…this is a family network, you know. We can’t lose sight of that.”

Sometimes, when Roger was a kid—when his father was being an asshole, or later, when some older guy wanted to fuck him and it was easier to let him than to try to stop him—Roger would get into an elevator. That was how he always thought of it: he’d step into an invisible elevator and its doors would close around him and somehow, without even moving, Roger would rise up and away from wherever he was, for as long as he needed to be gone. Even as an adult, he still has the elevator sensation now and then—during sex, for example, or when the Adderall kicks in, or at the first sip of his first drink after he’s laid off booze for a while—but he hasn’t had it in some time.

He forgot how much it physically feels like going up in an elevator, the way his stomach drops and his head goes light and his feet get heavy. There’s even a vague, metallic elevator smell.

The exec is still talking. “The world has changed, but not that much. It’s easy to forget that there’s a whole country between L.A. and New York. And we already get enough hate mail from there as it is, just for Liberty. It’s not politically correct, but it’s the world we live in. Maybe in ten years…you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay? You knew that, right, about the hate mail?”

“Oh, sure.” Roger didn’t. “Believe me, I get what you’re saying. It’s no big deal.”

After hanging up, Roger walks to the parking lot, gets in his Maserati, and emails the Liberty team. “I have jury duty,” he types. No, not jury duty—they can still call him if he has jury duty. He deletes that. “I’m going in for surgery,” he types instead. “I’ll be out of touch for the next”—three? four?—”few days, so you’ll have to wrap without me.”

Is that it? Is it really going to end like this?

“Tell Peter,” he types, but then he deletes that too.

“It’s been a pleasure working with you all on LIBERTY. Sorry I can’t be there to see it through to the end.”

Send.

Seconds later, his phone starts ringing. He turns it off.

Then he turns the ignition, drives to a liquor store in Culver City where they don’t know him, and stocks up on Ketel One—enough to knock him out and then knock him out again when he wakes up, enough to get him through the sick shaking hours after he can’t knock himself out anymore. Enough for five days, he thinks, though he always lowballs; it’s never enough. He drives home and closes the curtains and doesn’t bother with tonic or ice or a glass.

***

Who says L.A. doesn’t have seasons? It has more seasons than anywhere else in the world. Pilot season. Midseason replacement season. Season one, season two of whatever show you’re working on. Basketball season, when you shouldn’t even think about driving anywhere near downtown unless you have some kind of fetish for sitting in gridlock. The season when there’s always someplace nearby that’s on fire. The season when the Grove blasts the shoppers with Christmas music and fake snow that you probably shouldn’t inhale or touch. The season when you can see real snow on the blue peaks of the San Bernardino mountains, though they say there used to be more of it, before global warming. The season when it rains so hard you can’t see anything at all, not even the lines painted on the road, and at night all the wet cars swerve blindly around each other like sweaty drunk people grinding together under disco lights. Awards season. Gala season. Last season, which all of Roger’s clothes suddenly are.

Roger lets the seasons pass, just as he lets all the dick-swinging muscle cars pass him on the freeway. His Maserati isn’t the latest model anymore, hasn’t been for a while, but he never gets around to choosing a replacement. He’s too busy, he thinks, though he’s never been less busy. On his new projects, The Platinum Card Kidz and Gross-Out!!!, he’s credited as creator and executive producer, but he’s chosen not to be the showrunner for either one. That means he doesn’t have to write or direct or supervise the casting process or interact with the actors, unless he feels like it, which he never does.

He tries not to Google Peter Lane. He’d like to avoid thinking about him altogether, but that’s impossible: in his line of work, he can’t help hearing about the roles Peter turns down. At first there are a shitload, and Roger is beside himself—what the fuck does Peter think he’s doing? Doesn’t he get that this is the whole point? That his momentum isn’t going to last forever? But gradually the offers subside, and if Roger doesn’t look into it, he can almost convince himself that Peter’s got it figured out. Maybe he’s moved somewhere like Santa Barbara or Monterey, someplace scenic and clean and far away from all this crap. Maybe he has a boyfriend. Or a cat.

But sometimes, when it’s late at night and Roger is drunk and alone in his bedroom, he gives in and Googles. He sees the abandoned Twitter page, the news items about Peter Lane getting fired from this or that project, the tumbleweedy IMDb profile with the unchanging header: “Known For: Life According to Liberty.” He sees the fansites, the hate sites, the galleries of images Photoshopped to make Peter naked, the writings of the crazed Lylephiles: Please tell me where I can find Peter…why doesn’t he write back…when I meet him I’ll hold him down and skull-fuck him until he chokes on my dick and then I’ll pull out and come all over his face until he cries because he’s so pretty when he cries… And he sees the paparazzi photos, recent ones, in which Peter looks unwashed and undernourished, though in most of the shots he’s wearing sunglasses or covering his face with his hands. “COME OUT, PETER!” the headlines say, or “SMILE, LYLE!”

And Roger thinks about apologizing. He does. But where would he start? He can’t single out one bad thing he did to Peter; he’d have to apologize for Peter’s whole life. And why stop with Peter? Why shouldn’t Roger apologize to the viewers he disappointed and the staff he abused and the boys from Craigslist and every washed-up child star who ever burned out after doing a Roger Knox Production? He should apologize to everyone he’s ever met for everything he’s ever done and, let’s face it, everything he’ll continue to do until the day he dies, because Roger sure as hell isn’t going to change now, not at his age. Whereupon Roger closes his laptop and has another drink, and another, and however many more it takes to calm the fuck down and forget about Peter Lane once more.

So when Peter’s email pops up in Roger’s inbox, it’s an honest-to-God shock. It’s a reply to an email that was apparently sent the night before at 4:38 AM, and which Roger has no memory, none at all, of writing. He’s perversely proud that it’s typo-free.

Peter, did you know there’s a dance club in West Hollywood called the Circle? I drive past it a lot and it always makes me think of you and the Circle Game. How does it feel to be inside the Circle? How does it feel to be on the outside looking in?

Peter’s written back: haha ive been there but i never thought of that before. youd like it there btw, they play old school disco sometimes.

When Roger sends his own response—Meet me there tomorrow at 9pm—he’s half-hoping Peter will ask why, or claim to be too busy, or just ignore the invitation altogether. But Peter Lane always was too nice, and he still doesn’t know better.

Roger is halfway through a vodka on the rocks when Peter texts to say he’s on his way. Despite the DJ’s occasional old-school disco choices, the crowd at the Circle looks young enough to be in the target demographic for Roger Knox Productions. Roger wonders if they’re all looking at him, pitying him, asking each other what this old guy is doing here alone at the bar. He tries to remember what he thought when he saw men this age at clubs, but he doesn’t remember seeing any, and it occurs to him that he might simply be invisible to them now.

“Roger?”

Roger turns, braced to find Peter changed beyond recognition. But as bony and haggard and hollow-eyed as Peter is now, his sweetness is undiminished—he smiled that same shy, needy smile on the day he auditioned—and this is somehow even more of a horror.

“It’s so awesome to see you again!”

He clambers onto the barstool next to Roger’s, and Roger has to lean away so as not to be overwhelmed by the sudden closeness of Peter Lane, the surreal juxtaposition of the familiar (the coltishness, the lisp) and the new (the grayish skin, the faintly putrid smell).

“Jesus,” says Roger. “Where the hell have you been? You look great.” It’s a Hollywood compliment, somewhere between a white lie and flat-out sarcasm.

“Thanks!” Peter needs a haircut. Well, he needs a hell of a lot of things, a haircut not least among them. He jabbers away, and the music is loud, but it’s still early enough in the evening that Roger can make out most of what he says. “I haven’t seen you in, like, forever. We never even got to say goodbye, right?”

It’s true. Roger should apologize, but he doesn’t want to start off by apologizing for that, of all things. Instead he asks, “What’s your drink?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

Roger orders Peter a vodka on the rocks, plus a refill for himself, before the sign on the wall catches his eye and it occurs to him to do the math. Even after all this time, Peter Lane isn’t twenty-one yet. He was so young on Liberty.

He notices that Peter is pulling out his wallet. “Put that away,” says Roger. “It’s on me.”

“Oh, no, you really don’t have to do that!” The bills quiver in Peter’s fingers. “Seriously, I—you’ve always been too nice to me.”

“Oh, spare me.” Roger drinks.

“No, really!” Peter’s voice is the same, breathy and light, and Roger can barely hear it over the thumping music and other shouting voices. “I seriously miss you guys. How is everybody?”

Roger brings Peter up to date on various Liberty alumni, and Peter nods politely at all of it before asking—with such studied nonchalance that Roger has to roll his eyes—”And what about Tom?”

“Who knows?” says Roger. “I think he might have gone back to Canada.”

Peter wilts a bit. “No, I knew that, from Facebook stalking. I just thought he might have…I don’t know. I mean…” He trails off with a spastic little shrug-laugh.

“He was a little shit,” Roger starts to say, just as Peter blurts out, “My mom adored him. Every time he came over, she’d, like, make cookies and stuff. She was always going, ‘If you don’t marry him, I will!’…and it was funny?” he adds, uneasily, when he sees Roger’s face.

Roger doesn’t know what to say. He wants another drink. “How’s she doing?” he asks, even though he’s barely met Peter’s mother.

“Oh…” Peter picks up his glass, but it’s empty. He tries to slurp the melted ice through the cocktail straw. “I haven’t seen her in a while,” he says, playing with the straw, poking it around the ice cubes until it bends. “I brought some stuff home and she got weird about it, so…”

This kid, Roger thinks, has never finished a goddamn sentence in his life. “So?” says Roger, and either he says it too sharply or Peter just doesn’t get that Roger is echoing him, but Peter looks wounded. Wishing he hadn’t said it, Roger tries to change the subject. “Are you still living around here?”

“Kind of,” says Peter, and it’s too early for him to look as tired as he does. “I’m kind of between things right now?”

Roger suddenly gets it, and without thinking he says, “You can stay with me. I have a guest bedroom I never use.”

“Oh,” Peter begins, but Roger talks over him: “And save the whole song and dance routine about how I don’t have to.”

“You don’t have to!” says Peter, but Roger can tell he’s thinking about it.

“I know. I don’t have to do anything. I do what I want.” Warmth is spreading through Roger; he has a vivid image of Peter asleep in the guest bedroom, far from anyone who might try to hurt him, an entire wall separating him from Roger. “And I want you to be safe,” says Roger, “because”—he finishes his drink—”I am a terrific person.”

“No, I know,” says Peter, not being sarcastic. “I know you are.”

This makes Roger laugh. He can’t remember the last time he laughed this hard. He orders another round for both of them, and as Roger drinks, Peter says, “It just sucks, you know, doing the couch-surfing thing.”

“I know,” says Roger. “God, I know…” He drinks some more. The music’s gotten even louder, shaking the building like an earthquake.

“My first night in L.A.,” Roger begins, and Peter says “What?” and Roger says, “My first night in L.A.—I was about your age. I went with some kids to a party on the beach and there was this guy there, and he seemed really old at the time, but who knows how old he really was. Maybe forty. Which I thought was, you know, older than God.”

Peter laughs at the correct moment, but then he says “Wow,” the way you take a guess and say “Wow” when you didn’t quite hear what the other person just said. Roger leans in and talks louder, right into Peter’s ear. “He had a tab of acid, and I didn’t really want it, but I took it anyway, because I was an idiot, like you.”

“Hey!” But Peter says this, Roger thinks, almost flirtatiously. Their knees are touching.

“Don’t worry, it’s part of your charm. So he took me back to his place, and we fucked, and the whole time…” Roger slices the air with his free hand, as if this will make Peter understand. “It was like I could feel my whole life, everything before and everything after, and every single decision I’d ever made was wrong, and every single decision I’d ever make from then on would also be wrong, and that moment—any given moment was just one point in this string of wrongness that wouldn’t end until I died. You know that black thread of shit that runs through the middle of a shrimp?”

“What?”

“A shrimp. Before it’s deveined. That’s what my life was.” Roger’s voice is hoarse and broken from shouting. He can’t even hear it himself anymore.

“Oh my god,” Peter says in a way that makes Roger think he didn’t hear a word of the story. He hasn’t moved his knee away from Roger’s.

Roger orders one more round, and once again Peter makes a show of pulling out his wallet. “Put that fucking thing away,” Roger says, and he reaches out and slaps Peter’s hand so hard that the bills scatter across the bar.

Peter cringes, but doesn’t protest. Roger pays. The loudness of the music has pummeled them into submission, and for a while they no longer even bother trying to talk. Then Peter gets up and says something unintelligible. Roger follows him. Someone’s in the bathroom, so Peter waits by the door and Roger stands behind him.

After a moment, he puts his hand on Peter’s waist. Peter doesn’t even turn around; he stands rigid as Roger leans forward, pulls Peter backward, grinds slowly against him.

The bathroom door opens. “All yours,” says the guy coming out. Peter goes in. Roger follows him in and locks the door behind them. The bathroom is small and dimly lit, and Roger’s ears roar in the relative hush.

Peter looks down at the grimy, puddled floor and rubs one foot against the other. Roger glances at their reflections in the bathroom mirror, but looks away quickly because he looks like hell. Not Peter, though. Peter Lane is still beautiful.

It’s not too late, Roger thinks as he reaches for Peter’s wrist. Peter’s hand is trembling; he looks like he might try to get away, like he’s about to say no, stop, this isn’t what he wants. The world has changed and it’s not too late for Peter Lane.

Roger lifts his hand to touch Peter’s mouth. Peter’s lips are soft; they part, pliant, as Roger sticks his finger inside, and then another finger, and Peter closes his eyes and his jaw goes slack and his throat is warm and wet and tight and, no, Peter isn’t going anywhere. He doesn’t get it yet—this is Roger’s last thought before he stops thinking altogether—Peter Lane still doesn’t understand; he needs to be shown.

–

–

Frankie Thomas grew up in Manhattan and now lives in Brooklyn. She is the creator of Verlyn Klinkenborg In Summary and the co-creator of Shut Up, David Brooks. She writes the Writing Advice column for The Faster Times and is also a longtime contributor to its Life After College column. She never finished college.

No use fibbing about the weather. The cold air hurt my brain. People claim the blizzard of ’93 caused the worst winter down South, but once that record snowfall was covering the streets, a gentle warmth crept forward like the breath of some lost animal. My cold was different. Ten years had passed since the blizzard, and it was colder in Georgia than I remembered it ever being. A real mean freeze. My ears and throat burned. The mucous in my nose turned into a bitter crust. It’s not that I can’t deal. I’ve peeled away black toenails. My skin has cracked and bled. But the cold I’m talking about had purpose: it slid between my ribs, into my lungs and heart. This cold frostbit my insides.

It was December, and I was taking trails up Bull Mountain near the town of Dahlonega. I was on my way to the Paul Bunyan Club, axe slung over my shoulder. The wind stung something fierce, but the old pines had a chilled-gin scent that relaxed me. I was thinking of the bottle of Bombay waiting back at the cabin once I’d finished the male-bonding business—a few tumblers by the fire, Willie on the tape deck singing “No Great Pretender” and “Whiskey River.”

• • •

People won’t let bygones be bygones any longer. See, the day before, my wife’s ex, Kurt, he showed up in town to give a lecture at the college. Beth knew he was coming. He’d called her with his plans and she’d asked him to stay at our place, on the futon in the living room. It’d been her idea to buy the futon, a pad five or six sleeping bags thick with a Japanese name that sounded like a snack food. Beth said if we got it, we could have visitors. Sure enough, Kurt was our first. She waited till he was in town to tell me.

“It’s his birthday this week,” she said. “I thought I’d make a gesture.”

We were in the kitchen. I stood shirtless with the refrigerator door open, peering at the egg carton.

“Okay,” I said.

Her fingers hooked under the waistband of my pajama pants, cool against my skin. “It bothers you,” she said.

I said I guessed not.

“I could always call, say something came up.”

I twisted the lid off an expired milk jug and sniffed. Still good enough.

“Lee.” She pressed into my back. “Don’t be internal.”

I shut the fridge and opened a cabinet and grabbed a bowl. I took the Cheerios from the countertop and sat down at the table near the window, away from Beth, and ate. If I said no, I didn’t want Kurt over, he’d have been the better man. Suspicious hick of a husband? No big. Get a room at the Red Roof Inn downtown, meet the hick’s wife for breakfast at the Cracker Barrel, meet her for beers at the Dead Rooster Pub and leave Dahlonega cocksure, the levelheaded grown-up. Guess I didn’t much care for Kurt. I’d never met him, but he was always calling Beth. Plus he kept sending her these books of poems to read. They’d dated six years before she holed up with me. Now Kurt was so relaxed about us being married, he felt he might as well come stay. We’d make some kind of family. Beth had pretended to give me the decision, and maybe that was best, all told. Maybe I thought the best way to kill Kurt’s spell was to invite him inside.

Beth exhaled like an actress. “The past doesn’t just vanish, you know?” She stared at the pine tree outside the kitchen window, as if the past perched there, watching us. “You can’t just let go.”

• • •

Kurt came over the Friday night after his lecture. He brought two pints of Jim Beam and a deck of cards. A guy named Jay Tanner came with him.

Beth’s laughter woke me from a nap in the bedroom at the back of the cabin. “Here’s the old bear,” she said when I walked into the kitchen. She tugged at my unbuttoned shirt and used her palm to flatten my cowlick. I buttoned up, nodding at a big man in a pea coat and his sidekick, a midget by comparison but buff, his neck a brown stump. We all shook hands when Beth introduced us.

“How about some cards,” said the big man, Kurt. He draped his coat over a chair.

We sat down to play rummy, and after a few shots of bourbon this Jay character said, “A porcupine in heat will mate with a pinecone.” He’d been quiet up to then.

Kurt slapped the kitchen table. “That’s it. Like prefers like.”

Jay scratched his nose. His face was rough, like he’d fallen asleep on hot gravel. His chest barely reached the tabletop, but his biceps damn near tore his white turtleneck sweater. I caught whiffs of his cologne, a sort of smoky vanilla. Real clean cut. Kept his black hair combed slick as a paintbrush stroke. His chin-curtain beard made him favor Abe Lincoln, and his dark eyes were like knots in wood.

“A fact,” he said. “My daddy saw it happen by Shoal Creek. Said the porcupine made a grinding noise, like a car’s blown starter.”

“I’ve heard that sound,” Beth said. We had one car between us, a brown Ford Maverick I paid five hundred bucks for, and it was fine. Got us from A to B and back again. The vinyl seats had a lasso stitch in them and made Beth laugh when we bounced over the back roads.

She sat on a high stool at the table. Her red halter top hung a little loose for my liking, showing too much skin, but there she was, gray bags beneath blue eyes, hair a mess, gorgeous. Under the antler chandelier, the fuzz on her shoulders glowed. You could say her skin was incandescent, like the atmosphere before lightning storms—white heat. Your blood warms up, your hair buzzes. It’s a strange thing, hair. Beth’s blonde spots conducted electricity. All but flickered. In our good sex days, I’d wiggle my nose over her stomach, go bump in her bellybutton, then slide on down to the pelvis area where—zap—her pubes would shock me with static. Whenever I did cunnilingus, I swear the spark sometimes left my nose tip tingling.

“Well,” Kurt said. His chest rolled forward when he stretched his arms. The tiny swordfish on his polo shirt seemed to leap a moment. “I’ve always said ideas begin in the body.”

Kurt was assistant professor of something about rituals and symbols. His deal was primitive man. He couldn’t get enough of what he called our next of kin, these people who lived near volcanoes and on top of desert mesas. He’d written books.

“For instance, in the moonlight, Jay resembles a coyote,” he said.

Jay wrinkled his nose and panted.

Beth laughed. “I think he looks French.”

Kurt made a big display of inspecting me. He cupped his hands and held them up to his eyes like binoculars. He whistled. “I’ll have to observe you, Lee. See what animal emanates from you.”

“Lee’s a squirrel,” Beth said, giggling. “Or no, a possum.” Jay huffed along with her.

“Wait and see,” Kurt said. He waved his hand in front of my face as if wiping a windshield clean. “Tell you what. Jay here is founder of a club. A group of local boys get together and drink and hack wood for a fire pit cookout in the evening once a month. Jay’s been swell enough to invite me along and—well it’s your call, coyote.” He drank his drink.

Jay fanned his cards across the table and swept them back up. He considered me and fanned out his cards again. He clucked his tongue. “All right. He can come.”

Beth filled Kurt’s tumbler with more JB. I’d been watching her. She kept reaching beneath her halter top and rubbing her stomach. All month before Kurt came, she did sit-ups and leg lifts before her shift at the Visitors’ Center. One time, I woke up and there she was on the floor with her back bowed and one leg kicking in the air like a crab half stuck in sand. The stiff beige shirt and green skirt of her uniform sat upright in the armchair nearby, as if coaching her exercise. I asked her what it was all about. “I’m keeping firm,” she answered. “For us.”

When it wasn’t his turn at cards, Kurt left the kitchen to poke around. In the living room he rubbed his chin at the purple futon and turquoise Navajo throw rug. From the fireplace mantle, he picked up the picture of Beth and me in front of Space Mountain at Disney World. Once he opened the fridge and stuck his head inside and said “Huh,” like that.

With some liquor in me, I made no secret of scrutinizing him. I knew Kurt had grown up in Dahlonega before he moved North to be a yuppie. He had that fake tan you see on guys who drive fancy cars, but I caught glimpses of what Beth must have liked. His face was smooth as a full balloon and his cheekbones cut shadows when his head turned. His feathered brown hair stayed in place. The specks of white across his nose looked boyish, like they came from sunbathing with sand on his face. And he had these bright green eyes. I grant that’s something. Green eyes do magic in certain lights.

I admit, from the neck up Kurt had an image. The rest of him wasn’t much to speak of. He wore rings on most of his fingers, but he’d never married. His junk did bulge in his khaki slacks, but the whole package was tucked under an udder of a stomach that must have swung to and fro when he climbed over a woman.

He pulled his chair up close to the table. “It’s a splendid idea for a club,” he said. “Paul Bunyan expresses the values of mountain people. He’s about raw labor, chopping, building with your own hands.”

I heard a metal scraping sound outside, followed by a clash. That stray cat was getting into the trash again. I went into the living room, where I unlatched the antique pirate chest I’d bought at the Salvation Army. The copper Jolly Roger skull on the lid grinned at me. My handgun was inside, nestled between the red plastic tackle box and the wedding album.

“Lee,” Beth said.

I walked past the table and out onto the porch, letting the screen door clang behind me.

The cold slapped my face, but I kept still. I listened. The sun had sunk behind a mountain and the trees around my front yard seemed to flicker in slow motion before fading into the dark-blue dusk. The breeze carried rich scents of dung and wood spice and the sweet rot of fruit. “John Pope,” I said. That’s what I called the cat. “Hey. John Pope.”

I stepped down to the yard. Behind me, Beth and Kurt stood in the kitchen window, lit with firelight. Their eyes and mouths were dark holes.

The cabin light glanced off the aluminum trashcan at the side of my yard. I raised my gun and shot at nothing. The night echoed crack, crack, lower and lower.

John Pope leapt onto the trashcan, his yellow eyes doing a firefly dance. I pulled the trigger. The side of the can crumpled into the shape of a laughing mouth.

The cat skittered into the blue light of the yard lamp. I fired into the sky. It was mostly for show. In the end I’d let John Pope have his apple cores and Cheetos and what have you.

“We got ourselves an audience,” I told him.

He whipped around and sprayed my property. His tail got all prickly and shook, and he mewed like my clock radio with dying batteries. I took aim at his asshole. Then I tucked away the gun. It’s low to shoot a homeless animal.

“Did you plug the trespasser?” Kurt asked back inside the cabin.

I returned the gun to the pirate chest and went to the table.

“You didn’t,” Beth said to me hopefully.

I shrugged.

“He couldn’t,” Jay said, combing his beard with his fingers. He shook his head.

Kurt nudged me. “Say, Lee, you could settle something. You take an axe and swing it, and that sensation taps something elemental. Right? It’s intimate, transformative. Very different from that gun of yours.”

I turned to Beth for hints of a shared joke. “It’s what you do to build a fire,” I said.

Kurt beamed. “That’s it. That’s just what I’m getting at. Your own fire. You discover this instinctive know-how. No time to think. It’s a warm rush of sudden clarity.”

Point a gun at him and he’d see clear enough, I thought. I’d been in Kuwait. Back then my commander made captives pray to the Michelin Man, Papa Smurf, Donald Trump, and Lee Iacocca with his pistol. Three years later, the same commander blew himself to bits with a homemade bomb in the Georgia Aquarium. He flooded twenty-two Americans and killed a baby beluga whale in the mix. Guy’s name was Dan Jacobs, and he had a wife in Memphis. Another time, an army bud of mine from Idaho got shot in a skirmish. He was comatose for two months. When he came to, he had a brand new passion for South American dance beats and what he called the Latin cause. He adopted a little Peruvian girl and named her Chiara, and he learned to play this rare accordion known in Uruguay as the bandoneón. You see? You never can tell. It reminds me, some old men in Dahlonega say you don’t hunt for deer, deer come to guns. A deer stands still in your sights because it knows its place in the scheme of things. It gives you one shot to make good on the gift of its body. Keep shooting and you ruin the gift: then it’s just any old meat. Leaves a bad taste.

Jay said, “You swing that axe, and it’s a real high coming on.” His head bobbed like an excited gamecock. “Your eyes focus. The tiniest movements—chiggers, eyebrow mites—you see them, and they’re yours for the taking. But it’s the red meat you crave.”

“What do you say?” Kurt blurted. “Some drinks, fresh wood, a good sweat!” He karate chopped the table.

I steadied my drink.

Kurt leveled his gaze at me, half serious, half winking above his tight smile. He reminded me of those hosts on TV shows about big battles.

“You’re like on the History Channel,” I said.

Beth lifted her chin like she smelled something burning.

“You could introduce old famous battles.”

Kurt swirled his drink. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s grand.”

My wife gave me the eye. That morning in the kitchen when she’d said Kurt would stay with us, I just stood there and took it. I spooned my bowl of cereal and finished my two cups of coffee, black, like always.

“I can chop wood,” I said.

“Good man,” Kurt said. He slapped my back like an old pal.

• • •

So there I was, late afternoon the next day, trudging through pine needles and half-frozen leaves to Jay’s club. These Bunyan guys gathered on a plot of land Jay owned near the upper Toccoa River. He had an old crib barn on the property, where club members drank homemade beer and roasted venison over the wood they chopped in the afternoons. I knew the river. I’d spent my share of summer mornings wading for trout everywhere from Deep Hole down to Sandy Bottom and the Noontootla Boil rapid that paralleled the Aska Road, which I was climbing to join the Bunyans upstream. Come to think of it, I’d seen men going in and out of Jay’s barn on days I fished pools for rainbows thereabouts, just above Blue Ridge Lake.

I let my legs direct me. Crackling noises came from all sides, as if hidden campfires were melting the ice in the trees. Pins of wind did voodoo on me. I pulled my knit cap lower and tightened the red and white striped scarf I wore because it was a present from Beth, even though it looked like raw bacon to me.

I had my blue jeans tucked into waterproof hip boots in case we waded some. I waded most weekends. It took my mind off the complications of living with a woman whose body stunned me, and whose beauty made me nervous. Beth had eyes so blue they reminded me of ice in a blue ice tray. Her porcelain face invited lips to polish it. She was about my height, with fine wide hips that made me restless. Good solid apples, round September apples in your hands. Call me sentimental, but I’d wanted Beth to lick wedding cake from my fingers and kiss my face goodbye when I was in a coffin.

Thing is, her and Kurt went way back, to when he moved from New Jersey because his dad landed a job with Coke in Atlanta. She was in third grade and he was in fifth. So before they ever slept together in college, they’d shared chickenpox and plenty of skinned knees. They’d had stay-the-nights where they snuck whiskey from their parents’ liquor cabinets. For the Dahlonega Wildflower Festival each May, they painted black-eyed Susans and forget-me-nots on smooth rocks they sold for five dollars a pop. They used the money to buy things like roller skates and Madonna records, pogo sticks and a fishbowl with red and white betas that killed each other.

It was Kurt who first inspired Beth to write. She had these poems about their past. She called them homages. You didn’t know it was Kurt in the poems. You just knew that he meant him. In one, they went camping. He waded into a river and snuck up on a fish and touched its sides with fingers gentle as the river’s current. Her words. When the fish grew accustomed to his hands, he snatched it. That was that. She never mentioned skinning the fish or stripping its bones away or eating it with wine and pasta. It was just that touching moment before the catch. It bothered me. In bed, I’d stroke her stomach and think of the fish, and I wondered if she felt caught or calmed. In the poem, it seemed like being tricked kind of turned her on.

One night, Beth rolled over on her pillow and told me about the time she and Kurt swam naked in his mom’s pool. When supper was ready, his mom hollered from the veranda. Kurt leapt out of the water and sauntered right into the house in the buff. His mom thought nothing of it, just gave him a plate of spaghetti. Beth loved this. She called it his salt.

After she told me that, we fooled around some, and when Beth fell asleep I went to the window and pressed my cock to the cold glass as I drank a can of Tecate. I looked at Beth and thought about our bed talks, how we listened to each other and didn’t judge. I couldn’t get tired, so I roamed around the house touching things—the kitchen faucet, the doorknobs, the porcelain figurines of puppies and turtles that Beth collected. I wondered how much you have with a woman is just a garage sale waiting to happen, or something that only happens before you fill your space up with things. I still don’t know. I always tried hard not to jinx our relationship with doubts.

But later that night, when Beth kicked the sheet away and exposed her magic ass, I got worried. I petted the footboard. I fingered the brown glass ashtray with bubbles frozen in it like some sculpture of smoker’s lung. I laid my palm in the curve of Beth’s waist. At that moment, I hoped to hell I’d never be just words to her, nothing but nameless hands and wet skin in some poem.

• • •

I followed a path of pressed weeds through the woods, heading uphill until the trees gave way to a narrow dirt road overlooking the town. From that height, Dahlonega looked like a model village, with cotton snow on the rooftops, plastic pickups on an electric track, a bank that doubled as a cookie jar, and street lamps the size of toothbrushes. I stopped to take it all in. My backpack and suspenders felt weird, like I was hovering in a parachute above the buildings. I could just make out the huge green dragonfly painted on the side of my old high school. The Lumpkin County Dragonflies. Those were the days, back when bra straps and cheap beer kept us buzzing.

I walked around a bend and found the old observatory. It was a rain-stained igloo made of concrete and covered with bright graffiti. On its side, some prankster had spray painted a neon pink spaceship with a Confederate flag on top and a green alien with eye stalks in the cockpit. The building split the main road. I took the left fork back toward the woods and came across a white pickup. Kurt and Jay stood by the truck and smoked.

“Here’s the man,” Kurt said. He wore a brown and yellow plaid shirt tucked into Levis hitched high on his waist by a pair of wide suspenders. On his head was a knit beanie, bright red with the Bulldog logo.

In the cargo bed of the pickup stood a huge piñata, bright blue and stiff legged and plump, secured with bungee cables. Its chin touched the roof of the cab. The thing seemed to me part horse, part cow. Two tinfoil horns were glued to its head. Its round plastic eyes looked startled.

Jay climbed into the truck’s bed and patted the piñata’s rump. “Lee, meet Babe, tonight’s sacrifice.”

“The Blue Ox,” Kurt explained, propped against the tailgate. “Paul Bunyan’s loyal companion.” He said loyal like the word was used up.

I remembered the stories from when I was a kid. Babe’s tail plowing a gigantic gorge into the earth, creating the Grand Canyon behind her. The tired lumberjack laying his head on Babe’s stomach and searching the night sky for the constellation of Taurus and Orion. “Looks good,” I said.

“Well, she’ll soon be crammed full of goodies,” Jay said. “Your typical M&Ms and Tootsie Rolls, sure, but also a year’s worth of poker winnings, from pennies to the big bills. Probably a solid thousand bucks in Babe’s belly. Everyone’s pitched in. I’ll stuff her with other prizes, too: packs of cigarettes and a few nice Zippos, beef jerky, some lottery scratch cards. Mardi Gras beads for entrails.” He ran his fingers through the tufts of blue paper on the piñata’s back. “Let me tell you. When we crack her open, it’ll be quite a spill.”

Kurt motioned for my axe. “See you brought your own rig. Do you mind?”

I gave it to him.

“Solid make,” he said, doing some practice swings. “A smooth grip, too.” He handed it back.

Jay sat in the cab. He cranked the ignition and the truck shuddered. “I’m back to the barn,” he shouted over the engine. “Got to prepare the main course.”

“Right,” said Kurt. “We’ll get some wood ready.”

We crunched through the underbrush and entered a clearing where fifteen, maybe twenty guys lounged around several tree stumps. Everyone wore plaid flannel shirts and suspenders and caps in combinations of red and blue and yellow.

The cold wind died away in this open space. An axe stuck up from a stump here and there, its polished wood handle like the lever of some primitive trapdoor. I imagined one of the Bunyanites pulling one of these axe handles and the ground snapping away and me falling onto sharp antlers and ox horns, gorged to death.

“They found some Civil War skeletons out here,” I said for no real reason. It was a fact. Two soldiers were discovered in 1989. One had a canteen fused to his pelvic bone. The other gripped brass binoculars. Scientists decided they were between seventeen and twenty years old.

“Is that right,” Kurt said.

I leaned on my axe. “It was two boys, one with a rotted blue uniform and one with a gray one. They were perched up in the trees. Neither had evidence of a fatal wound. What do you make of that? Likely they were hiding, or could be they deserted. My guess is death by starvation.”

“Interesting.” He contemplated the trees.

“The History Channel wouldn’t cover it.”

“Come again?”

“Seems a couple of young dead skeletons down South isn’t much special.”

“You never know,” Kurt said. “Those programs always need new material.”

We looked at each other. He fidgeted with his suspenders. A plane rumbled overhead.

Kurt pointed to somewhere beyond the trees. “Beth’s in the barn. It breaks the rules to bring her, but I thought my visit called for an exception.” He rubbed his clean-shaven face. “It’s been years. Besides, her barbecue sauce smells mouthwatering. You’ve tried it?”

“So this is what you do,” I said. My blood was fire.

His green eyes narrowed. “What’s that?”

“You go places,” I said, staring at his pinched lips. “You go into towns. Fix the rules to suit yourself.”

“Now hold on,” he said.

“It’s my wife.”

“Sure.” He reached for my shoulder, but I flinched away. “Look,” he said. “She wanted to come. And Jay didn’t mind. He’s an old friend of mine. We met here, before I left.” He scanned the woods around us. “We’re all friends here.”

“Sure,” I said, inhaling.

A sharp crack came from behind me. I turned and saw a plaid-shirted man pumping the handle of an axe that was wedged in a log half split on a stump. He braced his foot on the stump’s edge for leverage, grunting. “All right now,” he said. “Come on.” Finally he jerked the axe out and heaved again, splitting the log in two. “We’ll need more of these for the fire,” he said to us, wiping his forehead on his sleeve.

“Not a problem,” Kurt said. He motioned me over to a different stump.

More guys came into the clearing carrying wood. They dropped it onto the ground. I raised my axe like an executioner. Kurt laid a log on the stump and I chopped, breaking pieces in two, blinded by images of him splitting Beth’s legs and wedging into her. I couldn’t help it. Each blow of the axe and her skin unfolded pink with Kurt before me, and I cursed him, less for his past pleasure with my wife than for what he left inside her. His big name maybe now burned proud somewhere deep in Beth, in a place I’d never reach.

The corners of my eyes stung. My elbows throbbed from the force of my axe pounding wood.

“Good!” Kurt shouted. He put his hand up to get me to stop. His face was flushed with satisfaction.

“We’re stacked full,” he said, brushing dirt from his hands. His breath filled the space between us. “This ought to keep us well fed and warm.”

We piled the timber into a wheelbarrow that Kurt pushed ahead of me. Soon the Toccoa River shimmered at the far end of a field, like a strip of corrugated tin with stars dashed across it. Jay’s barn stood in the left corner of the field. There was a light in the large doorway, and I could hear men murmuring. As we got closer, the air thickened with a sweet honey smoke. I smelled barbecue on the wind.

Kurt went into the barn first. “Party’s starting,” he said.

Inside, lanterns hung from ropes lashed to rafters, and sawdust covered the open floor. Horse musk pervaded the place, though all the stalls had been removed. The plank walls had gaps. In the middle of the roof, there was a hole so big you’d think a meteor had hit the barn. The fire pit in the center of the floor coughed orange embers that spun up through the hole. On a spit above the fire, a skinned doe turned, its muscles blistering brown. I approached the animal. It still had eyes. They looked at me, glazed over with patience. I watched the face revolve, the eyes reappearing, unblinking, and all of a sudden I felt used up, abandoned. I had myself a wife, but I sensed I’d finish this life alone.

The barn got hot and the men rolled up their flannel shirtsleeves and pocketed their knit caps. Everyone drank mugs of beer and told stories about drinking beer.

Jay came over to the pit beside me. He pointed at Beth, who sat with Kurt near the keg.

“A real catch,” he said and handed me a drink. I finished it in three gulps. Jay walked away and pulled a tin milk pail from the shadows of the barn and carried the pail to the keg. He laughed with Kurt and Beth while pumping the keg and filling the pail with beer. Beth sat Indian style and dipped a spoon into a bowl in her lap. She brought the spoon up covered with brown sauce then licked it off.

Jay dragged the pail over to me. He plunged my empty mug into the beer and handed it back.

“Old friends, those two,” he said.

“And some.”

“Never can tell what you’re getting into, can you?”

I said I had a fair idea, most times.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe so.” He held out his beer for cheers. We clinked mugs. I watched Beth.

“Look here,” he said. “Know about moon craters?” He gulped his beer, his eyes fixed on mine.

“What?”

“Craters. Those holes on the moon’s face. What can you say about them?”

I figured I knew as much as the next man.

“Do you now. Let me tell you a story. I can see you’re wondering what this is all about.” He swept his hand from Beth to Kurt to the fire. He brushed his stucco-looking cheeks as if trying to shoo the firelight.

“Paul Bunyan,” he said, “had a bad case of insomnia. He’d be half-asleep while stumbling across state lines, stepping on barns and splashing up huge waves from lakes and generally making a big mess he’d have to apologize for later. He hung out in country places with small populations, but still, it’s amazing no one ever got hurt during one of his nighttime rambles. Well, once Paul rested in these very mountains while on his way to Florida. He aimed to bathe in the Atlantic Ocean.”

He paused and poked at a wood chip floating in his beer.

“Okay,” I said.

Jay looked pleased with himself. “Hold on a minute. See, Paul Bunyan’s stomach grumbled in his sleep so much it caused earthquake tremors in Tennessee and Georgia. All the shaking kept him awake, and pretty soon he had a mighty hunger. He stumbled around some more, until he came across a flock of spotted deer grazing in a nearby field. He scooped the whole bunch into his mouth. He pinched a few blue jays and robins from the trees. Smacked some rabbits flat and ate them like mini pancakes. But he was still famished, and his mouth was like a hundred hot paper bags. So he leaned over the Toccoa River and slurped it dry. All the fish were left flopping in the mud, and Paul Bunyan swallowed those up, too.”

Beth had her foot wrapped around Kurt’s calf. She leaned forward to hear something he was whispering into her ear. His hand swam in front of her. Beth seemed moved, but determined not to cry. She looked like a new bride. When Kurt finished, she leaned back and her eyes met mine. She raised her hand with the spoon and held it out to me, as if inviting comments. I gave Jay my full attention.

“Well,” he said. “Paul Bunyan’s stomach grumbled so loud, folks in Chattanooga checked the sky for an approaching storm. He commenced to walking again, poaching a cow here, a pig there from farms he passed. At long last, he settled down in an orchard. Big Paul just couldn’t swing that massive axe of his unless he got the food he needed. And he was starting to get dizzy, to tell the truth. Soon enough, he noticed a huge plump fruit far above him. It hung from what must have been the tallest, most expansive tree he’d ever encountered, since he couldn’t see a trunk nowhere, or no branches for that matter. He licked his lips and reached up for that fruit, touched it, scratched at it, and finally grasped it just long enough to take some quick nibbles. ‘Yuck,’ he said. The fruit was bitter as chalk and concrete hard. Paul was disgusted. He threw that bitter fruit as hard as he could above him, and it got stuck between some stars and started glowing again, only this time not looking so tempting, what with all the scrapes and bites Paul gave it. That’s when he realized he’d been half asleep and munching on the moon. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. Thing is, he was no longer hungry. Moon killed his appetite. With his bladder all swollen with the Toccoa River, Big Paul tugged his trunk from the world’s largest Levis, and he created the Okefenokee Swamp with his hot stream. You never heard such relief. All down the coast of Georgia, folks mistook Paul Bunyan’s moans for a hurricane on the rise and rushed to board up their vacation homes.”

Jay dropped his mug into the pail. We’d finished most the beer during his story, so he unzipped the chest pocket of his overalls and passed me a metal flask. I drank some backyard liquor that tasted like rubbing alcohol mixed with licorice and grass.

“All that was long ago,” Jay said. “Before Columbus.”

My face screwed up. It felt like two lit matches were stuck in my nostrils. The barn shrank and fizzled and Jay waved back and forth, his mouth moving. His words flew who knows where. I felt good. I swigged more of his stuff.

Before long my ears were humming. Voices leapt out at me in clear bits and pieces, as if someone was fiddling with a radio tuner. The static gave way to announcers saying things like “best sloppy joe in Dahlonega,” “a big conspiracy,” “Are you some kind of Democrat?” and “I’d like to tap her keg, if you follow me.”

Jay was shouting over the commotion. “Bunyan! Not a fact. Not like this barn or the river out there. But true enough. There are things like that. Man on the moon. We have these cravings, you know? UFOs. Ghosts. It’s what it’s all about.”

“Bigfoot,” I said.

“No doubt.”

Beth and Kurt joined a circle that had formed around us. That’s when I noticed the giant piñata rising from the sawdust floor. Two men pulled a chain and the piñata floated up and dangled under the hole in the barn’s roof.

Jay passed me an axe. “You’re new. You take first swing.” He leaned close. The lines in his face were like scribbles made in wet cement by some deranged kid—hardening, crazy.

“Show us what you had in the woods,” Kurt yelled from the other side of the piñata.

I hesitated, trying to focus through my liquor haze.

“Have at it,” Kurt said. His arm went around Beth.

Jay pulled a bandana over my face. I shut my eyes anyway and watched the fireworks behind my lids. I bobbed in the babbling darkness like a cork tossed in rapids.

“Save some for me,” I heard Kurt say. “I get next hit.”

Beth laughed. Jay’s liquor rushed through me. I wanted to bust that piñata so good the Tootsie Rolls and plastic necklaces and coins scattered among a bunch of boots and grasping hands and the game was over. Mostly, I wanted to swing once and go home to bed. It was my bed. I’d had it long before Beth and I’d slept there by myself and with other women, too. I saw myself clinging to the quiet mound of pillows until the undertow of liquor ended. How many nights had I drifted off alone like that? Kurt and Beth could have a fling, for all I cared. Right then, I hoped they did. At least I’d wake up knowing what was mine: an acre of land, a cabin, three rooms, a bed, two eyes and two hands and all the freedom a man needs to shut out the world.

Jay clutched my arms and guided me backward a few feet. The Bunyanites were banging plates and mugs with silverware and chanting “Swing! Swing!” I lost my sense of direction in the clamor. I just knew the piñata was in the air somewhere, too big to miss. I raised the axe and swayed and baby-stepped in a small circle. Someone said “Careful now” as I tried to find my way. Hands turned me to the right and held me steady.

Then I recognized Kurt’s voice ahead of me. “Give us what you have!” he shouted.

So I did. I sprang forward and swung so hard my insides about burst out. The impact was a dull splitting thud, like striking a big cabbage. The axe slipped before sticking firm. There were slow heavy gropes around my stomach and legs. I waited for the scuffle, the grunts of laughter. The piñata’s contents had spilled across the floor, but the men were silent and still. My eyes throbbed behind the blindfold. I turned my head back and forth in the dark, straining to listen, but I only heard my own breathing.

—

Born and raised in Georgia, Matthew Harrison lived in Seattle and the Los Angeles area before moving to Massachusetts, where he’s currently working toward an MFA in fiction at UMass Amherst.

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“Would you say this is yellow?” I reached out to stroke its surface, but drew my hand back before my fingers made contact. I was afraid to touch it, that I would fall in love with it.

The sales girl nodded. “We call it Buttercream.” It was a nod with authority. Her fingernails were painted black, as if she didn’t really belong there either. She stood apart, assessing me. The store was the type where they didn’t wear nametags, just chic clothes. She was outfitted in shoes I couldn’t have walked two steps in. But then there were those fingernails.

“Go ahead,” she said, “Try it out.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t.”

She had cornered me. I’d only meant to nip in and have a peek. The store was full of beautiful things I couldn’t afford. “Limitless” was the name on the sign. The space was cavernous, dark with small track lights—I’d fooled myself into believing I could walk through, invisible.

The piece was velvety, plush with a tall, curved back, low-slung in the front and double wide. In my mind I was already painting my blank, all-white condo something daring like chocolate brown to provide the perfect backdrop for it. It seemed so sophisticated. I could imagine myself a new future. Earlier that day I’d asked my co-worker Elly, “Everyone talks to themselves, don’t they?”

Elly turned in our shared cubicle and just stared at me. “A cat,” she said. “Get one.”

And now, there was this. I’d seen it in the window.

“Go ahead, sit on it,” the sales girl put in.

I let myself reach out and touch it. The sales girl watched my fingers slide along its surface. Its back came up and around, ending in curved points, almost like animal ears sticking out on either side of a head. I traced one of the buttons on the backrest. She knew she had me. I turned and sank slowly into it, felt its firm, snug cushioning beneath my office-fatigued butt. I sat with my purse on my knees, but then leaned back and the purse fell onto the floor. To my surprise, I didn’t lean forward to retrieve it.

“That’s it,” the girl said. “Get comfortable. It’s what it’s made for.”

“I’m just browsing, really….”

I stared across the store at the plump, geometrically shaped rockers in jellybean colors—violet or red chenille. At the sleek gray and white swivel chairs, at tweedy orange sofas with arms like pillars, at low contemporary pieces in olive green and hydra blue whose arms were almost part of the seating. There was even a chartreuse chaise that resembled an octopus, its footrest divided into sections, legs that seemed to take steps away from itself.

“I wasn’t even going to come in….”

I swiveled in the other direction and took in the immense sectionals. I’d walked past them to get here. They loomed larger than my living space, and all had women’s names affixed to them: Lola, Thelma, Jenna, Lily, Stella, Simone, Catherine, Scarlet. None of them had my name.

“I’m sure it’s out of my price range….”

The girl just smiled. Her front teeth were crooked but very white, as if she’d had them processed.

I leaned back. The item was built so that its walls and arms seemed to embrace the person sitting on it. It wasn’t circular, but rounded, yes—too big to be an armchair and too snug to be a loveseat.

“My place is small…” I said, closing my eyes and imagining it there.

“It’s called the Cuddler,” the unnamed girl announced. “It’s sized for one but built for two.”

“I could watch TV in it…”

“You could.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. There seemed to be an insinuation in just those two words.

“Will it actually fit two?” I asked.

She beamed. “That’s what it’s made for.” There was something about her look that made me readjust my position. I crossed my legs, but eventually scooted down a little further, creeping my way around its rounded back. Clearly it was made for cuddling, but had she meant more than that?

She walked around behind it so I was staring up at her from the depths of the upholstery. She explained the design, the fabric, the fabric protector, and the frame, which I couldn’t even see.

“I don’t have company that often…” I began to protest as she pushed further into her pitch. The Cuddler. I wondered if she was selling me something distasteful. I got up off of the thing.

“Maybe you’ll have people over when your place is the way you like it.”

I stood there staring at the object, considering that. I still hadn’t picked up my purse. It lay on the shiny black floor.

“You live close to here.” It wasn’t a question. She startled me into telling her which condo was mine. I told her my name. I told her about the office seven blocks away, how I was just walking past when I saw the chair. The Cuddler, I corrected myself, the name exotic on my tongue.

“Just moved in?” she asked. She leaned forward and touched my Cuddler, showed me the detail of the stitch. Then she said casually, “You know, they’ll top up your loan by several thousand to furnish your condo. Everyone does it. The bank’ll do it for you like that.” She snapped her midnight fingernails.

I told her I did know, but that I’d turned the option down, trying to be sensible.

She nodded like she knew my type. “So you put your old furniture in your new life.”

“The interest… I—I wanted to avoid it,” I told her plainly. I bent to pick up my purse. That was when she won me.

“We have a monthly payment plan, Marlene,” she said, expertly. “We could have it delivered for you on Saturday.”

“What color would you put this with? I mean, I’ve—I’ve been thinking of painting since I moved in.” I trailed her through the store’s dark, glittering aisles. She walked ahead of me with my credit card.

“Something dramatic.” She glided around the glass counter, behind which staplers, receipts, and calculators felt like art objects. She prepared my invoice.

That was exactly what I’d been thinking! I told her.

“Black,” she said, as I signed my name.

“Black?” I stared at the document. “I was thinking chocolate. Buttercream against chocolate.”

She tapped another line. “Nice, but that color is a little last year. If you want to be really bold, maybe fuchsia. Fun!”

“No,” I told her, and passed the form back. “I’m not the ‘fun’ type. Blue? Green?”

“A bit ordinary. Depends what shade,” she said with some distrust.

“Let’s go sophisticated then,” I suggested, as if she would be living there too. “Black.” I nodded, ready to dedicate myself to any color that would best match the Cuddler.

“What’s the rest of the condo?”

“White.”

“It should be bone,” she said decisively, tearing off a carbon copy for the store.

I peered at her. “What’s the difference?”

“Ask at the paint store. They’ll help you.” She gave me a watery smile, as if I was beyond help. We arranged a time for delivery. “How do you feel, Marlene?”

Better, I admitted.

“I thought so.” She smiled more broadly this time, screwing the pen back onto a rope that hung around her neck. “When you came in, you seemed as though you had a real purpose. You went right towards it.”

“Did I?” I laughed. I gestured vaguely. “I was looking at the bookshelves, too….”

“Really? I didn’t see you there. It was as if you just materialized in front of the Cuddler. You must have known what you wanted.”

“Yes,” I told her as she folded up the $3,000 paperwork and handed it to me. The Cuddler would cost me $125 per month for twenty-four months, plus tax and interest. “Yes. I do. Almost always.”

• • •

I had pulled all the furniture into the middle of the room to paint, then left it there so I could find the best spot for the Cuddler when it arrived. The old furniture was covered with plastic sheeting to protect it. Speckles of paint dotted the surface of the drop cloths.

“Where do you want this?” one of the delivery men asked. His blue uniform had the name Joe stitched on it. He was bald but good-looking, amicable.

“I didn’t know I’d have to put it together!” I cried as Joe and his co-worker tipped the box this way and that to fit it through my doorway.

“Oh no, it’s together,” Joe said. “The box is just to protect it. You don’t pay this kind of money to put it together yourself.”

They got the box in and through the foyer. Joe began busting the staples open with his bare hand. He tore part of his fingernail and shook his hand and stuck it in his mouth. “See?” he said, and there it was, the Cuddler. I could tell it was going to look stunning. Joe pulled away the rest of the cardboard, then straightened up and looked at my handiwork.

“That’s sure pink!” the younger guy said from beneath a ball cap.

Joe gestured to the corner where the two fuchsia walls met. “Clearly that’s where it belongs.”

The rest of the living room was a more subtle bone. I had sat in my condo, on my old couch, staring at my walls for two days before deciding the sales girl was right: I did need more fun in my life. When I imagined putting the Cuddler against a black wall it seemed so desolate, like an island floating in the middle of a dark sea. I beamed at Joe, who looked quickly back to the piece of furniture.

“Funny little number,” he said as he and the other guy hefted it up between them. They edged it over to the corner, backing it in carefully.

“They call it the Cuddler,” I told him with authority. As the men set it down and stepped away, I clapped my hands. “Oh, it’s just as I dreamt it would be!”

“Cuddler, eh? Your boyfriend’ll be happy.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I told Joe. “It’s just for me.”

The other guy tried smiling at me as he picked up the cardboard. He had a row of pimples along his forehead, and I hadn’t liked his reaction to the fuchsia. I ignored him.

“Well,” Joe said. He presented me a clipboard, and as I signed it, I noticed the name of their company was different from the store name. I stood close to Joe and signed with a flourish: Marlene Fuchs. He smelled salty, but also like peppermint and Gillette shaving cream.

Joe squinted at my signature. “How d’you pronounce that?”

“Fewks.”

“Bet you took some teasing over the years. Well, enjoy then.” He held an open palm out to the furniture, as if presenting it to me for the first time. They backed out of the apartment, dragging the plastic ties and cast-off cardboard that had protected my new life.

I sat for a while looking at the Cuddler. I didn’t sit on it right away. I just wanted to look at it in its new home. I walked around my condo and looked at it from all different angles. I went into the kitchen and looked over the counter at it.

It was perfect. If someone were standing in the kitchen, they could pass a glass of wine through to the Cuddler. Someone could lounge on the Cuddler and have a conversation and look up at the person in the kitchen adoringly. The person in the kitchen could walk through the living space and out onto the balcony. Then the person on the Cuddler could call them back in.

After a while, I went and sat on the Cuddler. It was so soft, and it seemed to cradle me. But it was too big. There was a whole space alongside me. It would be better if there were someone to lean into, even just an arm to snake along the back of the Cuddler behind my neck. I sat there all alone and tried to enjoy it. Just the beauty of the thing. I sat there for an hour. I peered into the kitchen and watched the hands move around the arty glass clock that Elly from work had given me at my condo-warming party six months before.

Joe was right. The Cuddler needed another person.

• • •

“Do you take away furniture as well as deliver it?” I asked the “Y’ello” on the other end. Phone cradled to my ear, I lounged backwards on the Cuddler.

“W’hell… Where’d you get this number?” the man on the other end asked.

“Is this Joe?” I pressed.

“Joe’s out on a run.”

“It’s Marlene Fuchs. He delivered my Cuddler from Limitless,” I told the anonymous man and rattled off my address.

“Something wrong with it?” the voice asked.

I ran my hand up its soft back. “Not at all. But my other furniture doesn’t go with it. Any chance Joe could haul it away?”

The man on the line said they didn’t usually do that sort of thing, but when I pleaded with him, asking if he could pass the message to Joe, he said he’d see what he could do.

• • •

Joe was married. I’d been so enamored of the Cuddler I hadn’t noticed his ring. While the pimply headed boy squeaked in and out with the dolly, I made eyes at Joe, who eventually said, “Now cut that out,” and held his large hand aloft for me to see the nicked-up gold band.

“How long?” I was gracious enough to take a step back.

“Forever.” He looked past me, towards my bedroom.

“You work afternoons.” When the lackey had wheeled my old IKEA couch and end tables out into the hall, I said, “I could take a day off.”

Joe ignored the invitation and asked what I did. I ignored his question and told him again I could afford to take a day off. He put one of those large hands on my back, right at the spot where the spine curves upwards and the buttocks out—only for a second, as if he was going to move me around the room like a piece of furniture.

Somewhere his wife was sitting with her mouth hanging open, changing the channel on their flat-screen TV. I had a very clear picture in my mind. She was lazy, selfish. That’s what I told myself. I didn’t feel bad at all.

Then the kid came back, and Joe said, “So, Thursday?” as if it was all set.

“Thursday.”

“What are you going to put there?” The kid gestured to the rest of the fuchsia wall.

“Nothing,” I told him. “I want it just like this, so there are no distractions.”

“From what?”

“No distractions,” I repeated, as if the phrase ought to have been enough.

• • •

But Joe wasn’t a fit. He came over and sat on my Cuddler on Thursday afternoon, his big white hands upturned on his knees, almost as if he were meditating. He refused the glass of wine I poured, saying he had to go back to work and he didn’t drink and drive. Instead of looking up and back at me in the kitchen, his eyes kept wandering around the empty condo. He asked a lot of questions, but not sexy ones. He asked how long I’d been in the space and where I came from. He kept licking his lips. He got excited when he found out I was a small town girl.

“But I’m not really. I just lived there,” I insisted. “I belong in the city.”

“Sure, money, clothes, shows, lots of entertainment.”

I told him about a movie I’d seen, but he hadn’t heard of it. I asked what he liked to watch, and he breathed out like he’d never thought much about it and then said, “Action?”

I’d barely joined him on the Cuddler when he suggested we go in the bedroom.

“I’m happy here.” I drank some of my wine and held it in my mouth for a second before letting it slip down. I admit I didn’t have a lot of experience at being seductive, nor with married men.

“I get it. You wanna break it in?” Joe slapped my thigh like he’d made a joke.

“Shush,” I told him, and put my finger against his lips like a femme fatale in a movie.

He took the hint and kissed me. He smelled good. My eyelids fluttered open and shut, wanting to see him there in my space, on the Cuddler, at the same time I fell into the kiss. He had a whorl of hairs at his throat beneath his undershirt and work shirt. He kissed like he was a bit afraid of me at first. Then he grabbed me by the back of the neck and slid me down on the Cuddler until I was almost prone. It was too small for this, and he wasn’t even on the furniture anymore, but the speed with which he worked was sexy—until he kicked over my wine with his work boot. I watched it spread across the hardwood while, in spite of my attempt to get up, he circled my mouth with his tongue and pushed his hand up my shirt, right underneath my bra without unhooking it. Beyond his pool-ball head, I watched the wine continue to spread across the floor.

We didn’t do it that day.

I auditioned Joe several more times, but things never went quite as planned. Once I made the mistake of asking about his wife. Once he came in and stood around and refused to sit down on the Cuddler at all. The third time, finally, knowing he was taking risks without any reward, I let him do it to me in the bedroom. His penis looked like an anteater, and he asked if I would say dirty things, which I did, more to amuse myself than him. Through the open doorway, I stared at the lemon smirk of the Cuddler and wondered how I’d got to this point—I’d thought I’d known what I wanted. I’d told the sales girl I knew. And now I’d lost four days of work in a single month when I had bills to pay. I had the Cuddler to pay for on top of the mortgage. Joe finished up with a groan like he was in pain. He sounded regretful when he said he’d come by the following Thursday, and I said of course then stayed at work that day.

• • •

“Don’t you have somewhere to go today?” my cubicle-mate, Elly, asked me.

I frowned. “Nope.”

She turned around and continued working. We sat back to back, and I could hear her fingers tapping over the keyboard. There was a hesitation to it—as if she was only pretending to work.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“What?” I said again.

She swiveled around to face me. “I just thought maybe you were seeing a counselor, Marlene. You’ve taken the same day every week. Are you all right?”

“Like a therapist? Does our health plan cover that?”

“So it’s not a counselor.” She stood up and gazed over the cubicle’s top. Satisfied, she plunked back down and drew her chair up to mine. We both leaned in.

“I was having an affair with a married man,” I confided. “But it’s over. Too much work, and he isn’t the right one for my—lifestyle.”

Elly was aghast and excited: her face was suddenly pink, her eyes overlarge. “I could fix you up!” she whisper-exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me you needed a fix-up?”

She made it sound like I was a car in need of a mechanic. I asked her why, if she’d had someone she thought was right for me, she hadn’t offered before.

“You always seemed happy on your own. Self-sufficient.”

“I am happy on my own,” I agreed. She had already turned away to open up a social networking site on the computer.

She scanned through pictures of her friends, available men she knew. One of them, a Roger, had posted a quote from Langston Hughes.

“Who’s that? Isn’t he a poet?” I asked. Roger was holding a pint glass up in the picture. I tried to imagine him suddenly three-dimensional, lazing in my Cuddler, quoting poetry and saying intelligent things while the city twinkled behind him. Roger only had half a beard. I felt like you should either have a beard or no beard. I was also skeptical about the fact that he was a beer drinker. It didn’t really go with my decor.

“He likes Scotch, too,” Elly said. “He brought us some one Christmas, so he must drink it himself.”

“Scotch…” I considered it.

Tom Davis from Marketing walked past, glancing in to see what we were doing. Elly clicked the window closed. After he had passed, she said, “I know another guy, James—”

“No, no,” I said, reopening my spreadsheet. “I’ll take Roger.”

• • •

I met Roger at a coffee shop rather than my apartment. It felt smarter for a date arranged by someone at work. I did a lot of things in preparation, in case he came back with me, if not right away, then maybe after our second or third date. I was already planning ahead. I’d worried what he might think if I had a living room with only one piece of furniture in it, so I’d gone back to the same store and bought a very contemporary lowboy, although at Limitless they didn’t call it a lowboy. They called it Leo. It didn’t cost quite as much as the Cuddler, but I now had two payments to make. I also put some of my old things back up, pictures in their frames, an iPod hooked into speakers, a flat-screen hung on the bone-ivory wall so it could be viewed from the Cuddler. I had to make it look like I was living in my condo. I found an old vase in my closet that my mother had given me years before: a gift for my first student apartment. I dusted it off and set it on the lowboy. It didn’t go. I put it back in the closet. Then I went, got it, and put it out again. It looked homey, authentic, in spite of its yard-sale quality.

“I’m sorry,” I told the Cuddler.

• • •

Roger lived in a neighborhood near mine. I walked through condo land, then headed north past all the furniture stores and Starbucks and mega-pharmacies. Suddenly, it seemed, I was in an area filled with houses and auto mechanic shops, used car lots, junk shops, and grade schools, one of which was French—école, it said on its brick façade.

I’d had no idea I lived this close to a family neighborhood. I never saw any children near where I lived except on the weekends, when hip mummies came in with SUV strollers to shop at the huge indoor farmers’ market. Even then, they only invaded a single block. The rest of the time it was just gay men or straight girls with small, curly dogs on leashes. I took a side street and found myself walking past some old colonial buildings and some really darling coach houses too. Then I came to a row of houses that were all so small they looked like they only contained a single room. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment gazing at them.

At the café, there were high stools looking out the front window, but Roger had chosen a wood table near the back. It felt private. He was older than me and had a bit of a widow’s peak where his hair was receding. He had a large nose, and I wondered if other parts of him were large. His eyes were greener than they’d seemed in his photos, and his smile made me feel unbalanced. I set down my purse and touched the edge of the table. I could imagine his energy running through the wood from his elbows toward me into my fingertips.

“You must be Elly’s friend,” he said. “Roger. Hi.”

“Marlene. Hi,” I said back. It seemed like we should have shaken on it, but we didn’t touch.

He stood up. “Let me get you something.”

I was charmed. I watched him move around the place, confident, like he came here often. He took his wallet out of his back pocket and bought my beverage. When I asked him how he’d found the café, he gazed around as if he hadn’t been paying much attention.

“Google Maps. I’ve never been here. It’s halfway between our two places; that’s why I suggested it.”

He told me he lived in Regent Park, which was once a famous Toronto ghetto. Elly had said he lived in a condo, like me. Roger quickly confirmed that yes, he did. A new one. He’d just moved in. “The neighborhood’s going through a lot of urban renewal and our condo’s part of that. It’s not gentrification—it’s more of a communal action of mixing new residents with families who’ve been there a long time.”

“I see,” I said. I had no idea what he meant.

He pulled a large orange from his satchel and asked if I wanted to split it. I looked around to see if anyone cared that he’d brought something from home. Before I could get embarrassed, he jumped up and got a plate from the counter staff. Then he took out a pocketknife and cut up the fruit. We ate the large, pulpy wedges. After I got over my distrust of the situation, I decided it was romantic. Like something you would do in a café in Montreal or Paris. I thought of the French school I’d seen on my way.

“I saw the tiniest little houses on my way here. On that street…” I pointed off in the direction I’d come from, not knowing the name of the street.

Roger smiled and tugged a bright section from the rind using his teeth, waiting for me to go on.

“I grew up on farmland outside the city….”

Roger asked where, and I told him it was essentially a large flea market, a gas station, and a Chinese restaurant parked in the shadow of the Niagara escarpment. Sounds great, he said.

“My best friend lived two concessions over. Next to her place was this tiny house, just like the ones over there. Couldn’t have been more than a single room and a little attic, but the most enormous man lived there. We laughed about it, that he could live in that miniature house.”

“You’ll have to show me,” Roger said.

I nodded, unsure if he meant the real house or the ones that looked like it.

“Did you ever see inside?”
I told him I hadn’t, but my friend had, that there was a stairway so narrow she couldn’t imagine he could get up it. He was so fat. He was the size of three men. He lived there all by himself, I said, and it had seemed creepy to me as a girl, that he was all alone like that. It made me think of him as a kind of ogre. People in the country and in small towns generally couple early and stay together for life. Or if they have divorces, they go on for generations in bitter feuds.

“But not you,” Roger stated. “Elly said you’ve just started dating.”

“Did she?” It wasn’t accurate, I told him, I’d dated, just never had a real boyfriend—but I might be ready for that to change soon. He wanted to know what a “real boyfriend” meant. Knowing you would be seeing each other so you didn’t always have to prearrange it, I said, and maybe staying at one another’s places sometimes, sometimes even in the middle of the week. Oh, I see, he said. And what about love? I held my breath. Then he said it was getting dark and he would walk me home if I wanted.

I took him past the tiny houses, and we stopped and looked at them.

“What was his name? The big man?” Laughing, Roger held his arms out on either side of him as if to encompass the girth. He shook his head. “Very politically incorrect of me.”

I tsk-tsked him. “Joe. His name was Joe.” Truthfully, I couldn’t remember the neighbor’s name, or his face. All I could remember was the feeling. We laughed at him behind his back, and I was secretly terrified of him—or of what he meant, living in that big vast nothingness, all alone in that flimsy little space.

• • •

At my condo doors, Roger agreed to come up, but only for a minute, as if he was trying to be chivalrous. Inside, he walked around touching things. He stopped at the vase I’d put out. He touched the lip of it.

“I like this, this green.” Roger turned and looked around the space. “It’s different than Elly said. You’ve redecorated?”

I told him enthusiastically that I had. I went and sat down on the Cuddler, hoping he would come sit with me of his own accord.

“Elly said you had plants, that you were a green thumb.”
“I did, but I threw them out.”

“You threw away living things?”

“No—no, I gave them away.” I gestured vaguely. “They didn’t go.”

“The windows. Not enough light?” he asked. “My place is the same. It’s a sweet spot, but it has its disappointments too, which I’m still discovering.”

I liked the tone that had crept into his voice, not bitter but tender. He looked at my view.

“I could have had the CN Tower,” I said.

He chuckled. “I’ll bet that was a lot of money though.”

I admitted it was. He told me that from his condo he could watch the expressway traffic all day—that people should call him for the traffic report. Finally, he turned away from the balcony window and noticed me on the Cuddler. Roger was lanky, I realized as he made his way over. I hadn’t noticed before, because he’d been sitting at the coffee shop, and then we’d been walking side by side. The facial hair was to compensate for the lankiness, I guessed.

“Say, what do you call that thing, a lounger?”

He kind of kicked at it, gesturing with his toe. I’d let him keep his shoes on, which were running shoes, but the stylish kind.

“Yes, it’s a lounger, exactly!” I leaned back, stretching my arms out along the top of it.

“You look good in it,” he said, and didn’t join me.

I jumped up. “I have some Scotch if you like.”

“I don’t drink Scotch. I’ll take a beer if you’ve got one though.”

“No beer. It’s the kind you gave Elly and her husband for Christmas.” I showed him the bottle. I wanted him to know how hard I’d worked, that I’d done my homework.

He seemed perplexed. He took the bottle and examined it. He nodded. “Sorry,” he said. He handed it back to me, and I felt the weight of it come into my hands just as he leaned in to kiss me, softly, at my mouth’s corner. “I should go,” he said then, and before I could set the Scotch back on the counter, he had plucked his jacket from the hook and pulled it on.

• • •

On Monday, I told Elly about the orange and the Scotch. I didn’t tell her about the tiny houses. She conceded that in spite of a few bumps, she thought it had potential.

When I asked her if Roger had said anything, she turned away and pretended to type. “Be honest,” I implored the back of her head.

“He thought you would be more down to earth?” She said it like it was a question, as if I could decide for myself if he’d really said that. Apparently, he’d liked me until we got back to my place. Then he’d thought I moved too fast, and that I had pretensions.

• • •

In spite of what he’d thought, Roger got in touch again before the weekend. He said he’d picked something up for me that he thought I might like. We agreed he would come by on Saturday night. I picked a safe, friendly time—five o’clock—to prove that I wasn’t just trying to get him into bed.

When I opened the door, he leaned in and kissed my cheek again. This time he missed and hit closer to my ear, which seemed more intimate and sent a flutter through me. He was carrying a Kraft paper shopping bag. Before he could give it to me, I went and pulled two beers out of the fridge. I held them up, and we both laughed. I didn’t normally drink beer—it made my tongue feel like an old car tire—but it got us off to a good start. I flicked off the caps with an opener and left them lying on the counter so he wouldn’t think I was anal. I sat down on the Cuddler. Roger came over and sat beside me. He was close, and had to stretch one of his lanky arms across the back. I didn’t lean back against it because I didn’t want to be bold, but I knew it was there. I felt like I was digging my toes into warm sand. Every time he took a drink from the neck of the beer bottle, he moved the arm from around me to his mouth, then back again.

“Open it,” he said. The present was sitting on the floor at my feet.

I leaned forward, and as I did felt my thigh rub against his. The Cuddler was working. I slowly brought the bag up into my lap. It had a wood-stamp image on it, as if someone had decorated it by hand.

“It’s from my friend’s store. She’s an artisan. She works with vintage fabrics and recycles old materials, like photographs and postcards and bottles and things.” Roger took another drink, and the arm crept back and around me. I leaned back just a hair into it.

I reached into the bag and felt something soft, squishy. I retracted my hand without pulling the object from the package. “What is it?” I asked.

“Just take it out,” Roger instructed.

When I did, I saw that it was a velvet pillow with a small patch in the middle depicting an angel. The pillow was purple and the angel was gold with flowing gold hair. The image might have been from a children’s book cover. It was cheesy.

“For your lounger.” Roger’s face lit up. He stood up and left me sitting on it alone. “For your lounger!” He pointed to the spot he’d been in.

“Hmm,” I said, “because of the gold, right?”

“Exactly.” He took another sip of his beer and a little bit ran into his half-beard. He wiped at it with his fist.

Reluctantly, I set the pillow beside me on the Cuddler. The violet was sharp against the fuchsia wall, maybe trendy—I couldn’t decide. But the gold was lurid against my buttercream. I got up and stood next to Roger, assessing it.

“I’m just not sure,” I said, tilting my head. “Maybe the bedroom.” I picked up the pillow, took it in, and set it against the headboard with the others. “Oh yes, don’t you think?”

Roger stood uncertainly in the doorway. He’d never seen my room. Unlike the other one, it was still all white, including the linens on the bed.

“But I got it specifically because of the gold, to go with your chair.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to where we’d been. “Won’t you try it out and then see how you feel about it?”

Defeated, I extracted the pillow from the spot I’d found for it and carried it again to the living room. I set it down on the Cuddler and looked at it. Roger sat down beside it, which definitely made it look better. I sat down beside Roger, and he looked at me like an excited kid. He bounced a little, and the pillow moved between us. I realized that he was a dork, and that by setting me up with him, in essence, Elly was saying I was a dork. But I wasn’t a dork, and why would she think I was? I tipped back my beer, hoping that would help.

Later, when we were making out, the pillow got in the way. It constantly snuck in between us, and finally I threw it onto the floor, hoping Roger wouldn’t notice. There wasn’t room for three in my Cuddler. Roger kissed like he wanted to keep his mouth closed and I was forcing him into opening it. He kissed like there were wires running through his body telling which parts what to do, and certain parts were prohibited. I began to wonder if he was a robot. His half-beard scratched against my face like a Brillo pad. I wanted to feel it in other places, but he was too stiff to go further than kissing. At the end of the night, I felt like my vulva had blue balls. This, in addition to having a tire yard for a mouth due to the beer.

“I should go,” Roger said, replacing the ugly angel pillow on my beautiful Cuddler. As he gathered up his satchel, he said in a low voice, “You know, you never thanked me for the gift. You never said whether you liked it.”

“Really?” I yawned. “I’m sure I did.”

“No,” he said, a bit tersely. “Actually, Marlene, you didn’t.”

“Oh, well, thank you,” I said, and I held the door open for him.

• • •

After Roger, there was James, then Gary, then Maurice. James came from Elly, but Gary and Maurice came from an internet dating service. None was the right fit for the Cuddler, and Maurice least of all. I had no one but myself to blame for him.

I slept with James right away, because I wanted someone to come back. I could tell he wouldn’t be the type of guy to sleep with me and then dump me—especially since I was Elly’s friend and he would have to answer to her. My thought was that if I had repeat visits, the Cuddler would get the kind of treatment it deserved. But mostly James wanted to sit there and watch hockey on it. Every time he threw up his arms and hollered, my vision of my new life was demeaned.

At work, Elly asked to be switched to a new cubicle. “You’ve changed. Nothing’s good enough for you,” she told me as she lugged her file folders away.

I requested my own cubicle, but I was told my performance wasn’t strong enough to warrant it. Management wanted me to share with someone who would inspire me. They paired me with a new girl, which I found even more demeaning than watching those hockey games. I knew I should be careful—what would happen if I lost my job and still had to make all those payments to Limitless? Would Joe come and take the Cuddler away?

• • •

Gary had potential. He was a wine hobbyist. Our first date was at a bar where the server acted like he was baptizing us into a new religion. Ramekins of almonds and olives arrived. We sipped berry and oak flavored blends from gigantic glass goblets, and laughed a lot. Gary had a big bald head and a ready smile that reminded me a bit of Joe, but he was cultured and well traveled. It was a good combination. The problem was that he never came to my condo. Because he owned a house, it was always his place. I slept with him six times before I managed to broach the issue.

“How come we don’t go to my place?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we could.”

The first time he came was a Saturday, the busy day for the St. Lawrence Market, by my place. We were walking back from brunch to my condo, and I could imagine the Cuddler at home against its vibrant pink wall, waiting. A woman with a stroller and two more tots in tow strode ahead of us. Every time the boy, who was about six, walked over a grate in the sidewalk, he peered down and yelled as if he thought there might be someone under it. “Hey!” He went hey and hey and hey down the street.

Gary nudged me. “You want kids?”

The boy’s little sister was carrying a caramel apple on a stick. I could see the girl sitting on my Cuddler, the apple toppling from its stick, rolling a sticky mess across the fabric.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” I said, because “No” was the wrong answer.

Upstairs, the Cuddler drew Gary in right away. He sat down on it while I poured him a glass of wine. I passed it over the counter to him, but he was talking about those cute kids we’d seen, looking at me and not the glass. The wine goblet slipped from his fingers and burst on the floor, splashing up violently across the fabric.

I was able to scrub the stain out, but I took it as a bad omen.

• • •

Maurice came to my condo right away. He was a music producer, and I thought that was very sexy. I offered to make him dinner. Taking a cue from the restaurants Gary had chosen, I put all sorts of nibbles into fancy dishes so Maurice wouldn’t notice there wasn’t much actual food. Living almost on top of the market, it was easy. I could just buy everything there. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of enticing men with food before.

Maurice looked like his online pics, so that was a plus. He wore a leather jacket and didn’t take it off when he came in. I wondered if his large, sculpted hair suited him naked or only in his outfit: an untucked white collared shirt and black jeans.

“This is hot, this is so hot,” he said, making a rhythmic finger motion around the room, gesturing to the Cuddler, Leo the lowboy, and the walls.

He said the same thing about the food, which I’d spread out on the counter since I didn’t have a kitchen table. I’d cleared it out of my place to make room for the Cuddler. “A good meal is totally hot. People forget that. Everyone wants to be so skinny.”

I wasn’t sure if that meant he thought I wasn’t.

He commandeered my stereo for the evening, and we drank. Through two bottles, I listened to him banter about musicians he’d known and the musicians on my iPod. He had a very sonorous voice, but he paced a lot. Eventually I went and sat on the Cuddler and looked at him expectantly. I stared at him long enough that he came over and joined me.

Maurice didn’t start with my mouth. He raised my palm up to his lips and kissed it, then ran his tongue up the length of my arm, into the crook of my elbow, and up to my armpit. He raised my arm over my head and licked. No one had ever been so tantalizingly dirty before, and no one had ever been so original on my Cuddler. In short order, our clothes were on the floor. I was holding onto the ear of my Cuddler, the back part of it. My heart bumped against my ribs and I stared down the long pink wall as Maurice extracted a condom from his jacket pocket. He struggled against me, seeking. I leaned forward. It was happening, at last. It was happening on the Cuddler!

Maurice pushed and thrust a few times—I gasped enthusiastically—but then he popped out. When he went to penetrate me again, I could feel him knocking against my bum. I pulled away and looked back at him.

“I don’t—” I started, but he didn’t let me finish. He tore against me. I pushed him away.

“You know it’s hot,” he whined. “It’s not working the other way for me.”

“It was for me,” I said. “And I don’t want to.”

“Come on…” He grabbed me around the waist and held me upright against him. I could feel his heart against my back, and my own heart in my chest. I stayed there waiting to see if he was going to move into me again or not. I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t decide if we were still having sex, or if something had seriously changed. Intentionally or not, his forearm was tight across my throat. If I didn’t move soon, I might not have a choice.

I grabbed his arm and flung it away, jumped off the Cuddler, and sprang to the other side of the room. “Go. Please go….”

Maurice didn’t move. He kneeled on the lounger, still hard, erection pointed in my direction. I looked around for something to grab, and my mother’s yard sale vase found its way into my hand. It was long and heavy, as if it were cast iron instead of retro stoneware. I held it up, threatening.

Maurice started to laugh. It was clear he was drunker than I was. “All right, crazy chick. How could I know what you like and what you don’t? I don’t know you that well.”

He shrugged on his clothes, his leather jacket last. I stood there holding the vase against my naked body for a long while after he left. There was something on the Cuddler. Taking a step closer, I saw he’d dropped the half-used rubber. A man had almost raped me on my loveseat. I went over and picked up the condom between my forefinger and thumb. Then I whipped it across the room. It stuck to the fuchsia wall above Leo.

I carried the vase into the bedroom. It was cold against my breasts. I lay down on my bed with it. There, I found Roger’s angel pillow. I wrapped my arms around it. Why had I thrown Roger away? Roger and Gary and James, and even Joe. I remembered what I’d told Roger about the fat man, and how we’d gone and looked at the tiny houses and made fun of that anonymous man from afar. What was his name? Albert? Like Fat Albert? No, it was Arthur. We called him Fat Arthur.

I slept with the pillow on one side of me and the vase on the other. As I was waking up, my leg kicked out, and the vase rolled onto the floor and broke. I bolted upright in the bed.

• • •

The condom was still stuck to my paint job, and my clothes strewn around the Cuddler’s UFO base. Dishes of olive pits and platters of pita pockets cluttered the counter. The stuffed grape leaves had hardened overnight into small green turds. I opened the balcony door to get some air into the place. A brisk April breeze flooded the space, and the curtains snapped and spun. Sirens warbled in the streets below.

I snatched up the platter with the grape leaves on it and strode across the condo. I watched as they rolled off one by one, down to the courtyard below. I looked around to see if anyone would notice. There were some dog walkers in the parkette across the street, but no one was near. I heaved back and flung the platter out, too. It shattered on the concrete, spreading the glass pieces around like a constellation. A ripple of satisfaction went through me. I ran back into the apartment and grabbed the other dishes. I smashed them on the kitchen floor. Leo and the Cuddler were too heavy. I pulled the lowboy out from the wall, then knocked it back again, chipping the paint. Then I went out on the terrace with the Cuddler’s seat cushion. Unzipping it, I tore open the pillow’s thin white mesh and yanked out handfuls of stuffing. The material floated on the wind, some tufts blowing back into my face, some sailing free or catching in the trees of the parkette below. When my hand touched the bottom seam and the covering was emptied, I let it go, and it flapped, twisted, and fell. I stood there, still naked, breathing hard, and waited for someone to knock on my door to reprimand me, but no one did.

The sun was shining. A girl my age, already dressed for work, was pointing to the grass in the parkette, directing her terrier to do its business. Obediently, the dog did.

• • •

“Someone died,” I told Elly when I called in sick. “I have to go home.”

“This isn’t good, Marlene. You’re on thin ice here. What do you want me to say?” She sounded tired. We still hadn’t completely reconciled.

“Help me,” I implored.

“Your aunt,” she said. Her tone suggested someone was now standing near her. “On your father’s side. I’m so sorry for your loss, Marlene.”

“Thank you.”

“How awful for you,” she said, in a voice that was almost sincere.

• • •

Home was only forty-five minutes by train. When I got off at the station hut, my father was there to pick me up. He had become old almost overnight. He hunched more than I remembered. I almost cried when I saw him.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “That city is too much stress, Marl. You should move home.”

“It’s not the city, it’s me. Really, what would I do here?” I said as he threw my knapsack in the back seat.

“What do you do there is the question.” He got in and fastened his seat belt.

• • •

Later that weekend, I asked if I could take the car for a drive. “I think I’ll go out past my old friend Natalie’s,” I said.

My mother looked up from a jigsaw puzzle she was doing on the kitchen table and said Natalie didn’t live there anymore. The family had moved away years ago, after she went off to school.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I just want to see.”

“What’s there to see?” my dad asked. He notched up the volume on the six o’clock news.

The wheels found their way over the dirt road. I’d forgotten how loud the gravel sounds as it shoots out from under the car, how slow you have to drive on such roads. Then, there it was—the little house, just as I remembered. I slowed down and before I knew it, I was turning into the driveway. In the evening light, it wasn’t quite as shabby as I had envisioned, though it was just as small. It was sided in blue now, I noticed as I climbed out of the vehicle. I left the keys in the ignition, in case I needed to get out of there fast.

As I walked up the drive, I was aware of every step as if I were memorizing it—as if I had been meant to walk it. I watched my finger reach out and push the doorbell, but I didn’t hear a sound, so I rapped hard against the bottom part of the screen door for good measure. The pain of the contact felt good.

The fat man answered. His face was soft, his eyes dazed and apprehensive. At first I wasn’t even sure if it was him: Fat Arthur. But it had to be. He was the right age. I suddenly remembered the slope of his shoulders, which had become even more pronounced over the years. The inner door swung back, and he leaned against the screen door so it creaked open a crack. “Whaddya want?”

Arthur was not as gargantuan as I’d remembered. He was simply 300 pounds of large. Fat, but not monstrous. Maybe it was that I’d gotten larger. I was no longer a skinny ten-year-old girl. He didn’t scare me at all. Everything about him seemed gray. How could I be afraid of an old, gray, pudgy man? His hair was gray, his skin was gray, his teeth were gray, his sweatpants were gray. He hadn’t turned on his living room lamps yet, and the light was fading.

I moved from foot to foot, nervous, as though I was ten. “I used to be best friends with the girl who lived next door,” I explained.

“What girl next door?”

“Natalie. The Bernards. The ones who moved away,” I said. I shifted my weight again.

“That’s a long time back. Don’t know how I can help you.” He looked down the road, then at the car in the driveway, trying to put together how and why I’d come. He didn’t know my family lived only two concessions away. For all he knew I’d been traveling all day.

“Can I come in?”

He looked me up and down. “I guess.”

He moved aside, and I followed him into the tiny house, which smelled like tomato soup and cigarette smoke. The walls were painted the color of saltwater taffy, pale pink. He had a calendar with a picture of birds on it, and a carved mallard on the front windowsill. We stood there, him slightly inside the door, me turning in the center of the room. As Natalie had described, it was only one room, with a kitchenette in the corner, a futon couch, and a TV. There was a fake-wood dining table in one corner. Nothing seemed cramped. It was just ordinary. Off the back was a tiny bathroom, and what looked like a closet.

“Everything fits,” I said.

“Of course it does.” Arthur stayed near the front door. He didn’t offer me anything to drink. We didn’t introduce ourselves.

I turned and gazed around again. It was no smaller than my condo, just a different shape. As kids, we’d been stunned by its size because it was a standalone house. A house made for one.

“Where do you sleep?”

“What business is that of yours?” he huffed. He was unshaven. If he’d ever worked, I supposed, he must be retired now.

The place was carpeted in dirty white. I stared at the gray cover of the futon sofa. It wasn’t dove or pewter, charcoal or slate. It was just plain gray. It sagged heavily in the middle, which must have been where he sat, right in the middle. I imagined him sitting on the Cuddler. He’d take up the whole thing. His own couch had cat hair on it, but if he had a cat it was outdoors. I looked at the depression and I said, “How do you do it, all these years living out here alone in the middle of nowhere?”

He sighed and closed the door. “It don’t bother me.” At last, he lumbered over. As he sat down in front of me on the futon, his breath gushed out of him.

“Don’t you get lonely?”

“Everyone’s lonely.” Arthur’s hand scrabbled around on the side table, attempting to tidy up for his guest, but he didn’t move anything because that would have required him to get up again. There was a magazine, an open eyeglasses case with a pair of metal-framed reading glasses inside, and a plate with some breadcrumbs on it. “You knew the girl next door?” he asked. “One of the parents died, the fellow, and the other remarried. Daughter, I think she’s in the city now, but I forget her name.”

“I didn’t come here for her.” My voice was barely a whisper. I sat down beside his hulking gray form. “The loneliness is crushing.”

“Is it? I can’t do anything about that.” Arthur glanced at the door, then looked over his shoulder at the back half of his place. I could see what he was thinking: that there was someone else standing there, that it was an ambush, an elaborate set-up. He snorted, almost laughing. He said he had things to do, but again he didn’t move. It didn’t seem as if there was really anything that needed doing.

“Hold me. Just put your arms around me.”

The fat man hesitated. He understood that I had come to him. Whoever I was and wherever I’d come from, my visit had a purpose. He may not have remembered me, but I was here now. A look passed between us, and he obliged, the hams of his arms encompassing me. They were loosely draped, but it felt as if sandbags were stacked upon my shoulders.

“I’m pretty, aren’t I?”

He agreed that I was.

“I’m not stupid, am I?”

He said that I didn’t appear to be.

“Kiss me,” I said. I must have had a pull on him, too, because he leaned in and did it, softly. He still hadn’t put the light on, and it was dark in the house and dark outside. In an hour the whole world would be dark, and it would seem as if there was no light in it.

When he pulled back, his breath in his chest sounded like a bird flying up, wings fluttering. “You’re trouble,” he said. “Trouble, and troubled.”

“Kiss me again.”

“You’re too young to feel this way.” But he leaned in and kissed me again, deeper, a sexual kiss, and I felt my insides expand as his whiskers scratched into me, and his arms grew heavier.

“Crush me,” I told him. “The loneliness is crushing. Lie on top of me and crush me.”

“Sure that’s what you want?” he asked. Two white sprigs of hair stuck out at an odd angle from his eyebrows.

“I know what I want.”

He didn’t need a second invitation. It was as if I’d asked him to have sex with me. But I hadn’t, and his clothes remained in place.

The fat man obliged again, in his miniature house, on his shabby gray sofa a long way from anywhere. He crawled over top of me as gently as he could and let his heft sink me into the foam, his large hands wrapped in my hair, his chest against my chest, mouth solid against my mouth, and all his weight bearing down on my belly and my bones. Groaning beneath him, I felt a great weight lift from me.

—

Emily Schultz is the co-founder of the short fiction website Joylandmagazine.com. Her novel, Heaven Is Small, recently released in the United States, was named a finalist for the 2010 Ontario Trillium Book Award. The novel she is now working on, The Blondes, is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in 2012. She has published in the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Black Warrior Review, Prism International, and CellStories, among others.

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Miss Emily’s voyage was set for April 17, a tour of the Mediterranean with her mother, her sisters Anne and Violet, their husbands, and their children; two other society families: the Connors of Albany and the Wellands of Boston; and Mr. Fred Talbot, a family friend.

Miss Emily’s mother had at one point been Miss Sarah Reilly, a dazzling headhunter on a voracious shopping spree through New York society, appraising this possibility and that possibility before settling on the astoundingly rich, astoundingly boring Mr. Jack Bradford, heir to an incalculable shipbuilding fortune, who could not, by any reliable clock, maintain a pleasing discourse for more than thirteen Christian minutes at a time. Miss Sarah, now Mrs. Bradford, having assured the financial comfort of herself and, conservatively, three generations following her, now paid the price, as her much remarked-upon vivacity was worn down by Mr. Bradford’s corrosive tedium, like shiny paint sanded off one coat at a time. He vanished behind plans and balance books and only emerged to forbid her from this occasion or that occasion, adamant she should not be seen without him at the public events he so despised and would only attend for the minimum possible level of reputation maintenance. And just as any orchid, no matter how rare and exquisite, withers and droops without water and sun, so Mrs. Bradford withered, bent over, spent money in copious amounts, and slept late. This former Valkyrie of society became the Gargoyle of her middle daughter’s existence, an old crone, vicious and ill, whose arms and legs required constant massaging for their limp circulation. The death of the boring Mr. Bradford in 1901 only cemented his widow in her scabrous dislike of all creatures younger and happier than she, and she set about, with every resource at her command, to demolish youth and happiness wherever she might find it. She had certainly done that with her middle daughter, Emily.

Miss Emily’s voyage was set for April 17, 1905. All told she expected to be mostly ship-bound for the better part of three and a half months in what was reputed to be the most beautiful part of the world. But Miss Emily had developed a bad habit: she had begun the practice of anticipating the future, by drawing upon the available clues surrounding her in the present. This practice caused Miss Emily no end of anguish, but she found herself unable to stop. Indeed, a mere sixteen days away from her voyage, Miss Emily found herself engaged in the unbearable practice of anticipation once again, as she regarded the people around her one evening in Mrs. Bradford’s drawing room.

There had been a dinner party earlier that evening, but now most of the guests were gone. In the drawing room, only these remained: the widow Mrs. Bradford, the oldest daughter Anne, Anne’s pinch-faced husband Claude, the youngest daughter Violet, Violet’s beef-faced husband Edward, their guest (Mr. Fred Talbot), and in the corner, close by her mother should the sudden need arise for hot milk or a few scrambled eggs or the rubbing of medicinal lotion into long, varicose arms, sat Miss Emily, anticipating the future. What was useful about this situation, at least inasmuch as it fed Miss Emily’s bad habit of anticipation, was that the people in the living room at that moment were much the same people who would be ship-bound with her for three and a half months in what was reputed to be the most beautiful part of the world.

A portrait of Miss Emily’s anticipation: They would be in long, low chairs on the deck as the sun-dappled villages along the Mediterranean slowly drifted past. (She had always heard they were “sun-dappled.”) In one long chair would sit her mother, her face a perpetual mask of pain and hatred, calling out constantly for medicine or lotion or telling Anne to learn how to discipline her children or telling Violet she had over-applied her rouge and looked like an actress. Anne’s children would run and yell and fight as if stamina were no object, and Anne, in response, would summon the governess and then cover her own face with a night-mask. Violet would take the opposite path and turn her frustration on the middle sister, Miss Emily, an easy target who didn’t know how to fight back.

“Well perhaps, Emily, if you knew how to properly fulfill your duties to mother, she might not find herself so disagreeable! Have you considered that?”

“Violet—I am at her pleasure from dawn to dusk, I carry her medicines everywhere I go, I never leave her side—what more am I to do?”

“You know, Emily, your face takes on quite an ugly aspect when you are pitying yourself. Small wonder you haven’t married.”

And to such a response, Emily was always speechless. She had never known such malice could even be addressed.

The two husbands, wealthy and stultifying—like their mother, Anne and Violet had married quite well, a credit to their training—would provide no relief. Anne’s husband, Mr. Claude Rimgale, would go on and on about the discoveries reported in the scientific journals always in his lap. Violet’s husband, a stout, choleric, swinish man named Edward Lane, would long for the quail and game hunting that was his life’s obsession, and he would no doubt moan about its absence all the way to Crete and back. This last anticipation was certainly based on strong enough evidence, as that subject was occupying Mr. Lane’s speech at that very moment.

“Frankly? Candidly? It is my belief that a hunter who requires more than one shot is no true sportsman. When I bring back a quail, it is immaculate. Immaculate!”

Across the drawing room, on a low sofa by the fireplace, the Bradfords’ handsome family friend Mr. Talbot listened to Mr. Lane with an expression of mock-attentiveness, nodding, and making little sounds of acknowledgement, but Miss Emily knew from long and careful examination of Mr. Talbot that this apparent interest was really a form of reconnaissance, gathering enough information about the enemy so that the strike, when it came, would be quick and effective.

“I wonder, Mr. Lane”—and here Mr. Talbot reclined further and leaned his head back into the sofa— “have you ever actually met a quail?”

“Uh… I beg your pardon?”

“Met a quail. Made its acquaintance. Shook its little… talon.”

“Met a quail?” Mr. Lane was already dangerously out of his depth, and beginning to flush.

“Before you shot it, I mean. My curiosity only stems from my utter ignorance of all things quail, compelling me to the nearest expert, which must surely be yourself, Mr. Lane. So I must ask: Do quails have moods? Are quails mostly cheerful, or usually in distemper? Do quails address one another in a native tongue, or are their clucks and squawks as unintelligible to one another as they are to us? When you shoot one of them, does the remainder of quail society notice his absence, or do they go on as before?”

Mr. Lane flailed. “I do not—” Here he turned to the pinch-faced Mr. Rimgale for salvation. “Mr. Rimgale, do the medical journals—” And then he caught Mr. Talbot’s eye again, wide with facetious patience.

“Sir, you mock me!” Miss Emily saw Violet and Anne’s eyes meet, saw their shoulders shake with laughter. Yes, Mr. Talbot was quite a favorite of her sisters, quite a favorite of all the wives, in fact. No sooner would he arrive at a function than all the women who had been married more than a year would abandon their husbands and flock to wherever Mr. Talbot was holding court, usually in the lowest sofa he could find. There he could slouch with conspicuous decadence and dispense withering commentaries to his heart’s content. The real curiosity about Mr. Talbot was his social goals. Little to nothing was known of his affections. It was truly strange that he had gone so long without some form of attachment. He lived in a very fashionable downtown hotel for bachelors, and it was quite often said that he was the handsomest man anyone knew, and the most handsomely dressed, and the wittiest. And yet this man was not married, nor even betrothed. No one, for the very life of them, could fathom the reason.

Miss Emily lived in as much ignorance as anyone else. All she knew of Mr. Talbot was that he alone of the all men she knew paid her the same attention he paid all other women. And this was truly unique, and here Miss Emily was not ignorant. As men stared, dazzled, at her sisters, with their little observations and their tiny wrists, Miss Emily found herself complimented on her hair (which she knew to be thin and limp), her posture (which she knew to be inadequate), her drawings (which she knew to be laughable) and her manner (which she knew to be essentially reclusive). The first time one carries on a conversation with a man who the entire time is looking at some other woman as he speaks, a wound is placed upon the skin, and if nothing should come along to salve this wound, it turns gangrenous and lethal. Everything about Miss Emily was too large: her lips, her shoulders, her teeth. She was her father’s daughter, coarse and equine, hunched in a chair in the corner, unlooked upon, waiting for her mother to cry out for tea or medicines.

As the party disbanded, Mr. Talbot bowed his head to her at the door. “What do you say, Miss Emily? Shall we flee? Shall we set out across the grounds with only the clothes on our backs and hail a slow boat to the antipodes?”

Miss Emily looked down at her feet, scarlet, feeling big and stupid. “Who would look after my mother?”

Mr. Talbot smiled. “Ah, yes. The selfless life. Service, and no complaints. You know, Miss Emily, I think we could all stand to be a bit more like you.” And he drew her hand up in his, swooped down like a gull, and kissed her wrist. “I wish you a good night.”

And if nothing should come along to salve this wound…

You see, Mr. Talbot figured in Miss Emily’s anticipation as well, for he would be there too, ship-bound for three and a half months along with the rest. No doubt one of his friends from his fashionable bachelor’s hotel would join him, no doubt he would continue to be attentive to Miss Emily, and make his routine jest that they should run away together. No doubt he would be entertaining at all times, that the husbands would sulk, and the wives would laugh with glee. And Anne would wear her night-mask, and her children would run and shriek, Violet would be vicious, the husbands would be tedious, and old Mrs. Bradford would never let her oversize, useless daughter out of her sight. And it wouldn’t matter that what was reputed to be the most beautiful part of the world would be rolling lazily by, because no one would notice it. They would carry this drawing room with them all the way across the ocean just as if they had brought it aboard the ship in pieces and reassembled it plank by plank.

***

Miss Emily took her walks at one in the afternoon. The time was convenient because her mother would often take her rest at that time of the day, exhausted until three o’clock by the effort of a paltry lunch that would scarcely sustain a child. For an hour or so, Miss Emily could escape the house with a clear conscience, leaving her mother with servants and setting off through the hunting trails that wound through the grounds of the Bradford estate. Here, free of observers, Miss Emily could indulge in her most shameful of activities.

Today, for instance, Miss Emily was rehearsing Mr. Talbot’s marriage proposal. Mr. Talbot was a man who chose his words with discretionary care, but also a man who could practice this discretionary care in a matter of seconds.

“Miss Emily, there is a subject of great importance upon which I must—”

“Miss Emily, there are a few words—”

“Miss Emily, were your departed father still with us—”

Details were important. Mr. Talbot would choose his circumstances wisely. Would they, perhaps, be sitting? Standing? Would he kneel before her as she sat on his favorite low sofa? In some versions he swept her away from the drawing room before the astonished eyes of her sisters, in others he found her standing alone before a fireplace.

“Miss Emily—for many days and nights now—”

And the shame of these scenarios singed itself onto Miss Emily’s skin for hours after their imagining. Her other habit, the anticipation, was regrettable enough, but it carried no accompanying brand of shame since those imaginings were actually going to happen.

“Miss Emily—Miss Emily—I wonder if it might be agreeable to you—”

The sound that at this moment disrupted Miss Emily’s rehearsal was deafening—it was like the sound of a thousand simultaneous dog-barks, followed by a hollow crackling that reverberated dully through the forest. Miss Emily froze—

Miss Emily freezes—

Just as you too would freeze if you heard a sound that simply could not be explained, that no entity you’ve ever known or heard of could ever make.

Miss Emily turns to her right, for that is where the low crackling is, to her right, from deep in the woods. Above her, the skies are black with panicked, departing birds.  Now is the time for young ladies to do what is right, to flee to the house, to alert the men and the servants and the police. Now is the time for plain young unmarried ladies to hand the business of problem-solving over to the people who solve problems.

Just as the crackling is dying down, a single voice, from deep in the woods on her right:

“Fuck! Aah FUUUUUUUCK!”

Miss Emily, without considering, steps off the path and into the woods on her right. She runs, runs. Miss Emily runs. The pain in the voice, like nothing she’s ever heard before. She falls—her skirt caught on the bramble. Rises again, and in a gesture she has never before made, raises her skirts with both hands and continues running, running in the direction of the scream.

In a small clearing, a two-minute run from the hunting path, is a shiny black sphere, partially embedded in the earth. The sphere is mottled with little black holes, like Swiss cheese, only uniform in depth and spacing. The crackling sound seems to be emanating from one oval-shaped opening in the side of the sphere, through which nothing can be seen but occasional flashes of blue light. Miss Emily takes a step back, resolved to flee, and then:

“Fucking GAAAAAAAAAAAHDDD!”

Run, Miss Emily. Run and fetch the men and the servants and the police. Surely this is the mouth of Hell. But one thing you must understand about our Miss Emily: There are these certain moments, when perhaps a servant is placing before her one of the most expensive of the Bradford family plates and she thinks, Break it, or other moments when she peers out a third-story window and thinks, Jump.

Inside the oval-shaped opening is not the mouth of Hell, but a room, an odd room, a dark room lit up by hundreds of little flickering lights and one big flashing blue light. The room is spherical to match the outside, except for a flat, smooth floor. The center of this spherical room is dominated by an enormous metal chair, and when the big blue light flashes again Miss Emily can see that the chair is occupied by a twisted, contorted man, clearly in great pain.

“Fuck! Fucking cunt-chocula!”

Miss Emily considers nothing. It is by considering nothing that she is able to continue. She braces herself against the side of the oval-shaped opening, raises her skirts with her other hand, and places one leg in the vessel—

“Fucking Christing fuck!”

And then the other. The man is bleeding, and his torso seems to be partially charred. She can see the blood running down the side of his chest. Again, she does not consider. If you’re seeing your first spaceship, you scarcely have time to consider that you’re seeing your first nearly naked man.

And then a soft, elegant male voice to her left says:

“Good afternoon. You are in violation of this vessel.”

Miss Emily screams. At first she takes the creature approaching her for a child, maybe three feet in height, unblemished by age. A closer look reveals its unblemished skin to be composed of metal, reflective and smooth like a piece of silverware, a tiny silver homunculus with a simple mock-up of a human face, and bright blue eyes. It points one long, silvery arm at Miss Emily and extends its little index finger.

“Good afternoon. You are in violation of this vessel. Currently my weapon is set to disable, but I am empowered to use lethal force if you do not depart this vessel and its immediate perimeter. Please leave now. Thank you.”

“I—I—I—”

“Good afternoon. You are in violation of this vessel. Currently my weapon is set to disable, but I am empowered—” and then the bleeding man in the chair speaks.

“Jesus fuck, disarm, DISARM! FUCK!”

The little metal child lowers its arm immediately. It turns away from Miss Emily as if she was no longer there, crosses to the man in the chair and begins to examine him. In the stark, slowed-down clarity of her fear, Miss Emily can see that the shirtless man in the chair is wearing some kind of helmet that obscures most oh his face, and that long strands of some strange material are attached to various parts of his body. The metal child speaks again. “Please remain as motionless as possible for this examination. Thank you.” It holds up its other hand, the hand it had not pointed at Miss Emily a moment before, and from the palm of the silver hand it emits a beam of yellow light, with which it slowly traces the man’s body.

“Jesus Skullfucking Christ,” the man says, “1904?”

The yellow beam of light vanishes. The metal child steps back. “Examination complete.  Your treatment will require four days. Please remain stationary while I prepare the necessary procedures. Thank you.” The metal child vanishes into one of the darkened recesses of the sphere.

“Recline,” the man says, and the back of his chair slowly slides down until he is almost prostrate. “Stop.” He breathes, raggedly, for a moment. “Hey lady. Lady. Hey lady. LADY!”

Miss Emily is jarred as if from a trance. She does not know what to think. Never mind action; she does not even have the basis from which to compose a single thought.

“Hey lady!”

“…Yes?” She hears herself speak.

“Lady. Come ‘ere. Come ‘ere. It’s okay. Lady. Come ‘ere.”

***

Now: There are certain things that every young lady from a respected family who has reached a marriageable age should know about the XS7 Santa Kitana Edition 3 Leisure Class Chrono-Hopper. Design on the Edition 3 was completed, pleasingly enough, in 2100, giving the Santa Kitana conglomerate the edge in declaring the XS7 “The Chrono-Hopper of the New Millennium.” Indeed, the Edition 3 boasts enough upgrades that it can probably expect eighteen months or so of market dominance until some competing chrono-hopper renders it obsolete.

A few of these upgrades include: a more complete film and music catalogue, even incorporating some of the earliest folk recordings from the nineteen-hundreds; upgrades of old films and television shows into a more decently watchable holographic format; a more refined and customized series of visual-tactile scenarios (for owners over thirteen years of age, of course) featuring a full range of homo, hetero, hometero, fetish, and taboo action that could be specialized according to the user’s specific needs. The time and space-travel capabilities are strictly standard issue, no one having figured out a new operating system to deal with the glitches of the basic program, but the Edition 3 does have one neat twist on the old restrictions: The Sentry, a three-foot tall android that in addition to performing all maintenance and janitorial tasks aboard the Hopper will also enforce the regulations of the time-space continuum. And should that not be enough, the Sentry can carry on a conversation, perform medical procedures, and provide reasonably effective manual sex for a male or a female, given speed and intensity specifications beforehand. Should the occupant of the Hopper be threatened, the Sentry is equipped with an adjustable weapon built into one arm, which can dispatch any opponent with a single blast.

There have been criticisms, to be sure—some from competitors, some from legitimate hardware experts—who suggest that placing the enforcement of time-continuum regulations in the hands of an android instead of simply programming it into the drive-system is not only impractical, but worse, is simply Santa Kitana’s latest way of showing off. The criticisms have affected sales not one jot.

***

“Okay—lady—lady—are you listening to me?”

“My—”

“Lady, what the fuck?”

“My brothers—we have hunting rifles in the house—we have dogs—”

“Stupid fucking bitch, I just saved your ugly-ass life, I coulda let the fuckin’ Sentry kill your fat ass, what the fuck, you’re gonna turn me in? What, 1904, you got, what, cross-bows or some shit?” He takes a breath, then coughs. “Lady, it’s cool. It’s cool, it’s good. We can work it out.”

“Who are you?”

“Retract!” The helmet, which Miss Emily now sees is connected to more of the strange shiny strands from the ceiling, is lifted off the man’s head. He turns his face to her. “I’m Jakks.” Miss Emily shifts slightly and the sunlight from the oval-shaped opening strikes his face. “Ahh, Christ—” He tries to roll away, and then cries out again: “Fucking fuck fuck!”

From the darkness, the voice of the Sentry: “Please avoid excessive movement until I have attended to your injuries. Thank you.”

“Yeah, fuck you, you little bitch. Okay lady. C’mere. It’s cool. It’s cool.” Miss Emily steps closer. “See? It’s cool. I’m Jakks. J-A-K-K-S, you know the alphabet? You know the alphabet?  I’m Jakks. Do you read, do they have reading yet?”

“Where have you come from?”

“Ah boy. Ah shit. Okay—I’m from the future—okay—ah shit.” He appraises Miss Emily. “Okay—say—lets’ say—you have a mom, right?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A mom, a mother, right?”

“I have a mother.”

“Great, awesome, you have a mother, thank Christ on the fucking cross. Okay. So like—your mother, right? She lives what, like in a castle? Or like a teepee? Whatever—she—she eats breakfast, right? Come on, your mom eats breakfast!”

“When she is able, she is ill—”

“I don’t give a shit if she’s—okay—my bad—whatever. But say like—let’s say—like tomorrow she eats her breakfast, you know, buffalo or whatever the fuck, and she pukes it up. Fine. But let’s say like, what if you didn’t have to wait until tomorrow to see your mom eat breakfast and puke. Let’s say you could go see your mom eat breakfast tomorrow right now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Course you don’t understand, Jesus Christ, fucking cave-bitch. It’s like—instead of waiting all night to see tomorrow morning, what if you could see it right now? And then you could come back to right now, and then wait till tomorrow morning, and you’d already know how everything was going to happen ’cause you’d already seen it?”

Miss Emily is silent for a long moment, struggling. “Then you foretell the future?”

“No—GodDAMMIT—I don’t foretell the future, I go to the future—I go to the past—I have like—when were you born, what was the year?”

“Eighteen eighty-two.”

“1882. Okay—so like—what I’m saying is—1882 isn’t a year, it’s not really a time, it’s a place, it’s a place you can go to, if you have the right kind of ship. It’s the same with tomorrow morning, when your mom eats the buffalo—that’s a place you can go. That’s what they figured out. That’s what this thing does WHEN IT FUCKING WORKS LIKE IT’S SUPPOSED TO!” Jakks winces in pain again. “Sentry—explain to her how—”

The Sentry, hidden in the darkness, cuts him off. “All time exists simultaneously in the space-time continuum. The Chrono-Hopper travels on the bandwidth that encompasses the space-time continuum by means of a—” But Jakks waves it into silence with a kind of impatient panic.

“Holy fuck, I’m about to die, that’s enough. Look—lady—I don’t care if you understand or not. All I’m saying is: don’t tell anyone about me. Okay? I’m in a shitload of trouble as it is, but the more of your people who know I’m here, the worse it gets. Please don’t tell anyone you saw me. I’ll make it worth your while, big-time. The Hopper can do anything, anything you want, just name it. Just don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

Jakks is pale and stubbly. His body, strangely enough, looks not too terribly different from Miss Emily’s body: soft, pudgy, pale, neglected, only he seems shriveled, shrunken while she’s ungainly and large. He wears only a small white garment covering his loins and his arms and legs are spread, trailing the shiny strands that connect to the ceiling of the sphere. Miss Emily has never seen a creature so helpless in her life.

“What’s your name?”

“I am Miss Emily Bradford.”

“Bradford—awesome. Hey Sentry! This is Bradford!”

“Good afternoon, Bradford. I am the Sentry. Welcome to the XS-7 Santa Kitana Edition 3 Chrono-Hopper. Please let me know if I may be of service. Thank you.”

***

There was quite a row going on up and down the supper-table that night in the Bradford estate, but Miss Emily only had the vaguest notion of its content. Earlier that evening she suffered her mother’s remonstrations over her unusually long walk in the woods with what must have appeared to be very good grace, but the truth was that Miss Emily simply could not listen. And here again, at supper, the same spectral presence, as Miss Emily placed her body in the space it was required to occupy and immediately departed it. Can there really be such a thing as the present, one wonders, if all of one’s thoughts are diverted away from it, to the future and the past?

“But surely,” Mr. Talbot was saying, “but surely—”

“Mr. Rimgale,” said Violet, “you cannot be suggesting that we eliminate all the lower orders.”

“Not at all,” replied Mr. Rimgale. “That is not at all what the eugenicists suggest. Without the lower orders, there would be no one left to carry out the loathsome but necessary tasks that would distract the higher orders from their higher purposes. But by identifying the lower orders and restricting their breeding, and by identifying the higher orders, the lighter-skinned, Anglo-Saxon races, and restricting their breeding, we create a society where each type of human being may be bred, raised, and trained to the task for which he is most suited.”

Had Miss Emily looked to her right, as she had so fatefully done on the hunting path earlier that afternoon, she would have seen Mr. Talbot’s aspect of perpetual amusement bleeding over to genuine anger. But she did not look to her right. Miss Emily was indulging in her bad habit of anticipating again, only now she had a whole new basis for doing so.

Suppose Mr. Jakks told the truth. Miss Emily had no reason to assume otherwise, no alternative to explain the extraordinary sights and sounds and events of the afternoon. So Jakks told the truth, and the following morning was not necessarily a time to be awaited, but instead a place, a place to which one could travel, like the Mediterranean. If all of time existed simultaneously—if, suppose, the events of time could be placed upon a map—if, further, this map were labeled with little cities: here is “Adam and Eve Cast Out of Eden,” here is “The Fall of Rome,” here is “Miss Emily embarks on a three-and-a-half-month sea voyage with the exact same people with whom she spends every single day”—than surely the events of future times—times she had always thought would be shaped by human action—were actually already set, predetermined. And when her sister Violet turned down a dashing Jewish entrepreneur to marry the non-dashing, non-Jewish Edward Lane, Violet was not actually making a decision, as she thought she was, but rather traveling to the next part of the map where her decision had already been made and was waiting for her, like a piece of coal wrapped in a red ribbon. One could not decide there was no Mediterranean; it was there. She would see it soon enough.

So Miss Emily began to see this map in her head, which cities would dot its topography, and which ones would not. There was no city, for example, where Mr. Talbot knelt before her as she sat on his favorite low sofa. There was no city where Mr. Talbot swept her up in front of her astonished sisters and said “Miss Emily, there is a matter of great importance I must discuss with you.” No city containing a breakfast table where Miss Emily and Mr. Talbot sat together, with no others present, while he showed her some funny item in the newspaper and they laughed, and she passed him a little pitcher of jam. There was a map of time—it existed—and on it these cities were nowhere to be found.

“I see you turn your famous smirk on me, Mr. Talbot,” Mr. Rimgale was saying, “And I resent it!”

“Oh, do I seem to smirk?” replied Mr. Talbot. “Perhaps it is merely my expression of concern which you misread. I’m only thinking that, in order to implement your plan, one would have to know without a shadow of a doubt which ones the lower orders are, and where they are. It could well be, Mr. Rimgale, that after a careful inventory has been taken of the most desirable characteristics of Higher Man, you yourself may be found wanting and consigned to loathsome but necessary tasks far away from your charming wife.” And here Mr. Talbot turned and winked at Anne, who beamed and giggled.

Mr. Rimgale pounded the table with his fists. “I read the medical journals, sir!” he bellowed. “Can you say as much?”

“Indeed I cannot, sir,” replied Mr. Talbot, “But I have read the works of William Shakespeare and I do recall where our Mr. Hamlet says ‘My tables—meet it is I should set it down, that one may read the medical journals, and read the medical journals, and be a buffoon!’”

And here he caught Miss Emily’s eye, to his left, as she emerged from her reverie, and he winked at her as well, a simple throwaway gesture that sent lances through Miss Emily’s heart. Such a careless man, this Mr. Talbot. Such fire sticks he was willing merrily to juggle, without care for the sparks.

As she sat by her mother’s bed that night, massaging the veinous legs while the elder Mrs. Bradford murmured invective under her breath, Miss Emily thought to herself that surely this was the city in which she would always dwell, the unmarried middle daughter with the big shoulders and the invalid mother, never loved, never touched, never noticed, to serve in darkness until she simply expired. She needn’t ever move to another city; all cities were exactly the same.

***

“Good afternoon, Bradford. Would you like me to select a song for you?”

But Miss Emily is not quite ready to talk to the Sentry as if it were another person, so she just stares.

“Thank you,” it says, as if she responded, “I will activate the menu for you, and you may select at your leisure. Thank you.”

“Mr. Jakks is asleep—I will return later.”

“Jackks is under anesthetic for his surgery. You may remain or depart. Thank you.”

Jakks’s head is lolled back in the chair. His eyes are closed, his mouth is open and tilted to one side, and a trickle of saliva runs down his cheek.

“Please select a song. Thank you.” Another voice, this time female. Miss Emily turns in the direction of the voice and finds herself facing yet another astonishment, a giant ghostly mosaic hanging in the air, obscuring a large portion of the inner sphere, and composed of thousands upon thousands of tiny portraits of smiling people or groups of people.

Miss Emily reaches out one quivering hand—can such a thing be touched? Might such a specter not be lethal to the touch? But again, that peculiar aspect of Miss Emily. Break it, Jump. She extends two fingers, touches one of the portraits, and the world detonates in noise:

Pour some sugar on me
In the name of love
Pour some sugar on me
Come on fill me up

Then the woman’s voice: “Please touch the thumbnail again to hear the complete song. Thank you.” Miss Emily sucks in her breath. What terrifying fury in the voice, like a dragon. She quickly touches another portrait, to the left of the first one.

She—showed me her room
Isn’t it good
Norwegian wood

This one calmer, more benevolent, but nearly as startling.

“Please touch the thumbnail again to hear the complete song. Thank you.”

A single syllable of laughter escapes Miss Emily’s lips. She touches another, further left.

Now I’m blue, Navy blue, I’m as blue as I can be
‘Cause my steady boy said ship ahoy and joined the Naaavy!

“Please touch the thumbnail—”

Further left—another—

In the big rock-candy mountain
All the cops have wooden legs
All the lakes are filled with whiskey
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs

“Please touch—”

Miss Emily is laughing openly now. She reverses direction and touches another portrait, to the extreme right of the first one:

Ladies leave your man at home
The club is full of ballers and they pockets full grown
And now you fellas leave yo girl wit her friends
‘Cause it’s 11:30 and the club is jumpin’ jumpin’

“Please touch—”

Now back left—another—

All my thoughts just seem to settle on a breeze
As I’m lying wrapped up in your arms
The whole world just fades away
The only thing I hear
Is the beating of your heart…

“Please touch the thumbnail again to hear the entire song. Thank you.”

Miss Emily has stopped laughing. She likes something about this one. She reaches her hand out again, careful to touch the same portrait as before: a fair-haired woman in a white dress, called, if the caption were to be trusted, “Faith Hill.”

I can feel the magic floating in the air
Being with you gets me that way
I sit and watch the sunlight dance across your face
And I’ve never been this swept away…

Miss Emily is mesmerized. Before she knows what’s happening, she’s sitting on the strangely hard, smooth floor of the vessel with her mouth opened, staring at nothing in particular.

‘Cause I can feel you breathe
Washin’ over me
And suddenly I’m meltin’ into you
There’s nothing left to prove
Baby all we need is just to be…

And before she knows it, it’s over, and the elegant female voice, like cold water: “Would you like to select another song?”

“But—but—” She hunts frantically through the mosaic for Faith Hill. Wasn’t she under the picture of five well-dressed Negroes? But where are they?

“Excuse me, Bradford,” says the Sentry from where it’s hunched over the unconscious Jakks. “If you wish to hear the same track again, you may simply say, ‘Replay track.’”

“She will sing it again?”

“The track will replay, that is correct. Thank you.”

Miss Emily turns back to the mosaic. She opens her mouth, and then hesitates, feeling foolish.

“Re—replay track.”

I can feel the magic floating in the air…

Miss Emily claps a hand over her mouth. She hardly trusts herself to speak. “Thank you, Sentry.”

“It is my pleasure to serve, Bradford. Thank you.”

Miss Emily goes on to listen to the song a total of five more times while the Sentry operates on Jakks. By the fifth listen she finds her lips moving along with the last chorus:

“In a way I know my heart is waking up, as all the walls come crumbling down—”

“What the fuck are you listening to?” Jakks is awake, propped up on his elbows. “Frankenfuck, what is this shit?” Miss Emily stares at him, filled with a bizarre new rage: He ruined my song!

“Good afternoon, Jakks,” says the Sentry. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah—how much more of this shit is there?”

“Well, Jakks, there are two more skin grafts and then the pores and sweat glands will have to be repaired. Rest now. We will resume in eighteen hours. Thank you. Would you like your messages now?”

“Whada we got?”

“There are several advertisements and one greeting from K-Dog.”

“No shit, K-Dog? Put that shit up. Awesome—K-Dog!”

The musical mosaic vanishes, to be replaced by another phantom, this time the portrait of another pale, hairless creature, more or less exactly like Jakks. Suddenly the portrait comes to life and begins to speak:

“‘Ay, what ‘appened? Where you at, you fuckin’ homo?! You fuckin’ some sheep? Yeah, you a dick. Fuck you, ya fuckin’ homoooooo! Hit me back.”

The face vanishes. Jakks absolutely howls with ecstatic laughter. “That motherfucker! That motherfucker! That shit is FUNNY! Reply—fuckin’—REPLY!”

The elegant female voice returns: “Begin reply now—Thank you.”

“Aaah, you fuckin’ dick! I should kick your fuckin’ ass! You can lick my nuts! You can lick my nuuuuuuuts!!!! End message.” Jakks is helpless with laughter. “You hear that shit? How I told him to lick my nuts? Oh man, he is gonna laugh his fuckin’ ass off.”

“I understand nothing you say, Mr. Jakks.”

“What’s this Mr. Jakks shit? I’m just Jakks, okay? Fuckin, ‘Mr. Jakks.’” He looks at her for a moment. “Hey Bradford.”

“Yes… Jakks?”

“You tell anybody about me?”

“No, I did not.”

“Any a’ the other cave people, how there’s a spaceman in the woods n’ shit?”

“I told no one, Jakks. That is the truth.”

“Alright. You’re allright, Bradford. You know that? Ain’t nothin’ wrong with you, Bradford. Bradford’s okay, right Sentry?”

“Right you are, Jakks. Thank you.”

“Lemme do something for you, Bradford. Whadaya want? We got the Hopper here—the drive-system’s out, but the whole entertainment center’s working. Whadaya want? Name it. Homo, hetero, weird stuff, whadaya do?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Jakks.”

“Right right right—my bad—fucking—you know—I mean—having sex, sexual, uh, you know, sexual fucking.”

Something in Jakks’ voice is touching off a vague memory in Miss Emily’s mind— some conversation, some voices, some admonitions from the past. But who? And where? Her mother? Some dark room, firelight? Ominous warnings about mysterious events in the future, terms like “marital obligations,” and “disgrace.” These terms seem to belong to a forbidden lexicon kept in a locked drawer somewhere, one Miss Emily has certainly never opened, nor even touched. And then there are those moments when Miss Emily’s sisters fix her with that certain stare, that particular brand of contempt Miss Emily has never been able to name, the contempt of the knowledgeable for the thoroughly ignorant.

“I am sorry, Jakks. I must ask you to rephrase your question with other words. I do not understand what you mean.”

Jakks looks at her for another long moment. “You know what, forget it.”

***

Miss Emily’s story was quite clever, given her time constraints and—she’d realized with a jolt—the fact that she had never, to her memory, lied before. She had fallen asleep, she tearfully told the others, while sketching an emergent crocus flower, and awoke in a panic just as dusk was beginning to set. The elder Mrs. Bradford, of course, told her she was a fool, and her sisters exchanged more of those knowing looks that they must have imagined Miss Emily never noticed. But Mr. Talbot fussed over her, and tried to help her recover from her trauma with a several of his best anecdotes, including the one about the stolen pastry that everyone liked so much.

When Miss Emily awoke the next morning, she was delighted to discover that certain trace elements of the song from the vessel seemed to be playing inside her head, in fact playing and repeating. She gasped aloud with the joy of it. At breakfast, as the others dredged up all the old morning topics, Miss Emily, whom no one expected to speak anyway, played the song, or rather the segment that was in her head, over and over.

“There’s nothing left to prove
Baby all we need is just to be…”

“Miss Emily?” It was Mr. Talbot at the far end of the table. “Do you have something to share with us?”

With a shock of bright scarlet horror, Miss Emily realized she had been singing aloud without even noticing it. Mr. Talbot leaned forward with an aspect of delighted curiosity. “Were you singing something, Miss Emily? I could not quite place the tune.”

Anne and Violet giggled, but Mr. Talbot did not turn to them to acknowledge their giggling. “You are mistaken, Mr. Talbot,” declared the elder Mrs. Bradford, “my daughter does not sing at table.” The sisters giggled again, and Miss Emily flushed from head to foot. But throughout the rest of the morning, as she dragged herself toward her one o’clock escape, she continued to replay the song in her head:

Caught up in the touch
A slow and steady rush
And baby isn’t that the way that love is s’posed to be…

In the years before she married, Miss Emily’s sister Anne used to play the piano in the parlor and sing love ballads for company. Miss Emily would endure these in silence, aware that they contained nothing to which she could aspire. But now the song from the vessel was in her mind, apparently not to depart any time soon, and Miss Emily understood something she hadn’t before: Love songs belong to the lonely, too.

***

For the first time since Miss Emily has made his acquaintance, Jakks is standing up when Miss Emily arrives in the vessel that afternoon.

“Bradford! What is up, B-Dog! Check me out! Huh?” He turns around, displaying his torso for her, and she sees that large portions of his skin are off-color, a kind of light-pink that almost matches his natural skin tone. “Can’t hardly tell I got second-degree burns comin’ out of the continuum, can you?”

“I am glad to see you well, Jakks. Perhaps as a complement to your convalescence you might enjoy these.” She holds up the basket she’s brought with her. “We had scones this morning, and I was able secrete a few for you.”

Jakks is speechless. He takes the basket from her, carefully unwraps the napkin, and lifts up one of the scones, studying it in the blue light of the sphere.

“Kick-ass… kick-ASS, Bradford. You see this shit, Sentry?”

“I do see it, Jakks. Thank you.”

Jakks, rather than taking a bite, puts the whole scone in his mouth and devours it. “Oh fuck. I my fucking god, I can’t believe how much this shit rules. Real food, man! I fuckin’ FORGOT! You are the bitch, Bradford, you are the fuckin’ bitch.”

Miss Emily beams. She understands not one word Jakks is saying, but she can tell he’s grateful nonetheless.

“So check it out, Bradford, I’m outta here tomorrow.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Yeah, Sentry figures he needs another twenty hours to fix the drive system and then I gotta go home and face the fuckin’ music.”

“Home?”

“Yeah, check this out.” He leads her to a wall of flickering lights, including a long blue stripe lined with numbers that turns red at its extreme left end. “Okay, we are… here—” he indicates one point in the blue stripe, marked with odd numbers—”It’s hard to explain, that means 1904—and I’m gonna set coordinates for… here—” and he indicates another point at the far right end of the stripe: “2106, where I’m gonna get my ass majorly fucked.”

“Why is it red at this end?” asks Miss Emily, pointing to the red end, far to the left of 1904.

Jakks looks over at the Sentry, grinning. “I’ll show you. Check this out.” He calls to the Sentry, “How’s that drive comin’?”

The Sentry, bent over a mass of machinery, doesn’t even look around. “Quite well, Jakks. Thank you.”

Jakks reaches out and touches part of the red end of the stripe. “Activate coordinates—” But before he can finish the command, the Sentry has crossed the sphere and seized Jakks’ wrist in its tiny silver hand.

“I’m sorry, Jakks, but you are in violation of the Time Continuum Code of 2097. I cannot allow you to activate those coordinates.”

“Okay, okay, my bad.” The Sentry releases Jakks and returns to its work. “I fuckin’ love doin’ that.”

“Why did that happen?”

“‘Cause you can’t go into the red. You have to have the capability, in case you need to do a quick-jump out of somebody’s path or something, but you don’t ever wanna use it. That’s why Sentry’s here.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause that’s the beginning of fuckin’ time, bitch. You don’t want a piece of that.”

Miss Emily studies the red on the timeline as Jakks returns to the scones. “There is a beginning to time?”

“Well, there’s something.”

“You have not seen it.”

“No, I haven’t fuckin’ seen it, Jesus Christ.”

“Why not?”

“Cause nobody ever comes back from there. You’d have to be fuckin’ bonkers.”

Miss Emily is silent for a moment, while Jakks gobbles scones. “Well, I wish you a safe voyage back to your home.”

“Hey, fuckin, you too, Bradford—I mean, not a safe voyage, I mean—Hey Bradford—you know what?”

“Yes, Jakks?

“I got a surprise for you, too.”

***

For a moment there is only a series of flashes, blue light alternating with red. Then Miss Emily is in a room, an enormous, gorgeous room, huge open windows with long, white diaphanous curtains, swaying in a light, warm breeze. She is reclining on an enormous bed bedecked with pillows and she feels strangely… ventilated. She looks down to see she is wearing nothing but a nightgown, and a wisp of a nightgown at that, a little fragment made of the same material as the swaying curtains. But wait—it’s not just the nightgown—this isn’t her body! Those smooth legs, the giant, protruding bosom, all skin an orangey-brown—by now Miss Emily is getting used to disorienting phantoms, but this is something else entirely. And this is all before she sees the man at the foot of the bed.

He’s just a silhouette at first behind the gauzy white bed-curtains, but then he slowly draws the curtains aside and smiles at her. “I knew you were going to be here. I just didn’t know you’d be so beautiful.” He looks like a piece of sculpture, like something you’d see in a museum brought to life. If one imagined a spectrum, a long blue to red stripe, and at one end placed the small, pale, mole-like Jakks, and in the middle the dashing Mr. Talbot, then this man was surely at the far end, in the red.

“You look tired,” the man says. “I bet you’ve had a hard week. You know what I do when I’ve had a hard week? I just work it off with some long, deep, fucking.” And then the man is on top of her and pressing his mouth onto hers. His jaw feels like hard iron.

***

“Jesus Christ—abort program—abort program!”

Miss Emily is shrieking with sobs. As Jakks lifts the helmet off her head, her face is streaked with tears. “I cannot—I cannot—I cannot—”

“Jesus Christ, lady, fine, FINE, just—I thought you’d like it—just stop, okay—I’m sorry—I thought you’d—”

But Miss Emily is doubled over in the chair, weeping. Her whole body is wracked.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—that’s just what guys do, where I’m from—you like a girl, you fix her up with a nice program, I didn’t think—Bradford, I’m sorry—I don’t know how to… ”

And Miss Emily does understand, in a way, she does understand Jakks, and what he was trying to do, but she doesn’t know how to say it and couldn’t speak anyway even if she wished to. Her body is revolting against her. It feels not so much like a solid entity as some kind of tumultuous occurrence, like a hurricane, pounding under every inch of her skin.

“I’m sorry, Bradford—shit—I mean—” And without knowing anything else to do, Jakks perches on the side of the huge black chair and puts his arms around her—first one, then the other. “Shit, Bradford…”

She manages to speak: “Forgive me.”

“For what?”

“I know you thought of it as a gift…”

“No no no, forget it, I just… man… that’s just how it is. I got a Hopper when I was three—everybody does. You’re not supposed to get fucking programs ’till you’re fourteen, but everybody I know does ‘em way before that; the encryptions are easy as hell.”

“Three? Fourteen?”

“What?”

“But your mother and father…”

“They’re in their own Hoppers, they got their own things. I mean, they send me messages every week, it’s not like they don’t—I mean, this is how things are supposed to be—I mean, what do you have, like outhouses, like arranged marriages an’ shit? In my time everything’s perfect—you just put the helmet on, tell the Hopper what you want. Bradford—I’m serious—I really thought you’d like it.”

“I’m sorry, Jakks.”

“Well I mean…” Her sobs are beginning to die down. She does like this, though. Jakks is small and squishy, not very handsome and not at all dashing, but he has an unexpected talent for holding. “Hey, scoot over, Bradford.” She makes room for him, and he sits in the chair with her and holds her. They are silent for a moment, and then Jakks says “Okay, this is fuckin’ weird, we need music—what was that shitty song from yesterday?”

Miss Emily giggles. “You must say ‘Replay track.’”

“Smart-ass, huh? Replay track.”

Faith Hill sings: “I can feel the magic floating in the air…” Miss Emily rests her head against Jakks’s neck.

“Jakks?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever wish you did not live in the Hopper?”

“Naw, I mean… that’s just how people live. You know… you should…”

“Yes?”

“Ahh… I’m in enough trouble as it is.” She reaches up and touches his face, his bristly hair, and hears his breath catch. But he doesn’t move away.

Faith Hill sings, “The only thing I hear is the beating of your heart…”

“This song does suck, though, and that’s true shit.”

***

A gunshot, then, and everything changed. A gunshot, and once again Miss Emily is running, with her skirts pulled up with both hands.

The gunshot had come as the elder Mrs. Bradford was vociferously reprimanding her unmarried middle daughter, and not just reprimanding her, but reprimanding her in front of her beautiful, married sisters.

“These walks of yours, these leave-takings. They grow increasingly long. Twice now you have neglected my side for an entire afternoon, leaving me to the care of whichever savage may be dusting in the next room. It is irregular, and it is disgraceful, and it will cease.”

Anne and Violet were attempting to look smug in the corner while their oversized sister was scolded, but they were also quite irritated. Where was Miss Emily spending her afternoons? What was she doing out there? Not meeting someone—not meeting someone? Not Miss Emily. What right did she have to an intriguing secret?

The elder Mrs. Bradford reached the crescendo of her disapproval in what was almost certainly a direct quote from her late husband: “You will remember your duty is to me, and you will not leave this house!”

Then the gunshot. All turned to the window in shock.

“This is your husband, Violet,” roared the elder Mrs. Bradford, “This is your quail-hunting fool of a husband!”

Miss Emily ran to the window, sheet-white with terror. Where was the shot from—what part of the grounds?

“There!” cried the elder Mrs. Bradford. “There’s the fool now!”

Edward Lane was running out of the woods, screaming. From the second floor they could make him out: “Monstrous! Monstrous!” A sudden bolt of blue light emitted from the woods, narrowly missing Mr. Lane and setting a rose-bush on fire. The married sisters screamed. Break it, thought Miss Emily, Jump. And right there, right in front of her mother and her married sisters, she reached down with both hands, drew up her skirts, and ran.

“Emily! Emily!”

Miss Emily ran. Miss Emily runs. Down the staircase. Over the front walk. Across the great lawn. Past the smoldering rosebush. There are shouts behind her, the men, the servant, even Mr. Talbot, but our Miss Emily’s shedding the past like so many scales upon the ground. The woods. The second path. The left fork. Over the hill. By the creek with no bridge. The woods on the right.

From the oval-shaped opening of the sphere, Miss Emily can make out the voice of the Sentry. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This vessel—Thank you. Thank you.”

“Jakks!”

“Bradford? Ah, fuck! Bradford! Get away from here!”

Another bolt of blue light issues from the opening, racing past Miss Emily and boring exquisite even holes through several tree trunks.

“Thank you. Thank you. This vessel—Thank you.”

The Sentry is collapsed on its side, with its weapon arm pointing at the opening. A large portion of its torso has been blasted away and there is an awful burning smell in the air. Mr. Lane’s newest quail.

“Fucking IDIOT!”

“I did not tell them, Jakks, I told them nothing, I swear on my father’s life—”

“Fucking idiot, fucking musket—I can’t believe it worked!”

The Sentry’s movements are slowing, and his arm is beginning to droop. “Thank you. Thaaaank you.”

“He was just finished with the fucking drive-system, he didn’t see the guy coming—ah fuck!” Jakks is clutching his chest. He collapses into the chair.

“Are you hurt? Jakks, are you hurt?”

“Shit, Bradford, you’re the one lookin’, you tell me!”

“Miss Emily!” It’s Mr. Talbot’s voice! And others! “Miss Emily! Miss Emily!” Footfalls, crunching through the bramble.

“Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank you.” The Sentry’s arm drops to the ground.

“Jakks—they’ll kill you—they’ll hang you—”

“They’ll ‘hang’ me? Okay. Door!” And for the first time since Miss Emily discovered the sphere, the oval-shaped opening vanishes as if it had never been there. “Hang me now, you fucking cave motherfuckers!”

Miss Emily touches the wall where the opening had been. Solid metal, just like the rest. By now she has almost forgot the taste of astonishment. It simply strikes her as a useful feature.

“You didn’t tell ‘em, Bradford.”

“I did not. I would not. Mr. Lane found you on his own.”

“Bradford—we gotta figure out how to get you outta here.”

BAM! BAM!

“The fuck are they doing?”

Miss Emily can hear the vibrations of her friends and family as they hammer on the outside of the vessel, seeking any weakness or point of entry. That’s Mr. Rimgale’s voice, that’s Mr. Talbot, that’s the butler, Leven, and further off, her sisters Violet and Anne, and even further, in the almost inaudible distance, her mother, the elder Mrs. Bradshaw. She supposes they are terrified. She supposes they love her.

“Jakks… how do we embark?”

“What?”

“How do we depart?”

“Are you serious?” Miss Emily turns to Jakks, and something in her face spares her from having to speak. Jakks says, “Activate voice command.”

The female voice: “Voice command activated. Thank you.”

Jakks points to the red and blue stripe. “Touch the spectrum right under the black homing mark. That’s 2106.”

Miss Emily finds it, a black hatch mark close to the right end of the stripe. She takes a deep breath—falters—touches it. Outside, Mr. Talbot: “Miss Emily! Call out if you can hear us!”

“Did you touch it?”

“I did.”

“Activate coordinates.”

“Coordinates activated, Jakks. Thank you.”

There is no vibration, no blast, no sound at all. The only sign that they have embarked is that one moment Miss Emily can hear Mr. Talbot: “Emily—please—” and then the next moment she hears him no longer. She braces herself against the control panel and breathes.

“Oh shit—oooh shit—” Jakks is bleeding badly from two wounds. “Bradford—I’m fucked…”

“What happened?”

“Shrapnel from the Sentry—ah fuck—I don’t know what to do, he always fixes me—I’m so fucked…”

Miss Emily inspects him—the wounds are deep, and they seem mortal. “Could they heal this in your time?”

“Yeah.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“Twenty, twenty-five minutes.” They both manage not to voice the obvious conclusion.

“Is there anything you wish me to do?”

“Bring me the helmet.”

“Of course.”

“Computer, show me the experiences catalogue.” A list of strange words appears in the air before him. “Scroll.” He studies the words as they dance by him. “Where’s that one, where’s that one…”

“Jakks.”  Miss Emily holds out the helmet. “Shall I put it on?”

Jakks suddenly flicks his hand and the ghostly list of experiences in the air vanishes. “Bradford.”

“Yes, Jakks?”

“Can I tell you something.”

“Of course you may.”

“I feel like an asshole.”

“I do not know what that means.”

“No one’s ever kissed me before.” He raises his head and looks directly at her. “Outside the entertainment center. In life. No one’s ever kissed me before.”

“No one has ever kissed me, either.”

“Well what’s your fuckin’ excuse?” And she can laugh for a bit, and it’s good. She sits on the edge of the chair, as Jakks had done the day before.

“How do I begin?”

“You’re askin’ me?” Jakks is beginning to shake.

“I do not wish to hurt you.”

“Bradford—I think I’m past that.”

She leans over and puts her lips to his. As simple as that. His lips are chapped. But these are of him, these lips. The breath in his nostrils is stale, but this is of him, too. Mucus runs from his nose, but this is of him, too. He coughs, and blood trickles from his mouth, but this is of him, too. There are tears in his eyes, and these are of him, too. These are all Jakks, these are part and parcel of him, and this is what she understands now. She sucks in this breath, kisses this mucus, this blood, kisses these tears from his eyes, and when their tongues touch, which ought to be vile but somehow isn’t, Miss Emily knows: everything I have ever been told is a lie.

“Bradford…”

“My given name is Emily.”

“Emily.”

“Yes, Jakks.”

“Can you… can you touch the… the yellow square by that wall? Big-ass yellow square? For the ob-screen?”

She locates the square next to a blank portion of the inner wall where there are no flickering lights. “This?”

“Yeah, just touch that, that’s for…” She touches it, and the blank screen vanishes, to be replaced by another phantom: a night-sky filled with stars, but not a black sky, a sky of bluish-gray, with a horizon of white in the distance. There are flashes and bursts of light, there are great stones suspended in the sky that vanish as soon as they appear, there are other spheres, other vessels whizzing by in both directions. And Miss Emily realizes this is no phantom—this is a sort of window—this is what’s happening outside.

“Jakks—Jakks, it’s—Jakks, it’s—” And here she turns, and here she discovers her companion with his eyes open, twisted over on his side, motionless.

Miss Emily’s response is methodical. She lays him carefully on his back, sets his arms on the arm-rests of the chair, lays his head back, and closes his eyes. She murmurs a prayer, asking for pity for this man who never got a chance to be good or evil. Then she goes back to the window. There is now, visible in the distance, a blue-gray sphere from which all the tiny black spheres are either approaching or departing. This would be Jakks’s world, where she will be arriving presently.

She turns to her right, once again, and looks at the red and blue stripe. 1904. 2106. And so many years for the choosing in between. The Sentry, in pieces on the floor.

Break it. Jump.

Miss Emily goes to the stripe, presses down on the extreme left end, deep in the red, and says, “Activate coordinates.” The female voice: “These coordinates violate the Time Continuum Code of 2097. Are you sure you want to activate them?”

“I’m sure. Activate coordinates.”

“Thank you.” And just as quickly, the Jakks-world vanishes. In the spectral window, the other spheres begin to fly by at an extraordinary velocity, but Miss Emily cannot feel this speed from inside. So she keeps her eyes on the window.

Outside the window, stars are beginning to blur, elongate. There are fewer and fewer other spheres to be seen until there are finally none at all.

“Warning. This vessel is now in violation of the Time Continuum Code of 2097.”

But Miss Emily only replies, “Replay track.” Faith Hill sings. Miss Emily watches the window.

Suddenly there are no stars. The gray-blue deepens to purple deepens to black. Great sounds invade the sphere, enormous guttural voices. She watches the window. There are colors, shapes, great gouts of fire. There are councils, there are great meetings taking place, beings whose eyes are nine hundred feet across. There are great declarations and plans, damning truths, new ways to see and hear—new to Miss Emily, that is.  Somewhere in the deep background, Faith Hill sings.

The sounds and the colors and the creatures are coming into the vessel, they’re coming into the vessel, they are joining Miss Emily on this final leg of her voyage. They are her companions.

They are coming in the vessel, the shapes, the colors, the sounds, the creatures, they are coming into the vessel and disassembling the package, the inches and quarts and tendencies that compose Miss Emily. They are taking her apart and putting her together again. It is not that no one has ever returned. It is that they were never themselves to return.

Outside, through the window, the vessel has stilled. There’s nowhere else to go. There are no more planets, no more colors, no more sounds. There is only a great black wall of silence. The vessel drops away, the song of Faith Hill, the body of Jakks, the remains of the Sentry. There is Miss Emily, suspended in space.

And just as suddenly, the black wall splits open, cut open by a lacerating light. Miss Emily closes her eyes.

But this is the end of Miss Emily’s voyage. There is nowhere else to go. And this light, rushing forward like a great wind, is not to be denied. Its brightness is so savage, so complete, it’s if her eyes are not closed at all. So what is left of our Miss Emily of the drawing room—Break it. Jump.

Miss Emily opens her eyes.

–

–

Mac Rogers is a writer and performer based in Brooklyn. His plays Universal Robots and Viral won Best Off-Off Broadway Play honors from the Independent Theater Blogger Awards, and Robots earned four New York Innovative Theater (NYIT) Award nominations. He is the co-founder (alongside Jordana and Sean Williams) of Gideon Productions, and an NYIT nominee for his performance in the title role in James Comtois’s The Adventures of Nervous-Boy. He lives with his wife Sandy in a converted auto-body shop in either East Williamsburg or Bushwick, depending on who you ask.

“Fuck you fuck you fuck you. Fucking American army piece of shit,” Sa’ad al-Azawi chanted behind the wheel of his BMW. He couldn’t recognize his own city, he couldn’t navigate it. He just wanted to hop across the July 14 Bridge to the manicured center of the city’s power, Baghdad’s palm-lined answer to the Washington Mall, soon to be home to the occupation headquarters. A tank blocked an on-ramp. We had to circle west along the Tigris River and then back east again to get to the Rashid Hotel.

Baghdad’s map had become malleable, old routes across town melting away like mercury and reforming in odd places. Americans had closed some roads and bridges with checkpoints. They had cut others with bombs. Buildings were missing in action. Pits of rubble had replaced homes, like an entire block that included a Saddam safe house behind a Mansour restaurant. A bunker buster had buried a three-story house in a pit 20 feet deep.

Along the approach to Baghdad, every hundred yards or less, a killed car askew beside the road — either a rotting driver, shot to death, or a charred car frame from a direct hit on the car by some kind of bomb. (Rocket? RPG? Mortar? So early in the war, I certainly couldn’t tell.) Bullet casings at every intersection, detours around each part of the highway bombed into a moonscape. A bloated dead donkey blocked the bridge across the Tigris in downtown Baghdad. You could date the bodies in the cars and sometimes on the sidewalks by their shape and smell. Within days of death the skin turned black. As they decomposed they bloated to twice their normal size. And they smelled stronger than anything I’ve smelled before, like that rush up the back of your nose from your stomach just before you vomit, and then blooming into something worse.

That’s what you could see up close. Wide-angle: the bombed buildings, the ubiquitous black smoke. (Why? Who knew. Things just seem to burn during wars, often random things like a junkyard full of old tires, or a warehouse, or the papers in a government building.) The entire city of Baghdad, it felt, had been tipped over on its side and shaken. Now its people were washed over the sidewalks, driven but directionless. City streets that a month before were full of traffic, lined with produce stands, pharmacies and jewelry stores, had been transformed into an alien landscape, often impassable, barely recognizable, like those microscopic images of human skin that show tiny predators foraging in our pores, the only reminder of place and scale a pylon that’s actually the base of an eyelash. The warped physical environment catalyzed the psychological change that began gestating for Iraqis during the months of drum-beating and posturing leading to Shock and Awe: a sense of possibility and change yoked to fear. The destruction of the country and its institutions left an uneasy vacuum for the mind as well as the body.

It wasn’t immediately clear to me, but it was clear to Sa’ad al-Azawi — and, it turns out, to millions of his compatriots — that all this destruction would require each and every Iraqi to concoct a new identity to fit the new taxonomy of power. Iraqis had a very intense personal relationship with the state, and had long needed to define their political, sectarian and religious selves in relation to a capricious and seemingly all-powerful leader, who might kill them if they unwittingly projected a whiff of sedition. Saddam and his security services had made the rules clear for decades.

Now new powers would rewrite the rules, and men like Sa’ad al-Azawi didn’t know who those powers would be. In that environment, it was no wonder that Sa’ad al-Azawi felt suspended, adrift, fluid: Not just free to reinvent himself, but required to do so. Most of Iraq, in a state of confusion, embarked on a similar self-reinvention project at the same time. The road map had literally changed overnight. The political hierarchy had vanished. Many of the old psychological reference points had melted away with the Ba’athists; the old habits remained, but their raison d’etre, and their enforcers, were gone.

2.

Sa’ad al-Azawi was handsome, skinny, dark, with a long, vertical, equine face. He had the twitching mannerisms of a nervous man, always fidgeting with his keys, moving his hands, pacing with small steps, looking away, around, and back at you. He smoked not for pleasure but out of compulsion, wincing with distaste as he took a drag. His hair was cropped close but the gray patches showed anyhow. His eyes were dark, dark brown, but I remember them as somehow black, brooding, and impregnable. He talked at a fast clip, imperfect but confident English.

He had fished us out of the crowd at the Palestine Hotel on April 10, 2003, two days after Saddam’s government fled. The hotel lot on Baghdad’s east bank was teeming with foreign journalists, hundreds of new arrivals from Kuwait and Jordan who like me were looking for a place to stay and a way to begin reporting. Iraqis who spoke English or owned cars had likewise flocked to the Palestine to offer their services at amazing inflated rates. $200 anyone to drive around in a jalopy with a sullen man who hardly speaks?

The U.S. military had put down some barbed wire, some APCs and tanks were parked around the neighborhood, and the hotel entrances were so packed with people it took a quarter of an hour to get from the street to the lobby. I was traveling with Essdras Suarez, a photographer from The Boston Globe, and Rebecca, a Lebanese we had seduced away from a guest relations job at the Kuwait Hilton in order to translate for us. She knew next to nothing about Iraq, but she was smart and game, she spoke the language, and she knew from sectarian war, having grown up during some of Lebanon’s worst fratricidal excesses. We were equipped to work on a basic level.

Someone in the crowd overheard me saying I was from The Boston Globe and shouted: “Bostonglobe! Bostonglobe! You are Bostonglobe! A man is looking for you.” For me? No one knew I was in Baghdad except my editor. Instantly I was suspicious, on the alert for a scam.

My wariness was misplaced. It turned out that Sa’ad al-Azawi had been asking all day whether any Boston Globe correspondent had yet appeared in Baghdad; he had promised the last correspondent in Iraq that he would resume work for the paper as soon as any of its reporters returned. The random man led me to Sa’ad al-Azawi, who embraced me tightly, like we had a long history. I hugged him back, susceptible to the smallest gesture of familiarity and affection.

Under the circumstances, the enthusiasm and warmth felt entirely normal. We’d all spent the last three weeks in shell-shock — some, like Sa’ad al-Azawi, because of Operation Shock and Awe in Baghdad, others, like me, from the cacophony of smart bombs and artillery exploding in southern Iraq. We were rattled from the constant sounds of gunfire, artillery, and bombing, and we were all distressed from constantly witnessing death. People tended to turn more readily to one another for comfort, hugging strangers or sharing odd, brief moments of communion.

Elizabeth Neuffer, the Globe’s UN correspondent and a veteran of Iraq coverage since the first Gulf War, had enthusiastically introduced Sa’ad in an email as “the wonderful Sa’ad al-Azawi, our loyal Baghdad driver … our eyes and ears in Baghdad.” Some of our reporters had tried calling him during the war to hear first-hand about the toll on Baghdad, but after one or two brief conversations it proved impossible to get through. By the time I got to Baghdad after several weeks camped on the roadsides of southern Iraq and a harrowing drive through the frontlines to the capital, I had completely forgotten about Sa’ad al-Azawi. My memory of The Boston Globe’s institutional connections to Iraq had momentarily shorted.

When he found me, he immediately asked about Elizabeth and briefly brought me up to date. None of his family had died or been injured, he said. He had evacuated them to a Sunni village outside of Baghdad, and had stayed in the capital as long as he could to make sure his house wasn’t looted. By the third week he couldn’t take the bombing anymore and joined his family in Sunni-dominated, bucolic Diyala Province. Roughly an hour’s drive from Baghdad, it was a popular locale for Ba’athists and other well-to-do Baghdadis to build weekend getaway homes in the date groves. The day Saddam fled, Sa’ad returned to Baghdad, expecting (so he said) to hear from The Boston Globe that he was needed for work. He had money and a generator belonging to Elizabeth, and was eager to start.

We piled into his black BMW and got a quick tour of the city, whose war-scrambled layout was harder than ever to decipher. On the east (or left) bank of the Tigris –called Rusafa in Arabic — we saw the commercial downtown and our future home, the mixed-sect upper-middle class neighborhood of Karada. (Later it would become the last semi-safe area outside the Green Zone.) We saw churches, mosques and Husaynia, small prayer halls for the Shi’ites; electronics shops, DVD stores, fancy restaurants, multi-story hotels, all shuttered for the duration of the war, now removing the boards from their windows.

3.

It was Friday. On Inner Karada Street, Baghdad’s middle-class mall, men on the sidewalks stared angrily through the windows of Sa’ad’s BMW. The people who lived and shopped in Karada were more likely to worship money than some obstreperous cleric. The churches got some traffic, but the mosques seemed equally neglected by Sunnis and Shi’ites. Karada was an idyllic neighborhood, its secular residents bound by pragmatism; American war planners had intentionally spared it as much damage as possible, considering it a friendly area and an important quarter for post-war Baghdad. Still, some bombs had struck the neighborhood, leaving a twisted truck chassis here or a crater in the middle of a lane there.

At the time, Baghdad was a patchwork of neighborhoods usually dominated by one sect or another, but with lots of intermixing. Karada was exceptional even then for its blurred boundaries. Historically home to some noble Shi’ite merchant families, Karada had attracted secular, middle-class Iraqis from all sects because of its vibrant commerce, proximity to Baghdad University, and waterfront streets. Its denizens were not for the most part stalwarts of the regime; they were more likely to have earned or inherited their wealth than to have profited from one of the Ba’athist state’s highly remunerative sinecures. The neighborhood was poised to be the unofficial capital of a new Baghdad, embodying all its ideals — harmony among sects, zeal for commerce, religion observed quietly in the background.

It was flanked on one side by the river, which oozed brown rather than flowed, and on the other by the smokestacks of the Baghdad South power plant and the plume of the Dora refinery, where they just burnt the natural gas byproducts of the refinery process. (Why save it or sell it when oil was basically free?) On that second day of “liberation,” Karada’s denizens wanted to keep out the predators who were stripping bare every home, office and government building, burning anything they couldn’t carry away. Karada’s merchants would brook no such anarchy; at every intersection, shopkeepers had erected checkpoints.

Saddam in his grandiloquence had dubbed the destined-to-be-glorious 2003 war against America the “Marakat al Hawasim,” the Decisive Battle. Iraqis quickly adopted the word to describe the “decisive ones” — the looters, thieves, and opportunists, the poor and the greedy who stole Iraq blind during and immediately after the fighting. The hawasim were everywhere, stripping molding from public buildings, loading air conditioners from the university onto donkey carts under the indifferent eyes of U.S. soldiers, trashing the national museum. High-class hawasim emptied banks and munitions dumps. Malevolent political hawasim burned incriminating Ba’ath Party records. Americans counted themselves among the hawasim, availing themselves of cars from Iraqi government depots and palaces, sometimes handing over vehicles with a nod to embedded journalists or random Western civilians.

Not in Karada, though; this was a neighborhood of businessmen, and they had no intention of waiting for a government or soldiers to come to their protection. The U.S. military might not shoot looters on sight, but Iraqi businessmen would be thrilled to.

“I want people to know that not all Iraqis are lawless and violent,” Fahed al Jabouri declared to me. He was bald, with a pot belly and a tucked-in shirt, and seemed upper-middle class. He held his AK-47 with familiarity but not with a fighter’s swagger. He was the chief of a vigilante band on a busy corner of Inner Karada Street. The merchants’ placid faces belied the violence they were prepared to dispense at a moment’s notice. Some held chunks of concrete, others clubs or twisted lengths of rebar.

This wasn’t raging street justice though: these men were imposing law and order with the blessing of the community, in the form of a crowd of festive onlookers and a local cleric, in effect supervising the checkpoint. “We want the American Army to know these people are not fighting them. They are establishing security in their own neighborhood,” the cleric, Imam Faris Jaber al-Halo, told me.

“When the hawasim finished with the government buildings and the schools, they started to come into our homes,” Jabouri said. “We will protect ourselves.”

Just then, the men at the checkpoint stopped an Iraqi driving a bus. His family sat in the front seats. The bus overflowed with government furniture: sofas, desks, cabinets, and the like.

“Excuse me,” Jabouri said. “We have business.”

The merchants pulled the man from the bus and threw him to the ground. Jabouri joined them in a circle, kicking him the man as his wife and children watched.

The beating over, Jabouri returned to our conversation without skipping a beat. “We don’t need the Americans to protect us,” Jabouri said. “We’ll protect ourselves.”

4.

Further into that first Friday afternoon drive, we crossed the Tigris into Karkh, the west or right bank of the river, and approached the seat of government: Saddam’s palace, his triumphal arch, the one decorated with Iranian skulls, to commemorate the disastrous Qadisiya, the 8-year bloody draw of a war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s. We were in the future Green Zone. The architecture in this serene, wealthy residential area around the government buildings was ugly and Ba’athist — two-story villas with tightly clipped hedges, tinted windows, and ornate porticos over the windows and doors, curlicues drawn in cement. Lots of pink marble and gray granite accented the facades. These were the villas that in short order would house Iraqi official who wanted to be near but not in the Green Zone .

We kept getting lost trying to find our way around American checkpoints. The unsmiling troops were jumpy; already many of them had weathered attacks by suicide car bombers.

Just the night before, on our drive north from Basra to Baghdad, we’d camped overnight with a platoon from the 3rd Infantry Division at an overpass just outside the city. We were terrified to drive downtown in the dark. The soldiers were still on a combat high from days of gun battles, and they were camping in a patch of silt littered with the bodies of the men they’d shot the day before. At night Iraqi fighters were still firing at the platoon. It stank, it was scary, the men were on edge. Just after dark, a white car drove up the highway. Its driver didn’t hear, or ignored, the warning shots fired by the night guard, and didn’t (couldn’t?) see the tiny sign on the road, in English, ordering drivers to stop for a coalition checkpoint. The frightened soldiers fired a heavy machine gun, the red tracers drawing neon lines through the night. They looked fake, like Star Wars special effects, except for the insistent pounding noise, which echoed in my stomach the way bass does at a club. The car suddenly careered, its wheels screeching on the pavement, and came to rest a few meters beyond the checkpoint’s far side. The reality of the thudding bullets and skidding car jolted me out of an unreal trance, slamming into my gut with the force of a foot. In the morning we saw the driver’s corpse slumped over his wheel — a civilian, it turned out, with no weapons or explosives in his car. “Too bad,” a soldier said. “He should have stopped.”

The image of that dead driver still vividly in my mind, I ordered Sa’ad al-Azawi to slow down and approach the U.S. checkpoints with care: hazard lights flashing, 5 miles per hour, both hands visible on the wheel. But Sa’ad couldn’t believe that the same “fucking American army” that had bombed his city was now controlling its streets and telling him, an Iraqi, what to do. He approached checkpoints at full speed and only slammed on the brakes at the last minute, when the frightened soldiers raised their guns. Then he’d shout, “Jaish Amriki ya hara!” It was one of the first phrases I learned in Arabic, and it roughly translates as, “American Army, you are shit.”

“They won’t shoot us, don’t worry,” he assured me.

“They absolutely will fucking shoot us,” I shouted back. “You can’t do that, or you’ll get us killed.”

My protests were futile; Sa’ad could not control his rage. He was not alone. Everywhere a national temper problem was in evidence. At intersections, traffic would gnarl to a halt as anarchic drivers swarmed into oncoming lanes and sidewalks in search of shortcuts. Men brandished guns and screamed out of their car windows. It took hours to make even the shortest trip through the city center. At the newly erected checkpoints Iraqis recoiled at the invasive searches, outraged that an American with a gun might — for no apparent reason — decide an office worker wasn’t allowed to cross a checkpoint to the downtown building where he worked. Looters from lower-class neighborhoods roamed wealthy inner districts balancing menacing lengths of pipe over their shoulders. Those with property to protect wore pistols ostentatiously tucked into their jeans. Sa’ad was a bit player in this angry national drama.

He drove fast, taking curves recklessly, screaming at the Americans. He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. And on the third day we were together, he suddenly started to pray. He came from a Sunni tribe, but he told me he was a Shi’ite, and he started praying as Shi’ites do, kneeling and pressing his head to the ground on a small round cake of hardened earth from Karbala. The most devout press so hard they create a permanent black bruise in the center of their forehead. In a day, Sa’ad bore the bruise of newfound devotion.

Out of old habit, Sa’ad al-Azawi wanted to please the Iraqis in power. In Shi’ite east Baghdad, he prayed like a Shi’ite. In Sunni west Baghdad, he talked with bluster about his powerful Sunni tribe. In Christian neighborhoods in the city center — the Christian minority was mostly Ba’athist and supported the regime — he reminisced about his old job at the Ministry of Information. Without a regime hierarchy, and with armored Americans asserting themselves at street corners everywhere, Sa’ad’s reflexes were confused, flexing and grasping at random as if a mad doctor was striking all his joints with a little rubber hammer. Surely Sa’ad knew he was a Sunni, but he didn’t know how that would play now that Saddam’s Sunni regime was in hiding. Until he knew who was going to take charge, aside from the Americans, he was going to hedge his bets, appealing to anyone and everyone he could. He could start by expanding his sectarian credentials, developing Sunni, Shia and mixed identities. He would also blend his political record depending on the audience, hinting at his affection for the Ba’ath when speaking to some members of the old Iraqi elite, or bellowing his rage at the regime’s atrocities when speaking to its victims.

He took us to meet his wife, a slight, pale and sweet woman who covered her hair. His wife was as placid as Sa’ad was nervous, sitting with her back straight but her facial features relaxed into a smile. She didn’t speak much English, and Sa’ad seemed uninterested in including her in a conversation. Their newborn baby, only a couple of months old, slept peacefully in her arms during our visit. Sa’ad said the bombing had upended his child, making him weep inconsolably at night. I believed it. I felt like weeping all the time.

5.

Within a week of my arrival, Globe colleagues joined me at the Hamra Hotel: Elizabeth Neuffer, the seasoned correspondent who was going to take control of our Iraq coverage, and Anne Barnard, another metro reporter from Boston. Anne and I made common cause as newcomers to war reporting. Anne was delighted and fascinated to find herself in Iraq just as it was opening to the world after decades of repressive dictatorship; it reminded her of the years she had spent in Moscow in the early 1990s, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She dived into the story with a great thirst to meet Iraqis and find nascent institutions as they were first getting off the ground.

Neuffer, who had reported extensively in Iraq since the first U.S.-Iraq war in 1991, got two shocks upon arriving. The first was the overt emergence of raging politics. Before, there had been nothing but Saddam; Neuffer had futilely sought to learn about the political tastes of the population. Before the U.S. invasion, officials in Washington had told her they were looking for “an Iraqi Hamid Karzai,” that is, an authority figure friendly to the Americans who still had the credibility to ascend to the leadership. The experts looked hard and deep among the ranks of known exiled politicians, but failed to canvass the clergy, the Ba’ath Party, and the exiles who still lived in the Middle East, quietly raising money in Tehran, Damascus, Beirut and Amman. All these operatives opened offices and revealed themselves in the span of a few short weeks in April 2003. No longer terrorized by Saddam’s intelligence services, suddenly everyone had a political opinion. Political parties hung banners on recruitment offices across Baghdad, and the secular populace was flocking to the mosques, openly trumpeting their allegiance as Shi’ites or Sunnis.

Her second shock came from Sa’ad al-Azawi, the man she completely trusted as a guide and a friend. Saddam’s Ministry of Information had tightly choreographed the movements of foreign journalists, but Sa’ad had been willing to bend the rules. He’d taken Elizabeth to meet Iraqis in their homes, without permission from the official minders. He’d expressed his own discontent with life in Ba’athist Iraq, signaling that he wasn’t a true believer in Saddam’s rule. Before the war he had stockpiled supplies for the Globe at Elizabeth’s request, including the generator. He had been generous with his time and taken risks to help Elizabeth do her job.

Now, after this latest war, Elizabeth couldn’t recognize Sa’ad’s brusque rage, his blossoming greed, and his newfound faith. As soon as she arrived, Sa’ad asked her for thousands of dollars as a reward for not decamping to the competition when the foreign press corps descended on Baghdad. He demanded that she hire only his relatives, and pay them through him. When Elizabeth balked, Sa’ad sulked. He told Anne he was a Shi’ite — another surprise for Elizabeth, who knew him as Sunni. He never used to pray during the years she had known him.

He was a man at a moment of transition, undergoing a process in tandem with most of his neighbors and fellow countrymen. And at that moment, people are hard to recognize, like a bolus of molten glass just before it’s blown into a shape. Sa’ad was Sunni, he was Shi’ite, but more than anything else he was Iraqi: a survivor, mutable, adaptive, sensitive to changes in the breeze.

He might have adopted religion, but he didn’t let that get in the way of other new things he wanted to try. We were busy, but he insisted every day that we stop for lunch at the most expensive restaurants. At those which served alcohol he drank cold beer with lunch — an indulgence that not only seemed obscene in a city reeling from war and steeped in death, but a luxury of time I couldn’t afford when, already exhausted, we were working 16-hour days filing news stories, features and photo packages in a constant stream.

On Thursday, April 17 — eight or nine days after the heaviest fighting in central Baghdad — we sped down to the ancient ruins of Babylon to see whether the antiquities were guarded. Sa’ad drove like a demon on the highway, 100 miles per hour over roads rutted by tank treads and explosives. I begged him to slow down, ordered him to slow down. “Your driving will get us killed!” I screamed. I really thought it would. Sa’ad al-Azawi refused to slow down; he chose to make it an issue of pride.

Past the city of Hilla, on the plains beside the Euphrates River, we came to the site of one of the ancient world’s great wonders, the hanging gardens of Babylon, perhaps the birthplace of writing. Now a barren parking lot and a concrete arch welcomed visitors to a spot unlikely to hold anything of beauty or wonder.

We found the museum sacked, archaeological records and slides strewn across a parking lot, and no one monitoring the site. A looter’s heaven. A few old tourist guides loitered around, offering their services. We climbed atop the famous lion sculpture, posing for photographs. A Blackhawk helicopter flew low over the temple walls reconstructed by Saddam Hussein. Babylon symbolized Iraq’s awesome cultural heritage, the birthplace of agriculture and writing, the fertile land between two rivers that spawned civilization. Saddam understood Babylon’s magnetic pull for Iraqis, similar to that of the Parthenon for Greeks. Bricks inscribed with Saddam’s name accented the reconstructed walls of the ancient city, an attempt to link Saddam’s secular Arab Ba’athist Republic to the most hallowed pre-Islamic history of Arabia. It depressed me to see such a symbol of Iraqi history and culture trashed and abandoned — almost more poignant than the looting of the Archaeological Museum in Baghdad.

If to me Babylon bereft was a despondent sign of America’s failure to treat its new occupied zone with honor, for Sa’ad al-Azawi the state of disorder in this ancient place was positively humiliating. He ceased his usual angry patter and gazed with generalized hatred at his surroundings, and at us. On the way home he drove with abandon, propelling the car with such focused speed that it felt barely connected to the road by gravity. All three terrified passengers, Essdras, Rebecca and I, rode in silence, mindful of the simmering rage in our driver’s eyes. I vowed never to enter the man’s car again.

Like so many common-sense decisions made in a war zone, it wasn’t a vow I could keep. In a time of flux, nearly everyone overrules their better judgment to fulfill some immediate need — a travel visa, a safe house on the road, an important interview, a hot meal, news of a missing relative.

6.

Upon our return to Baghdad, we heard a crowd had gathered at the Ministry of Information, or rather, its ruins. It was in Karkh, right up the boulevard from the Assassin’s Gate. In front of the ministry was a park, a grassy, palm-lined square in a government quarter delineated by wide avenues, stiff statues, and grassy lawns watered by sprinklers. Everything was dissonant, though. This was the building where Sa’ad had come to get his highly-paid work driving foreign journalists during Saddam’s rule, where creepy intelligence officials browbeat reporters, revoking visas at will, determining on a whim what could and could not be said about Saddam’s Iraq.

Red Crescent workers were exhuming bodies from the park. A major battle had been fought here during the first week of April, it was said in the crowd; American infantry soldiers versus Saddam’s Fedayeen, the passionate young militiamen, many of them foreign volunteers paid $600 in cash for their fervor, choosing near-certain death in a last stand against the foreign invader. Most of them had sent their signing bonuses home before joining the fight. In Basra, I had fished the receipt for the cash payment from the breast pocket of a dead Syrian Fedayeen fighter.

In the park, the Iraqi fighters had built an old-fashioned World War I-style earthworks. Meter-deep ditches and meter-high berms meandered through a park only the size of two city blocks. It looked like a mini-golf version of trench warfare. At the end of the fight, someone had thrown the bodies of the Iraqi fighters into the trench and bulldozed over them. Now the Red Crescent had dug away the earth and was carrying the rotting bodies away one by one for proper burial. The stench was so great the Red Crescent was passing out surgical masks to the onlookers. Some of the fighters looked as if they had been buried where they had died in action — fallen face forward, a machine gun or grenade launcher still clutched in hand. All the dead were young men, wearing the headbands of the Fedayeen. Craters of rocket-propelled grenades and bullets were stacked beside them in the trench.

An outraged man wanted to talk to me, the foreign reporter. “Do you see what the Americans have done here? They have slaughtered innocent civilians! Look: men, women, children, no fighters here. Is this liberation?”

In three weeks of war I’d already seen plenty of carnage, including countless dead civilians. Here, though, was clearly a battleground, where combatants had met and perished. These specific facts were immaterial to the man in his immaculate rage: voice raised but controlled, anger expressed in singsong crescendo, hair and mustache neatly combed, shirt tucked in, no excess sweat or emotion. He was making a speech about a greater truth, the details of objective reality be damned. If he had spoken directly, he might have said: “I don’t want the Americans here and I loathe all this death and destruction. I hate whoever visited it upon us, even if I hated Saddam as well.” But he wasn’t interested in betraying emotion openly. Nor, it turns out, was he interested in the actual people who had died on this square, and whose bodies were being dragged out of the pit beside us. He wanted to deliver a message to me, in a guise soon to become familiar to me: a cloak of righteousness, denial of reality, and literal lies, all in service of expressing an emotion that heralded an undeniable truth. The Americans had killed countless civilians and now they were occupying the country. That was the source of his outrage. So what if right here, in this particular place, Americans had killed Fedayeen soldiers in combat?

Then, so early in my time in Iraq, I couldn’t understand why was this man was describing a false reality in order to make a genuine point. A hundred meters away on the same street was a burnt car with a dead family inside. Why make his argument by identifying gun-toting Fedayeen boys as women and children? But my mistake was that I was still thinking too literally, not realizing that the war had created a new, liquid realm, which empowered everyone to name things anew. This state of mind was the key to the sectarian opening; anger and emotion pave the way to an alternate reality, in which literal truth doesn’t count, and then the sluice opens, ready to accept the torrential washing waves of the sect.

“Don’t these men look like fighters to you?” I asked. “What are these guns doing here, these trenches?”

“No, these are women and children,” he said, then shrugged and walked away from me. He wouldn’t give me his name.

There outside of the Ministry of Information, the still-recognizable cityscape played host to a mini-drama of war, or post-war, or pre-the-next-war. The boulevard was clear, and the row of riverfront villas across from the Ministry was fully intact, though pockmarked from shrapnel. One man had found a stray camel in the city streets and had brought it home. The beast stood in the front yard, watching the pandemonium in the park. “Why the camel?” I asked. The lady of the house explained: Her husband had gone a bit crazy during the bombing, seeing too many people die and powerless to help them. When he found the camel in the street, he brought it home, even though, she said, they barely had enough food and money to take care of themselves. For the man, it was no question: He had to help the camel, because he could. He didn’t talk to us, or to his family; he just stood in the yard, looking impassively at them, at the camel, at the crowd outside his gate.

Sa’ad al-Azawi disappeared. We found him an hour later. He said he’d been looking for us the whole time, which was hard to believe because the area we were in was so small. He wouldn’t say where he’d gone, or why he was so angry.

7.

As April 2003 wore on, Sa’ad would do his duty by the Globe, but increasingly, he would do it gracelessly. Neuffer was wary of Sa’ad’s new ego, but with the country now so unfamiliar, she relied on him to help her set up a full-strength bureau. His temper unsettled her enough that she started looking for an office manager, someone to serve as a counterweight to Sa’ad. But for the time being, she still trusted him, and acceded reluctantly to his will, hiring the drivers and extra translators he presented. He brought on board a coterie of relatives whose old jobs had suddenly vanished. I ventured into the city with a succession of drivers disgusted that they had been reduced to working for $50 a day chauffering foreigners: One was a doctor, another had a wedding photography studio, and a third styled himself a fighter pilot. A coquettish young student of English joined the bureau as a translator, although she was reluctant to work too closely with men. The nepotism was a classic case of war zone expediency: not necessarily smart, but the path of least resistance.

Sa’ad had already denounced my Lebanese translator to me, not coincidentally just after Rebecca had called to our attention that Sa’ad was taking a cut of the salaries we were paying his relatives.

“I don’t like Rebecca,” he declared. “You should not work with her. She is no good.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I cannot tell you, but you must trust me,” Sa’ad replied, with a conspiratorial look. “You must not work with her.”

“Why?” I insisted. “Can you give me any reason?”

Of course he had none, but he wouldn’t back down. “You don’t trust me?”

Mostly he worked with Elizabeth, but occasionally we still had the privilege of his seething services. While cruising one neighborhood, he chatted with some teenage men and then excitedly hustled Essdras and me into an underground bomb shelter. It was filled with acrid smoke from a fresh looter’s fire. (Why the hell do hawasim set aflame the shoe boxes they leave behind? A mystery of human nature.) We got lost and briefly contemplated suffocating to death. After we found our way out, Sa’ad defended his judgment: “They told me there were weapons of mass destruction in there!” he explained. “It would have been great for your story.”

Sa’ad al-Azawi was no more or less greedy than the other Information Ministry alumni who had parlayed their tainted but familiar relationships with the foreign press corps into office manager posts, ripe with opportunities to hand out patronage jobs, collect kickbacks, and skim money off the war-bloated news budgets. Sure, he was theatrical, he liked cash, and he made too much of a production of every gesture of generosity that otherwise would have engendered affection. But he clearly cared about Elizabeth, and he worked hard, taking risks and initiative in a society that had notably punished creative and entrepreneurial behavior. In those confusing yet heady weeks, he lurked around the Hamra, trying to preside over what he hoped would be a lucrative business empire at the service of The Boston Globe. He didn’t want to be a driver, no, he wanted to follow the lead of his old Ministry peers.

While he was a bullshit artist of the first caliber, Sa’ad was also delightfully specific, tangible, real. His loyalty had been bought through a combination of concern, gifts, phone calls, help, money and trust; he was always offering it for sale to other prospective high bidders.

I went away to Karbala for a few days. When I returned, Elizabeth told me she had fought with Sa’ad when it came time to settle the bill for his first days of work after the war. Elizabeth had refused some of his more egregious terms, so Sa’ad went looking for alternate jobs to use as leverage. His old contacts at other newspapers were wise to the game, and put off by his manic demeanor, and refused to make him offers. Sa’ad was now driving like a teenage drag racer, and praying five times a day.

On the last Friday in April I said goodbye to Anne before dawn, and Essdras, Rebecca and I piled into our rented Pajero for the trip back to Kuwait City. Sa’ad al-Azawi, in his BMW, led us out of the urban labyrinth to the drawbridge on the Kut highway. He hugged me tightly. “You are my brother,” he murmured. A pack of cigarettes strategically dispensed to the American soldiers at the riverbank got us to the front of the line for the one-lane bridge across the Tigris. By afternoon we were at the Kuwaiti border, subjected to hours of nonsensical bureaucracy (“Are you bringing alcohol? How come you have no exit stamp from Kuwait?”). That night we dined in a ridiculous restaurant shaped like a schooner at the SAS Radisson. The next day, home.

I knew I would return to Iraq soon. The day after Anne returned, however, brought horrific news. There had been a car crash, a wreck somewhere north of Baghdad. The details were fuzzy at first. We frantically called other reporters at the Hamra, Globe reporters who had replaced us in Baghdad, and Rebecca, who had stayed on as Elizabeth’s office manager. Slowly the details came in. Elizabeth was gravely injured. She had been driving back from Tikrit with her translator Walid, a gentle Republican Guard veteran whose wife was pregnant with their first child. Sa’ad al-Azawi was driving.

According to Sa’ad’s account afterwards, Walid was napping in the passenger seat, and Elizabeth was deep asleep in the back. Sometime in the early hours of dawn, Sa’ad lost control of his BMW at the great yawning turn where the six-lane divided highway bypasses Samarra. The car skidded onto the side of the road. The guardrail smashed through the engine block and went straight through Walid and Elizabeth. Sa’ad somehow emerged unscathed. Elizabeth, we learned, had died immediately. Walid was less fortunate; he apparently walked in circles trying to speak before finally collapsing.

There were lots of gruesome logistical details. Her partner, my friend and editor Peter Canellos, was trying to figure out how to get her body back home, with help from friends in the U.S. military and journalists in Baghdad. Everyone was trying to piece together what happened: Was the accident somehow war-related? Had the military caused it? Another driver? Sa’ad al-Azawi’s recklessness? Was there shrapnel in the road? And then there was the raw grief — for Elizabeth herself, for Peter, and for the shattered sense of invincibility that had somehow survived the first two months of war.

The unreality of all the killing of the last month suddenly dissolved. In all that time, I hadn’t cried once; there was too much to process, too much to write, far too much pain to hold. With Neuffer’s death, it all cracked open. My sense of grief paralleled in a small but tangible way the loss that had left almost all Iraqis raw: a pain at once personal and public, an individual death that had somehow political dimensions, since it would not have occurred were it not for the circumstances of the war.

It became quickly clear from all accounts that Sa’ad al-Azawi was to blame for the crash. The Globe fired him. Meanwhile, Walid’s family was negotiating with the Azawi clan over the fassil — the traditional compensation paid by the guilty party in the event of a crime, injury, or death. Sa’ad, however, wanted no responsibility. He had taken to harassing the Globe staff at the Hamra every day, demanding cash to replace the totaled car.

One afternoon in my office in the Boston Federal Court basement, I picked up the phone and was stunned to hear Sa’ad al-Azawi’s voice on the other end of the line, tinny and distant, calling from a Thuraya satellite phone. I had heard about his abominable behavior after Elizabeth’s death, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“Sa’ad,” I shouted into the phone. “How are you doing? I’m so sorry about what happened to Elizabeth and Walid.”

With no preamble and no words of sympathy, rote or sincere, he launched his attack. “The Boston Globe cannot punish me. You are my only friend in Boston, you must tell them. They are responsible. I must pay my brother for the car. Bostonglobe owes me money for the car. Six thousand dollars! Six thousand! Where am I supposed to get the money to pay my brother? The car is destroyed because of Bostonglobe, I am working for Boston when car is destroyed. I would not drive to north unless Bostonglobe asks me to.”

I was shocked. I couldn’t believe this man had lost touch so drastically with his humanity and his manners, no matter how impetuous and prone to rage he had seemed when I first met him. If he didn’t actually feel remorse or sadness for the two deaths he had caused, I imagined he would at least be able to feign the emotion. But no: The world was out to screw him, and he wasn’t going to let it happen. I silently weathered his barrage of angry words, at first too stunned to react.

“You tell Boston I will have the best lawyer in Iraq and I will sue them if they don’t give me the money immediately!” Sa’ad was saying. Something about the simultaneous venality and absurdity of the threat knocked me out of my stupor.

“Have you gone crazy?” I interrupted, my voice hoarse, shaky and faint, the way it gets when I’m on the verge of tears or a rage episode of my own. “Don’t you have anything to say about Elizabeth, about Walid? Are you sad? Are you sorry? What’s happened to you? Two people are dead and you want only to talk about money?” He said nothing, so I continued. “As for suing, just go ahead. Please. Sue in Iraqi court and see how much they’ll make you pay, since you’re the one at fault. And for your own good, stop threatening people at the Hamra. You’ll never work for another journalist again, and if you keep showing your face at the Hamra and threatening reporters, you could find yourself facing consequences you can’t imagine.”

Only then did he backtrack, apologizing vaguely, mumbling nonsense about his sadness and sense of loss, how sorry he was; the line dropped, and I was glad not to hear his voice anymore. I couldn’t blame him for the two deaths — well I could, a little, because he drove like a maniac, but he certainly didn’t intend to kill his passengers — but I held him responsible for his behavior afterward, which reeked of cowardice, self-interest, greed, and a kind of root selfishness that I could hardly understand.

The reporters still in Baghdad were frightened of Sa’ad al-Azawi’s erratic behavior. With old power structures gone and police non-existent, everyone possessed some vague, ominous power, some reserve of the old laws of tribal justice and power. Sa’ad might have been playing the Shi’ite card, but he also came from a tribe well versed in shows of force and violent confrontation. A one-time regime thug or spook could reinvent himself as a Western media translator; a Ba’athist could come back as a devout Shi’ite clerical aide; a Westernized secular man could reinvent himself as a criminal or a resistance fighter. In fact, many men and women could and did manage all these transformations at once. Sa’ad al-Azawi loitered outside the Hamra, demanding money, and the reporters staying there worried that in short order if they didn’t pay he would sic thugs on them, people who could cause harm. Ultimately, he backed down.

8.

I returned to Baghdad in August. On my second day back, Sa’ad learned I was there and waited for me at the back gate of the parking lot in the afternoon when I returned from reporting. He looked gaunt and pale, his face far skinnier than I remembered.

I trembled as soon as I saw him, with an irrational mix of rage and fear. I was afraid of what he might say, or ask me to do, or make me want to do to him. As soon as he spoke, I realized my animal instinct was misplaced. Sa’ad had a new tack: contrition. It was almost believable. The first thing he did was hug me, desperately. He felt bony in my arms, wasted away in the three months since I’d last seen him. “Look,” he said, taking out his wallet. He showed me an ID card of Elizabeth’s that he’d kept. “I think about Elizabeth every day. I have changed my name. I have taken away an ‘a.’ My name is now Sad, not Sa’ad. I’m sorry.”

In a land where militants grooved to Boyzone and had Hello Kitty in their clubhouses, his words were only as hokey as the next English-speaker’s, if he meant them. I had no reason yet to believe that he did. He looked so fragile though, his once-angry posture now deflated to a slouch, that I couldn’t summon my own anger.

“I’m sorry too,” I said. We stood close, holding each other’s forearms. “I hope you’re okay,” I added.

“You must forgive me,” Sa’ad said.

“It’s not for me to forgive,” I said. “I’m not the one you wronged. If it makes you feel any better, though, I forgive you for any harm you’ve caused me. But I can’t help you.”

“I need to work again,” Sa’ad pleaded. “I want my job back. Please. Or help me get a job with another newspaper.”

I was too immersed in the war, too raw, too damaged to credit Sa’ad al-Azawi for the limits of his agency. He was responsible for the deaths of Elizabeth and Walid, but he hadn’t murdered them. He had shirked his responsibility and for a time had gone mad, but now his paroxysm had passed and he was carrying the chronic form of his condition. In our final encounter, it was I who failed to take responsibility and acknowledge that we were bound, and owed each other things. I knew that he had frightened me, and frightened me still, that he had nakedly pursued money and authority, and that already once he had lost hold of himself in that first phase of Iraq’s structural failure. He had lost hold of himself so wholly that he had surrendered to the tunnel vision of impulse and insulted pride.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” I repeated. I meant that I was sorry about everything that had happened, starting with the destruction of Sa’ad’s world in the war and the way he had pissed on everybody around him and ending with the pointless, avoidable deaths of Elizabeth and Walid. I was sorry that I no longer wanted to know this man, who not long ago had been so connected to Elizabeth, and who had promised to accompany me on Iraq’s journey across the Styx to whatever was coming next. I was sorry that he had failed, even though he had been under cataclysmic pressure.

Symbols of both destruction and transformation littered Iraq like the red dust from the spring sandstorms. We were learning about the first phase of structural failure, like engineers testing the limits of the materials they had created, but our lab was a nation and our materials ourselves, a society, and a web of human institutions. We knew this grisly phase was but an introduction to the failures and reinventions to come, but that foreknowledge made few of us any wiser. For the time being we were still stupefied by our inquiry into wartime physics. How long does a dead body bake in the sun until it explodes? What shape does a family sedan take after it burns, melts, and cools with the family inside? How long do half-destroyed buildings remain standing? What’s the boiling point of a man’s identity? What happens to those traces of sect, tribe, and politics when the state that suppressed them by fiat burns away in a flash?

Sa’ad al-Azawi and I would navigate Iraq’s dissolution on parallel but unconnected paths. “Please don’t come to see me again,” I said, wan and tense from the effort to control the emotions that would take me years to understand. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said Sa’ad, crying freely, but suddenly looking more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. He never contacted me again. Years later I heard he had left Iraq too. He’d taken Elizabeth’s nickname as his email address.

—

—

Thanassis Cambanis’ first book, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel will be published by Free Press in September. He served as Baghdad and Middle East bureau chief for The Boston Globe, and writes about the Middle East and the Arab world for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Global Post and other publications. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York, where he lives with his wife and son.

I think of it now as a late valentine to Muffy, my first love, but that day, as I and my pack of friends chased her down and dragged her to the sewer drain, the only emotion I knew was rage—stripped bare and feeling its way in some unmentionable dark. I see that dark surrounding Aaron, expressionless as he turns my makeup mirror to glance at his face, exploded vessels risen now and spread over his mouth like a macabre shade of lipstick. I see myself naked and cold under its weight as he prepares to go.

He zips a suitcase shut on the bed. It is my suitcase, because he doesn’t have one. In it, he throws clothes, deodorant and toothbrush, his Halo games. The Xbox he will undoubtedly return for, so I do not remind him now. He touches his bloated lip, pressing it over and over.

“Does it hurt?”

“It hurts when I push on it.”

“Well don’t push on it.”

“I like to push on it.”

He pulls the suitcase off the bed with a whooshing noise. I am fiddling mindlessly with the ankle bracelet. It reminds me of the arthritis, before it went into remission. Aaron waves. His brown eyes bludgeon me. I want desperately to run over and put my arms around him. But he opens the door and nudges the cat away with his foot, saying Stay put, and I think he is talking to me.

• • •

It was late March, just days before my grandmother died. A slow thaw had descended on the Cereal City. Bailey Park’s surface was strewn with cigarette butts and brown bottles, and it had taken on a spongy, bog-like consistency. The park was a sort of land bridge over which we traversed on our way to W.K. Kellogg Junior High, our downtown middle school, in the days when the walk to school, not the drive, was the locus of our morning social gatherings. As high school juniors, we arrived at Battle Creek Central only by car, namely a 1988 Toyota Camry driven by Jennifer Goldman, my best friend. Only those with no friends, and thus no connections with a licensed driver, still walked over the sad, soggy space that Melissa Bryson, our leader, had fittingly dubbed “Bumley Park.”

This waning Michigan winter, Marisa Snow, who was usually called Muffy, had no such connections. We spied her on her way to a forensics club meeting on a Saturday: I, Jen, Miss, and the fourth member of our pack, Maria Rodrigues, who we and the general population of Central knew as Rio. Muffy was tiny but quick and would prove to be a voracious kicker. She darted in the opposite direction when she saw us coming through the park, but Miss’s long spidery legs soon caught up with her, ensnaring the hood of her heavy black cloak with one outstretched hand. Stringy, pale, and tinny-voiced, Miss would never strike anyone on first glance as the leader of a group of venomous bullies, but the sophomores of Battle Creek Central knew better. She was as mean as a cornered raccoon and had a tongue that bit like teeth.

Miss snapped Muffy into the waiting clutches of Jen and Rio, who had come wild-eyed and panting right behind, ponytails wagging, thirsty for the wet feel of fists on flesh. Come on Pootie you gimpy little bitch, Miss called out to me, because I had of course fallen way behind, struggling to run against the bitter refusal of my uncooperative joints. The winter damp had aggravated my rheumatoid arthritis, the bane of my teenage existence, and my ankles were swollen to the size of baseballs. When I finally caught up to the pack, I heard Rio telling Jen through an errant mouthful of her own dark hair, as she attempted to put Muffy in a headlock, We might not get hauled in if only Pootie wasn’t so pokey… The three of them had managed to immobilize her arms and head, but now had to contend with her feet, which dug hard and fast into the stinking muddy grass.

The drain that I had designated was just north of the park, in a less-traveled block of Sherman Road, nestled against a curb. Shortly after we had moved to Battle Creek (my mother, my sister Beatrice, and myself), I had discovered that such grates could be removed. Bea and I were exploring our new neighborhood when we saw a family of ducks on their way from the river being driven out of the middle of the street by a passing truck. The mother led her babies over the grate in a panic, and they slipped into its vents and disappeared. Bea, who was ten at the time, screamed when they plunged. The frantic mother duck circled and squawked, calling for the children she could not see, the little voices still drifting up from the river of waste below. Hoping to soothe my distraught sister, I had run around the block looking for passersby to help. Twenty minutes later, I met Jen Goldman and her brother Sam, whose smile always sucked the clouds out of the sky.

Holding Muffy in position over the fast-running sewage would be easier than getting her to the grate. First of all, it was clotted with a winter’s worth of decaying plant matter. My weak wrists and arms being less than helpful for subduing a squirming Muffy, it fell to me to clear the cold muck away. I began by trying to shove it aside with my sneaker, already black with mud from the park. By the time Jen and I were able, amid audible grunting, to lift the grate from its place, drag it up the side of the curb, and drop it clanging on the sidewalk, my hands were frozen and Jen’s curls were soaked with sweat. Rio and Miss had no choice but to pin Muffy to the wet pavement. She began to scream for help, potentially attracting the ever-hovering police. Miss answered her cries with a barrage of forceful slaps, which caused a gurgle of blood to spring from her nose. Rio’s white knuckles clutched a fistful of her hair.

“Keep it up dyke bitch,” Miss growled. “Rio, see if you can get my knife out of my pocket…”

It was a classic Miss bluff, and for a moment Muffy was shocked into silence. But when the smell of sewage wafted up, rich and acrid, our victim’s voice (my victim’s voice) again echoed through the misty air, this time as a despairing, wheezy howl. Jen caught my eye, her breathing ragged and her head shaking.

“Pootie,” she said, quietly, so only I could hear. “Forget this. We’re gonna get hauled in. We gave her a good scare, now let’s jet…”

Under the usual circumstances, I was on the sidelines at such events—a toady, there to mutter supportive comments like Yeah bitch! and That’s right! while the girls dealt out their lacerating brand of education. But there existed in me, at age seventeen, a drafty little hole, which during certain moments would widen to a yawning chasm and bluster forth a gale-force rage. Within that anger, the girl I should have been (the pretty and small and liked by one and all) spun around in the tornado and became just a blur, and I turned into someone mythic and unrecognizable: a monstrous doppelgänger. The seconds after Jen suggested we abandon the plan, my plan, was one of these moments.

The sewer had been my idea, and this was my enemy. When I’d described the plan, Miss and Rio had looked at me as if they saw me for the first time. The four of us were gathered at Rio’s cousin Ricky’s on Cherry Street, just a couple of blocks from the YMCA, where I often told my mother I was. (This way, it almost wasn’t a lie.) Ricky was what I would call a boyfriend, though had anyone asked at the time I would have denied it. He was as beautiful, dangerous, and entertaining as a circus tiger, with sad eyes that never changed expression, even when he gave in to his paranoia, diving behind the couch at the sound of a knock or the ring of the doorbell. Jen had lost her virginity to him in the eighth grade (he was a senior at the time) and had been trying to get us together since Sam left home that fall. Sam was a friend of Ricky’s, too, though like most of Ricky’s friends, had grown bored of him. Lonely, Ricky had taken to inviting us over to watch this game or that, giving us beer, feeding us salad, and making us laugh with his imitations of others in the Rodrigues family. He’d seemed as animated by my plan as the girls did (though his eyes remained sad—always). On the way home, walking in zig-zag fashion down Calhoun Street, Miss had thrown an arm around me.

So I could not, would not, suffer my plan to be upended. I swept over to where Miss and Rio held Muffy awkwardly against the cold street and swung my foot as far behind me as I could, then brought it forward with a mighty thrust, embedding the toe of my sneaker in Muffy’s abdomen with a calamitous crunch. A hot shard of pain traveled up my foot and pierced my ankle. Muffy emitted a sound like a furnace shutting down.

“Now get into the sewer with the rest of the shit…”

The name Pootie was a variation of Pattie, itself a nickname (for Patricia) that I had been trying since the sixth grade to shed in favor of the more feminine Trish. I had earned Pootie that afternoon with Jen, Bea, and Sam, at fourteen, after allowing myself to be dangled over the swirling sewer, baseball cap in hand, Sam holding one leg and Jen and Bea holding the other, my arms and face being flecked with the foulest grime imaginable (some of it landing, I recall, in my mouth) as I scooped the brood of terrified ducklings out of their smelly trap. As we stood there years later, suspending Muffy the same way, that act of kindness to my wailing sister suffered a diabolical reversal. The moment of weakness that had led me to give in to the irrational tenderness of Bea, who was heavier at age ten than I was at fourteen, who was unable to stomach even a boxing match, much less the horror movies I was never allowed to rent, would make me an equal among my merciless pack. Muffy’s wails and pleas sounded distant as foghorns coming up from the depths, the ends of her hair and her quaint cloak possibly dipped in filth. Her hands were busy holding her purple skirt over her panties. Miss and I held a single lace-up boot while Jen and Rio clutched her by the other calf, all of us huffing and puffing and stifling fits of laughter that would have sent Muffy splashing into the rancid river below.

The many times I had pictured her bare legs, I imagined them to be as covered with freckles as her arms. I envisioned them coated with wispy auburn hairs, like the ones I saw along the back of her neck when she wore her hair up in that ridiculous knot of ornate braids. Not so. Her legs were as smooth shaven and stark white as my own.

• • •

I have fantasized about apologizing to Muffy at our ten-year reunion, seen myself approaching her and seen her turning, perhaps arm-in-arm with a new lover, surprised, discombobulated, but pleased to see me, as when I walked into Advanced English for the first time. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. You know, for everything. You know what I mean. I’m sorry for putting you through, you know, all that… (Even in my fantasies I stammer, unable to avoid pointing out to the other person what they know—what I should not have to say.) Then I would hug her, tightly, and bury my face in her hair, and smell it again, and remember with pain and with pleasure. She would break away from me and maybe smile and perhaps hold my hand or pat my shoulder and say she has already forgiven me.

I see Rio, Miss, and Jen there, maybe, apologizing too, and that disturbs the fantasy, like my mother’s presence in a sex dream. My apology must be separate, because it is different. I am not merely apologizing for tripping her in the hallway, for calling her “carpet munch,” for flinging pennies at the back of her head during a pep rally.

But I am afraid. Just look at me, trying to be a poet, still in school—I, who hated school.

Aaron has been by while I’ve been at class. He has taken the Xbox. His smell, he has left—a mix of oniony night sweat (he eats the Vidalias like apples), smoke (he does not, but the casino patrons do), and a body spray (horrid) now gone from the sink. He also appears to have poured out the vodka that was in the freezer. A Post-it note on the makeup mirror says Im okay Hope U R 2… God, the gap between one love and the next is excruciating.

I decide I will not attend the reunion. Not with a tether on my ankle like a badge, and not even if, by mercy of the court, it is removed ahead of schedule.

Poetry and poverty are almost the same word, Aaron always says.

• • •

There were only two openly gay juniors in the Battle Creek Central class of 1997. Muffy was one. The other was Eric Ames, a younger member of a prominent black family who owned a local restaurant. I sat with him at lunch whenever Miss skipped school, which was often. (Jen and Rio had a different lunch period.) Eric hung out with the drama club kids, mostly the girls, and he was very outspoken. He could appreciate a jibe if it was good (What’s a gay horse say Eric? Haaayyyyy…), and would humiliate or outdo his abuser if it was bad (Pillow biter—well that is such a new one and so original. Would you like to hear one about your mama that everyone’s heard before?).

Marisa Snow was also outspoken, though not intentionally funny. She had the gall to want her sexuality to be taken seriously—granted dignity, even. A tall order, since she insisted on wearing that garment like a witch’s cloak, in addition to other random seventeenth-century baubles and accessories. Eric knew her from drama, but she was also a member of a Magic: The Gathering card game club and part of the forensics team (two strikes). Worse still: instead of answering jibes with sarcasm and equal vulgarity, she corrected those who taunted her, like an exacting piano teacher with a knuckle-rapping ruler.

It was this attitude that had earned Marisa her nickname. When Miss called her a “muff diver” in P.E., inciting howls of laughter from the entire class, she had only scowled and informed her tormenters that the act was called “cunnilingus” and the body part was termed “vulva.”

“A muff,” she said, “is an item that keeps your hands warm in winter.”

“Ewwww that’s how you keep your hands warm?”

Henceforth not only was she called “Muffy,” her hands were universally avoided in the halls of Battle Creek Central. I heard the story second-hand from Jen, who clutched her sides and rolled around on her mother’s carpet, repeating… v…vulva… cu…cun…cunnilingus, tears oozing from the corners of her eyes. I was excused from taking P.E. because of my condition, so once again I had missed out on one of Miss’s triumphs—one that, given my relationship to Muffy as time wore on, I would have particularly enjoyed viewing.

I had classes with Muffy myself, which I outwardly endured and secretly devoured. Psychology, Ancient History, Advanced English. In these classes, Muffy was constantly raising her hand, even when the teacher hadn’t asked a question. She spoke like an adult, often starting the teacher down a long road of explanation that drew sighs and hisses from the many students who spent every class staring longingly at the clock, six times a day, five out of every seven days they lived.

“Mr. Roberts, that’s preposterous,” she said, unprompted, during a lecture on the Trojan War early in the semester. “Why would Menelaus take her back? It’s as if the war was pointless! It’s as if it had nothing to do with Helen’s affair with Paris at all but was just an excuse…”

“Well it’s more complicated than that, Marisa, you see…”

The truth was, I found ancient myth—and particularly ancient war as depicted by Homer—enthralling. Mr. Roberts’ delivery, furthermore, was very theatric. He swayed back and forth from toe to heel, his arms crossed in front of his chest, the drama heightened by his in-depth probes into the personalities of each figure. It was like a tabloid saga—the romances, the gruesome deaths, the quirks and hang-ups. What a treat to read of Clytemnestra’s revenge against Agamemnon for throwing their daughter into the sea: how she and her lover tossed a net over him as he bathed and then stabbed him full of holes. I identified with Achilles, angry and indignant. And Muffy was exactly right. Helen was a scapegoat.

My obsession with Muffy as a possible target began in Advanced English. I had been placed in this class, which focused on the American classics, by my bottle-blonde, overly made-up guidance counselor Mrs. Lattimore, with whom some meddlesome English teachers had conspired about my potential. I generally claimed to understand nothing important about the books we read. The fact that I loved Huckleberry Finn and My Antonia and The Great Gatsby—that I read them with rapturous ferocity, making excuses to my friends so I could continue reading instead of driving around with Jen looking for boys or sipping hawked booze in the loft above Miss’s parents’ garage—did not mean I wanted to be asked any probing questions about them in class. I just wanted to read them, answer the rote vocabulary and comprehension questions on every quiz, and be left alone. But Mrs. Lattimore had insisted I needed the challenge.

I never talked to my friends about my grades, though I often listened to their frustrations about theirs. Jen received an allowance for clothes shopping and movies as long as she managed a C average. Due to absences, Rio and Miss straddled a particularly thin border between repeating their courses and doing just enough to depart from them forever. Miss’s parents initially yelled at her about the problem, but were often too occupied with her autistic brother to dwell on the subject. Rio’s parents left her alone in such matters. Several Rodrigues adults hadn’t finished high school and had found a way to survive. They seemed to believe in Rio’s ability to do the same.

I, on the other hand, had maintained an A average as a freshman. My junior year I had increasingly gotten Bs, thanks to Chemistry, which I found frustrating, and Economics, which I found stultifying. My mother didn’t hide her disappointment, but deferred the lecture to my stepfather, Mike, a middle school principal. “It’s not that these are bad grades,” he told me. “They just seem beneath your potential, that’s all. We’re just a little confused.” My mother even suggested that I quit my job shelving at Willard Library, which I protested. It was peaceful, unobtrusive work that allowed me to unwind among the dusty shelves. Thankfully my stepfather agreed with me, and the idea was scrapped.

It was important to me to keep my good grades a secret. My mode of operation was to leave the envelope that came for each marking period sealed until I got home. Junior year, though, I began to open them up on the spot, checking for Bs so I might prepare for the inevitable questions. I opened each envelope on my lap, pulling out the sheet just enough to glance at the information, then quickly replacing it before stuffing the whole thing deep within a textbook.

For a boy to have good grades was permissible. Handsome, athletic types like Trevor Winchell and Dave McAdams retained their popularity despite their academic excellence. But absolutely no popular or pretty girls got all As—at least none who would reveal such a thing. There was widespread suspicion about the dolphin-like swim team captain Laura Greenwood, and whispers circulated around Chelsea Meier and Latisha Adams, two other homecoming court candidates. But I believed no one suspected me. The attention of every boy in the school (black, white, or brown) hung in the balance.

At the end of the first marking term for Advanced English, Mrs. Brown handed us back our papers and our report cards at the same time, meaning I had to hide not one, but two documents. Though the class was heavily populated by the requisite nerds, there was also a smattering of popular kids, among them Chelsea, Trevor, and Dave. Dave in particular interested me. Despite Jen’s constant encouragement, I wasn’t falling for Ricky. He was gentle and funny and certainly cute, but I pitied him. Introspective and soft-spoken, Dave was unlike Ricky or the obnoxious, sex-driven popular boys, who I generally despised. He was close with a boy named Drew Jenson, who lived in the house behind ours. The more I saw Dave, the more my girl’s heart filled with a poison familiar to me from Sam.

I hadn’t expected my paper on Of Mice and Men to get an A. The goal of studying literature as we were was still cloudy in my mind. When I saw the letter, in red ink, at the top of the page, my instinct was to slide the paper onto my lap and quickly fold it in half. But in doing this, I dropped the open envelope that contained my report card on the floor. Before I could retrieve it, Muffy, who sat in front of me and was already no friend of mine, snatched it up. She knew I ran with Miss, the originator of her despised nickname, and with Jen, who regularly tripped her in the hallways, and with Rio worst of all—beautiful raven-haired, full-lipped Rio, who contemptuously ignored her.

Muffy had smiled when I’d walked into class the first day. You’re in Advanced now? she’d asked excitedly when I sat down. My response of What of it, dork? hadn’t earned me much favor. So instead of returning the envelope, she removed the report card and saw a row of six As. She registered the same look of surprise as that first day, minus the smile. We looked in each other’s eyes for a moment, and when I sensed she was about to speak, I bared my teeth. She quickly turned around in her chair, silent, and I thought a crisis had been averted.

It occurred to me the next day that I’d thought too quickly. Latisha, always chatty and nice, congratulated me in the hall. Then Drew, who hardly ever spoke to me, gave my long hair a tug and whispered Somebody’s a nerd in my ear. I seethed all day, deducing that that confounded lesbian had told Chelsea during group work in class, and Chelsea had no doubt told Dave, among others. At lunch I ranted at Eric, who had heard about my grades from Muffy herself.

“Who does that bitch think she is? Opening your report card,” said Miss, not absent that day. “I hope you burned that envelope. Lord knows what’s on them hands…”

“It’s none of her business what grades I get. That’s personal, right?” I had a vision of Muffy in her witch costume, burning at the stake.

“So you got all As. What are you so mad about?” Eric said. Miss and I answered with a resounding shhhhhhh.

“What? I wish I got good grades. I could get some money. You should be happy.”

Instead Miss and I plotted my revenge. She didn’t comment on the fact of my grades until we parted ways for fourth period.

“I used to get all As,” she said. “In junior high.” Then she swung her hips as hard as she could against mine, shoving me into the wall. “Dork!” she exclaimed, and ran off to class.

A few days later, I saw Dave walking down the hallway, hand-in-hand with Trevor Winchell’s blond sister Tori. Like that it was over, the revving of love interrupted by the groaning halt of reality. That night, lying on my back on top of the covers until dark, I heard boys’ laughter drifting up like an odor from the Jensons’ property: Drew and Dave playing a game of one-on-one on the driveway. Bea knocked, and I begged her to scram, but she whined until I allowed her to come in. I felt sorry for her. Her only friend was Courtney, Mike’s daughter, who was in the seventh grade. Courtney stayed with us every weekend, and I regarded her as a pest. She always left a coating of hairspray residue on the sink, and she was constantly clogging up the phone line. But she let Bea tag along with her and her little friends, because Bea promised not to tell on her for things like sneaking out at night to see her pimply little boyfriend, or putting on eye makeup and changing into a miniskirt once she got to school.

Bea sat on my bed and turned on the light.

“Turn that off.”

“It’s dark!”

“Turn that off.” She did.

“Are you crying?”

“What do you want?”

“Are you thinking about Grandma?”

“Well I wasn’t, but now I am.”

We began to sniffle. Bea crawled into bed with me. Her shoulder was soft.

“Do you think there’s a heaven?”

“She’s not dead yet.”

“Don’t be depressed Pootie.”

“Don’t call me that.”

We slept.

It was ludicrous, of course, for me to be blaming Muffy for destroying my chances with Dave. But I see now that the rage that besieged me that night and many nights after was fueled not by this trifle, but by jealousy and admiration—love—for Muffy Snow. This girl understood secrets I did not about the literature I loved. She accepted who she was without concession. She had thick, lovely mounds of hair. She had delicate, feminine little hands. She was smarter than me. However high my grades, she knew more. She did not belong in the cesspool that was high school, because she was an adult.

I slept with Ricky, for little reason other than to have something new to talk about with Jen. She’d tired of the subject of Muffy, and wanted to talk about boys—in particular a new one named Chad, who went to Lakeview and who she claimed had a huge penis (they all did), but also Ricky, for whom she had a lingering fondness. True, she would happily throw a foot in front of Muffy and send her diving to the tiles while socializing between classes. But she did it without emotion, and only to watch me string a garland of curses in Muffy’s direction afterward. My swearing amused her. I elaborated upon common obscenities (suck a bucket of dicks), or creatively skirted the school’s rules against profanity, turning ass into ass-inine or using Spanish terms like pinga or puta. She also enjoyed hearing me talk frankly about sex, and since I knew no other way to talk about it, we had these conversations often, most of them filled with lies.

The truth was, it had been many months since I had last had sex, and although my feelings for Ricky were lukewarm compared to what I had felt for Sam, they seemed easier. He didn’t mind that I laughed during the act, perhaps because he knew I laughed not at him but at myself. I spent much of the time, whether underneath or on top of him, looking at and thinking about my own body, its curves and inconsistencies. I rather liked, I found, the hang of my breasts and their shape, though one was noticeably bigger than the other. I liked the way my skin felt. Ricky’s body was well-made enough: lean and hairy and tattooed. But mainly I liked the way mine looked against it. I wondered daily, while I planted an acid stare on the back of Muffy’s pale, fuzzy little neck, what her body looked like naked. Whether her belly and breasts were like mine. Whether her flesh jiggled like mine did.

With Sam sex had been frightening, not to mention painful, because he was the first. But even when the pain was no longer a factor, I became a blithering network of nerves each time I knew we were going to make love. Fortunately, Sam had a fake I.D. and always bought me a forty-ounce bottle of Mickey’s malt liquor when we met. Halfway through it, I would be pleasantly warmed and relaxed enough to eat dinner with him and then slide into his lumpy, boy-scented bed, where he would be brutal and chaotic. When the act commenced, I felt a cold, quick sensation that I couldn’t quite name, like Emily Dickinson coming across the narrow fellow in the grass, with a tighter breathing/And Zero at the Bone. I always bled a little. After, Sam would curl into a damp clump against me and become utterly silent.

He liked to cook: chili, spaghetti and meatballs, potato latkes, homemade pizza. Our times together in the Goldmans’ kitchen were more joyful than those in the bedroom. I ate great troughs of the food he cooked, though less than he by far. He marveled that I was so thin, and I would think of poor Bea, a vegan who picked at her food and yet had only managed to lose ten pounds in the past three years. If Jen was home, we all played rummy after dinner and watched slasher films in the red-painted rec room. If Jen was out with Miss or Rio or both, Sam and I went to his room and had strenuous, sweaty intercourse. Their mother kept entirely to herself. Their father lived in Lansing. If Mrs. Goldman knew Sam and Jen fornicated and drank alcohol in her home, she did not say so. On the way out the door, my hair wet and my clothes disheveled and smelling of Sam, I would stop in the living room to say hello without hesitation. Mrs. Goldman would look up momentarily from an Allure or Elle and ask how my grandmother’s health was. I would reply that it was not good, not good at all, and she would say Oh you poor lamb and return to her magazine.

I’d last seen Sam over Christmas break, when he came home from Western Michigan University in nearby Kalamazoo. He was stubbly and his hair had gone wildly curly, but his smile still skewered me. I saw him only at a party thrown for him at his friend Seth’s apartment, and we never got a chance to be alone together. Wherever the two of us were, Jen was also. Sam drank an incredible amount of hard liquor, in all varieties, and he kept sliding out of his chair to the floor like spilled sauce, cards in hand, as we played rummy around the kitchen table. At intervals, the 250-pound Seth would tug him upright by the back of his shirt.

Sam bristled at my questions about college, and my impression was that not all was well. In turn, I shirked on his questions about Grandma, who I had spent the day with at a hospice, mostly reading while she slept a gurgling, cavernous sleep. The conversation Sam and I had was therefore restricted to the Cowboys and Steelers, The X-Files, and the latest rumor circulating the neighborhood, which was that the recently divorced Mrs. Meier, fourth grade teacher and mother of Chelsea, was having an affair with Mrs. Lattimore’s husband, who everyone knew to be a womanizer and who hadn’t shared his wife’s bed in years. (This was confirmed emphatically by Miss, whose mother cleaned for both households.) I spent the night at Jen’s. Sam never came home, and I sensed that something had shaken loose from him.

Perhaps I felt more at ease with Ricky because I had managed to get myself on the birth control pill. All it had taken was complaining to my mother that my menstrual cramps were unbearable (which they could be, so that wasn’t really a lie). There was never any discussion of sex, and no accusations. Only a brief, unpleasant visit to the doctor. Miss was jealous that it was so easy. Her own parents had not only adamantly refused, they had begun listening in on her phone conversations with boys soon after she made the request. When her boyfriend Teddy, already on their forbidden list (understandably, for he was quite a stoner), implied a certain activity during one conversation, Miss had been locked in her room at night for a month.

Jen, on the other hand, was never punished for anything. The first time she was caught with alcohol was on her sixteenth birthday. She was granted the privilege of driving her mother’s old car soon after just the same. After my part in the birthday incident, my mother burst into tears and slammed her fists repeatedly into the kitchen cupboards. I was forbidden thence from riding in any car other than an adult’s (I reasoned that Jen’s Camry counted, since it belonged to Mrs. Goldman, and so that wasn’t a lie either), and from staying out later than eleven o’clock unless it was at the Goldmans’ house. (My mother did not know Sam had been a lover.) My mother liked Jen—so much more sophisticated than my old country friends. I cared more that Jen had been my friend back when most of my classmates were reluctant to start a friendship with me, the handicapped kid. Whenever we got into trouble together, which was steadily more frequent, my mother blamed Miss and Rio exclusively. Whether it was because they were the daughters of purported drug dealers and a local cleaning lady, I can only guess. Needless to say, Ricky’s name was not mentioned to her. Ever.

•

Later on, after the sewer battle was over, I went to Ricky’s so we could make love, possibly for the last time before I was confined forever or sent away. I watched him eat a delicious-looking salad topped with walnuts and some sort of white, crumbly cheese, and wondered what Muffy’s mother had said when her daughter returned home too early from her forensics meeting speckled with sewage, bruised, and maybe even bleeding. How does a mother attempt to heal such despair? Did she cover her daughter’s purple, muck-flecked face with kisses? Did she cradle her head against her breasts and rock slowly? Did she run her a hot bath with bubbles? Did she wash her thick pile of hair, thoroughly massaging her scalp and rubbing her temples in tiny, methodical circles? How long did the girl bleed? How heavy was her head?

Ricky jumped at the sound of the telephone ringing and stopped short like a spooked cat, ears twitching, fork in hand until the noise stopped and the answering machine came on. Rick, it said, Are you there? Pick up pick up pick up…

Later, I had an orgasm—something I hadn’t experienced since I was a child under the bathtub faucet. It was, as Miss Dickinson would say, a Whip lash/Unbraiding in the Sun.

The next day, the girls and I chose to make up a story rather than gracefully await our fates. We sat on beanbag chairs in the Brysons’ garage loft, flipping edgily through magazines and practicing voices of indignation at being accused of such a horror. What a liar Marisa Snow is! She’s starved for attention! We were at Lakeview Square Mall!

Miss instructed us to be specific.

“Rio, you tried on jeans at Express, but you didn’t like them. They didn’t fit right…” she said.

“Are you saying I’m fat, ho?”

“Shut up bitch. Pootie you did what? Shopped the back sales racks at Hudson’s?” She laughed. “Pootie’s mom said hit the BOGOOOOOO…”

“Of course. And I found a hot tank top with skulls on it. Pink with white skulls…”

“No, white with pink skulls! Because it had somebody’s lipstick on it…”

“Yeah and so I couldn’t get the hoodie—the gray one, not the black one, because I couldn’t get it half off.”

“It would be the tank top you would get half off on, dummy,” Jen interrupted.

“Shut up Jew. Only your mom would ask about that,” Miss said. “And where were you? bebe? You tried on six things…” Here she proceeded to make a list of possible garments, none of which sounded like anything Jen would wear. Jen frowned.

“And where did you go?” she asked Miss. “To the Gap? Like everyone goes into yours?”

I was certain our stories were ridiculous and would be regarded as such. We would be caught, and I would be punished. I dreaded living in the country again—the long lonely roads, the impenetrable dark of the nights. I dreaded living with my father, whose face bore the confused and erased look of an amnesiac at every visit. To him I was more and more a stranger. He clung to his memory of me as a little tomboy, helping him clean bluegills and riding with him on his snowmobile. He did not recognize the sullen, lip-glossed nail-chewer who appeared before him once a month, garish hoops wobbling under my ears with every silent nod and shake. I wondered if my mother would hit me. She never had, but I sensed on many occasions that she wanted to, instead opting to slam a door or bang any nearby hard surface. My stepfather would shake his head. He would remain calm, but would cut me nonetheless with a well-placed threat. I wondered, as I listened to Jen and Miss bicker over whether Jen would be caught dead trying on this or that, what it would be. You are not the girl we know, I imagined him telling me. You are not our daughter.

We waited out the day, then went home. I made Spanish rice, portobello mushrooms, and green beans, which my family complimented as they ate. I was trying to help Bea by cooking things within vegan limits. After dinner, Mike made popcorn, and we all watched the football game. The phone call, painfully expected, never came. Later, Bea and I stayed up and watched MTV together on the couch, gossiping about Courtney. I predicted (correctly) that she would be more like me in high school than Bea.

“Pootie, I wish you were more like you,” Bea said.

The next week in school, Muffy looked downward at all times. Her cloak was gone. If there were bruises, they weren’t visible or severe enough to evoke questions from anyone who might care about her. I spoke with Eric, who had begun bringing his own homemade lunch in a paper bag. He had also begun, randomly and inexplicably, to speak in a mock British accent.

“Hey have you talked to Muffy? Muffy Snow?”

“You mean Marisa, luv?”

“Yeah have you talked to her?”

“Of course, wankah! She’s in A Doll’s House with me, the saucy minx.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

“Like what, wankah?”

“She didn’t tell you that I did anything?”

Eric slitted his eyes and smacked his gums. “Now what did you thugs do? Thug life!”

The night before, I had torn a page out of an old copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. (My mother collected antique books, many of which I had secretly defaced.) I had folded up Sonnet 23 (As an unperfect actor on the stage/Who with his fear is put besides his part,/Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,/Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart…) and brought it to school with me. Before leaving that day, I slid it into the vents of Muffy’s locker. That night and every night, I hid in my room and read, ignoring the calls of the girls asking Have you heard anything? Has she told anyone yet?

Spring break came and went. Miss went with Rio to Texas, where they spent part of the week with Rio’s aunts in Brownsville and part (unbeknownst to the Brysons) in South Padre Island. Jen went with her mother and second cousin to Daytona Beach. Our family trip to Fort Myers was cancelled, due to my grandmother’s condition. It was windy and gray that week, and my grandmother was fading fast. Suddenly the event at the sewer seemed like a cold draft that whispers through window cracks and dies away just as fast. That Easter Sunday, my grandmother died of cancer.

• • •

I have thought that the present is always disappearing and the future under construction, while the past is as vivid and knowable as the words in a book. But I see now that this is simply not true. The past is in fact like the future, always being molded and caulked together.

Bea comes to stay with me for a weekend after I tell her that Aaron has left. She looks beautiful but pale—there are veins visible under her eyes. She has been working for Kellogg’s and living alone in the apartment complex near Felpausch in Battle Creek, across from the field where the local baseball team, the Battle Cats, plays each summer. Rio and Miss often bought drugs from a fellow who lived there, but I do not tell Bea this. Drugs horrify her. The ankle bracelet horrifies her. I am making homemade Asian dumplings, since we cannot go out. Bea has relaxed her vegan sensibilities and now eats seafood. She helps close the wraps by crimping the edges with a fork.

“You didn’t make these too spicy, did you?”

“It’s good for you.”

“Are you messing with me?”

After dinner, Bea and I sit cuddled on the couch, and I force her to watch one of the Lord of the Rings movies, which she pretends to hate, on DVD. I miss Aaron, but recall how much I’ve missed the warmth of my sister’s body, too. I have written poems about the soft sound of her breathing, so I know when she has fallen asleep without looking at her. When she leaves I will cry more than when Aaron left. I will cry against the flesh of my arms, moaning like a ghost in the bed I have left unmade three days in a row.

Since I no longer drink, I am run through in the night with memories like the sewer incident. I am open and spilling like a duck crushed in the middle of the road. The sharp crunch of my hand bones on Muffy’s teeth and the look of fear on her face—the last look she ever gave me. The puncture noise of Aaron’s lip as the pint glass hit it. The haiku he screamed at me:

Damn it. That is it.
This time you’re going to jail.
You are such a cunt.

• • •

When my grandmother died, Bea was helpless. Her crying was beyond a wail—it was a screech. The blood vessels in her face broke, peppering the orbits of her eyes and her cheeks with purple dots. She didn’t eat or shower and was kept out of school. Courtney was commissioned to collect her homework. Bea wore the outfit that she had worn on Sunday the entire week—the same socks as well. My mother was stronger, but distant and distracted. Normally, she would never have allowed one of her daughters to forego washing her hair until it hung in twisted strings from her scalp. She refused to let Mike help with the funeral arrangements, filling the days with much bustling and ordering and calling and signing and check-writing. In this we were alike. I went to school every day without missing a class, then went to the library for work or went home and did my homework industriously. At night, I went to Ricky’s, kissing and pawing and copulating, but talking little. The girls I avoided, speaking only to Jen when necessary. Mrs. Goldman had offered to host a small reception following the burial.

By the day of the memorial, I had been without sleep for three days—not from my own grief, but from staying up with Bea’s. I had stopped trying to ignore her howls, which my exhausted mother slept through, and had begun sleeping with her in her tiny twin bed. She thrashed and cried and snored, mucus gathering in her nose and the back of her throat. Her breath and sweat were acidic, redolent of burning fat.

At the funeral, the air in the church was stifling. My grandmother’s mourners piled in and spilled out into the vestibule. In the midst of the service, Bea began to sway back and forth in the pew. She finally keeled forward, smashing into the carpet in front of us in a lump. For the remainder of the funeral, I sat on the cement front steps with Bea’s face buried in the lap of my skirt. My mother appeared and offered to take my place, then my father, and later, Mike. I refused all three times. Exhausted, I skipped the burial altogether and slept through the reception. By the time I awoke in the Goldmans’ guest room, the food was nearly gone, along with the guests, and the sunlight had all but buried itself under the earth, leaving only a purple trace behind.

That night I dialed Muffy’s number. The girls and I had crank called her many times before the sewer incident. Usually Miss was the ringleader. She would pretend to be a salesperson or a surveyor and then drop her victim into a surreal abyss.

“Okay sir. First of all what is your city of residence?”

“Battle Creek, Michigan.”

“Thank you. And your zip code please?”

“49017.”

“Very good. And your sexual orientation?”

“I beg your pardon?”

I was surprised Muffy allowed herself to be a victim of these stunts. I expected her to give the phony salesperson a lecture, or to provide clear, concise answers to questions like When was your last yeast infection? and Would your call your mother a) obese, b) a crack whore, or c) a dirty obese crack whore? Either that, I thought, or to slam down the phone at the start. But no, she stayed on the line until she tired of being abused. Then she would sigh and finally hang up. When we would call right back she often, inscrutably, picked up again.

It was late. I took the cordless phone to bed with me and pressed it to my ear in the dark. When her mother answered our crank calls, we would hang up and try again later. But when it happened this time, I asked Mrs. Snow if I could talk to Marisa. When she asked who was calling, I said “Trish.” Muffy picked up, breathless, and I said nothing. Just lay there listening to her repeat Hello? Is anybody there? like an echo. Then something strange.

“Is it you?”

I shivered underneath my covers, and the speed of my breathing increased.

“I hear you. I hear you breathing.”

How did I know that tone of voice? It seemed so terribly familiar.

“Talk to me.”

I wondered if she could hear my heart drumming. At least five minutes of silence passed between us, heavy and deep. Muffy finally spoke again.

“Goodnight,” she said, and hung up.

That week in school some other strangenesses occurred. Eric asked me, out of nowhere, to the junior prom. I hadn’t given the event a thought. The catalogues had begun featuring billowy, sparkling dresses, but none of our gang took much interest. Yet there was a tension in the school hallways, something almost beneath awareness, like a loose tooth.

“You don’t have to go to the prom with me because you feel sorry for me.”

“What do you mean, butt-nut?”

I shrugged.

“Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pootie,” Eric said, and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re the hottest dude I know.”

“Oh eat me.”

“So that means you’ll go?”

“Well I can’t go with Ricky.”

“Why would you want to?”

“True.” I started laughing, because Eric had a small milk moustache. His lip looked like a negative of Hitler’s.

“So you’ll go?”

“Yes already! Jeez.”

“Hey I have to have a solid answer from you otherwise I can’t win the bet.”

“You’re a giant tool.”

Miss had not been at school all day, but suddenly, like a blip, she appeared onscreen. She was essentially in pajamas: hot pink sweatpants and a matching hoodie. Her eyes looked oddly dull without her mascara. She nodded at Eric and then faced me, straddling the bench with her hands tucked into her front pockets.

“’Sup.”

“Were you here today?”

“Did you talk to Jen?” Miss’s voice was hushed.

“No. I can’t get her attention.” As a matter of fact, it seemed as though Jen was ignoring me. In the car, she had blasted the stereo—Cypress Hill—and spoken not a word. Nor had she stopped to chat as usual between classes, instead powering down the center of the hall. I attributed this to my grandmother’s death, not to mention my bizarre behavior in missing nearly the entire funeral.

Miss leaned in and gave a sideways glance to Eric, who stared pointedly at her, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses like binoculars. She ignored him. “Did you cheat on Ricky?”

I laughed, almost choking on a rubbery school nacho. The idea that Ricky and I had any exclusive contract was ludicrous to me. Still, I said, “What? No.”

“Pootie, Jen thinks you cheated on Ricky and she’s kind of pissed.”

“Ricky’s paranoid. He’s just imagining things.”

“Jen says you did.” Miss looked at me with her head cocked. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“No.” I felt the anger widening in me, and turned to face Miss.

“You didn’t do it with Sam at your grandma’s funeral?” Miss’s dreamy tone suggested she knew I had not. “Because that’s what Jen is telling everybody.”

The cafeteria seemed to turn red all around me. The other tables with their haphazard cliques of wilted teenagers. The wheeled garbage bins. The blue and gold of the brick wall painted with a mural featuring our mascot, the bearcat. All hazed over crimson like the budding trees in front of the church where my grandmother was memorialized. I turned back around to face Eric, who was shaking his head.

“Oh no she didn’t,” he said.

“I told her to cut you a break,” Miss went on. “I said you were sad about your grandma and all that. Shoot. Who cares about Ricky anyway? He’s a loser.”

“I didn’t do it with Sam.” My voice was raised.

Eric looked around us. “Chill out, butt-nut. There’s people about.”

“Well I don’t know Pootie. That’s what Jen said. I’m not mad. Rio’s not even mad.”

“Rio heard about this?”

Just when I felt myself breaking open, it occurred to me that it had been a while since I had been the butt of one of their pranks. The wind flew out of me, and I had to stifle a laugh.

“Okay fine I did it,” I said. “I did it with Sam at the funeral.”

“No kidding?”

“Yes. Anal. In the graveyard in fact.”

Miss and Eric both threw their heads back at the same time, guffawing.

“Girl you are crazy,” Miss said.

“You need to be put away,” Eric said through his fingers.

When the day finally ended, I had to catch up with Jen on her way to her car. She had left without collecting me. It was raining, and I had to struggle against stiff knees while fumbling with an umbrella in an attempt to gain on her. By the time we got to the car, I was out of breath. Jen was more impatient than usual about the slow process of leaving the parking lot, letting out audible puffs of frustrated air and pulling at her curls. I opened the window and unleashed every curse I had within me at Laura Greenwood and a couple of her friends, who were walking in front of us as Jen tried to move forward in the queue of cars. Jen did not laugh at this, nor cheer up in any way. Once we were finally on the road, I decided to ask Jen whether she was angry at me. She got right to the point.

“Miss told me you were laughing about it, too. Anal in the graveyard—very fucking funny…”

“Settle down already.”

Jen was clutching the steering wheel tightly at ten and two, rather than resting her hand in her lap and driving with one thumb as usual. She almost never swore. She was truly angry. Nervous and confused, I defended myself against the accusation.

True, Sam had insisted on tucking me into the guestroom bed. He had undressed me too, but just to my slip and camisole. He told me what sitting shiva was—that when Jewish people lost a close relative they didn’t get dressed up or eat their own food, but instead, for one week, stayed in, and people dropped by with dishes they had prepared. I told him Bea had been sitting shiva. When I was under the covers, he leaned down and kissed me on the neck, whispering my nickname before pulling away. Then he left the room and did not return.

I slept like the dead in that guestroom. At one point, I woke to my father sitting on the bed and smiling down at me. He held my wrist gently, as if feeling my pulse.

“Go back to sleep, baby,” he told me, and that was all I wanted to do. “I left you some money in your jacket pocket. Go buy yourself a milkshake, okay?”

As he kissed my forehead, it occurred to me that he thought not only that I was still twelve years old, but that this was the late fifties. When I slept again, I dreamt of Sam making me a milkshake in my old kitchen in the country. When I tried to drink it, it simply wouldn’t move up the straw. I awoke later to my mother weeping over me and stroking my hair. The sound of her crying was low, almost secretive. When I fell asleep again, Muffy invaded my dreams, as she had done many a night. I stood facing her in Sam’s rank bedroom, trying not to breathe. By the time I got up, everyone had left. Only the tofu remained. As we packed up and went home at last, I found a hundred-dollar bill in the pocket of my pullover.

There was no chance that Sam had snuck in and ravished me in my sleep. With Ricky that might have been possible, for he was as odorless and soft as a shadow. But Sam had never failed to leave my body upheaved. Whenever we had made love, I walked away with a phantom pounding between my legs and a coating of Sam on my skin like paraffin.

Jen was shaking her head. “I saw him…”

“When? How? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I saw him naked in his room! Walking around!”

I agreed this was strange, but the fact remained: “I was in the guestroom.”

“Oh yeah one room over. Why would he be walking around naked Pootie, huh? Why?”

“I have no idea. Maybe Sam’s going crazy. Did you ever think of that?”

Jen slammed on the brakes, sending me flying forward against the dashboard.

“Get out of my car,” she said. A car behind us was honking angrily.

“Jen!”

“Get out of my car before I kick your cripple ass out!”

Having seen her do this to a previous boyfriend, I decided not to test her. I grabbed my book bag and slid out into the rain. After she drove away, leaving me alone on Calhoun Street, I realized my umbrella was still in the car.

•

Without Jen to drive me to and from school, I had to rely on Ricky, who picked me up and dropped me off a couple of blocks away from home. He seemed to be the only one who didn’t care about my supposed infidelity. The girls left me largely alone, but I kept my eyes open just the same. I had once seen Miss pull a girl’s head down to meet her knee with terrible force, giving the poor thing a knob on her head like a rhinoceros horn. I’d seen Jen rip a girl’s earrings out. My only hope was that Sam would clear things up with Jen and all this would soon be over.

On Friday, Rio approached me suddenly in the hall. I braced myself, but she only wanted to inform me that Ricky would not be by to pick me up. He thought someone named Reggie was looking for him and was afraid to leave the house. I asked Rio whether or not I should bother asking Jen for a ride. She shrugged.

“Do what you want. I’m going over to DaShaun’s right now.” (DaShaun, her boyfriend, had graduated the previous year.) It didn’t look hopeful, and it was raining again. I sighed.

“Come on Pootie, quit being so mopey,” Rio said. “I’m gonna start calling you Pittie.”

I laughed in spite of myself as she walked away. Of all of us, Rio seemed to adhere most closely to the notion that all things were negotiable.

Walking home on the soggy sidewalks, I found myself tailing Muffy. She wore a long black vinyl raincoat with the hood over her head. Though she never looked behind her, I kept my distance. She lived on McKinley Street, not far from Sir Pizza, where a host of Battle Creek Central students typically met after football games. Her house was ranch-style, white, with a screened-in porch. I hid behind a neighbor’s hedges and watched her step inside the porch, wiping her feet. She fumbled in her messenger bag, apparently for a key, and then struggled to unlock the door, finally pushing it open with her whole body and disappearing inside. I waited there for a while, trying to catch a glimpse of her in the windows. Lights were on, but Muffy seemed to have dissolved into the house. It started to get late, so I began walking home.

Bea and I were doing our homework in front of the TV when my mother came in from work. She normally greeted us warmly and joked about how we could possibly concentrate with the TV blaring in front of us, but today she just hung up her coat and walked, arms crossed, into the kitchen. Bea and I exchanged puzzled looks. We listened to the sound of high heels pacing back and forth on linoleum for a few minutes, and then my mother walked up to us, her arms still crossed and her eyes dark.

“Bea will you go upstairs for a minute?”

“Why?”

“Don’t talk back to me. Just do it.”

Bea’s lip quivered, and she slammed her book shut and ran out of the room. My mother’s eyes stayed fixed on me. I tried to think what I had done, particularly since I hadn’t had a crew to get in proper trouble with for a week. Then I remembered, with a jolt, the sewer.

“Do you have something you want to tell me?” my mother asked.

I tried to recall our excuses. I had gone to the Gap—no Hudson’s… and why had I not bought anything? Or had I? My mind was gruel.

“No. What?” Deny! It was the only way.

“You know very well, so stop it.” Her hands fell to her sides and seemed to twitch.

“Know what?”

“Just help me understand. What do you see in someone like that?”

I was confused by the question. Now my mind was searching for the reasons why I loved Muffy. She was a role-game-playing, cloak-wearing, pretentious geek. She was pretty. She was a stomachache. She was a rebel. She thought she was somebody all right.

The bewildered look I must have worn angered my mother. Her voice boomed.

“Is that the sort of person you want to be with? Rick Rodrigues?”

Despite the consequences that would surely follow, I laughed. The way my mother’s cheeks flared, the fast movements of her eyes—all were ridiculous. I couldn’t stop.

“Do you think this is funny? Do you think dating a drug dealer is funny?”

She took two bounding steps toward me, and I stood up, balling my fists, ready. But she stopped short and pointed a finger in my face. I was not laughing anymore.

“You are absolutely not under any circumstances allowed to see Rick Rodrigues. Do you understand me?”

My mother was practically stuttering, which was not funny but pathetic. I ground my teeth together and envisioned punching her and telling her to open her eyes, for once, or I’d close them both in a way she didn’t like…

“Do you understand me?”

As I turned and walked away, set for Bea’s bedroom, she clutched my arm before I could get past her. I couldn’t wrench my arm from her grip. She clamped her other hand other around my chin and cheeks like a vise.

“Answer me.”

My jaw wouldn’t move above her hand, but I did my best to mutter a terrible curse at her—the second-worst words that can be uttered to a parent. With my forearm, I dealt her a powerful shove that sent her tumbling into her beloved Boston fern. I yelled the worst words and then ran as fast as I could through the dining room and up the stairs to Bea’s room. I would barricade myself there until Mike came home.

What my mother didn’t understand was that boys, or men, like Ricky were the only kind I had any chance with. Ones like Dave and Drew would never have risked their reputations to go steady with the school crippled girl, and those who aspired to such reputations knew to avoid the same. Ricky did, in fact, have a dresser drawer full of marijuana, which he sold periodically to friends, co-workers, and former friends and co-workers, but he was hardly a drug kingpin. He wasn’t violent, and he had nice teeth. That, I felt, was plenty for me to ask for. And that, more than anything, was the reason I fell crying onto my sister’s bed.

“Pootie, boys like you. All the boys in my class think you’re pretty…”

“Oh great. I’m glad the eighth-graders can see my secret beauty.” I buried my face into an unmade bundle of bedspread. It smelled like Bea’s foot lotion. Mint and medicine.

“Everybody thinks you’re pretty.”

This I interpreted to mean our parents. The issue was always fuel for Bea’s whining. She felt I got away with more because I was thinner and had fewer skin problems, rather than because our parents were afraid of my temper. The truth was, I was pretty, though I did not know it at the time. I had a lovely, creamy complexion (which I saw as pasty) and long, caramel-streaked, shiny hair (which I saw as brassy and greasy). I was slender but not gawky. Though I wasn’t exactly tall, I had a long, graceful neck. But when I looked in the mirror, I generally loathed what I saw.

Bea asked about Ricky, whom she imagined as a sort of action-movie villain.

“He’s been in jail.”

“I’m not going to marry him, Bea.”

“Isn’t he like twenty?”

“So?”

“Does he go to college?”

“No.”

“Does he have a job?”

I heard the garage door open below. “Mind your own damn business.”

I was forbidden from socializing with Miss and Rio and especially Ricky for the remainder of the school year, perhaps longer. I was allowed to keep company with Jen only in the presence of her mother, and never later than seven o’clock. (My mother was unaware that my friends had cast me out, but I did not give her the satisfaction of that knowledge now.) My mother would drive me to school and the library, and Mike would pick me up. I couldn’t leave the house without adult supervision. I was to break up with him over the phone in the presence of my mother and Mike. At the time, Ricky did not seem to grasp what was happening.

“Pootie I told you I’m not mad about Sam,” he said. “Your grandma just died and you weren’t thinking. All is forgiven. Come over tonight.”

“No I can’t. And I didn’t… you know. Ask him, will you?”

“Fine I’ll ask him. Are you coming over or not?”

“I can’t. I told you I can’t see you anymore.”

“Oh. Well call me tomorrow then.”

“I can’t.”

“Are you going to need a ride tomorrow? Because my cousin wants to borrow the car.”

“No I don’t need a ride. I can’t get a ride from you ever again. I can’t call you. I can’t see you.” I looked at my mother and Mike standing over me as I said this. My mother’s jugular pumped against her necklace. Mike kept swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

Ricky was drinking something. The sound of the ice tinkling in the glass made me thirsty. “Okay well just call me when you need a ride, but not too early, okay? Call me the night before,” he said. “And stop by later, will you please? I’m bored.”

“I can’t.”

“Bye honey.”

My only chance at a social life was to join an academic club. (I couldn’t play sports, and I had no real hobbies.) I had heard that the Spanish club might be arranging a trip to Mexico. Although the club was overseen by Mrs. Connor, who had such a droning voice and bad sinuses that she managed to rob the Spanish language of its passion whenever she spoke it, there was an advantage to joining: I knew almost no one in the club. Most of its six members were what Miss would call dorks, but none were dorky enough to be one of her victims. None of them was a neighbor or the offspring of a teacher, and so none of them would accidentally or indirectly inform my parents if I were to skip a meeting. When I let Mrs. Connor know I was joining, she came alive like a jumping bean and welcomed me on the spot.

Meetings were Wednesday nights. The first order of business was the planning of a great Cinco de Mayo party that would be both cultural lesson and fundraiser. There would be a piñata, salsa dancing, a PowerPoint presentation on the history of Mexico, and a menu of traditional Mexican foods. It would take place at Darcy Strothers’ house, an enormous mansion with two cement Labradors on the front porch, located on Capital Drive across from the Y. I had walked past it many times but never knew the girl who lived there. I volunteered to make rice and a chicken dish with garlic and jalapeños that Sam had taught me. Most of the other kids at the meeting seemed dumbfounded by my presence. At one point I was forced to throw dagger eyes at Darcy, who kept staring at me.

The Magic kids met in the cafeteria the same night. Even Darcy and the other Spanish geeks sneered at them as they passed the door of Mrs. Connor’s classroom. I situated myself as far out of sight of the doorway as I could, expecting Muffy to pass at any second. Finally I heard her voice, high and lilting and almost relaxed, become louder and louder and then softer and softer again. I’d never known her to sound so at ease.

The next meeting, Mrs. Connor told us, would be switched to Saturday. We would assemble at the school and head out for lunch in her minivan. Then we would pick out green, red, and white decorations for the party and plant fliers and posters all over town. We were supposed to ask all our friends and all our friends’ parents to attend and donate. It sounded like a lost cause to me.

I did not tell my parents that the second meeting had been switched. Instead, I said that the Saturday trip was an additional thing, and that we would still be meeting on the regular day. That Wednesday after school, I plodded toward Henry’s Ice Cream Shop on Calhoun and bought a bag of M&Ms. I sat at one of the booths and ate them one by one. Then I walked to Muffy’s.

The sky was a pinkish silver color, and the smell of singed cornflakes permeated the air. Muffy’s house was dark. I entered the screened-in porch, which was unlocked. In a wicker chair with an orange-striped cushion near the door to the outside, I sat and I waited. Within a few minutes, I could hear her voice drawing near. She was talking to herself, but I could not understand her. When she opened the screen door, I placed my foot in front of her and held my breath. Although the pain of her legs colliding with my ankle was terrible, the trip succeeded, and her body fell to the floor of the porch with a clatter. I jumped up triumphantly and stood over her.

“Yes!” I exclaimed, doing a sort of end zone dance. “Totally rocked you. Woo!”

Muffy rolled over and stared up at me in horror. “What are you doing in my house, you troglodyte? Get out of here now or I’m calling the police.”

Before she could move I pounced on her, straddling her pelvis. Instead of trying to push me away, she covered her face with her arms.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she said. “I swear my mother is coming home any minute…”

I grabbed her wrists and pinned them beside her head, amazed at how easy it was. Muffy wriggled and twisted under me, dragging the heels of her boots on the rug beneath us.

“What are you going to do, spit on me?”

“Maybe.” I was grinning uncontrollably now. I had never been more excited.

Muffy redoubled her efforts, and the pressure on my own wrists and hands became painful. I leaned over and held her arms down with all my weight, bringing my face close to hers. That smell—a combination of her shampoo and hard, iron-laden water—engulfed me, mixed in with sweat and a heady waft of fear. I licked my lips and pressed my mouth against hers.

At first she struggled against me, clamping her teeth shut as I attempted to snake the tip of my tongue between them. When I pulled my face away, she let out a gust of air. Her face was deep red. Seeing her mouth open, I came down again and kissed her in deep, searching strokes. Her body went limp under me. When I ran out of breath I broke from her, smile still tattooed on my mouth.

Muffy sniffled. “You look like the Cheshire cat.”

“You’re a robo-geek.”

I placed my lips on the side of her neck and began gentle suction, slowly moving my arms along hers, down over her shoulders to her breasts. I had never touched breasts other than my own. She wasn’t wearing a bra, although my mother would have said she could use one. At first, she just let her arms drift to her sides, but then suddenly she pushed me away.

“Don’t,” she said. “My mother. She’s coming home. She’ll see us. Please.”

The thought of being caught filled me with horror. Quickly I jumped up, and Muffy slowly rose to her feet and dusted off her clothes. She was wearing a typically odd outfit: a black knit dress over a long-sleeved purple T-shirt and striped tights. “Just come inside. We can talk in my room, okay?”

Muffy’s house was clean, but full of mysterious junk. Her mother collected large and interesting trash: ceramic bunnies and frogs, cracked birdbaths, gaudy hip-high candlesticks, upholstered chairs, glass sculptures, giant lamps. She supervised the greenskeepers at Leila Arboretum, and on the weekends cared for the gardens of various wealthy families in Lakeview. The house itself was a jungle, even more vast and variegated than my mother’s collection of plants, but ironically it was also more unkempt, with dead fronds and wilted blossoms crowding together in clumps. A spotted cat darted out, and Muffy scooped it up and kissed its whiskers before it writhed out of her grasp. She told me her mother knew she was gay, but wouldn’t allow her to date. Her father lived in Indiana and was rarely heard from. Her older brother went to Michigan State and studied journalism. So as long as her mother wasn’t around, and I could escape mine, I could have her to myself.

I had often dreamt of Muffy’s room. In reality, it was small, about half the size of mine, and very messy. Nailed to each wall were cast-iron baskets with red candles in them, well-burnt. No dresser or shelves, just her bed, a well-worn quilt, a desk strewn with more candles, a pair of long gloves, a purple top hat, a portable CD player, a kitten flip calendar, high stacks of papers and books and CDs, and various accessories: barrettes, ribbons, bracelets. Clothing and comics and books covered the floor. A small lithograph on the wall featured Alice confronting the smoking caterpillar. A full-length mirror resting against the wall was nearly covered with writing in black and purple marker. A picture of the cat was tucked in a corner, and on the corner of the frame hung a dilapidated hand puppet with a skull for a head.

Muffy’s stockings, I discovered, did not go all the way up. Halfway up her thigh, beneath the skirt of the dress, was dewy bare flesh. When I took off her panties—plain red cotton—she pushed me away and demanded, still suspicious, that I take off some clothes, too. So I removed my tank top, which I was wearing inside out anyway (the school had banned it because it depicted an Uzi in gold glitter), and pulled my shorts down over my sneakers. She nodded, as if to give me the go-ahead, and leaned on her hands against the door. However, when I stepped forward, we both heard the sound of her mother arriving. I couldn’t help laughing as we wriggled back into our clothes. Muffy begged me to be quiet and told me to leave out of the window.

I still recall some of the things that were written on Muffy’s mirror. Together they make a decent poem:

forgotten knots wrapped secretly inside your boots
vine-encumbered
labyrinth of nighted silence
smells like passion
things I want: chameleon skin, cat’s inner ear mechanism, snake tongue
some fierce thing replete with too much rage
in the supreme horror of that second I forgot what horrified me and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images

• • •

My mother tells me Muffy resides in Ann Arbor and works at an LGBT resource center. She lives with a girlfriend and is doing well. Ricky is still in prison but should be out in time for a new niece’s christening. My mother sent him a book of Robert Bly poems, and he wrote her immediately asking for more. Today she will send him Wendell Berry.

Now that Aaron has returned, I see the ways in which he is too young for me. We do not communicate. And yet I am happy he is home, talking to the TV and to the cat. When he talks, his large hands gesture in ways completely unrelated to what he is saying. He is constantly falling asleep with his computer open on his lap.

The Huron Valley LGBT Resource Center is on Packard Road in Ann Arbor. I know the city well enough, having lived in neighboring Ypsilanti as a student at Eastern. I feel this is a sign of some sort. A tenuous and strained communication between God and myself.

• • •

The Cinco de Mayo party could be called a success. In the end, Darcy’s parents—a Kellogg’s executive and an assistant principal—donated most of the money for a trip to Mexico City and Puerto Vallarta the following winter break. I was battered with compliments on the rice and chicken dish, including one from Darcy, who chucked me on the arm and said You’re all right! My mother and Mike were pleased that I had taken part, and Bea laughed for what seemed like the first time in weeks when Courtney broke the piñata. Courtney sulked through most of the festivities, especially the PowerPoint presentation, but by the end was enjoying herself. I noticed that she referred to me as her sister when she introduced herself to the other kids, and I felt proud. I found myself wishing Bea could approach one of the kids she didn’t know and talk to them the same way. Instead she clung to me and nibbled on tortilla chips the entire time.

Muffy and I skipped the next meetings of the Spanish and Magic clubs. We spent three hours together in her room, kissing nude on the bed until we became uncomfortably excited, at which time she opened a book of H.P. Lovecraft stories and began reading them aloud. Her body was softer than mine. Though I was taller than she was, our hips lined up. Her breasts were larger and less firm, with bigger areolas. Her feet and hands were perfect like a doll’s. Resting my head on her shoulder as she read, I reached for her pendant, mistaking it for the Star of David.

“You’re Jewish?” I interrupted.

“It’s a pentagram, goofball.” So it was.

“Do you believe in God?”

“I pray to the goddess of nature.”

“For real?”

“Yes for real.”

“I believe in God, but I think I love my family more than God. And I think that’s supposed to be a sin.”

“That’s why I don’t worship ‘God.’ Why worship something that tells you it’s wrong to love your family? Only a male god would compete for your love.”

“Are you going to prom?”

“Prom is a materialistic celebration of patriarchal culture.”

“Would you go with me if I asked?” I was laughing.

“Stop teasing me.” Muffy frowned. “That’s not nice.”

“You could wear a tux.”

“You’re a jerk.”

She went back to reading. Beneath the lull of her voice, I tried to conjure a memory of my grandmother, but there were so few. The sound of her rickety old blender. The smell of flour. The feel of the plastic beads we would use to make Christmas ornaments between my fingers.

I felt between Muffy’s legs, and soon the book fell to the floor.

•

To be on the safe side, we both made sure to attend the following week’s meetings. A large part of our excitement and joy seemed to come from knowing we shared a secret. We passed each other in the hallway without speaking, and yet something would pass between us—a spell that vibrated us both. We glanced and smiled during our classes together, too quick for others’ eyes to catch. When she passed papers back to me in English, I made a point of touching her fingers.

That weekend, Miss and Teddy were pulled over for speeding on I-94. The police found marijuana and open intoxicants in Teddy’s Chevy. Finally pushed to their limit, Miss’s parents enrolled her in a Christian summer school program for wayward kids called Miracle Camp.

“Go to Canada,” Eric suggested at lunch. “That’s where I’d go if my folks tried to send me someplace like that…”

“How long? I mean, aren’t you kind of old for summer camp? What would you do there?” I asked.

“Damned if I know and damned if I care. I’m not going. I’ll burn the house down before I do, and then we’ll all be going to camp…”

The next week Muffy and I skipped our meetings again. While we lay locked together on her bed, the afternoon fading away, I told her what had happened to Miss. I expected her to be cavalier or even happy about the disposal of her old enemy, but she wrinkled her brow instead.

“Your parents wouldn’t send you to that place if you got caught with me, would they?”

“I doubt it. Better you than Ricky probably…”

“You’re already in trouble though.”

“Well maybe, but I’m not going to waste my time worrying about it. You can’t just go around not doing what you want because you might get in trouble.”

Muffy rolled off the bed, crawled over lumps of clothes to the mirror, and plucked down the skull puppet. She crouched low for a moment, and suddenly its little face was peering at me over the side of the mattress.

“Patricia Barnes,” it said in Muffy’s lowered voice. “You will now be sentenced to three months hard labor at an oppressive Christian prison camp. Do you have any words to say in your defense?”

“Will you get back up here please, you moron?”

“Patricia Barnes,” it said. “I love you.”

•

Out of nowhere, I received a call from Jen. My mother allowed me to talk to her, telling me that it sounded like something was very wrong. Something was.

“Pootie,” Jen said, her voice full of mucus. “I’m pregnant.”

Suspecting a prank, I asked if she was serious. She begged me to come over. It was nearly seven, but Mrs. Goldman was at home, so my mother indulged me. When I entered Jen’s room, she was sitting on her bed in her prom dress. Black lace over nude satin. Strapless. (Eric had approved of mine: a short black velveteen with spaghetti straps.) Jen’s eyes were swollen to slits and her back was hunched into a C.

“I know you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I thought you hated me.” I sat next to her on the bed and petted her hair. After a moment, I asked what she was going to do.

“I don’t know. Probably keep it.”

“What about Chad?”

“I don’t know if it’s his.” Fresh tears poured forth, and she buried her wet face in my shirt. She told me she had talked to Sam, and he had denied the funeral sex. He was as infuriated with her as her mother.

“I’m sorry Pootie. I don’t know why I acted like such a bitch. You’re my best friend…” Jen was sobbing now, almost choking. “It’s just I get so jealous when you’re with Sam, and I’m afraid you’re only friends with me to be with him.”

“That’s not true.” Was it?

“I’m so sorry…”

“It’s okay Jen. Really. It’s no big deal. I would have been grounded anyway.”

“Not if my mom hadn’t opened her mouth.” Of course—that was how my mother had found out. I put my arms around Jen, and we rocked back and forth for a while, not speaking. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be pregnant, to face my mother and stepfather and father carrying a little Rodrigues inside me. An icy slush of dread washed over me, and I hugged Jen tight.

Our prom took place in the Stouffer Hotel downtown. I was surprised to be let out for the entire evening, even in the capable, platonic hands of Eric, whom my parents knew and liked. But I had not gotten pregnant, like Jen. I had not been arrested, like Miss. I had not been caught shoplifting at Lakeview Square, as Courtney had. By omission, I was granted a night of freedom.

When I put on my dress, my mother clapped her hands together and said, “Look at those gams!”

Bea said, “When you bend over everyone’s going to see your underwear.”

My mother and I agreed that Eric looked handsome and smelled wonderful. His tie was velveteen, like my dress, and he had chosen a tiger lily corsage. Before leaving, we posed for a few pictures in front of the fireplaces at both our homes and again in front of Eric’s mother’s car. I had told my mother I was going to accompany Eric and some other drama kids to a cabin on Goguac Lake, where adults would be chaperoning, but that was not what I would be doing. I had promised Muffy I would pay her a long visit as soon as prom was over.

The night went on and on. The dinner was bland and tepid. The DJ spun a glut of slow R&B songs, which Eric and I giggled through, alongside sporadic forays into old ’70s funk. When he played some tunes we remembered from childhood, like When in Rome’s “The Promise” and The Hooters’ “And We Danced,” Eric would drag me out onto the floor. Most of the time, however, we sat at the table and made caustic remarks about our classmates’ dresses.

Rio and DaShaun, however, looked like film stars. When they popped in, Rio ran over and embraced me while DaShaun chatted with his old pals in the senior class.

“Girl I miss you,” she said, and bit me softly on the shoulder.

“Hey!” She had never been so affectionate with me before.

She told me that she and DaShaun had booked a room in the hotel and invited me to come up and say hi after prom was finished. When she pronounced hi she put the gloved tips of her thumb and forefinger together and placed them against her pursed lips. DaShaun appeared and gave me a stunted hello before whisking her away for a dance. I quickly grew achingly bored and longed to leave. But Eric seemed to be having fun, joking around and dancing in rings with his drama club friends, so I stayed until the lights finally came on.

•

After a quick stop at Rio and DaShaun’s room upstairs, Eric dropped me off at Sir Pizza, where I’d told him I was meeting Ricky in secret. (Eric had done much stomping and groaning when I’d let him know I wasn’t coming to the cabin and the reason therefor. Trifling! Trifling Pootie!) From Sir Pizza, I walked to Muffy’s house and knocked on her bedroom window.

“Go away,” I heard.

“It’s me, stupid.”

“You’re late. You said you’d be here right after midnight.”

“Will you open the damn window, fool.”

She came to the window wrapped in her bedspread, and slid it up with her one exposed hand. I heaved myself in and tumbled onto the floor.

“You’re late,” she said. “You’re late and you reek of pot!”

“What are you whining for? I’m here now.” I pulled at the bedspread and brought her toward me. When I kissed her lips and nose, she didn’t respond.

“Did you have awesome good times at your precious prom?”

“No, it sucked,” I said. “Kiss me already.”

“It was certainly a lot of fun sitting here waiting for you like always.”

“Hey you said you didn’t want to go.”

“Well you could have not gone with me.”

“Will you stop crybabying and give me a kiss, or do I have to make you?”

“You’re being obnoxious.” She shuffled over to the CD player and pressed a button, and the Smashing Pumpkins began to play at medium volume. Then Muffy dropped the bedspread. Underneath she was wearing a sixties-style A-line dress in seafoam-green organdy. She opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a tiara, which she placed on her head. I put my hand over my mouth and doubled over laughing.

“I knew you would laugh at me,” she said, scowling. “It’s my mother’s dress.”

Still chortling, I walked over and put my arms around her waist. “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing near you.”

She put her head on my shoulder and we danced.

•

A Doll’s House opened during the last week of school. Eric played Torvald and Muffy played Christine. A complicated play for high school students, it had drawn numerous protests from parents who felt the material was too racy. This gave ticket sales an enormous boost. I found the play depressing, and Muffy’s part not large enough. Eric was astounding. I did not recognize him. The entire play I glowered, fidgeting, crossing and uncrossing my legs, prompting my mother, when it was over, to ask whether I was premenstrual. Actually, I had promised Eric I would attend the wrap party at his family’s restaurant, and I was full of pricks and nerves at the prospect of talking to Muffy in public.

My mother wished me the best of times, and when I told her I would be home at seven, she waved her hand at me. “Stay out until eleven if you want. I think you’ve been punished enough.”

And like that, my confinement was ended.

At the party, it was Eric who made the transition into public friendship with Muffy easy. He took me by the wrist and led me to her, then grabbed her by the wrist and shoved our hands together.

“Marisa, this is Poot—I mean Patricia. Patricia this is Marisa.”

“We know each other,” I said.

“Yes we’ve met.”

For the rest of the night we sat talking, an arm’s length apart. I told Muffy I didn’t understand the play, but she was great. She said she didn’t believe me about either. I told her I was no longer grounded. Her eyes bloomed.

“During the summer…” She stuttered softly, and her cheeks glowed red.

“I know right.”

“Promise me,” she whispered.

•

The last bell of the school year drew whoops of joy, and when the doors swung wide, a breath of sweetest summer met us all. In three weeks, the heat would become unbearable—a muggy Michigan jungle air would settle on the city—but June was mild and fragrant. I began working thirty-six hours a week at the library, and with the money was able to afford a modest amount of movies and records, and of the weaponry-emblazoned garments I preferred. Bea, now old enough, got a part-time job as a bagger for Felpausch. Miss, unfortunately, was shuttled away in the night by her parents. I didn’t get a chance to wish her luck.

I spent much of my time those first weekends with Muffy. Rio spent hers largely with DaShaun and rarely requested my company. Soon I convinced Muffy that lying out in the sunshine covered with oil was not ridiculous, and she introduced me to the comic book shop on Michigan Avenue. Nights I watched scary movies with Jen, who was beginning to show. She was morose and complained constantly about Sam. He was different. He was a mess. They didn’t know what to do with him. One night, when I dropped in with a copy of The Lost Boys as requested, I found the house empty and the door locked. The next day I was informed by my mother that Sam had come home very drunk, and at some point during the evening had tried to choke Jen to death.

Rio broke up with DaShaun toward the end of June, as the air was becoming dense and the Riverside Country Club pool less blue. Suddenly she was asking me to the mall, to the pool, to Meijer market for some aimless wandering—anything to pierce the crust of boredom. With Jen we could do little other than watch DVDs and play rummy, but Rio wanted to party.

Muffy and I had precious little time together, and she grew impatient at my outings with Rio. I pointed out that this was mostly her doing, as she was the one who insisted on not introducing me to her mother.

“You’re not one of my Magic friends. And you’re not in drama. She’ll suspect something.”

“Like what? That you’re friends with such a trashy girl?”

“You’re not trashy. You aren’t like your Neanderthal friends. I don’t know why you even associate with them.”

“You sound like my mother,” I said. “Listen. I want to go to South Haven for Fourth of July, and I want to bring Rio. And I want to bring you too.”

Muffy was removing a Type O Negative CD from its case. She stopped short and stared at her feet. “Why?”

“Because I love you.”

“No, why do you want to bring her?”

“Because she can get beer and a cooler, and we can get wasted,” I said. Her nostrils flared. “And because she’s my friend. She broke up with her boyfriend and she really wants to go.”

“I’m very perturbed right now.”

“Well what do you want me to do about it?”

“Why don’t you and Maria Rodrigues go and have a wonderful time.”

I jumped up from the bed and flew at her, pinning her to the wall by her arms—a method of seduction from which I still rarely deviated. Slowly I bent my head into her neck and then, when I felt her muscles relax, pinched her flesh with my incisors. She screamed Ouch! and pushed me away from her so hard I nearly fell backward onto the floor.

“You psychotic, stop doing that! You can’t do that to me all the time,” she said.

“Settle down.”

“Don’t tell me to settle down. In fact, do me a favor and get out.”

“No.”

“Get out.”

“Make me.”

“I can’t make you. You are a brute, you know that? You are a beast. You are the meanest, cruelest miscreant I have ever had the displeasure to know.”

“What’s a miscreant you mega-dweeb?”

“And stop acting dumb!”

“I’m not acting.”

“Yes you are. You pretend to be stupid so your stupid friends will accept you and in the meantime, you’re smarter than anyone I know. You could have a tremendous future ahead of you and every time you, as you so elegantly put it, ‘get wasted,’ you put it in jeopardy. Why? Why? Why?”

I paced in a circle, stomping over garments and crinkled comic books, and once I had rounded the room, I stepped up to Muffy, placing my face close to hers. In the loudest voice I could muster, I shouted, “Guess what? I already have a mother. And I don’t need another one. And when I do I will let you know. But I don’t. So stop judging me about everything!”

Muffy’s face broke. “I’m not judging you…”

“You are. And you don’t understand what it’s like to have real friends so you don’t know what it’s like to be loyal to them.”

“I have friends…” She began to cry.

“No. Your Magic geeks and those snotty drama bitches don’t count. Where are they, huh? Why don’t you hang with them outside of school? Because you and them are like Eric and me. You are in-school friends. But it’s summer now, and some of us still have people to see and things to do.”

“You’re so mean…why? Why are you… so… mean to me?”

“Okay. Stop crying please.”

I moved a patch of her hair aside and breathed into her ear, “Didn’t you hear me say I love you? Did you hear me?”

“Ohhh…”

“You’re coming with me. You have no choice, do you understand? So be ready.”

Rio was easier to convince. I told her and Jen that Muffy and I had made friends at Eric’s party after the play and that she was actually pretty cool.

“Yeah she is kind of cool, huh,” Rio said, chomping away on a radish from a veggie tray Mrs. Goldman had made.

“What?” Jen said. “Are you joking?”

I was equally shocked.

“She didn’t tell on us about that sewer thing,” Rio said. “That’s cool.”

“So you don’t mind if she comes to South Haven with us too?”

Rio looked skeptical, but I assured her that our sneaking a couple of beers wouldn’t cause a problem. Muffy would, as with the sewer incident, be discreet.

Jen shook her head. The bruises on her throat had faded into greenish smudges. “What the hell,” she said. “I get pregnant and everything in my life turns backwards.”

From this time on, Muffy, Rio, and I functioned as a threesome. Rio and I quickly put to rest her worries that we were lushes. In fact, our drinking was very infrequent: a couple of beers at night on the beach in South Haven, rum poured into a giant pop at the movies, a forty-ounce or two shared on Rio’s front porch. Muffy never partook, but Rio declared to me that she was more fun when we did, unlike Jen, who Rio had come to call “queen of the mopers.” It even seemed, after a while, that Muffy could see the humor in her own elevated language, such as when, at the pool, she referred to Rio tossing Laura Greenwood’s flip-flops into the garbage as a “ceremonious and symbolic gesture,” which was, of course, exactly what it was.

•

My eighteenth birthday fell on July 25, a Thursday. I called in sick to work and spent the entire day with Muffy. We went to Henry’s and shared a sundae, after which, owing to the oppressive heat, we watched old Tales from the Crypt episodes indoors. I did not drink, though Rio had given me, as a birthday present, a bottle of Hennessy, which I had never tasted, but which she assured me was delicious—one of DaShaun’s favorites. I did not call Rio or attempt to contact her, easy enough now that she and DaShaun had reconciled.

As evening closed in, Muffy and I lay on her bed, a rotating fan blowing our sweaty bodies dry. I sucked the salt from her collarbone, softening her up, because I had something to tell her that might upset her. Rio was planning an overnight trip to Cedar Point in Ohio. We would ride coasters all day and sleep in a Sandusky hotel at night, then drive back in the morning. Rio’s Aunt Marta would come with us, so there was no worry in terms of my mother and Mike’s rules. Muffy was of course invited—it was necessary in fact, because we would need an even number. Though she seemed an unlikely roller coaster lover, that wasn’t my worry. DaShaun was going to meet us there with Ricky. “And it’s not our fault or Marta’s fault either because oops—how did we know they were going to be there? What a coincidence! No worries, matey,” Rio had said.

Muffy sighed, as if waiting for something. Rolling on top of her, I kissed her throat. Then I told her about the plan. I didn’t love Ricky, I told her, which was not a lie. We were only friends, really, who hadn’t seen each other in a while. In truth, there were still moments when I missed him—his company, mostly. (Though the rest had not exactly been torture and there were times when my mind wandered mischievously in that direction.) Rio told me that he had learned to play guitar but could only play John Denver songs, and everyone in the family made fun of him. I had missed out on a rendition of “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” that had sent them all into hysterics. He was terribly bored and lonely, she’d implied.

At the news, Muffy began chewing her cheek, a habit she had picked up from me, and averted her eyes.

“Am I to believe you won’t be sleeping with this individual?” Muffy asked.

“Hell no. I mean hell yes. I feel sorry for him, that’s all. And this trip means a lot to Rio, too.”

“Maria is far too enamored with that DaShaun. It lacks dignity.”

“I want you with me this weekend.”

“Then stay here.”

“No. You come with us. With me.”

“I don’t like rides.”

“Okay well then don’t come,” I said, and sat up between her legs. “But I’m going.” I stood and hastily began dressing. Muffy rolled over and placed her head in her arms. “And I can’t promise I won’t sleep with him if you aren’t there, okay?” That would do it.

Muffy slid up onto her knees, her eyes aglow with rage. “I knew it. I knew you wanted to sleep with him. You liar.”

“I just told you so I’m not lying. I’m just saying…”

“You don’t love me. That’s why you’re a liar. You ogle boys all the time. You don’t care about my feelings. You are a monster.”

“I do love you.”

“You don’t. You like boys.”

“Yes I like boys. You knew that.”

It was true that Muffy had often had to endure my and Rio’s frank sexual comments about the boys at the pool and the beach, with their dripping Bermudas, shiny and browned and lean. We speculated about whose genitals would be hairier, whose would be more massive—tried to follow the small ravine that ran from their hip bones into the fronts of their shorts to the undulations and striations underneath. Rio would apologize to Muffy in those moments, to my embarrassment, but Muffy always dismissed her, saying she was just as capable of making objectifying remarks about the girls in their bikinis, but that she was above it.

“If I slept with some other girl, you wouldn’t tolerate it. You would leave me,” Muffy said.

The words leave me pried something open in me. I stopped buttoning by jeans and my arms fell to my sides. “So you’re going to dump me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well that’s what it sounds like.”

“I merely said that if I were to sleep with another girl…”

“Don’t even think about dumping me. Don’t even merely think it.”

“I don’t want to dump you. I just don’t want you to sleep with that man.”

“Then come with me.”

She did.

•

Sometime that August we all began wearing black eyeliner, thick and raccoonish on the edges of our lids, and black-red lipstick on our lips. It was Muffy who started this trend. I came over one afternoon to find her seated before her mirror, cross-legged, staring at herself. When I crouched and gently bit her scalp, I saw that she had taken liquid liner and applied it far too liberally. I gasped, because she looked beautiful, striking, older. Her hazel eyes were suddenly shockingly vivid.

“Do you like it?”

“Kind of.”

Her fingers swam in a pencil box full of assorted tubes and wands and pulled out an expensive-looking lipstick.

“This is called oxblood,” she said, and smoothed it over her lips. It was aptly named.

I sat facing her and presented my own lips. “Do me.”

She slowly applied the moist waxy substance to my lips and then kissed me, pressing our creamy lips together with a smacking sound. Then we both turned and looked at ourselves in the mirror. When I smiled, I noticed the dark lipstick made my teeth look very white.

“Can you do my eyes?” I asked.

“You needn’t humor me.”

“I’m not. I like it.”

The truth was I loved everything about her. The makeup was lurid and silly, perhaps, but I thought it looked tough. Only Muffy would have been brave enough to try it. The semi-independent films she took us to were always more entertaining than they sounded. Because of Muffy, Rio had begun a collection of anime graphic novels in spite of her long-time resistance to books. Muffy was cool, even if no one but me had realized it until now.

She lined my lids with the coal-black liquid, then blew gently over my eyes to dry it. By the end of the afternoon, blackberry-colored lipstick covered our bodies. My belly. Muffy’s neck. My breasts. Muffy’s toes. Her feet were truly perfect, clean and tiny and soft as silk. Typically, when I put them in my mouth she squealed and begged me to stop (meaning, I’d discovered, not to stop), but on this occasion, she just sighed deeply and stared at me, her foot slipping from my hand.

She had been acting very solemn ever since the trip to Cedar Point, and I was fearful that it wasn’t just the looming specter of school. At the park, she hadn’t joined us on any of the coasters, and Ricky had been in an affectionate mood, picking me up and spinning me at the gate, raking his fingers through my hair as we stood in line, attempting to tickle me.

He insisted on staying with Muffy and me in our room, and though I told him that we were only going to be friends, he kept reminding me that I was eighteen now. That I was free to do what I pleased. Then, while I was brushing my teeth before bed, he began vigorously rubbing my back—stiff and bunched from hours of standing followed by being yanked into and out of the grip of gravity. My muscles, my nerves, and my skin had memories of this man’s body. They wanted to relive them. We were noiseless, save for the rustle of sheets and my breathless moans, which I buried in Ricky’s chest hair. Muffy (it appeared) had long been dreaming. When Ricky fell asleep, I crawled in next to her, cold with shame, and wrapped my arms around her waist. The next morning Muffy had said nothing, and I assumed I had gotten away with it, but the feeling had lingered, dark and stormy, that I was losing her.

Yet, more than ever, Muffy seemed willing to participate in the sort of adventures Rio and I enjoyed. She rode in DaShaun’s car with us when we egged Tori Winchell’s car, stopping to write “whore” and similar epithets on the windows with our plum-dark lipsticks. She came to Meijer and strolled through the aisles with us, listening to us coo at the rows and rows of makeup and toys and guns. She took sips of our beer and other alcoholic treats on the occasions when we could obtain them, and sips were all it took for her to appear to be sloshing drunk.

When we went to see The Crow: City of Angels at West Columbia 7, Muffy drank half of the rum and Hennessy concoction Rio and I had manufactured in a vat of cola. She made her ensuing intoxication worse by spinning herself around in the parking lot on the way to the car, forcing DaShaun to catch her before she tumbled to the pavement. In the back seat, she fell asleep in my arms as Rio and DaShaun argued bitterly in the front. She insisted I come home with her and climb in the window, even though it was far too early for her mother to have gone to bed. When I crawled inside, she was struggling heatedly to unhook her bustier, which she had worn under a ragged mohair sweater.

“Here dummy,” I said, and made my way over to help her. Her breasts bounced happily when they were released, and Muffy placed my hands on them.

“I want you so bad…” she said.

I hushed her and pushed her back onto the bed, then knelt at the edge and reached under her skirt, a very long one that seemed to be made of patches, and removed both of her tall boots. I went to remove her panties, but found the skirt an encumbrance. She immediately sat up and reached behind her to unzip it while I kissed each thigh impatiently. In that moment, Muffy’s mother, still awake and, as Muffy had often implied, enormously inconsiderate of her privacy, knocked on the door and opened it at the same time. When she saw us she immediately backed out and shut it again, wailing in apology (Oh my goodness sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry…) while I, horrified, flung open the window and threw myself into the humid maroon night.

It was only an instant, no more than ten seconds, but that woman’s voice, and the sound of that door swinging open and—whoosh, slam—shutting again would echo in my memory for years to come. I ran as fast as any other kid could run that night, to my house. So many times I had fallen behind: at the sewer, toilet papering at Halloween, escaping police at an illicit party. But this night I ran faster than I knew possible.

• • •

Marisa Snow, aged twenty-eight, is on the phone behind the counter at the Resource Center. Her hair is piled into a bun on top of her head, with a pencil run through it. When she sees me, she blinks, squints, and blinks again, then drops the phone and runs out from behind the counter, bumping her hip (they have become quite a bit wider). Her arms come crashing around me and mine embrace her in return. Her smell is different. Different shampoo. Different water.

“I can’t believe it,” she says. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

• • •

For an agonizingly long week after being discovered by her mother, Muffy and I did not see each other. I waited for the phone to ring at home, imagined my mother’s ashen face when Mrs. Snow detailed what she had seen. But the only phone call came from Muffy herself, and I thought, at last, that everything would be fine. She implored me to come over, saying it was urgent. I half walked, half sprinted to her house. Upon entering her room, I collapsed in her arms and brought her face to mine for a kiss, but she pushed me away and nervously placed her desk chair against the door under the knob. I sat on the bed and caught my breath, letting out a giggle. She paced back and forth, biting her nails, another habit she’d gotten from me. Once I could breathe normally again I announced, “Well I’m horny. Who else in this room is?”

“No. I can’t do it.”

“Then just sit there and I’ll do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Hey, get over here.” Something in her voice, an ice bridge, hung off her words, prickling my skin.

“No Patricia. I can’t do this.” She drew her hands back and forth between her body and mine. “I can’t do us. I can’t do you and me anymore.”

“What do you mean?” But I knew. I felt myself crack open, deeper and wider.

“I love you. I love you so much, but you are… are… abominable! You are just… cruel and unfeeling and unthinking! As long as I am with you I am in danger.”

“What are you talking about, you big drama queen? Cut it out, will you.”

“And you… you don’t care. I drank because of you. I’m an accomplice to any number of crimes. But I can’t continue to drag myself into some abyss with you…”

“Don’t say that,” I said. Tears pressed my throat.

“No. I am not going to condone any more of your despicable behavior and then allow you to treat me like… garbage…”

“Don’t say it.”

“I’m sorry, we have to break up. This is over.”

“No.” I was crying now. I walked over and put my arms around her, sobbing into her breast.

“I’m sorry. Please go.”

I stood up straight and looked at her, waiting. She looked down at her shoulder.

“You can’t do this to me,” I said.

My rage whirled around me, like wind in a tunnel, howling and screaming and cold. Perhaps I should have slapped her then. Kneed her in the stomach. But I did not. Instead I climbed out the window and lurched home, letting the hole grow wider until it had no edge.

•

I called her several times, but Muffy was determined not to have any contact with me. I ignored all other calls and stayed mainly in my room, reading and listening to music. At night I cried and cried. My appetite disappeared. Food tasted like poison. One Saturday night, Courtney made a remark about the way I ate that implied I had an eating disorder. She had been learning about anorexia in health class. I replied that if she had a problem with what I ate, she could relocate. Then I flipped her off.

“Eat that,” I said. “And clean up the bathroom once in a while, why don’t you? Just because you have sticky fingers doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.”

“Okay, Patricia,” Mike said blandly. “You’re excused.”

“What on earth is going on with you?” my mother asked. I pushed back my chair and went to bed, imagining all the ways blood might spill.

The night before school started, my mother announced that Marisa was on the phone. I tore out of my room, where I’d been lying in the dark contemplating evil, and took the phone. It was Rio. She told me that Miss had come home pregnant. There were no morning-after pills at Miracle Camp. She and Jen would be attending night school and working toward their GEDs, and would receive their degrees months before I would. Then, before I could beg her not to, she put Ricky on the line. His greeting, Sweeeetiee, what’s happening… brought me to a gush of tears, so violent and unwieldy it pulled me apart. Ricky flew into a panic.

“Don’t… don’t do that Pootie. Please. I don’t like it…”

I hung up.

•

The start of school was like waking from a pleasant dream and being told we would not sleep again for nine months. We were all clouded over and twitchy with the remains of summer, but no one was more haunted than me.

I wouldn’t even make it through one day.

What I remember most was pain. Pain like nails driven into my hands and wrists—a noisy, hot pain. I had hurled Muffy against the wall so many times in the throes of desire I thought nothing of doing that to start. The moment her body collided with the lockers, my hands, which had for so many hot afternoons caressed and gently searched her flesh, balled into fists and began pounding her face, her chest, and her head in sudden, virulent strikes. I will not say I couldn’t control them. This was a case of mind over matter to outdo them all.

The joints of my hands screamed in ruthless agony. I could feel them disintegrating, and yet I willed them to continue as Muffy slid to the floor and tried to crawl away. She got away from my hands only momentarily, only to meet the tip of my sneaker head-on. When she collapsed, I set my hands to work again. Already broken, mangled, exploding with pain, I demanded their continued co-operation. Blood poured from Muffy’s mouth and nose. When I caught a blurry glimpse of her face at last through the red veil over my eyes, she wore an animal look of shock and terror and confusion. The taste of blood washed in, a rotting in my mouth.

In the end, I, not Muffy, ending up sitting in the emergency room at Leila Hospital. Her lip was bruised and split, one eye swollen shut, her nose bloodied. I had two broken metacarpals and two fractured proximal phalanges, and took three stitches on the inside of my mouth where I had bitten open my cheek. Following the treatment for my injuries, I was held in the Emergency Psychiatric Unit until a doctor and a social worker had seen me. Both declared me severely depressed. This they concluded from my silence, which is all I gave them.

The school’s officials deliberated and decided not to expel me. My stepfather and my mother met with the principal, along with Muffy’s mother, in the school office, to negotiate the terms of my punishment. At the least, I figured, my parents would take me out of Central and enroll me at St. Philip’s, the local Catholic academy, for the remainder of my schooling. Muffy’s mother certainly recognized me from that night after the movie. She had never called my mother. Now I supposed she wished she had. Her eyes were watery and dim. She was silent for a while, then put her head in her hands and told the principal that what was done with me was his decision. The principal informed me that Muffy had begged them not to suspend me. She knew I would not do this ever again. I swore it was true, and my heavily bandaged hands testified on my behalf. I could not dress myself, feed myself, brush my teeth or wash my hair, much less assault someone with my hands. In the end, they agreed on a week-long suspension, followed by six weeks of in-school suspension, and I was to see the school psychologist once a week for an hour for an indefinite period.

• • •

I never meant to hurt you. I’m so regretful of the way I mistreated you. I hope you can forgive me.

The beginnings of wrinkles beneath her eyes. I hope you can forgive me.

My glass refilled. I was ashamed of you—the person I loved!

I brutalized you…

Do we have this conversation? Am I me or am I her?

• • •

The day the casts were removed, Ricky played “O Holy Night,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?” on the guitar in our living room. Though it was only September, he had ventured from John Denver to Christmas songs and was anxious to try his skill out on my family. Ricky had been terrified to leave me alone following the incident, and had driven by the house so many times that Mike finally asked him to come in, at which point he darted over and gathered me in his arms. It occurred to me that I could cry in front of exactly two people in my life: Bea and Ricky. Again and again he ventured into our house, to the chagrin of Mike and my mother. It started with his delivery of an electronic toothbrush. Another time my mother walked in at lunchtime and discovered Ricky in the kitchen, feeding me a Speeds cheeseburger, rotating it so I got the best bites. Eventually he became a fixture, an extra set of hands. My parents had surrendered.

It was a motley bunch there in the living room, circled around a plate my mother had piled with grapes and cheese and pretzel twists. Bea and my mother wearing the same befuddled expression—questioning the whys and wherefores of this dusky young man’s presence in their house. Courtney sulky and indignant and grounded again. Mike singing along merrily, Do you know what I know? And myself, hands pale and wrinkly but not forgetful. Suddenly my mother placed her hand over her mouth and erupted in laughter. Bea started singing along in spite of herself, her face splotchy red and her voice beautiful. Courtney had taken to wearing dark red lipstick and thick black eyeliner, too. She rolled her eyes and made obscene gestures in the corner. Mike, who was butchering the lyrics, plucked a grape from the bunch on the plate and whipped it at her head.

• • •

The ankle bracelet is removed before Thanksgiving. I make love to Aaron noisily in my mother’s house, his hands on my abdomen like vines growing slowly up a wall to the sun. Is he him or is he her?

I never meant to hurt you…

When you were hurt, when you were threatened…

Somewhere along the line I learned that to love someone is to break them down, to beat them into submission. Where did I learn that?

There you go, pretending you don’t know something when you do.

—

Ann Stewart was born and raised in southern Michigan. She is now a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also teaches English.

This story is also available as a .pdf.

In the loosely related fields of planetary science and apocalyptic fiction, the phrase “minimum orbit intersection distance,” or MOID, describes the closest point of contact between the paths of two orbiting objects. Most vividly invoked whenever an asteroid encroaches on our corner of the solar system, that bit of jargon also has its aesthetic uses. Consider the coordinates of Neil Young and Miles Davis on the evenings of March 6 and 7, 1970, at the juncture of East Sixth Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

That setting, cosmic only in culturally suggestive terms, was the Fillmore East, a New York outpost of Bill Graham’s hippie empire. Young was the headliner, and Davis the opener. As far as we know, there was no particular spark of friction or connection between the two. But the musical evidence, even 40 years later, attests to the mysterious gravity of that moment. For all their differences — what you might inadvisably call their intersection distance — Young and Davis were both in the thrall of reinvention, pushing a distinctly contemporary, shrewdly cooperative agenda. It also happened that they were each in the midst of creative transition as they took the Fillmore stage.

Few musicians of any era have outdone Davis or Young when it comes to catalog savvy. For Davis, that development has been posthumous: the trumpeter died in 1991, just as the compact-disc reissue boom was getting under way. His music has since been endlessly repackaged and repurposed, and in some instances — like Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It’s About That Time, released by Sony Legacy in 2001 — made commercially available for the first time. Last year Legacy put out what would seem to be a culminating gesture: The Complete Columbia Album Collection, spanning 70 discs.

Young’s camp released a fetish object of their own in 2009: Neil Young Archives Volume 1 (1963-1972), a 10-DVD or Blu-Ray set consisting of obscurities, rarities and assorted other flotsam from a roughly half-century career. Among its bounty is the concert recording that was also released, in more standard form, as Live at the Fillmore East on Reprise in 2006. The material was assembled with active participation from Young, who had ample reason to reflect fondly on the Fillmore shows.

At that time, he was on tour with Crazy Horse: Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums. Not quite a year earlier they had released their first album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Young had spent much of his time since toiling as the final consonant in CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the supergroup whose album Déjà Vu would be issued within a week of Young’s Fillmore East shows, delivering what Billboard hailed as “a skill and sensitivity bound to be the measure of excellence in rock for 1970.”

Whatever he thought of such proclamations, Young felt the call to work with musicians who upheld what you might call different aesthetic aspirations than CSN. Their raggedness was not entirely planned. Young himself has said: “With Crazy Horse it’s such a special thing, because none of us can really play. We know we aren’t any good. Fuck, we’d get it in the first take every time, and it was never right — but we could never do it better.” That’s overstating the case a bit, as his own solos at the Fillmore would demonstrate. But there is something to his assertion of anti-virtuosity. Long before Crazy Horse, he was a skinny kid with a nervous voice, the embodiment of vulnerability. After a session with his Winnipeg high school band, the Squires, the engineer complimented his guitar playing but said he’d never make it as a singer.

Which somewhat implausibly brings us to Miles Davis, a trumpeter long appraised in jazz circles more in terms of resourcefulness than proficiency. Gary Giddins has credited him with “a thoroughly original style built on the acknowledgement of technical limitations.” The conservative orthodoxy often compares Davis unfavorably to Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown, which is not unlike saying Neil Young was no Stephen Stills.

In a 1993 essay, musicologist Robert Walser analyzed the most notoriously flawed performance of the Miles Davis canon, a 1964 rendition of “My Funny Valentine,” and argues that Davis had mastered the process of signifyin’ famously articulated by Henry Louis Gates. To really hear what he’s saying, you have to dislodge standard notions of legitimacy, or spike them with the awareness of an alternative technique. To that end, perhaps the most striking analogue between Miles Davis and Neil Young, or just the most obvious, is the fact that both artists make expressive and powerful use of an instrument regarded in some circles, even now, as imperfect.

Listen to the sprawling version of “Down by the River” that anchors Live at the Fillmore East, and you’ll hear that voice, along with that of a partner, Danny Whitten. The ringleader of Crazy Horse before it was Crazy Horse — that is, when it was the Rockets — Whitten was a good singer, in the conventional sense. He was also an excellent guitarist, especially in this context. Young once pegged him this way:

A really great second guitar player, the perfect counterpoint to everything else that was happening. So sympathetic. So unthoughtful. And just so natural. That’s really what made “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River” happen — Danny’s guitar parts. Nobody played guitar with me like that — that rhythm.

The Fillmore tapes represent the only known live document of Whitten with Crazy Horse. Soon after this tour, heroin addiction ended his tenure in the band and, within a couple of years, his life. This drama played out famously in song: first, “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” a set opener at the Fillmore East featuring Whitten’s soulful lead vocal. Then Young singing “The Needle and the Damage Done,” never more nakedly than in the acoustic solo version caught on the recently released 1971 Massey Hall concert.

Young’s description of Whitten is telling. Sympathetic. Natural. These are the attributes of a certain kind of intuitive virtuoso, an “unthoughtful” one. You often hear similar descriptions of jazz musicians. Young locates Whitten’s ability as a component force, “the perfect counterpoint.” His artistry, in other words, functioned best as a catalyst. In the same interview, Young goes on to say, “When I played these long guitar solos, it seemed like they weren’t all that long, that I was making all these changes, when in reality what was changing was not one thing, but the whole band. Danny was the key.”

Jazz discourse is full of theorizing about the expression of the self within a collective: Ralph Ellison put it succinctly in his famous formulation about “an art of individual assertion within and against the group.” For his part, Young has recalled that it was during a 1970 CSNY tour that he grew obsessed with the John Coltrane Quartet, hiding in his hotel room with cassettes of Equinox and My Favorite Things. “I used to listen to that shit all the time,” he said, adding: “The bass player was really good.” The fact that Young’s appreciation includes a special nod to Steve Davis may help explain why he isn’t often lumped together with the other rockers who valorized Coltrane at this time. Unlike Carlos Santana or Duane Allman, he didn’t fixate on the heroic and suggestively spiritual solo voice, but the cohesive and hypnotic properties of the group.

Speaking of which, Davis also came to the Fillmore East with a working cohort: saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette. Also on hand was percussionist Airto Moreira, who had been present the previous year for the recording of Bitches Brew. That album was issued in April, one month after the Fillmore stand. So Miles was not yet the hero that he would become to this crowd; Cashbox reported that most of the kids waited out his set in the lobby. This was the trumpeter’s first-ever performance explicitly for a rock audience. He had been cajoled into playing there by Clive Davis, his label head at CBS. (The cajoling probably had a lot to do with the opening slot.)

Jazz-rock was not a brand-new development, and Miles was no naïf. A year and a half earlier he had recorded “Mademoiselle Mabry,” an adaptation of “The Wind Cries Mary,” by Jimi Hendrix. That song was dedicated to a mutual acquaintance, Betty Mabry, who married Miles six days after the tune was recorded, and graced the cover of the album on which it appeared. (She has enjoyed a recent reissue revival of her own.)

Almost 20 years Davis’s junior, Mabry led him by the hand into a new social circle, one that included Hendrix and Sly Stone. Abruptly, he abandoned Brooks Brothers for bell-bottoms, opening the door to what Robin Kelly has called “the pimp aesthetic.” Musically, the shift was more methodical, as a trove of Legacy reissues has underscored.

His most recent album at this time was In a Silent Way, a bated-breath sound collage that has about as much in common with rock as it does with jazz. (Not much, in other words.) The composer of that album’s title track also wrote “Directions,” the song that opened every set at the Fillmore East. His name was Joe Zawinul, and together with Wayne Shorter, he would lead Weather Report. That ‘70s fusion flagship was just preparing to sail: the Fillmore East marked Shorter’s last gig as a member of Davis’s band. (You can hear him in incipient Weather Report mode on “Spanish Key.”)

Personnel-wise, it was becoming a difficult stretch for Davis. His 1960s quartet, one of the world’s finest-ever jazz ensembles, had splintered. Its slipstream post-bop had matured past its prime, as Davis had been forced to admit. So where to go next? He had no great regard for the avant-garde scramble of the era, which Corea and Holland would soon explore vigorously in a band called Circle. (Those interests crept into the Fillmore sets; check their conspiratorial glee on “Directions,” from 6:30 on.)

Quite the contrary: in his memoir, Miles recalls yearning for the sound of the Muddy Waters band, because his own music had grown so “abstracted.”  This jibes with Greg Tate’s suggestion that the trumpeter “left post-bop modernism for the funk because he was bored fiddling with quantum mechanics and just wanted to play the blues again.”

The blues proposed a complicated racial dynamic for Davis. “Let the white folks have the blues,” he had told Herbie Hancock as the end of the ‘60s loomed. “They got ‘em, so they can keep ‘em.” In 1969 he told Rolling Stone: “All the white groups have got a lot of hair and funny clothes. They got to have on that shit to get it across.”

“But,” he added in the same interview, “Jimi Hendrix can take two white guys and make them play their asses off. You got to have a mixed group: one has one thing, and the other has another. For me, a group has to be mixed.” One can only imagine how Davis might have vibed with Jack Nitzsche, who played keyboards with Crazy Horse at the Fillmore East, and later made the assertion that Danny Whitten “gave Neil the blackness he lacks.” Race was rarely far from Miles’s mind during this era, but it probably loomed larger on this night than most. He had lately been fretting about how to reach young black audiences, and only one of those adjectives applied broadly to this Fillmore crowd.

And he was probably still seething from a fresh indignation. On March 3, a few days before this concert, Miles was sitting in his red Ferrari in a no-standing zone on Central Park South. Reportedly he was with a young woman, and he was dressed in a turban, a sheepskin coat and cobra-skin pants. An officer approached and asked for his registration. Somehow a pair of brass knuckles was discovered, and Miles, booked on a weapons violation, spent the night in jail. Later he told Newsweek: “It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been a black man driving a red car.”

What, then, to make of Davis opening for Young? Would he have been upset about playing an opening set for one of those all-white rock bands? There’s always danger in ascribing intentions to art, but the trumpet playing on It’s About That Time is slashing and aggressive, almost confrontationally virile. (The album Jack Johnson, when it landed, would echo this quality.) And yet it’s more than possible that Davis heard something appealing in Young’s music. Three months earlier, he had recorded a group hallucination on David Crosby’s “Guinevere,” which would go unreleased until 1979. And if Miles heard something redeeming in CSNY, he might have done the same with just the Y, despite — or maybe because of — the rugged musical vocabulary of the accompaniment.

And what did Neil get from Miles? It’s just as hard to say. His method of recording in the next few years would come to resemble Davis’s in its shambling, say-nothing, capture-everything intensity. He even had his Teo Macero in the producer David Briggs. But if Young was taken with Davis, he didn’t say much about it. He had plenty else on his mind, including an increasingly unmanageable Whitten, whose strong delivery at the Fillmore East — notwithstanding a few bum chords in “Wonderin’” — was deceptive.

Whitten would soon be cast out of Young’s performing entourage, as Shorter would decamp from Davis’s. Within a month, Bitches Brew would appear as if out of a haze, with a sound much cooler and more alluring what was heard at the Fillmore East. Miles would usher in the album’s release at the Fillmore West, sharing a bill with the Grateful Dead. (That gig would yield its own catalog release, in 1997.)

That was April; in May the Kent State shootings would prompt Young to write “Ohio.” CSNY would perform it on each of their shows the following month, back at the Fillmore East. August comes. Miles performs at the Isle of Wight Festival. September: Neil releases After the Gold Rush. Their sounds had both changed more than once already, and would change again. Along the way there would be obsolescence and resurgence, and finally something like permanence. (When Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, he once again joined the company of Young, a member since ’95.)

It’s almost strange to think that Neil Young and Miles Davis are icons of our culture, one stubborn and rumpled and the other truculent and proud. It’s strange because each is a study in restless motion, fumbling forward with steady purpose. Which is perhaps the singular recommendation for this Fillmore testimony: It captures both artists at a pinpoint moment, spinning hard on their separate trajectories, each on his way to someplace else.

—

—

Nate Chinen writes about music for The New York Times. He is also a columnist for JazzTimes, an independent music blogger and coauthor of Myself Among Others, the autobiography of impresario George Wein. For each of the last four years, he has received the Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Newspaper, Magazine or Online Feature or Review Writing.

When Marcus’s mother and her boyfriend and just about everybody they knew were put in jail for possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Marcus went to live with his aunt for a while. Marcus was sixteen, a hurdler and sprinter on the track team at Boys and Girls, a solid B student. A good boy, everyone said. Even as a baby, his mama liked to say, he wasn’t any trouble. He cried so little that she would forget all about him.

His aunt Tiff was twenty-two and good-hearted, but no one could say that she was good. Ever since Marcus could remember, Tiff was always deciding between boyfriends, and the May when Marcus moved into her apartment was no exception. He came by gypsy cab on a Friday, humping his three duffel bags of clothes up the four narrow flights, Tiff chatting all the while about this one versus that one. It was an eighty-degree day, ten degrees warmer on the stairwell. Tiff walked backward on the stairs, hands free, as Marcus hauled the last bag off the landing. Marcus had left a bunch more stuff at the apartment. What would happen to it? What about his mama’s stuff, and the furniture? Nobody had told him anything.

You know, Tiff said, I bet I can get you into a club.

Inside the stale-aired apartment, Marcus looked around for somewhere to sit, but the couch was piled with clothes and balled-up sheets. There were old Styrofoam take-out containers stacked on the coffee table, roaches scurrying in daylight. The windows were grimy and yellow, the screens all busted out. Marcus kept a clean room at home, did the dishes every night. Inside his duffels, every shirt and pair of pants was rolled up in a special way to prevent wrinkles. Eyeing Tiff’s couch, he stacked his luggage neatly and made a seat for himself.

Papo took Mama to a lot of clubs, he said. Look how that turned out.

Tiff perched next to him and draped one long, lotion-scented arm across his shoulders. Don’t worry, she said. You and me are gonna have a good time, and Briana will be home before you know it. You ever get high?

At Tiff’s place, it was hard for Marcus to study or keep to his runner’s schedule, and he failed two of his final exams. When they were finally put out after a big fight between Tiff and her boyfriend and another girl, it was arranged for Marcus to go down south on a Greyhound, to Virginia, where he would live with his father’s mother.

“Be good,” his mama said over the jail phone, the seriousness in her voice a formality more than a real warning. “Be sweet to your granny and stay out of trouble.”

What trouble was there to be had in a little town—not even a town—in Virginia? In his mind he saw cows and fields, weedy ditches, long dirt driveways to nowhere.

But he promised her. The way he figured it, he was an expert at staying out of trouble.

—

It was early September when Marcus arrived. School was already in session, but the air still had that sticky, sweet feeling Marcus remembered from summers a long time ago when he was a little boy. Granny lived in a white house crouched at the very back of a long dirt road. The trees that hid it were bigger now, but it had the same cinder-block steps, the same creaky porch boards. There was one bedroom, where his granny slept, and a sun porch with a foldout couch for Marcus.

Marcus spent the first few days getting reacquainted with Granny, a small, stooped woman with curly gray hair and dry, gray-brown skin. Like Marcus and his dad, she didn’t talk except when she needed to. She told him the rules: No going out except on Friday or Saturday, eleven thirty curfew. No girls to the house unless she was there. He could have a job if he wanted but only on weekends and one or two afternoons a week. Keep his room clean, do homework first thing. Church on Sundays.

“Same rules I gave your father,” Granny said. “Maybe they’ll work this time.”

Marcus’s father had been in jail since Marcus was eight. He’d come out twice, both times cut short by his probation officer. You can’t fight it, he’d told Marcus on those brief and painful visits.

“I blame the city for what happened to Jerome,” she said quietly, after a minute. Marcus knew by “city” she was talking about his mother, Briana. She was like the city: loud and flashy and trash-talking, pretty when she took the trouble. Granny seemed to be seeing Briana before her eyes, but then she blinked heavily and looked at Marcus. “It’ll be good for you here,” she said.

At first it was relaxing, like a vacation. He liked the order of Granny’s house, always having clean towels in the bathroom, dinner served to him at a regular time, nobody just popping by for no good reason. He cleaned up every night after supper and Granny said, “Thank you, son.” He especially liked looking through old pictures she kept in two shoeboxes. They were of Jerome and Granny and a bunch of relatives he’d never met, and in no particular order. There were pictures from a cousin’s wedding and from a family reunion at a park in Washington, D.C. Marcus sat on the scratchy plaid couch and shuffled through the box, looking for a picture of himself. He’d find a baby and ask, “Is that me?” and Granny would look at it and say “No, that’s so-and-so.” The closest he ever got to himself were the pictures of his dad when he was Marcus’s age—same eyes, same chin.

But it didn’t take long for Marcus to get around to missing Brooklyn. On weeknights his granny would be in bed by eight, and since the television in the living room got such poor reception Marcus would go to his room. The windows in Granny’s house had no curtains or blinds, so when it was dark he got a creepy feeling, like he was being watched. There were no yellow streetlights, no sirens or car stereos, nobody calling out to anybody else outside. Just unfamiliar sounds rising and filling up the air until it sounded like they were invading the room itself. Frogs? Crickets? He couldn’t tell. He’d make up his bed and lie down in it and put on his headphones and close his eyes and think about home.

The funny thing was, what he remembered was not the daily quality of his life, ordinary things like his screeching, one-stop subway ride to school, or the shiny white walls of his small room in the Brevoort Houses, or the weedy courtyard where homeless dudes sat all day with their dicks in their hands. He didn’t think about the loud, profane hoochies at Boys and Girls, or how on Saturday mornings there would be glass and needles and vials and condoms all over the track. He didn’t remember getting patted down by security guards at school. Instead he pictured the old mansions on Stuyvesant Avenue, with their wavy glass windows and their dark, redbrick exteriors. He remembered the prettiest girls on the track team, with their elegant long leg muscles. He remembered the nicest, youngest teachers, the time the coach said he had a real shot at the state championships. He remembered his one and only field trip to the Museum of Modern Art, all the crazy shit inside, and when the subway would careen out of darkness onto the Manhattan Bridge and you could see everything—the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, everything.

None of the kids he met at King William High School had ever been to New York City, so Marcus could have told them the Empire State Building was made out of Moon Pies and 50 Cent was his uncle and they would have believed him. These were kids, black and white, who hung out at gas stations for fun. They looked at his clothes, the spotless Enyce and Fubu and Rocawear and Nike that Papo bought him, and heard the word Brooklyn, and figured he was the reason he was down here. They figured he had done something, and the rumors started up within a week: that he was a dealer, that he saw a drug murder, that he robbed a jewelry store, that he was part Puerto Rican.

“Rumors, man,” was all Marcus would say, shaking his head and smiling, when people asked.

Marcus was in the tenth grade. He signed up for harder classes than he would have bothered with at Boys and Girls: Chemistry, English, Algebra II, Technology I, and World History. He figured with not much to distract him, he might as well see what he could do. The track team practiced only twice a week; he signed up for that. He looked in the paper for a weekend job, something to keep him out of Granny’s way on Saturdays and out of church on Sundays. He wanted a cell phone—Granny didn’t have long-distance service—so he could call his friend Khalil and tell him how boring everything was. He wanted a car, because you needed one here to have a girlfriend.

That was how he found Skinny. The ad in the paper said: “Odd jobs for local mechanic. $8/hour. Plus you fix it, you can drive it home.”

That sounded good to Marcus.

Skinny lived on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation, just down the road from Granny but close to the river and even more remote from the two-lane main road that was all Marcus knew of the county. Secretly nervous about the reservation—he pictured teepees and feather headdresses, stony silences—Marcus had her drop him off even though she said it was walking distance. Quickly he discovered that the reservation was no different from anywhere else he’d seen in King William: trees, fields, squat little houses and trailers. All you saw when you pulled up to Skinny’s place was a row of cars—old, busted-up foreign cars on blocks: Volkswagens and Saabs and Mercedes and MGs. You could tell they had all been exceptional cars at one time, the kind of cars rich people drove, and Marcus went about picking one out—a dark-blue diesel Mercedes with primer-gray fenders—before he’d even found the house. As he got closer, he noticed that none of the cars was fixed up, not even on its way to being fixed up.

Well, he thought. At least the man knows when to ask for help.

Skinny’s house was not a regular house, with a yard and a driveway and a front door, and it took Marcus a minute to recognize it as a house at all. Behind the jumble of cars and engine blocks were three small structures, like shacks but newer, holding on tight to the edge of his narrow yard. Beyond the houses was a tree line, and beyond the trees was the river. Skinny, who was not skinny at all, came out of one of the shacks with a beer in his hand and two dogs and another guy with sunglasses and a beard. He did not seem surprised to see Marcus—they’d set up the appointment over the phone—and didn’t look twice at Marcus’s baggy jeans or clean white T-shirt.

“Can’t get a permit to lay a foundation,” he explained, waving his hand in the direction of the shacks. With effort Skinny propped a boot on the bumper of a trashed Saab, his great gut spilling over his belt, and Marcus stood with his hands in his jeans pockets and answered no to all of Skinny’s questions about experience. He didn’t ask where Marcus was from, or what grade he was in, or where he went to school.

The sunglass man stood drinking a beer and laughing, and Skinny spoke to him instead of Marcus.

“Well, Bruce, he was the only one to answer the damn ad. What do you want this job for, anyway?”

Marcus said he wanted to buy a cell phone.

“Good a reason as any, I suppose. When can you work?”

“After school, I guess, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. I can work any time on the weekends.”

Skinny thought for a minute. “What time does school let out? Hell, never mind, better make it weekends starting at nine o’clock for now.”

“He’s too drunk by three o’clock to work,” Bruce explained.

—

The first time Marcus ran sprints at track practice, the coach called him over. Her name was Mrs. Stephens, wife of Jay Stephens, the football coach. She yelled for the other runners, mostly girls and skinny guys, none of them even very fast, to do a mile of laps. “Wait here, honey,” she told Marcus, and then she got on her cell phone. Before long Jay Stephens was chewing on an unlit cigar and leaning on the back of his giant pickup, pulled close to the track.

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Stephens said. “Run a forty for us.”

When Marcus ran, there was nothing in his head. All he thought about was his body, the way it felt pushing the ground away from him. When he was a kid he ran so fast he sometimes tripped over his own legs. It had been the speed he liked best, everything a blur. He’d run down Atlantic Avenue, under the LIRR, just until the first thrilling burst of speed left him and then he’d stop, leaning over and panting hard. Now he liked the control, the way he knew just where his foot would go down to push against the track, the way the force and effort of running traveled up the muscles of his legs and into his abdomen and shoulders and arms, ending in his hands. His fingers curled loosely around this ball of energy, and when he was done he shook them out, releasing it. He trotted back and lifted his chin at the coach, hardly out of breath.

“You ever play football?” Jay Stephens asked.

Marcus shook his head.

“Well, you’re gonna play football for us,” he said. He nodded at the track. “S’alright, but it ain’t football, not here anyway. You’ll see. Practice is every day at four”—he pointed with his cigar toward the football field—”over there.”

He didn’t give Marcus a chance to say yes or no, just hopped back in his truck and drove off, a cell phone to his ear.

Marcus started to stretch for the next round of heats. “I like to run,” he told Mrs. Stephens when she asked him, nervously, what he was doing. “The road I live on is too rough.”

The coach paid for everything—the uniform and pads and cleats and helmet, all brand new and in the school colors, black and gold, with a C on the helmet for Cavaliers. Granny made a fuss over them when Marcus showed them off, but asked if he might want to think about quitting his job or taking an easier course load. You don’t have to do everything all at once, she said.

“I’ll be okay,” Marcus said. He didn’t say so, but it was good to have something to take his mind off his mama, whose letters were growing more and more bitter. She’d never been in jail before, and she was used to being taken care of in style. Briana had a closet full of Rocawear herself, which she bet, in letters, her sister had taken and ruined. And to top it off Papo forgot about me, she wrote. I got nothin in my comisary. Marcus had put off his cell phone plans; he figured he could send some money up to Briana and just talk on a phone card for now.

It took him a few practices to decipher the rules of football; or, more like it took a few practices for Coach Stephens to realize that Marcus had never even played a real football game before. He sat Marcus down in the locker room and explained it, drew diagrams on a yellow legal pad. They were full of circles and Xs and arrows, and Marcus nodded like he understood. “You’ll get it,” Coach said. “Just do what we tell you to and you’ll be okay.”

The first time he was tackled, in practice, was like nothing Marcus had ever experienced. His breath knocked from him, it was like he was flying, like every bit of feeling in his body was concentrated into the place where he had been hit. This is what I’ve been running from? Marcus thought, standing up. This was nothing. It was better than nothing. It felt good. He wanted to be hit again and again and again.

“Wait till they hit you for real, in a game,” the coach warned. “These kids are a little scared of you.”

“Yeah?” Marcus said. That part felt good too.

—

“Football!” Skinny cried when he told him about it one Saturday. “I didn’t take you for the jock type. You any good?”

“I run fast,” Marcus said. They were doing what they always did when Marcus came to work: shooting the shit. Normally they talked about fixing up Skinny’s place, or which car to work on next, or the NBA. They had the hood of a green MG open to reveal its destroyed engine, a door propped open to Skinny’s house, country music blaring. They were fixing it up for Skinny’s son; it was going to be a belated graduation present. Marcus’s job was to fetch tools and beers and cigarettes for Skinny, run errands to the Food Lion and the 7-Eleven when Skinny was too loaded. Marcus would point out that he didn’t have a license and only barely knew how to drive, but Skinny always waved him off. Can’t take something you don’t have away from you, he’d say. He was one ticket away, he told Marcus, from losing his license for good.

“I was on the track team at Boys and Girls,” Marcus offered.

“Boys and Girls? What’s that, some kinda private school shit?”

Marcus laughed. “Naw,” he said. “It’s a big public high school in Bed-Stuy. It’s got like, five thousand kids. It has a good track team,” he added.

“Bed-Stuy, huh?” Skinny leaned under the hood. “That where Biggie Smalls is from?”

“That’s the place,” Marcus said. That was the thing about Skinny: He knew more than you’d give him credit for just looking at him. “Track up there is like football down here.”

“So, what’re you doing down here then? Come to play football?”

And so for the first time Marcus told him the whole story, about his mama and Papo and the police raid. Everybody in his family who could be responsible for him had another five years before they could even think about parole. By then, Marcus said, he’d be all grown up. When he said it, it was like the first time he realized that it was true. He’d be a man the next time he saw his dad outside of jail, maybe even his mama.

Skinny shook his head. “That’s rough, man. Goddamn police.”

Skinny had had his own brushes with the law over the years. He’d been a junkie, and he’d been to jail a few times for that, plus DWI charges every now and again. Now he was clean except for the painkillers he abused for his hepatitis, and all the beer and sometimes weed. He had an ex-wife and two kids he never saw.

“They shouldn’t have got messed up with all that,” Marcus said. It felt strange, saying it. He’d never passed judgment out loud on his family before. “I mean, we had this two-bedroom apartment, we had plenty to eat. They had more without the drugs than my granny has living down here.”

It wasn’t true, but it was something he told himself. Before the drugs Marcus and Briana lived for a year in a shelter, commuting all the way to Bed-Stuy from the Bronx so Marcus could stay in his school. It took the whole year of riding trains and being late every day to get them off the waiting list and into Brevoort.

“People do all kinds of things,” Skinny said. “You can’t know why.”

—

Wheels weren’t the only way, after all, to get a girlfriend in King William County. Football was just as good. Being the newest player on the varsity squad was even better than that, and Marcus soon found that he had the pick of the best-looking girls at school. He chose Charlene, a short freshman with thick legs and a pretty, round face. She waited for him at the end of practice, and they walked home together. She lived less than a mile from his house, and there were dense woods in between where they could sneak off and have sex. Charlene was so sweet, she wouldn’t even let him dirty his Enyce jacket by spreading it on the ground under them. “Use mine instead,” she would say, offering her dingy down coat.

Marcus wrote mostly about her in letters to Khalil:

Man, it doesn’t take much down here to live large. You remember me, skinny dude who ran track? Well guess what. I’ve got a fine girl (look at her picture) and a job fixing old Porsches and I’m already like some kind of football star and we haven’t even had a real game yet. And the girl, let me tell you. We done it in the woods, in her little bedroom with her teddy bears on the bed, even in a car and I don’t have a car yet! She’s even smart, not some hoochie, she takes Algebra I and helps me with my Algebra II. Did I mention that she is 14 and never even had none before me?

For real, you should move down here. All the girls are like Charlene.

This last part was not true—there were plenty of dogs—but it sounded good.

The first game he played was in early October, an away game. Marcus was hit brutally at the end of most of his carries. After the game was over, he thought he’d never walk normally again, and he felt that way for days.

“You need to gain some weight, some muscle,” the coach said. “Take some supplements, drink some energy shakes.” He wrote out some suggestions on a notecard, even offered to drive Marcus into Mechanicsville to the GNC.

Instead Marcus went with Skinny in his truck, and Skinny even gave Marcus an advance on his paycheck so he could buy the supplements in bulk. Marcus hardly ever made trips outside of King William, and it felt good to be going fifty, sixty miles an hour on a divided highway. “Broadus’s Flats,” Skinny said, pointing to the wide harvested fields that stretched before them. They said little more than that until they got to the store, where Skinny made a big show of talking to the salesclerks, comparing nutritional information, and joking about Marcus’s training. “Our big hope for the championships,” Skinny said. “You’re looking at the next T.O. right here.”

They spent an hour inside the store, and it didn’t occur to Marcus until later, on the way home, that Skinny had done all of that talking and label-reading to show off, that he was proud of him. His own son was older than Marcus, in college, but he didn’t come around much. At home Skinny had a framed picture of him at high school graduation. He was wearing a long shiny robe and smiling. Marcus tried to remember the last time someone took his picture at home, and he couldn’t.

Marcus was ten the last time his dad had been paroled. He was in the fifth grade, and his dad had picked him up early from school. Marcus didn’t know that he was coming—the teacher came and got him at lunch, and he’d copied his homework without thought of doing it and packed his backpack and walked into the early afternoon with his dad. It was April and chilly.

They had gone to Coney Island on the F train. Marcus remembered that his dad couldn’t keep still on the train. He kept pacing back and forth, reading and rereading the map, tracing his finger along the routes of the A, C, and F trains. When they got to Coney Island, there was a stiff cold breeze off the ocean. They sat with their backs to the wind and ate four Nathan’s hot dogs each.

“Man,” his dad said, shaking his head. “I missed this.”

At the time Marcus didn’t think about how rarely, if ever, they’d come to Coney Island. Maybe his dad came out by himself. Or maybe he had come a lot as a child. Probably he just missed the idea of Coney Island. The fact that he could come, the same way Marcus would later miss the Museum of Modern Art.

“You sure must be glad to be home,” Marcus said. The hot dogs made him feel warm, excited. He started asking questions all at once about when Jerome would be coming by to see his mama, and when he would be moving back in.

Jerome held his hand up, palm facing Marcus. “Son,” he said. “Marcus. You know it ain’t like that.”

And he explained he’d probably be back in jail pretty soon, for one damn thing or another. After that they rode the Cyclone, Marcus trying to understand the whole time why it was that his dad would be going back, why parole worked like that. It was hard to think with all that up and down, the Cyclone’s short fierce run, the way it felt like it was trying to shake him off on every turn. There was no line, so Jerome gave the operator a ten and they rode it again and again, for as long as the money lasted and a little longer.

Marcus waited for his granny to go to sleep before fixing his Pro Performance mocha-flavored protein drink. She said good night and kissed his cheek, and he heard her door shut softly, her dresser open and close. After a half hour, when he heard her snoring, he poured milk into a tall, wide-mouthed Mason jar and stirred in two scoops of grayish powder. He stood at the counter and drank it slowly, steadily, looking past the uncurtained windows into the blank, black night. The taste was chalky and sweet, and he closed his eyes and imagined that new cells—stronger ones—were gathering up in his arms, his stomach, his back, and his legs.

Over the sound of his own swallowing, he heard a low rustling. He looked more closely through the window, past his own reflection at the oak branches closest to the house. There on the lowest branches were the black shapes of the biggest birds he had ever seen. He thought they might be owls, but they were silent and pointy-headed, black-feathered. He didn’t think owls looked like that.

Baby Boy,

I am writing you from jail, hoping things are going better for you than they are for me. My hearing came and went. It got postponed. I dont know why but I think its something to do with Papo’s case. Damn state lawyer hasnt been here once.

I been thinking alot—all I have time to do—and I been thinking about how when you were a baby me and your daddy liked to take you to Prospect Park to the zoo. I had a nice stroller for you, a big blue one I got almost new. We would wheel you around to look at the polar bears swimming in their pool. The sides of the pool was glass so we could sit your stroller in front of it and you could watch them diving under water, rolling around like it was a show. You loved them bears with their dirty white fur.

You know your daddy and me we loved you and we still do and we want to make things up to you. Its not right having two parents in jail but thats the way it is for now I guess. You know that I picked Papo for you dont you? I picked him so I would have somebody to take care of you, to buy you what you needed and help you get where you needed to go in life. He was so smart and strong and he took care of us. I never loved him. I guess I made the wrong choice but I made it for you.

I want you to be good, but anything you can do for me, for us, would be good too. I think if I can get a real lawyer I can beat this and we can move. I think we should move to Philly.

Love,

Mama

—

By the end of the month, Marcus had put on five pounds and saved two hundred dollars, but it wasn’t enough. The Cavaliers had lost an away game and a home game, and Marcus was benched for much of the time for worries about his knee, which he’d twisted at a game they won in Mathews County. “We got you for two more years, might as well save you for then, when you’re bigger,” Coach Stephens said, but sitting sidelined and costumed, Marcus felt as useless as a cheerleader, and he knew it was because he hadn’t put on enough muscle. He could see, too, that Stephens was disappointed, chewing on his unlit cigar and frowning at the field. Marcus felt bad every time he looked at his shiny new helmet, his expensive pads and cleats. Then there were the letters from his mama pleading for money, protection, a lawyer. Marcus knew you couldn’t get a lawyer for two hundred dollars. Charlene wasn’t speaking to him, even though he’d spent forty dollars on a trip to the mall with her and Skinny. They were shopping for a birthday present for Skinny’s daughter, and he hadn’t counted on buying Charlene a present too. He still wanted the cell phone, and the new girl he’d been seeing wanted him to have a cell phone too, plus a hundred other things he didn’t have.

Tasha Davis was a cheerleader, varsity, seventeen, twin to Wally Davis, the team’s quarterback and captain. Their mama owned a popular restaurant on Route 30 and they lived in a brick split-level house with a neat green lawn and a lawn jockey painted white. School days, if Wally could be persuaded, Tasha would pick Marcus up in her mama’s old Camry. Tasha always drove and teased Marcus, calling him “BK all day” and “city boy.”

Those two are wild, Granny told Marcus. I remember them from when they was little.

Nah, Marcus said.

Used to drive their mama to distraction in that restaurant of hers. A nice woman, but she spoils ‘em.

People change, don’t they?

No, they don’t.

After losing a home game at the end of October, none of his teammates felt like partying. Tasha was waiting for Marcus in her car.

“Where’s Wally?” Marcus said. Normally they shared the car.

“He’s mad,” Tasha said. “He went home.”

Tasha showed Marcus her bottle of Boone’s, and they drove on a dark, snaking road Marcus had never been down. Benched again, Marcus was hardly even tired, and what little about the game he remembered disappeared when he saw where Tasha wanted to put the car: in a little gravel spot behind an old burned-down church. After a few sips of wine poured into a Dixie cup, Tasha let Marcus hold her against him in the front seat of the Camry, and he didn’t give a thought to Charlene. Maybe it was because Tasha was so different: tall, light-skinned, put-together. Haughty, his granny said. But in the car she was sweet, telling Marcus how she liked him because he wasn’t ignorant. Because he’d seen stuff outside of this damn county. She said she hoped she would get in early admission to Grambling State so she wouldn’t have to be separated from Wally.

“You don’t look like twins,” Marcus told her. It was a good excuse, he figured, for looking at her and touching her. “I thought you was cousins at first.”

“We do too!” Tasha said. “We’ve got the same lips, same color and shape of eyes. Same hair if he let his grow.”

“He’s so big,” Marcus said. He pinched Tasha’s tiny waist. “You tiny, girl.”

Tasha squirmed and laughed, pushing his hand away. “That ain’t natural, you know.”

“What?” Marcus tried to kiss her neck.

“Wally being big,” she said, pulling away and widening her eyes in surprise. “You can’t say you don’t know, BK.”

“Don’t know what?”

Tasha leaned in close to Marcus’s ear. “He dopes.” She whispered it breathily, then laughed a hard laugh and took a drink. “He puts a needle in his ass. Sometimes I do it for him.”

Marcus didn’t say anything for a while. He didn’t want Tasha to think he was stupid. Then he said, “I thought he was big.”

“You could get a scholarship like him, you know,” Tasha said. “With your sad story and your speed, you could get all kinds of college money. You just gotta get play time. What you do to bulk up?” Tasha said.

Marcus was quiet, then admitted that he lifted every day and drank the powder drinks he’d bought from GNC.

Tasha wrapped her long fingers around his bicep, squeezed. “I’ll tell him to come talk to you.”

—

The drugs came in a plain manila envelope on a chilly, cloudy day. Wally’s dealer, a white kid with mirrored sunglasses, met Marcus in a hardware store parking lot in Ashland and took his two hundred dollars in a handshake. Inside the envelope were a clear glass bottle, three syringes, some antiseptic swabs, and a narrow bottle of pills. Marcus drove home in Skinny’s truck, checking his rearview mirror the whole way. He dropped off the truck, threw the keys into the floorboard, and walked off the reservation with the envelope under his arm like a school assignment.

At home, he stashed the drugs in his dresser, then under his mattress. He told Granny he wasn’t hungry but made a shake in front of her and took it back to his room. He leaned back in his bed and drank slowly, watching the darkening windows for those big black birds. It was chilly, air seeping in from every crack. He pulled on an Ecko sweatshirt and shook a woolen blanket over his legs.

After a while Granny knocked and pushed the door open. She had a pile of blankets in her arms.

“You warm enough?”

“Sure,” Marcus said.

“Time to cover up these windows soon,” she said.

Marcus asked what she meant.

“With plastic,” she said. “I put plastic sheeting up in the winter to keep the cold out and the warm in. What’s that you’re drinking?” she said.

“It’s a shake the coach said to drink,” Marcus said. He could feel the milk drying in a mustache. “For nutrition.”

“I thought only old people drank those drinks,” she said, looking around for laundry to collect. “You’ll do it for me then? You’ll get the plastic and staple it up?”

Marcus said sure. He asked her about the birds he’d seen—what were they? Owls?

“Buzzards,” Granny said, shaking her head. “Not owls, buzzards. We’ve got a buzzard problem in this county, but they won’t hurt you if you don’t bother them.” She looked around at Marcus’s careful pile of schoolbooks, the CDs stacked on his dresser. “You do keep a neat room,” she added skeptically, as if that were proof he wouldn’t go messing with buzzards.

Marcus stood to close the door behind her.

—

The raid happened on a Saturday, early, while everyone but Marcus was asleep. Marcus was running at Boys and Girls. When he thought of that morning now, he remembered things in separate fields of sensation: the way the sun looked coming up over the Albany Houses, the sound of the LIRR rushing by, his feet slapping the track. He had on new shoes that Briana had bought for him, black and red Nikes, and he remembered their stiffness on his feet. There was a rock in one of his shoes, a tiny pebble near his left heel, and he remembered its pressure, and stopping to remove it. No one was at the track; it wasn’t even seven o’clock. No one was on the street, and the only cars he remembered were livery cabs and yellow cabs on their way down Atlantic Avenue, back to wherever it was that cab drivers lived.

He had run for about an hour. His lungs burned a little, and he had a fine beading of sweat all over his body. His hamstrings tightened as he walked slowly home, drinking water. He thought he’d stretch when he got home, maybe take a nap or do some homework: a five-page personal essay on any topic.

The cops were parked outside, sirens off, when he came inside. It wasn’t unusual to see cops outside his building, but he had a nervous feeling as he walked up the stairs, and a dread thud in his chest when he saw his own apartment door open to the hall. Then he heard Briana crying and saw Papo in his shorts and no shirt, hands cuffed behind his back. The coffee table had been tipped over, a basket of laundry that Marcus had done the night before was upended, underwear strewn from one side of the small living room to the other. Sit on the couch, a black cop said to Marcus. He sat. There were no cushions on the couch, so it was uncomfortably low and hard, and he was close to the floor, where almost everything they owned had been tossed. Marcus could see past the living room to the kitchen, where the fridge and freezer doors stood open, their contents spilled onto the floor. All the drawers had been dumped. In the hallway, mounds of clothes and shoes were piled outside of both rooms.

The mistake, Marcus learned later, had been Briana’s. That was why she was crying. She had a package she was supposed to stash at her cousin’s. She’d been drunk the night before, too lazy to go out and get it done before Papo came by. It had been raining; she put it in the freezer.

Papo had a tattoo on his neck from when he lived in Los Angeles, and a lady cop was asking him about it in an angry, teasing way. His head was thrown back, and he kept saying in a low voice, Shut up, Bri, don’t say nothin’, and I want my lawyer. When she saw Marcus she wailed louder.

And Papo, louder: Come on, Bri. Keep it tight.

It took almost the whole day for them to release Marcus into his aunt’s custody. They must have asked him a thousand questions. The only one he knew how to answer was, where was he? Running, he said. Running the track at Boys and Girls. Even that question, the only one with a simple and truthful answer, they asked over and over again.

The waiting, that’s what Marcus remembered when he thought about that day. Waiting on a wooden chair in a cold, yellow room. When he turned over his own contraband in his hands, when he swabbed the place he’d chosen, when he drew the medicine into the needle.

He thought about waiting, not knowing what was happening. He thought about the last time he saw his mama, her messy hair falling out the elastic, no makeup, a crust of sleep in her eyes. Through the prison shirt he could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Be good, she said, then pressed her fingertips into her eyelids and groaned. It’s me that’s bad. You always been so good.

—

At practice he did high knees, butt kicks, crazy legs. He power-skipped across the field faster than anyone, did power slides, quick feet, carioca. He jumped, hitting his knees against his chest so hard it hurt. If the coach said to do five reps, he did eight. After practice he ran cross-country in the scruffy little patch of woods behind the school. “Don’t overdo it,” Coach Stephens said. “We don’t want some hunter shooting your ugly ass.”

He was like a TV coach—they were all ugly, stupid, sorry sons of bitches at practice. He drilled them on scenarios and plays, and if they didn’t say their answers loud enough, if they didn’t shout them like Marines, he mocked them, got in their faces. But before games he slapped their backs and told them they were the best, and they all bowed their heads to say the Lord’s Prayer.

In the school’s sweat-humid gym he bench-pressed 160 pounds, curled twenty- and thirty-pound weights, did incline sit-ups and leg curls and lat pull-downs. Sometimes at work Skinny would catch him doing squats and shake his big, bearded head. Then he would threaten to make Marcus drink a six-pack of beer, ruin all that work, but instead he fed him hamburgers, lean steaks, soups cooked from scratch. He kept a mug in his freezer and a gallon of milk in the fridge for whenever Marcus came by.

He gained a few more pounds, then leveled off. “You need to buy the whole package,” Wally told him one day on the drive home from practice. “The, the…testosterone pills, the T-400, it works together with the other.”

Wally seemed to always be forgetting what he was about to say. He would snap his finger in the air or thump his head until it came to him, or say “you know” and “the thing.” Marcus once asked Tasha if he’d always been like that and she said, what, you think it’s the drugs? Wally’s just got a lot on his mind.

“How much is that?” Marcus asked.

“One-fifty.”

Marcus shook his head. He’d just sent some money to Briana; he’d bought some groceries for his granny and finally paid his textbook fees. You didn’t have to pay textbook fees at Boys and Girls, just like you didn’t have to say “free lunch” at the cashier in the cafeteria. There wasn’t a cashier. Lunch was just free. “I don’t have it.”

“I could loan you—”

“No,” Marcus said.

“If you had some, you know, connections, there’s hardly any competition around here.”

It took Marcus a moment to understand what he was saying. They turned onto Marcus’s road and Wally stopped the car. By now the road was deeply rutted, and Wally wouldn’t drive his mama’s Camry down it. Marcus made ready to get out. The tops of the pine trees swayed in the wind. Marcus zipped his jacket. “No, I don’t know nobody.”

“You sure?” Wally asked. “‘Cause I know you came down here pretty quick. You just have to get the stuff, that’s all. Anything. Some weed, some coke. You could sell crack. Crack for crackers.”

“I’m sure, man,” Marcus said. He got out and leaned in to thank Wally for the ride.

“My sister, she’s hard to please for long,” Wally said. “‘Specially if you’re broke.”

—

Homecoming was late this year; Tasha was on the committee that picked the song and the theme. She told Marcus he’d need a patriotic vest and tie for his suit. The theme was “Red, White and Blue”; the song was “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” by Toby Keith. Tasha had fought hard for “Air Force Ones” by Nelly. She told the other cheerleaders, most of them white, that it was patriotic, too, but they didn’t buy it. She gave in, picked a red dress, strapless, with shimmery white insets in the skirt. She thought Marcus would be pleased by this theme; it was in memory of 9/11. The year before, she said, the memory had been too fresh, so it was time they did something. That year the song was “Country Grammar” by Nelly.

Marcus thought it was funny how serious everyone here got about 9/11. There were FDNY and NYPD T-shirts and caps for sale at the gas stations, plus “These Colors Don’t Run” and “Never Forget” bumper stickers. He didn’t tell Tasha how nobody he knew at home thought much about it; at Boys and Girls, they’d talked and laughed as usual during the moments of silence, and never paused to say the pledge or sing any anthems.

Marcus didn’t have a suit, but he didn’t tell Tasha about that either. He needed one anyway, he figured, for his mother’s trial, but he needed so many other things too: the cell phone, free weights for his room at Granny’s, plastic sheeting for the windows, more money to send to Briana. The Mercedes wasn’t done yet—she still ran rough, and her body was a patchwork of primer spots. Skinny said hell, drive his kid’s MG—it was almost completely restored, Skinny’s best work in years. The MG wasn’t exactly what Marcus had pictured himself driving up to pick up Tasha, but the paint job was so shiny he could see his reflection in it. He squinted at himself in his long T-shirt and coat, pictured a sharp gray suit in its place. Marcus would be seventeen in March; he was almost a man.

—

He and Wally got the Ecstasy in D.C. from a club-owner friend of Wally’s dealer. Wally picked Marcus as partner, he said, as a marketing maneuver, that and loyalty to his sister. They would tell the kids in King William that it was from New York, let Marcus do most of the selling. Waiting outside Passions II in his mother’s Camry, just off a busy avenue in the northeast part of the city, Wally tapped his fingers against his knees and wobbled his legs, nearly shaking with nervousness. Marcus knew it was also his experience in cities that made him partner. The neighborhoods they’d driven through to get there didn’t look much like the worst neighborhoods Marcus had been to in Brooklyn, with their towering brown-colored projects and elevated railroads and truck depots ringed with high, razor wire fences. Everything was low and crouching, ground-oriented instead of sky-oriented. The buildings were two-story frame houses that leaned into one another or crumbled into empty lots. Next to their car, a seagull picked at a McDonald’s bag.

“Man, what is it about seagulls and the ghetto?” Marcus said. “Those must be some lost-ass birds.”

Wally didn’t say anything, so Marcus went on: “Maybe they’re looking for some bootleg DVDs.”

When Wally didn’t laugh Marcus knew he must be really nervous. He had a lot at stake: the scholarship, for one, plus his mama’d probably kill him if she found out he even drove the car to D.C. She thought he and Marcus were going to Richmond to shop for the homecoming dance. Marcus thought about what he had at stake. Not much, he guessed—a job running errands for an ex-junkie. His granny would sure be mad, but his mama and daddy couldn’t say much, could they? He envied Wally, with his big muscles and his nice house and all he had to lose.

When the metal door opened and a man in dreads waved them inside, Marcus nodded at Wally to reassure him. They didn’t say anything as they got out. Wally had to close his car door twice to make it stick.

The nightclub was cavernous and empty. On a landing a DJ was setting up his equipment. The perimeter of the room was set with dirty couches. There were smeared, hand-printed mirrors along one wall. Marcus and Wally sat at the bar and waited for Wally’s dealer’s friend. Wally’s dealer had said to put the money in a FedEx envelope. Wally took the envelope from his backpack and set it on the bar, then changed his mind and put it back.

Marcus was expecting someone who looked like Papo, or the men who used to sit in their trucks on Nostrand Avenue with a thick chain and a ring on almost every finger. Instead they were approached by a muscular man of about forty wearing a lavender dress shirt. He smiled broadly at them. “You must be Marcus and Wally. I’m Tony.” He sat down next to Wally and asked the man in dreadlocks to bring them three Cokes. Marcus saw Wally’s hands shake as he handed him the envelope.

Tony looked in the envelope for a long moment. He nodded to the dreadlocked man.

“I hear you boys are football players,” he said, standing. His voice was friendly and calm.

“Yeah,” Wally said, straightening up like he was a recruiter.

“I played,” he said thoughtfully. “But that was a long time ago. I had a coach that would bust your ass. They still doin’ that?”

“Sure,” Wally said.

“I hated that motherfucker.”

Tony bounced his fist lightly on the bar, like he’d cleared something up. “Well, thanks for stopping by, boys. You’re always welcome here. Don’t forget your radio.”

On the bar a few feet down from them had appeared a small black nylon bag; it might have held a CD player. Wally picked it up as they went out.

Fifty-fifty, that was how they would split it.

—

Everybody had a part to play. Wally had to secure the connection, pass the word around school. He started by giving a couple of pills to Percy Wills, a big redneck everybody knew smoked weed after practice, and L.T. Betts, a stoner kid who hung around the field waiting for his girlfriend to be done with color guard. “Be more at homecoming,” Wally said. “But not for everybody and not from me. I got these from Marcus Conway. He says he got some more, but only for those that can keep they mouths shut. Forty a pill, have yourself a good ol’ time like they do in New York.”

Marcus had to look sharp, keep his clothes clean, run the ball. He had to buy new clothes for the dance, get an all-blue corsage for Tasha, wash the MG on loan from Skinny. Granny didn’t want him driving it at first; she frowned into its paint job, saying no young man needed such a shiny car, but she gave in after he told her he could keep it until Sunday, to drive her to church.

The game was on Friday, the dance was Saturday. Before the game and without Granny’s knowing, Skinny cooked dinner for Marcus, Tasha, Wally, and Wally’s girlfriend, Shay: barbecue, coleslaw, and potato salad and sweet tea for the girls, homemade energy bars and milk for the players. Granny had made it clear that after the borrowed car and the dates, Marcus was to stay home some, to drive her to Tappahannock for shopping and to her Ladies’ Circle but other than that to stay home and do his homework. But even she wasn’t hard enough to spoil homecoming week. She’d seen his father through it, after all, twenty-some years before.

Jerome had been a football player, too, though he didn’t get to play as much as Marcus. But as the season advanced, as Marcus ran yard after yard, Jerome just got better and better. The way Granny told it, racism was the only thing that kept Jerome Conway from the pros. He’d been a wide receiver—and fast, Granny said. “Like lightning,” she’d say, shaking her head as if at a driver going too fast down her road. Marcus hadn’t grown up hearing any of these stories; he knew his dad played, but it was never anything he made a big deal over.

Skinny, he was another story. He’d been at King William about ten years before Jerome, and he claimed he never played a single sport, not in any organized way. Marcus thought he must have regretted it; how else to explain the homemade granola bars, the time it must have taken to clear his table and four mismatched chairs of paper and tools and parts catalogues? The barbecue sauce he’d made for their dinner was a homemade, secret recipe. Marcus didn’t think he’d ever had homemade barbecue sauce. It smelled delicious.

“Aw, man, just a taste,” Wally said as his sister laughed and licked her fingers in front of him. It was almost time for them to go. Skinny was brown-bagging the plentiful leftovers for after the game. “After you’ve kicked King and Queen’s ass good,” he said. “Not before.”

Marcus hadn’t said much at dinner, but he wasn’t sweating the game. King and Queen would be an easy defeat—both their good players were hurt, and they’d beaten them bad in September. With all of them crowded into Skinny’s kitchen and Skinny bustling around them like someone’s mom in dark glasses and low-slung Wranglers, Marcus felt anxious and embarrassed, the way he’d felt when his track coach came over to his apartment at the Brevoort Houses and Briana had just gotten up from a nap. Did he have to smoke in this tiny-ass house? Marcus coughed dramatically and his hand back and forth in front of his face. The room suddenly felt too small, crazy-small, and he thought how Tasha and Wally must see it. A run-down shack with a fat Indian drinking himself to death. A coffin. Marcus craned his neck to read the time on the stove’s clock.

“Better go soon,” Marcus said.

But Wally wasn’t listening. “This’d be a chill place for an after-party tomorrow night,” he said. He stood and walked to the room’s only window, onto the field across from Skinny’s. It was true; the field across the road was empty and open, inviting. “Shit,” he said. “What’s that?”

Skinny had been drinking—a lot, even for him. He was slurring his words, and he stumbled as he moved to stand next to Wally. “Goddamn it,” he said, grabbing a broom and rushing outside. The little house shook as he opened the front door and stomped onto the front steps, waving his broom.

“What the hell?” Tasha asked.

“Buzzards,” Skinny announced. He seemed soberer, more awake. “Can’t keep ‘em off my property.”

“They hunting something?” Wally asked.

“Buzzards are scavengers,” Skinny said. “They like dead meat. Rotting meat.”

Everybody looked at the barbecue. “No, not that,” Skinny said. “Something must have died down there, on the riverbank.” Marcus didn’t admit that his house had buzzards too.

“So,” Wally said. “Cops come around here, like at night?”

Marcus interrupted. “We can’t—”

“No, it’s all right,” Skinny said. “I don’t think I remember them coming by lately. It’s pretty far from the Fas Mart, pretty far off Route 30. I suppose if you wanted to come here and drink some beer there wouldn’t be any harm in it. I can’t be responsible, but I can try to keep an eye on things.”

Marcus was shaking his head even as Tasha and Shay and Wally were grinning and planning and thanking Skinny. In his excitement, Skinny spilled a full can of Budweiser across the cluttered little dinette.

But then Marcus started thinking about Tasha in her cheering uniform, Tasha after the game, and about borrowing the MG. And finally about the game, about running, and suddenly he forgot to be worried.

—

Marcus had been nervous and absentminded at the pregame warm-ups, and the coach yelled at him to get it together. Sorry, sorry, he’d mumbled too low for the coach to hear.

Maybe you don’t want to win? The coach asked. Maybe you just wanna hang out for the month of December, huh? Do some Christmas shopping?

The game started badly, with the Chargers quickly shutting down the Cavs’ offense and getting the ball back in under a minute. They looked bigger on the field than Marcus remembered. They were a team of mainly black guys, while the Cavs were about half and half. They had a reputation for playing dirty, but Marcus had chalked that up to racism from the coaches. Now, looking at them across the line of scrimmage, he wondered. It seemed like they were all looking at him, marking him. He squatted down, touched his finger to the dry, chilly grass. They were at their own thirty-yard line, and Marcus could see Stephens standing with his arms crossed.

The Chargers blitzed on first down. Wally overthrew a pass to Martin James, who had always been short on speed. On second down, they managed to advance only two yards.

On the sideline, Stephens shook his head in disgust. He signaled for Wally to hand off to Marcus.

The ball was light in Marcus’s hands, slippery almost. One of the Chargers’ linebackers was already around the Cavs’ line. Marcus ran straight at the sideline, straight at Stephens, the linebacker on his tail. Then he pulled up, spun, and felt the linebacker drop off behind. He ran, expecting the hit from the safety, knowing he’d make first down. The hit was low, and he came down heavily on his chest.

When he stood up, he saw that everybody in the stands was on their feet, glad for some good news. Nobody had come out for track meets at Boys and Girls, only a few parents and relatives for some of the older, star runners, the ones with college scholarships and plans. Briana had never gone to one, and nobody had said much about college, but Marcus always thought that would happen later, in eleventh or twelfth grade. He looked for Tasha, saw her pompoms in the air. He swore he could see Skinny’s big gut shaking with his clapping.

The Cavs drove down the field, and Wally’s touchdown pass connected. The Chargers responded with a touchdown of their own, but missed the extra point. At halftime the score was 7-6. Stephens wasn’t happy. Are we going to lose our own damn homecoming game to a bunch of boys who can barely count to fourth down? he said.

Wally’s passes had been straight and true—a girl could catch them, Marcus thought—but he hung his head with the rest of them. Then they prayed and Wally asked if he could say something.

“Assuming the good Lord sees right to let us win,” he said, standing up in the middle of them. His shoulders were massive in their pads. “Assuming that the Lord is with us, I just want to be there to do His will. I want to do right by y’all, to put the ball in the air and get it down the field.

“We’re gonna have the ball back when we go out there, and I want you to slam ‘em. I want you to come down hard on ‘em, I want to see ‘em spittin’ out mud.”

He went on for a while longer.

Marcus was silent. He’d been slapped on the back by a few players and told he was doing right by the coach. He could hear the band playing “We Will Rock You” on the field.

It was colder after halftime, the sky blacker behind the floodlights. They charged forward on the kickoff. A white kid named Jim Shelton caught it at his belly and managed to get it to the Cavs’ forty-yard line.

They set up to run the ball and Marcus felt all eyes on him as the other team hunkered down. Marcus carried the ball across the fifty-yard line, into the Chargers’ territory. No one had laid a hand on him. He felt like he could outrun anybody on the field.

The Chargers blitzed, and the Cavs ran a draw. As several Chargers rushed from the outside, Marcus took the handoff from Wally and ran straight up the middle, juking a linebacker and winding up in the end zone. He watched the fans on the Cavs’ side of the stadium come out of their seats. He saw the cheerleaders’ feet leave the ground.

—

On his next carry the linebackers ran his face mask into the turf. The Chargers had failed to get anything on their last possession and they were gunning for him. It took a long time for someone to take his weight off Marcus’s helmet. Cleats sank into his leg.

He retched once. Then he stood up, looked at Wally, and hollered. Wally hollered back. The pain was superficial, a condition of his strength. The strong were going to get knocked down; they were going to have people coming at them from all sides. They had to be ready, they had to be looking for the hit. That was what Briana should have known when she put the cocaine behind the frozen pizzas. That was what Papo should have known when he trusted Briana—what Marcus did know, now that he’d shaken her. That’s what Jerome should have known when he came out only to go back in weak and tired after a couple of weeks of drinking and looking people up, for robbing the same bodega he always robbed.

Marcus saw that now. The bruising he felt was just on top. Underneath, where it mattered, he was muscle and heart.

The Cavaliers won the game by two touchdowns. Marcus had carried the ball eleven times. Tasha jumped into his arms when the game was over, and Skinny and Granny were standing together at the fence, smiling at him.

—

Marcus slept late on Saturday, read twenty history pages without committing a word to memory, and finally showered at around four. He soaped his body tenderly, massaging all the sore parts until the hot water ran out. He still had to pick up Tasha’s corsage and put gas in the car. He had to organize his thoughts, play back every moment in the game before it disappeared. First he remembered them in order of importance, starting with his touchdown after halftime; then he remembered them in chronological order. When he’d done that three or four times he turned his thoughts to the dance. There was money to be made.

He’d thought that they could keep the pills in the car to keep from dealing inside, but Wally said no, that wouldn’t work. You could only come into the dance once; when you left, you left for good. Marcus wasn’t eager to deal the drugs out in the open like that, but Wally said not to worry. They kept the gym lights dim. There’d be so many people that no one would even notice. Plus, didn’t kids at Marcus’s school start dealing when they were, like, eleven? Didn’t they deal in the bathrooms?

Marcus told him the story of a third grader he’d known way back when who sold dime bags in summer school. He remembered the runner he knew in fifth grade who wore a diamond in each ear and attacked the principal at lunch, the ninth graders who dealt in gym class. Wally listened with a bemused and unsurprised look on his face. Marcus didn’t mention that he knew all these stories because the kids had gotten caught.

Tasha would be putting up the decorations. She would be wearing that tight velvet tracksuit of hers and standing on a chair, her hair done already, calling out orders to the other girls. It made Marcus smile to think about her. He wondered if she was thinking about tonight too—if she’d be ready to go all the way. He wondered if she felt nervous about that, or about the drugs. Probably not, Marcus thought. Things came easy to Tasha. She’d already talked on and on about being crowned homecoming king and queen. The way she figured it, her toughest competition would be Wally, and Wally’s Shay was too shy to be queen. Tasha was the most beautiful senior girl who was also smart and classy, and Marcus didn’t really look like a sophomore, not anymore. Just have yourself a good time, Marcus told Tasha. Don’t be thinking about that.

No, she said, looking at him. Not like a sophomore at all.

Doing his errands, though, Marcus thought she might be right. He was congratulated by three different people at the florist’s, and asked when championships were when he gassed up the MG. How many more games would they have to win to make the championships? He was asked that question a half-dozen times; everybody knew the answer. Two more games.

Granny fed him a sandwich and took his picture alone and with the car; Tasha’s mom took about fifty pictures on the stairs, in front of the house, on the lawn, beside the car. Marcus wanted to drive Tasha and Wally to Granny’s house so they could take more pictures over there, but Tasha said no, there was no time, their reservations at Outback Steakhouse were at seven and they were already late. She’d love to see you, though, Marcus said, looking at Tasha. She was gorgeous—tall, slim and curvy both, her hair done up high and glossy, sparkly eye makeup. He thought he’d never seen such a beautiful girl before, and he worried about never getting a copy of the photo to send back home. We can’t be late, Tasha said, hurrying him to the car. We’ll see her after.

Your mama can get double prints?

Tasha laughed. What? You think we’re never gonna look this good again?

—

Music was pouring out of the gym. Marcus said he didn’t know country music could get so loud. Don’t worry, Tasha said. I rigged it so they play one song for them, one song for us.

And what do you mean by them and us? Wally teased. She rolled her eyes.

Red, white, and blue streamers brushed Marcus’s face as they entered the gym through the double doorways. Tasha took his hand and showed him the balloons, the banners, the tablecloths, the punch. Taped over the exit doors was a giant painting of the Twin Towers at night. Someone had painted hundreds of square yellow windows in each of the towers. They looked like giant tenements. Underneath, in cursive, were the words Never Forget.

“See?” she said, leading him to the wall of collapsed bleachers. “All the girls painted a poster with the different player numbers.” She pointed out the neatest, most elegant poster—number 22, done in sparkling gold paint. “I painted yours.”

Marcus nodded. Everybody was looking at them. He scoped out an empty table in the corner and took his seat. His knees bounced a little; he hid them under the table and told himself to be cool.

Wally walked off to get them some punch and say a few words to some people. He’d told Marcus to expect about ten customers. If each bought two hits, that was eight hundred dollars—four for Marcus, four for Wally. That wasn’t so bad, but it just paid for dinner and Marcus’s suit and Tasha’s corsage and gas, with only a little left over. If they did better, well, that would be good. He had forty pills.

From where he sat, Marcus could see his history teacher and the home ec teacher, the principal and his wife. The youth minister was there, plus the cheerleading coach and her husband. Seven chaperones, as far as he could tell. They were all busy talking, lingering by the punch bowl. Marcus had heard rumors about spiking the punch bowl; apparently, this was something that had happened in the past.

Marcus could see Charlene standing with another boy, a junior he recognized from track practice. He was also in Marcus’s technology class; he was stupid and lazy, couldn’t decipher an electrical circuit to save his life. What was Charlene doing with that guy? Trayvon, that was his name. She wore a lacy, strapless white dress that was too long for her. It trailed the floor when she walked. Her hair was sprayed up into a fan on the back of her head and Marcus could see tiny, sparkling rhinestones stuck to its surface, catching the light. She cut her eyes at Marcus.

“What you looking at, baby?” Tasha stood before him, smiling broadly. She held out a cup of red punch.

Marcus shook his head and focused on the plastic cup in his hand. The ice cubes were white and blue; where they melted the punch was starting to turn an oily-looking purple.

Tasha leaned in close to him. “Don’t be nervous,” she whispered. “We’ll relax later.”

Marcus put his hands on either side of her tiny waist and drew her nearer. “Will we?”

“We will.”

His first customer was L.T. It was strange to see him dressed up in a suit. The tweed jacket and pants didn’t match, and his hair had been slicked back with gel. He wore a narrow-collared white shirt and a skinny black tie. He sat down next to Marcus. “That shit was awesome,” he said.

Marcus nodded, leaned forward, and looked around. The adults were all the way on the other side of the room, probably talking about church or Costco or whatever it was they talked about. They were near the bathrooms, though. It would be better, Marcus figured, to hand over the pills right here.

“Seriously,” L.T. said. His eyes were on his girlfriend, who was dancing in a circle of other girls. She was a plump girl in a short red dress. “Britney and I never did it like that before. I mean, she was wild, man.”

Marcus held up his hand. “I don’t need to know all that. How much you want?”

L.T. shook his hand, passing him eighty dollars. “That was an awesome game last night.”

Marcus set two pills down on the table, under a napkin. “Thanks,” he said.

“You know Brandon and Shaun an’ them?”

Marcus nodded, though he didn’t. Wally came over, fresh from the dance floor. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and sat down, turned to L.T. “You got friends who want some?”

L.T. nodded.

“Send just one over. Tell them to be cool, act like they’re coming to talk to Marcus about football. Shake his hand, pat his back, shit like that.”

He looked at the clock; it was nine-thirty. “He’s done at ten-thirty.”

For the next hour, Marcus was congratulated by every stoner, redneck, doper, and druggie-preppie at King William High. He danced only once with Tasha, a slow dance. Her back felt warm and strong under his hands; he could feel her breasts as she leaned against his chest. She lay her head on his shoulder and whispered the dirtiest things he’d ever heard from a girl into his ears. Then he walked back to his chair and waited for ten thirty to come.

Some people he told to take just one; others he dealt to silently, accepting their praise stone-faced and serious. Wally kept coming by, even though he’d said he wanted to stay out of the dealing part. He told a few people to meet them out at the reservation by Skinny’s. He said they’d play better music; there’d be beer there too. Between customers, Marcus said he didn’t think that was such a good idea, but Wally told him not to be so uptight; it’d be fine.

The first person to lose her cool was Wally’s girlfriend. Giggling, she spilled punch on Wally’s lapel and tried to lick it off. She spilled some more into her own cleavage and tried to sit on his lap, then Marcus’s. When that didn’t work she settled for Tasha’s lap. She leaned her head back into Tasha’s neck and moaned a little.

“You are so fucking stupid, Wally,” Tasha said.

Shay looked plastered. The strapless bodice of her dress was askew. Her hair had fallen out of its careful arrangement. Her lipstick was worn away from kissing on Wally so that only the dark liner remained. Normally she was cute.

“Borderline retarded,” Tasha said, bouncing her knee. Shay squealed. “Get her out of here.”

“I can’t,” Wally said, nodding toward the exit doors. The principal was dancing with his wife to “Unforgettable.” “We can all go when they get up on stage to do the awards,” Wally said. “We’ll slip out.”

“Fuck that, Wally,” Tasha said. “I spent two hundred dollars on my dress, not to mention my hair and nails. I am not leaving early.”

“Here,” Wally said, shaking out a napkin and throwing it over his sister’s head. “You’re the goddamn queen already.”

Tasha snatched the napkin off her head. “Don’t make Marcus beat the shit out of you.”

Wally started to laugh, his broad shoulders convulsing under fine charcoal pinstriping. The song ended and the principal and his wife bowed while the students clapped. Wally was still laughing when the next song started and everybody ran onto the floor.

“Oh Lord,” Tasha said. “Look.”

Two of the cheerleaders, Megan Trice and Stacey Adams, were grinding each other to the opening, censored-for-radio bars of “Back That Ass Up.” It had been a cheerleading favorite, though no one would let the cheerleaders perform the routine they choreographed. Near the stage, a freshman was wiggling out of her dress.

“Hey,” Shay said, sitting up and frowning. “Why’d you think you and Marcus will be king and queen? Wally played good last night too.”

“You better hope they don’t pick you, you dumb slut,” Tasha muttered.

“Tash,” Wally said.

“You better hope they don’t pick you, too,” Tasha said. “If I was you I’d be over at the ballot box right now, voting for my non-fucked-up sister.”

Before the night was over, two couples were thrown out—one for making out in the hallway to the bathroom, the other for trying to have sex under an uncollapsed portion of the bleachers. The home ec teacher found both of them and marched them outside, but seemed to suspect nothing. Marcus didn’t know either couple well enough to be sure they wouldn’t snitch, but they hadn’t looked embarrassed as they walked out.

“Don’t worry,” Wally said. “You think they’ll care about missing the rest of this boring-ass dance? They’re about to wear each other out.”

In a little while, Marcus was the king and Tasha was the queen. The crowns were plastic, and the comb that held his in place bit uncomfortably into Marcus’s carefully groomed head. Wally had sneaked off with Shay; they were probably in the back of the Camry by now. From the stage Marcus could see the yellow and black disposable camera he’d brought along sitting unused on the table.

—

Newly crowned, Tasha wouldn’t hear of going off by herself with Marcus. And she couldn’t just leave her brother, could she? She didn’t want him to drive anyway; she’d take Shay in the Camry, and Wally could ride with Marcus. Wally had just taken a hit, and he wanted to go to the reservation with everybody else. Come on, Tasha said, let’s have some fun.

Marcus was relieved that the night had gone off without more problems. He and Wally each had more than six hundred dollars. He could send some of that to Briana, use the rest to buy his next round of steroids. When the season was over he’d spend time lifting and running, and by next year he’d get scouted. In the car as they made their way onto the little gravel road, Wally was talking about what was next.

“I mean, this could be a regular weekend thing,” he said, “if we get some more stuff. We could get some pills, some coke, maybe some heroin.”

Marcus thought about Skinny, what he’d said about being a junkie. “I don’t want to deal heroin,” he said quietly.

“Okay,” Wally said. “We got to give the people what they want, though. Am I right?”

Both hands steady on the wheel, Marcus repeated himself.

The reservation had no streetlights. They parked alongside a field and stumbled out of the MG. Two football fields away they could see Skinny’s little shacks, one light shining through the fencing. Marcus looked up; the sky was creamy with stars, more stars than he’d ever seen in his life. He thought about how he didn’t know any of their names. He couldn’t even find the Big Dipper.

“Whatcha looking for?” Tasha asked. Her eyes were shining; she smiled and looked up at him. He hoped that she hadn’t taken a hit.

“It’s right there,” Tasha said, pointing. She took his head in her hands and pointed him in the right direction. He could feel her long, red nails grazing the skin on his face. “The Big Dipper. Right?”

Shay fell back into the long dead grass of the field. Wally pretended to tackle her. Far away, then closer, they could hear the whoops and hollers of rednecks advancing across the field in their trucks. Marcus looked up at the stars, a whole bewildering sky full of them.

Above Skinny’s house, dark shapes were circling and swooping low, grazing the treetops. The field was filling up with people now, but nobody else seemed to notice the stars or the birds. After a while, Marcus forgot about them too.

—

By the time Marcus gets around to winterizing his granny’s house, it is December, and it is the last good thing he does for her. He approaches the task methodically, measuring and cutting the heavy plastic sheeting and laying it flat on the frozen ground outside each window. He starts with Granny’s bedroom window. He climbs a rickety wooden ladder leaned against the windowsill, hoists up the plastic, and rests his borrowed staple gun on the sill.

She is at church. Through the casement panes he can see her little iron bedstead, the smoothed sheets and quilts just so, the pillowcases taut and ironed. He can see her framed picture of Jesus on the wall, his face thin and sorrowful inside the cheap, ornate frame. There is her nightstand with its windup clock, her hooked rug, her white wooden dresser. Her closet door is open and he can see her rack of limp gray and navy blue dresses.

It took just days for Marcus to get caught. One of the football players’ girlfriends went too far at the bonfire with another guy, and the football player snitched. Marcus was dragged into the principal’s office during Algebra II the Wednesday after homecoming. By the end of the school day, when he should have been practicing, getting ready for the championships, he was at the police station in Aylette. All alone—no mention of Wally, who was in that very same Algebra II class. He hadn’t even looked up.

The principal had gone on about fresh starts and taking people’s goodwill for granted. He’d shaken his head over the championships. He said Marcus might never get another opportunity like that again, but it didn’t sound like it meant much to him. Think about all those people you hurt, he said, as he handed over the expulsion hearing paperwork he’d already prepared. Think about all they were trying to do for you.

Marcus had looked at the thin stack of papers the principal handed across but did not take them. Wally. Where the fuck was Wally? Sitting in Algebra II, right where he was when Marcus left, hunched over his notebook like those x‘s and y‘s held some kind of secret. Marcus puffed out a long sigh and leaned back in his chair, slouching to one side to show that those papers didn’t matter any more to him than they did to the principal. He lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes like he’d seen kids do at Boys and Girls, the kids who waited with their mothers or grandmothers in a line of chairs outside the office, the kids going out on long-term suspensions, expulsions. He didn’t say a thing.

And the principal had cleared his throat and set the papers down, very gently, at the edge of his desk, so that an inch or so of paper hung off the edge and Marcus could snatch them up without touching anything. Marcus kept his eyes slitted until they burned, shifted back further in his seat. The chair scraped the tile floor and the principal flinched. You’re not a bad kid, he tried, looking over Marcus’s shoulder to the door. Marcus blinked twice and the burning stopped. He took the papers.

Think about all those people you hurt. Marcus didn’t think he’d hurt anyone except Granny, and even she seemed unsurprised at how things turned out. What he’d done hadn’t touched Wally or his scholarship, and Tasha would find another boyfriend easy, some college boy most likely. Marcus tried to call them after he was home again, but he just kept getting their mother’s voice on the machine. He’d called and called until finally Tasha picked up. Don’t call here, she said. Please. He hung up without saying a word to her.

Marcus thinks a lot about Skinny. Skinny was the one who bailed him out; he finished and sold the Mercedes himself to cover the cost. Skinny said he’d have sold the MG too if they needed. Naw, Marcus told him, that’s your son’s car. Skinny said the boy didn’t want the car. He wanted something else, something newer. He had this look on his face that made Marcus hurt inside. Just keep it, Marcus said.

Marcus has a state-appointed attorney, a woman he met in person once, when she brought him the plea agreement. If he didn’t take it he’d be looking at a felony sentencing in an adult court. Did Marcus know what a felony meant, the attorney asked in her brisk way. He did, he said. No military service, no voting. Those weren’t things he’d counted on or looked forward to.

No, she corrected him. It meant time in prison. Years. And there were two of them. Sale of a Schedule I controlled substance. Five years. Within a school zone. One more year. She looked down at her yellow legal pad. Marcus could go to circuit court and risk six years in an adult jail or take sixteen months in a juvenile facility in Richmond, and on his eighteenth birthday, he would be free. The attorney said they have a high school at the juvenile hall. You can take the classes you need to graduate, or you can get released from compulsory attendance and just study for your GED.

Would Marcus’s mother or father be there to read over the plea agreement? I brought it home and they read it, he said. They said go ahead and sign it.

She moved to sit next to him while he read over the statement of facts, an outline, hour by hour, of the night of the homecoming dance. He read it so slowly she asked him if he wanted her to read it aloud. Asked it delicately, like he couldn’t read well. He said no ma’am, polite like he was taught to be, though he was thinking something else. He picked up the pen and she showed him where to sign.

Would there be a track to run on at the juvenile facility? She wasn’t sure but told him she’d check. So far she hasn’t checked.

He lifts up the plastic and fits it over the window. He staples the corners first, smoothing out the gaps and wrinkles. He holds the staple gun against the worn window frame and presses hard. It makes a loud, echoing wa-pow.

When he is done with Granny’s bedroom window, he does the kitchen, the living room, and the bathroom. He trims the extra plastic with a razor so it doesn’t look sloppy. He’s saved his room, with all its windows, for last.

There is his foldout bed, his little desk with all his half-written letters on top: to Khalil, to Briana. To Jerome, who told him the truth a long time ago: no sense in fighting it. There are his schoolbooks in the corner. His Walkman on the dresser. His closet filled with clothes.

It’s cold. Marcus blows on his bare hands, zips his jacket, and wonders who will look after his things. He fits the plastic neat and tight over the old windows. Wa-pow, wa-pow. If you don’t pull the plastic tight across the window, cold air will get in.

When he’s done he presses his face up close to the plastic. You can’t see anything except the vague dark shapes of furniture and doorways. He goes inside, where, he tells himself, it is already warmer. In his room he lies on the little couch and puts his headphones on but doesn’t turn on the music. He looks up at the windows, which stretch around three sides of his room. From the inside he can see a little better, but there isn’t much to see after all. If he’d stayed in Brooklyn he could be practicing for spring meets, running on a track that this time of year was almost empty. If he’d won some meets, who knows, maybe he could have thought about scholarships, college. Football had been a mistake from the start. He wasn’t a good strategist, like Wally, anticipating plays, looking ahead. Nobody he knew was like that. They were runners like him. Sprinters looking back from the finish line.

Tonight Skinny is making dinner for Marcus while Granny visits a church friend. He has to sneak out to see anyone. He’s going to be good for his last weeks with her; she is making sure of it. Good: It’s a word she still hangs on to. It means nothing to Marcus now. It’s a lie, something you tell little kids about but you know they’ll figure out the truth later, like Santa Claus and college. Nobody’s good, Marcus thinks, but some people are tolerable.

The wind pushes the plastic against the windows, releases it, and pushes it again like breathing. Down the road Skinny’s been cooking for days in his tiny kitchen, making chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce and sweet potato pie. He’s calling this an early Christmas dinner, like Christmas can be moved from one date to another. He’s frying a turkey in an oil drum and he’s got pictures, two whole rolls he took at the homecoming game. A lot of the shots are blurry and dark, but he and Marcus are going to look at every one of them, they’re going to take their time, and when Marcus goes home again he’ll have his own set to keep.

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Belle Boggs grew up in King William County, Virginia and has since lived in California, New York, and Washington, D.C. She has worked at many difficult jobs involving children, including inner-city schoolteacher and amusement-park bear. She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine, and her writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, the Oxford American, and Best New American Voices. “Homecoming” will appear in Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked short stories that was selected by Percival Everett as the winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize in Fiction. Mattaponi Queen will be published by Graywolf Press in June 2010. Belle lives outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina with her husband, Richard Allen, and their cat, Loretta.

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