This all happened years ago. Or is about to.

I liked Lane Wilder. Everyone liked Lane Wilder; it was difficult not to. To dislike a man so modest and congenial, so sincere, a person of such incontrovertible niceness, had to show fault in the appraiser alone. In the competitive, sharp-tongued circle we ran in— and the one-upmanship could be fierce—Lane took the brunt of a lot of ribbing and ridicule, not all of it good-natured. But even Alan Ryson and Ted Damon, guys who could be as ruthless sitting down for a drink with you as they were working the trading-room floor or in the boardrooms, had to admit he was a true gent, one of the good guys—a dying breed. People liked Lane Wilder and they were right to do so. I liked Lane and I had been sleeping with his wife for the better part of a year.

I first saw her at the party for the Colstons’ second anniversary. Jennifer was standing by the baby grand piano Marcus had purchased along with the condo and which was being played for the very first time by a hired musician wearing a tuxedo. She held a long-stemmed champagne flute with a red raspberry swimming inside, her other hand and fingers kneading the dangles of an earring, and was wearing a carnelian-colored dress, framed as she stood against a white window scrim and watched intently the man work the keys. Her focus was broken when Becky Colston touched her on the elbow, and I watched the two women half embrace and kiss each other’s cheeks, champagne bobbing behind each backless dress. They could easily have been sisters; as my friendship with the husbands trickled into gradual acquaintanceship with the wives, I would be regularly struck by the strong resemblance the women bore to one another: Becky Colston was at least as tall as Brenda Cleghorn, who was six feet, without heels; Brenda had prominent cheekbones and a thin cut of nose embroidered by narrow nostrils, as did Eva Barker; Eva looked somewhat like Ashley Ryson and Ashley Damon; and Jennifer in turn looked like them all. The apropos term for their collective physical type was willowy, a dendrological kind of word—long, lean limbs, slender fingers and toes, vines of hair that grazed branched shoulders (most of them sharing the same stylist).

Of course, she had traits particular to her alone—large, periwinkle blue eyes, for instance, which always appeared disconcertingly on the verge of tears.

Lane was sequestered in a nearby corner, held captive by Alan Ryson. Lane’s face was red—always he seemed in a perpetual blush—and he was not a man well endowed with hair, so up to the crown of his head his skin was tinted the shade of a cherub.

Alan picked off a scotch and water from a passing tray and went back to work on him: “Laney, listen to me, listen to me. You need a good nickname. Something solid. All the top guys have one. Danny Boy, tell him I’m right.”

I had joined them. “I think Laney is a nickname,” I said.

“No, no—that doesn’t count. That’s run-of-the-mill. We need to find our boy something choice.” Alan threaded a hollow ice cube with his tongue and tapped at the back of his teeth. “Wild Man, maybe. Or how about Wild Thing?”

Lane grinned, ducking his head and shuffling his feet. “Sure, Alan, we could go with Wild Man. Or Wild Thing. Either one.”

“It’s no fun for us if you like the name, Laney. So nix both of those. Now let me think…”

Jennifer wandered up to us, standing beside me. Alan turned around. “Jen, we’re trying to come up with a handle for your man here. Give us a hand.” She looked at her husband and passed a kind smile to him.

“A handle,” she repeated. “How do you mean?” Her speech, like her husband’s, was unencumbered by any obvious accent, only the temperate breeziness of the Philadelphia Main Line having floated into the Upper East Side—via a layover at Vassar.

“He means a nickname,” I said. She nodded at me and I returned the nod.

After a couple of seconds she moved her eyes over to Lane. “Well, he sort of a had a nickname in high school.”

“Did he now,” said Alan, instantly seizing on the nugget. “And what did the cool kids all call our Laney, pray tell.”

An apologetic crimp crowded the perk of her mouth as she looked at him; but I saw Lane, beaming, nod to her that it was alright. A giggle bubbled in her throat as she said, “Lois. They called him Lois.” Lane chuckled a little, to help out his wife, but otherwise the name fell dead amongst us. “Well, that’s what they called him. I think it was short for Lois Lane.”

Alan Ryson swished the nominee around in his mouth, vetting it for euphony and bite. Then he shrugged. “No good. Lame. God, is that the best you hicks could come up with? This guy,” and here bundled Lane around the shoulders with one heavy arm, “is a born Clark Kent if I ever saw one. It’s the perfect disguise. You gotta watch out for the quiet ones. Of course, Jen my dear, I’m sure you already know that.” He gave Lane a moderate slap on the cheek, intended to be playful. “We go with Wild Thing for now—you pit bull you—until I think of something better.”

Later, Lane introduced us: “Sweetheart, this is Daniel, remember me telling you about him? He and Ted went to law school together. Daniel, this is my wife Jennifer.”

Lane Wilder always called me Daniel. He was the one person who consistently thought to call me Daniel, which happens to be my name. With everyone else it was “Danny” or—an especially aggravating tendency with the native New Yorkers—“Danny Boy.” Continuous strafings of “Danny Boy.” Lane called me Daniel with the same cordiality, the same easy respect, with which he addressed everybody. The same warmth of tone, in fact, with which he called his wife “sweetheart.” Perhaps, to Lane Wilder, we are all sweethearts.
***

Next was the Barkers’ holiday party. It was one of those gatherings where for some reason the guests congregate in the kitchen, to the chagrin of the caterers, or clutter the walkways leading room to room, anywhere that is the most inconvenient. It was the kind of party where everyone drinks too much; Barry’s office had been converted to a bar, and a pair of men in paisley-patterned vests and bow ties worked double-quick to pump out the flavored martinis and gimlets and champagne cocktails. There was also a vicious spiked cider in a crystal bowl set on a table that blocked the doors to the terrace—vicious because it hardly tasted of alcohol but was absolutely loaded with it.

My intention had been to bring a girl from my gym I’d been seeing; I decided against it at the last minute. Arriving stag would normally have incited the wives to a flurry of scheming—in the group, I am the only bachelor, and this so fascinates and vexes Brenda and Eva and the two Ashleys that they are chronically desirous to set me up with any and all of the single women they know: sisters, sorority sisters, sorority sisters’ cousins, dental hygienists, estheticians, Pilates instructors, etc. A date tended to leaven the haranguing. At the Barkers’, however, the women were too buzzed to devote full attentions to any one focal point, and I moved easily through their midst.
I also found myself in the kitchen. Eva had Jennifer by the hand and was giving a gushing tour of the recently remodeled room, and the two women doe-stepped a minefield of whirling servers darting this way and that with the silver trays of duck foie gras and eggplant confit hoisted above their heads.

“These cabinets are henrybuilt caramelized bamboo—you should have seen the monstrosities that were in here before. I told Barry they just had to go.”

“I love the countertops,” said Jennifer. “This granite is gorgeous.”

“Yes. From Zimbabwe. Very expensive.” She perhaps thought she’d whispered the last part. “Weren’t you once a designer?”

“No, not really—I was an assistant in a design firm, right after college. I miss it.” The completed their orbit around the room and came to rest beside me.

“You should get back into it; I bet you’d be spectacular.”

Jennifer sparked pleasantly at the suggestion. “I’ve been thinking that very thing. In fact, I’m looking into starting my own company.”

Eva clapped her hands together. “Oh, you should. You have such exquisite taste. And with all the people we know, you’d have a client list in no time. You could do Danny’s place, somebody certainly should.”

I lowered my drink and said to Jennifer, “Mine might be a hopeless case.”

“Danny, your place is perfectly nice, it just needs some love and attention.”

“Where do you live?” asked Jennifer, tucking a frond of hair behind one ear.

“The Skyhouse. Near Madison Square Park.”

“I know that building. I love that building. How long have you lived there?”

“A few months now.”

“And it looks the exact same as the day he moved in,” Eva broke in. “A bed, a stereo, a flat-screen, maybe a picture on a wall—”

“I think I have a plant.”

“—typical bachelor pad.”

I do not recall the various routes the conversation took from here; I do know that at some point I shifted position, so that my arm was somewhat behind her, my fingers propped on the rounded lip of the counter. And that at some point I felt my hand begin to caress the silk of her dress, stroking lightly at the small of her back. Her slim rangy torso concealed the contact from sight of Eva Barker. Me running my fingertips gently over her covered skin, her leaning into my touch. We continued like that for some time.

Sometime later—a half-hour or so—I was back amongst the men, Barry and the rest. And Lane. Barry tearing the seal on a bottle of brandy he’d been saving and passing out cigars, I glimpsed her distant figure receding down some hallway. I swirled the brandy in the snifter and laughed at a joke I hadn’t heard; then, noting their obliviousness, detached myself and gradually drifted away.

The Barker’s place was quite large, and she had gone down a secondary hallway. The sconce lighting was dim and the corridor looked lit as if by candles. There was a dark bedroom on the right and inside it a segment of light shone from underneath a closed door. I moved into the room and heard a toilet flushing, followed by the running of a faucet. The bathroom door opened and light spilled over me; she emerged wiping her fingers with a tissue. She stopped, face made mostly of shadow. I made a stupid gesture like I was going around her to use the bathroom, but caught my hand on the edge of her wrist and she pulled her face in close and we were kissing. Our teeth clicked together once or twice and her mouth tasted of cloves and cinnamon and sweet apples. Her fingers fluttered hot on the back of my neck, and I felt the tissue scratch at me over my collar. My fingers laced inside her hair, a thumb cupped under her chin.

All at once the party noise seemed to expand and find us there. We relinquished the kiss, Jennifer laughing softly, as if to herself. We went to the doorway and I checked the hallway. No one. She took her own look to confirm my findings. She slipped a hand under my jacket, her palm dampening the shirt over my ribs, and we kissed one more time—a lot of breaths and sighs. Then she pushed the tissue wad into my jacket pocket and went out the door and disappeared down the dusky passage.
***

A few weeks later I was going through my mail and found an envelope addressed to me from something called Wilder Visions. Jennifer had indeed started her own design company. I pulled out her business card; it was tope-colored and made from some sort of stiffened fabric that had the texture of raw silk. Contrary to the claims of Eva Barker, my place did have a few furnishings, and I had not been inattentive when selecting them: a Triambolo sofa, black suede leather; the armchair that matched it; a Citterio low table with a brushed light-oak veneer; and these all sat upon a slate-gray area rug from Tufenkian. There was even more than one picture on the walls. However, I could not deny a sense of vacancy around me, an emptiness, as if my just my living there could not fill the yawning space, and the rendered atmosphere was that of a display home, hollow and cold. Perhaps it was really the encroachment of loneliness I was feeling. I tapped her card on the Citterio, sliding it between my fingers from one end to the other. The slogan she’d come up with for her enterprise was “Love Where You Live,” embossed just above her cell number.

***

Lane Wilder wanted children. I know because he said so, telling it to Ted Damon and me one day over lunch. We three met a couple of times a month, our talk generally revolving around our respective professional lives. Ted and I each practiced corporate law, at different firms; Lane was an investment broker with Deadrick Brothers, managing large mortgage securities, a position to us not at all incongruous with his soulful deportment. His divulgement, however, as he was finishing the last bites of his crab salad, was well outside the usual parameters of luncheon speak.

He was unembarrassed by our shrugs. “What can I say? I’m one of those guys who always wanted to be a dad. I want to have a kid, a baby.”

“Have one then,” said Ted. “You should probably check with Jennifer first; conventionally, the female of the species is the one who actually gives birth to the thing.”

My brain heated up whenever her name was mentioned, and a semi-delicious throb would chime in my stomach—these sensations were more acute and tender if her husband happened to be around. We were meeting later at my apartment. Second time this week. I watched Lane primly wipe his parcel of the table clean of crumbs and deposit his knife, fork and napkin into his plate.

“We both want a family. We talked about it before we even got married. The last few months, we’ve been trying—”

I rubbed my knuckles together.

“—but now, she’s really trying to get her business off the ground—and I totally support her—by the way, How’s the apartment looking, Daniel?—it’s just … well, it’s complicated right now.”

He did not elaborate further. Why he had brought up the subject in the first place, I didn’t know; likely Lane had only been thinking aloud. I had no idea if Jennifer wanted children or not; she and I so far had avoided talking over such jagged topics. And we never mentioned him.

But this sort of moratorium was doomed to be temporary. The situation’s more illicit and poignant aspects, initially forsworn by mutual, understood agreement, soon enough started their inevitable seepage.

We had spread the linen duvet on the rosewood floor in my living room, and now it was curled around us like a sleeping bag. Close to my head was the one decorative addition she had made, a rattan accent table by the sofa, with two ripped condom wrappers laid on it; the notion of her design makeover for the place was maintained now only for alibi purposes. I did reimburse her for the table, a moment flush with awkward implications.

“I’ll be gone next week. We’re visiting his parents in Hartford.” Her lips crinkled against my chest when she spoke.

“For the whole week?”

“Wednesday through the weekend. His father is having some tests run.”

“Is everything okay?”

“They don’t know. That’s why they’re running tests.” She nuzzled her head deeper into the crook of my shoulder. “Lane wants to spend some time with him.”

There was the whisking sound of traffic from the street. The solar screens across the arcade of windows were closed and the light that infiltrated was cool and crystalline.

“You know,” she said, “I haven’t had a cigarette since college, but every time after we—”
“Are you and Lane trying for a baby?”

The warm air of her exhale traveled down my stomach and prickled the hairs there.

“We’ve been trying for almost a year. What made you ask that?”

“He mentioned it at lunch today.”

She unfurled from me as if suddenly she felt crowded. “I’ve hinted that I want to wait. But his heart is set on the idea, I don’t know how to come out and tell him. About waiting, I mean. It’s not as if there’s been a really determined effort; we haven’t gone to a specialist or anything like that.”

“So you’re going to talk to him about waiting?”

“Yes.”

“Jennifer.”

“Yes?”

“Do you really even want a baby?”

“Yes.” She opened her mouth and scratched a thumbnail over the faces of her front teeth. As if only now thinking the question over, she repeated, “Yes.”
***

The voices. Voices vague and faint, but steady. We all heard them: Charlie Colston heard them in the mornings, at his vanity mirror, standing in profile to pat down the progress of his paunch. Ashley Damon heard the voices while trolling the boutiques in Soho. The Barkers heard them in the Hamptons—Eva as she got off the phone with mortgage broker, Barry during his squash game. And Lane Wilder must have heard them. They were only murmurings—soft, low, indistinct—but irritants nonetheless. So we consigned them to other rooms, treating them like the uncouth neighbors who bicker behind thin walls. A tolerable nuisance easily adjusted to. Yet the voices wouldn’t cease; and they massed and became a drone. A drone always intensifying. We tried ignoring it: we turned up the music, we talked frantically, we laughed too loud. Why wouldn’t it go away? Why wouldn’t it stop? We tried to drown it out: we made plans, we booked trips, we bought things. And still it escalated, harassing us, hectoring us. If we shouted, it screamed. If we screamed, it would roar. And no matter what we purchased, or charged, or subsidized, or borrowed, the roaring only surged and grew, a nightmarish engine continuously accelerating, inextinguishable and fueled on everything.

I was in my office, talking to Alan on the phone. Alan was talking about nothing really, but doing so with flourish: “So I told him that shit don’t fly around here. Six percent? I wouldn’t give my mother six percent on a turnaround. A finder’s fee, at best. A token payment for the heads-up. My team did the heavy lifting on this deal, I’m the one who shouldered the risk. The little prick will get his half a point and thank me for it—” Mob movies were Alan’s favorite. I settled back in my chair to wait out the diatribe. Mine was a work space of clean lines, straight edges. Metal and glass. The senior partners mostly held to their heavy oak desks, their plush leather chairs, rich, chocolaty tones smeared everywhere. In addition to being contrary to whatever aesthetic tastes I may have, such bulky encumbrances always feel somehow unsafe to me. One had to be able to move quick and travel light in this world and could not afford to be weighed down. Heavy furniture, massive bookshelves, ostentatious, oil-based artwork: I equated such accoutrements with swimmers diving into pools with cinderblocks strapped to their backs, to sink to the bottom while time itself made laps overhead.

“—give it to one, and they’re all going to come begging for a bone. So, you hear about Lane and Jennifer?”

“No, I didn’t” I said. No, I hadn’t.

“They’re moving to Westchester. Irvington. They closed on a house.”

“Oh yeah? Good for them.”

“If you say so—if I’m Lane, I’m shitting a brick I haven’t unloaded my place here first. The housing projections are worse than lousy. Lane really wants to pay two fat mortgages right now? More power to him.”

“He wants a family; that’s why people move to Westchester.”

“Jennifer’s not even pregnant yet.”

“I know that.”

The same day, late afternoon. I cinched my belt as I got out of bed, picked up my discarded shirt from the floor and pulled it over me. A light drizzle half-heartedly applauded the windows and I went over to the one facing westward and down the alleys between buildings saw the sagging redness of another flagging sun.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t keep doing this to him. I hate myself so much,” she said. She had sat up in the bed, naked and with the sheets thrown off, and she leaned back against the headboard with her knees folded up to her chin and her forearms crossed beneath the backs of her thighs like the seat of a swing. Her sentiment was not unexpected, and I had forecast it and played it out so many times in my mind that it already seemed well-worn to me. I had nothing to add.

“Sit next to me,” she said and patted the empty space on the bed where I had just been. When I didn’t move she dropped her forehead onto her knees and began plucking at the coverlet with her fingers. “I’m sorry. I should have told you before now.”

“No problem. I understand perfectly. It’s the best decision for everyone involved. You and Lane want children—you should move out of the city. And this eliminates the dilemma of the two of us.”

Her fingertips already had erected a foothill of satin and her mouth was settled in the shallow valley where her legs conjoined. “My God, Danny. Your voice. The way you speak sometimes. It frightens me.”

“I’m not trying to sound harsh.”

“That’s just it—your voice doesn’t sound harsh. It doesn’t sound like anything. It’s completely flat, like there’s no feeling behind it at all. And I think you very much are trying to sound that way.” She raised her head and blinked at me, and her watery eyes which I always thought looked as if they were born to crying still had yet to produce a single bona-fide teardrop. “I don’t just consider you some dilemma, or view us that way. You know that don’t you? Please, come sit next to me. Please, Danny. Please.”

It was the next day that Deadrick Brothers stock dropped forty-five points. The following Monday the company announced it was filing for Chapter 11. Rumors predicting this very outcome had been spreading for months. With a lion’s share of their holdings composed of mortgage-backed securities, and being deeply entrenched in the hemorrhaging subprime market along with other low-rated mortgage tranches, Deadrick had already been forced to sell off over two billion dollars in assets. The papers had pictures of company employees hauling boxes sided with the now defunct logo out of the building. Twelve hundred people lost their jobs in the home office alone; one of them was Lane Wilder.

His former employer became famous overnight. As the economy ruptured red, Deadrick Brothers was held up in editorials and blogs and the evening news programs as exhibit A for corporate corruption, malfeasance, mismanagement, and unfettered greed. Foreclosures were sweeping the country, the credit market was constricting, and property values were declining; the roles of villains had to be assigned, and a bloated giant that had at first gorged itself on, then crumbled from, the very same lending practices currently crippling so many, was a capital designee. It became one of those rare non-retail company names easily identifiable to the average citizen—it became an up-to-date Enron, it became a punch line. The ramifications for Lane Wilder were unemployment and a resume consisting mainly of a screaming bloody headline that read “Deadrick Brothers.”

The following month the Wilders decamped for Westchester. Their condo on Riverside languished on the market—for all I know it is there to this day. A certain good-riddance attitude trailed in their wake; I noticed among our friends a new note of resentment whenever his name was brought up, open derision mixed with a sort of self-righteous anger. As the Barkers and the Cleghorns and the Damons and the Rysons found their own lifestyles subject to curtailment, as their faith in the invincibility of their own wealth was challenged, gaping open-mouthed as their own assets withered in the sturm und drang of the crisis, with more enforced rationing still to come, Lane served as every bit the functional scapegoat to them that his old employer was to the country at large. Ted mentioned one day that Lane had left him a voicemail: “Hope he doesn’t hold his breath for the call back.” Solid, stolid Lane was now viewed as some sort of traitor, even if the exact nature of his betrayal was as impossible to ascertain as it was to articulate. When I received an invitation to their house warming in November, I knew of course I wouldn’t be attending; and that Jennifer also knew this and the invite had only been sent my way as a formality, an obligatory safeguard to prevent any suspicions being aroused. My surprise came when I found out no one else was going either. No one could come out and say why—perhaps they didn’t understand it themselves—but none of the excuses I heard sounded legitimate. And just like that, the Wilders’ exodus had become an exile. I wondered if they realized.

***

The last time I saw Lane he was emerging from a crowded elevator into the lobby of a midtown office building. I was stepping out from another elevator across the hall, in time to witness him getting muscled into the prongs of a fake hibiscus plant. He dropped a burgundy pleather binder and was stooping down to retrieve when I walked over to him. The folder had fallen open and at my feet I saw the cover page of his resume. He closed it and looked up at me. “Daniel.”

A little pang of panic bit me: what if she had told him? What if the guilt had become too much and Jennifer had confessed, and now Lane was staring at me with all the recent past having been made open to full disclosure? His eyes smiled, however, and they were as cloudless and credulous as ever before; he was, mercifully, still clueless. We shook hands. We each explained our presence here: he had been “meeting with” some of the higher-ups at a midlevel insurance company housed in the building; I had been convening with a client, a large health care provider, in preparation for a defense against a class-action suit currently being leveled against them. A couple of minutes of swift talk—“She’s great, thanks for asking. Busy with the house”—and I covertly checked his demeanor for any sign of disappointment, hurt, anxiousness. But I detected nothing; if he was stung by his social banishment (conceding he was even fully aware of it), or was despairing over the dissolution of his career, he wore the burden lightly.

“Where are you headed now? Let’s grab a drink,” I said.

He checked his watch. “I shouldn’t—I was planning on catching the five o’clock home.”

“You take the train in?”

“Oh, sure. Much easier: don’t have to worry about parking, worry about traffic.”

“It’s early yet. One drink and you can make the next train. Unless, of course, you have plans.”

He didn’t, and the idea of getting a drink with a friend seemed to please him. Perhaps it simply pleased him that he was being asked to do so.

We found a bar around the corner, a pub-style place just beginning to congregate with happy hour clientele. I ordered a vodka and lime, Lane a light beer. Once again, I was reminded that I liked Lane Wilder. Had never ceased to do so. The resentments festering in the others—Lane as harbinger of fiscal disaster, Lane as a cog, however unwitting, in the machinations of economic collapse—were easily transparent to me as so much neurotic bullshit. Besides, I had been only marginally hobbled by the downturn. My money was not heavily embedded in the markets and my job did not appear to be in any jeopardy. Whether it is the bulls dropping dead or the bears, the carrion still get fat.

Mostly he talked about her. “Jennifer is redoing the house completely. She’s picked out new color schemes for all the rooms—her eye for that stuff is fantastic. You know, the former owners were an older couple, and there was this very loud yellow in the master bedroom; Jennifer is going back over it with this very elegant gray—I can’t remember what she calls it, oyster gray or pearl gray, something like that. And the guest room is going to be colonial blue.” He told me the place had four bedrooms total, but they had turned one into a study. Carolina Mist. Lane shifted his elbow so a woman could pass by, youngish, blondish, delicate-featured, but with a hard, pale look in her eyes.

“I assume the two of you still want children.”

He nodded his head with such force his whole body shook and I thought he might spill his beer. “Yes, yes. No luck yet, but we probably talk about the nursery more than any other room. It’s a bit of a challenge, though; since we don’t know whether we will end up having a boy or a girl, we can’t really make a final decision on the colors.” His face leaned in a little closer to mine. “Actually Daniel, between you and me, we’re going to start in vitro.”

We’re. “I hear that can be a risky procedure, Lane. Particularly for the mother.”

A sliver of worry creased his face, from the dimple above the bridge of the nose down to the bow of his bottom lip—Lane as near a frown as perhaps he had ever before ventured. “Not risky so much, as very invasive. And there is a risk of side effects for the baby—a small percentage of birth defects, things like that. But we’re seeing an excellent specialist, and following her guidelines to the letter; this is a very common practice nowadays. Potential parents do it all the time.”

“I’m sure. So, you and Jennifer must be itching to get on with it. When’s kickoff?”

“We begin in January. We wanted to get through the holidays first—my father isn’t doing so well. And it has to be synched up with her cycles to have any chance of working.”

Her cycles. “And the excellent specialist believes this artificial insemination thing will solve whatever the problem has been with you getting pregnant.”

He sipped daintily his beer, laughed a little laugh. “It isn’t artificial insemination, exactly.”

“Of course not. Another drink, Laney?” but I was flagging down the bartender before he could reply. Behind the bar was a broad mirror, and in the glass my twin’s eyes caught my own for a beat or two before shifting to their left, where they snagged on the semi-blond who had brushed past us moments before; she had taken the seat beside me, was sitting alone, and our two sets of reflected eyes met up for a few seconds, hers very soon moving away in the opposite direction mine had been traveling. I changed course and followed her eyes’ path, and saw Lane in the mirror, again monitoring the progress of the hands of his watch.

I pushed his new beer in front of him on a fresh coaster. “Thanks. I need to let Jennifer know I’m going to be home a little late,” he said, as he was pulling out his cell.

“Say hello for me.”

He nodded and brought the phone to one ear, placing his finger over the other to block out the noise. “Hi, sweetheart.” I thought I caught the faint fragrance of her ever familiar voice in reply. I decided I needed to use the restroom and excused myself.

By the time I returned he had finished his call, and the partial blond had slid over to my seat and was chatting him up. A blushing red encrusted the tops of his ears, and he was smiling but with his eyes downcast and the toe of his shoe was prodding the floor tiles. I heard her saying something about an ex-fiancé—apparently Lane bore a great resemblance to him—but she cut it off quick on realizing I had rejoined them. Lane, for one, looked relieved to see me.

“I need to be getting home, Daniel.”

“No—at least finish your beer.”

“I can’t, I’m running late enough as is. Let me get the tab—”

“Forget it, your money’s no good here. This one’s on me.” Save the money for your train ticket, save it for a diaper genie and onesies, Laney. The girl had pivoted in her seat, her face knitted in annoyance—she blamed me for his abrupt departure. Maybe she was on to something. I was disappointed as well; it would have been weirdly fun to watch him splutter and bumble around her advances for awhile.

“Okay. Thanks, Daniel. It was good seeing you.”

“The same.” We shook hands; he smiled, demurely, almost apologetically, to the girl, before turning to meander his way around the burgeoning bunches of customers. I saw him push through the door and he was gone.

Outside, the day has bled out of the sky, and obsidian night swirled with smoked clouds hovers tight to the tops of buildings. A chilled rain begins to fall. It is nearly twenty cross-town blocks to Grand Central—he needs to catch a cab. He hikes up the collar of his coat to the cold and damp and walks to the corner to try and hail one down. Lane watches occupied cabs slosh by, his hand extended, the tips of his fingers dripping with rain like a leaky spigot. The headlights of cars approach through a watery prism, and their golden eyes glow and expand, only to dissolve in a tearful blur when they pass by. It is a few minutes before a taxi pulls to the curb. Once ensconced in the back seat, he feels somehow more drenched, and the insinuating moisture chafes him raw at the cuffs around his wrists, trickles into the shoal of his throat. The taxi halts and heaves in the traffic; on the windows raindrops bead and wink with Manhattan lights: goldenrod and garland green, aristocratic blue and lascivious tones of red. Pedestrians break over the sidewalk like floodwater breaking over boulders. The cab makes the turn onto 43rd, lurches to a stop. Lane pays the driver and splashes out, entering the Graybar passage. He nearly slips on the smooth marble floor. The passage is a thin tributary that drops him into the manic sea of the Main Concourse. Lane Wilder: a benign electrical blip moving mildly throughout the tangles of circuitry relaying other commuting blips under Grand Central’s high arches, its reverberating ramparts. Superman Lane trudging doggedly along in his best everyman disguise. He goes to the counter and purchases his ticket on the Metro-North, the Hudson Line, placing both ticket and change in his breast-pocket. “Thank you.” He pads back roughly the way he’s come. At a kiosk he considers getting a magazine, but finds the glossy covers—the beautiful, plastic people—discouraging. Next door at the coffee shop he buys a medium decaf, fixing it with two packets of Stevia. Then he catches the time on an enormous, gothic-looking wall clock—only minutes to spare. At his platform, the queue of passengers extends halfway up the staircase; he leans over the banister and pops the lid from his cup, blowing into the steam to cool the coffee. Eventually the cavalcade burrows into the train; he finds a last window seat in one of the back cars. The idling engines hum underneath his feet. His body relaxes into the seat as the idling shifts to a rumble, then a clacking crank—the train stutters along the track as the pillars in the tunnel march past the windows. A porter comes and punches his ticket, placing it in a notch on the back of the headrest. “Thank you.” The tunnel drains out into the night and the tracks ascend, above the reach of the streets, over Morningside Heights, over Harlem. A stop at 125th; stops in the Bronx, in Yonkers. Then the urban landscape tapers off, and between this and the approaching townships, narrow isthmuses of black, swampy fields recede to a purple horizon. Lane blinks at his face in the glass, where the giant hologram of his image is superimposed on the dark marshes outside, a benevolent spirit haunting the Hudson Line, bearing good tidings to all things, while also humbly hoping the hair remaining on his head will stick around awhile. He shuts his eyes, listens to the train’s song. A languid comfort fills him; even the traces of damp still lingering in his clothes is a pleasure, bestowing a sensation as though his spine were lined with wool, and in the trustworthy sounds of momentum his worries begin to dissipate, a lulling reprieve from the concerns of finances, job searches, house payments, his responsibilities, his obligations, his burdens. This new routine of commuting is a reassurance to him, a developing ritual of stability and normalcy, imbued with healing properties. His chin nods against his chest. He envisions his car awaiting him, parked in the Irvington station lot. He will retrieve it and drive home, down the slickered streets shining under street lamps. The steering wheel will feel taut and sure in his hands, his eyes will peer out into this world and, even if it is due primarily to faulty vision on the part of the beholder, he will see one comprised of peace and radiance. The radiance exists in degrees great and small, in the town’s clock tower and a cathedral’s cupola rising over the rustling treetops to spread into the raven sky, in a diamond droplet of rain that slides from one shimmering chestnut leaf to fall and impale itself on the tip of a blade of glass. Like a homing bird he will soar down the inviting streets, and when he glides up the driveway all the lights in the house will be on in welcome and the curtains all thrown open. Contemporary colonial, wrap-around porch like a wide smile. He will park in front of the garage they have yet to divine any real use for, and will get out and treat himself to a long look at his home. The light from within banks itself on the glittering lawn, rushes fresh and full on his face. Maybe she will be in the kitchen, with her hair tied back in a ponytail, the knotted tassel of which swings over her fine neck like a pendulum with any move she makes, her head nodding or shaking, and her eyes looking off at something he cannot quite see—perhaps she is working out some problem in her head. She notices him; she will wave to him from behind the transparent canvas of the kitchen’s picture window. Or she might be upstairs, the nursery for instance, brushing thin swabs of various colors (debutante yellow, princely blue) on one primed wall to present to him as possible options. He will enter the house and breathe deep all the inimitable scents of this world, his world, and will close the door behind him; and turn the lock, purely out of habit, since nothing could possibly assail him here. He will call out to her, and will reach out to lay one hand flat against the nearest wall. There is a comfort for him in tangible things, he draws his strength from them. He knows the walls do not stand alone, they are supported by the studs, as too the floor beneath him is held up by the joists. Just as the entirety of his substantial home rests on footers and the foundation and all these things are sturdy and solid and sound. He loves this inner-connectedness of worthy and worthwhile things, how the whole depends on the parts and the parts are the valued elements of this whole. This whole world. Because this is not some pious aspiration or dream—this is his life. His entire life. This is all he is, the very sum of him. And really,  what’s so wrong with his life?

***

The blondish girl watched Lane walk out the door, didn’t allow herself to let slip a sigh, just returned attentions to her drink. I was patient. Of course, her eyes eventually lifted to look at me. Resigned, she asked, “So, what do you do?”

“Me?” I said. “I make the world go round.”

 

Riley was in his nightly pose, kneeling on the floor by the bed, crying once again for mercy. This had been his ritual for some time, since when he could not exactly remember, just as he was unsure of the exact wrong for which he begged after such heavy penance in the first place. He was not a tyrant or a monster, not a major criminal or even a petty one. He had never killed man, woman, or beast, had never laid a hand on a child. He had never assaulted anything in any degree. Riley had never married and he had no children, therefore adulterer or an absentee father were both out. Around the holidays he gave change to the Salvation Army Santas; in every season he held elevator doors, gave up his seat on the bus to the elderly and infirmed. He had never committed arson, perpetrated racketeering, engaged in wanton vandalism, and had never conspired to do any of the above. When the girl at the grocery store gave him too much change, he always pointed it out to her. There was that Hustler magazine when he was twelve years old, but this lone act of shoplifting had occurred only a merciless goading from an older boy, and the next day Riley returned to the store and slipped the same magazine from underneath his sweater and returned it to the rack. He had never so much as fudged on his taxes, although he did have a poor head for figures and had possibly made some errors on his return. Could one, he wondered, sin out of incompetence?

He was not at all a religious person, not in terms of any organized belief system. More precisely, he had all the trademarks of a nonbeliever except for oodles of shame and guilt—these he had in spades. Every night he would wail and cry, his voice going from shrieking highs to lows, wanting something somewhere to forgive him the whatever he must have—at some point—done.

His exact wrongs remained a mystery however, and every day second and third helpings of unprocessed guilt, mammoth heaps of the sticky stuff, that dazed him and wearied him when he walked the streets in the late afternoon through the drapes of car exhaust, blinking into the crowning sun rendered more brilliant by the smog. He watched the buses slow and hiss at their appointed corners, and the sidewalks spill over with giggly, gaping gaggles of children, watched weakly as traffic grew surlier, and people screamed out their car windows and cursed and banged on their barking horns. Yes, he thought—anger. That might be the ticket. I should strive for that level of passion. I am too passive. Vitriol, anger, ire: these are the things that make real people feel alive, the steaming black bile rising from the furnace of their stomachs, the prickly barbwire strung in their hearts. You could use a little of that, you sniveling sop. Get mad, goddamn it. So he would flare for a few seconds, like an Independence Day sparkler, and that sulfurous energy would be his momentum all the way back to the apartment. Of course, it would wear off well before evening: come bedtime, he would be writhing again in the torturing clutches of that same, unnamable sorrow. But I haven’t done anything, I haven’t done anything, I haven’t done anything wrong. What is so wrong with me? Whatever it is, I’m so, so sorry.
Riley would rise in the mornings feeling as if he’d done a death march the previous night; his joints, his knuckles, the very soles of his feet, would ache deeply, and his eyelashes would be bonded together with the dried saline and crumbs of capacious tears, Along with a ringing in his ears, like he had stood on an airport tarmac for hours on end—perhaps I am going deaf on top of it all, he thought. That would be fitting; then I would be truly cut off from the rest of the world, stuck in my own head with these strange thoughts forever. Destined to float through life like a silent gray vapor.

Needless to say, such routines made his morning cereal difficult to swallow. He was bone-tired, but had sworn off coffee years before under the mistaken supposition that it was his caffeinated blood stream which exposed him to the panicky staggers and jags. Only a glass of water and half a cup of orange juice, and Riley would slide open the latch of his door and slug off to work, released unto the snares of another day.

Having abandoned driving some time before, he rode the bus to the office. His cubicle, actually; even Riley’s supervisor did not have her own office. He had worked at TransWorld Communications for seven plus years and did not know what he did there. His duties were roughly sketched, and between the hours of eight-thirty to five, Monday through Friday, he had the abstract notion of some sort of activity, but if called into court on the matter his testimony would have many holes in it, and he doubted he could be deemed a reliable witness. Many times a day the phone would ring, and according to the a) inquiry, b) complaint, c) both, he would transfer the caller to the appropriate division. Then he would file each interaction on his logged call spreadsheet, and go back to collating the database of all incoming calls to his department. He assumed a similar task was performed by the woman in the cubicle adjacent to his own, a woman with a narrow torso and a wide berth of hips, her hair dyed a sort of Valentine red, whose name was Nancy or Nora or Nancy Kay and with whom he rarely spoke. Twice a month he attended meetings of the C team, which was composed of all collators in his department whose last names began with letters in the final third of the alphabet. At these meetings, new efficiency goals would be instituted, and incentives offered (fifty dollar gift certificate for two to The Spaghetti Shack, use of a reserved parking space for thirty days, a new blender) to whoever exceeded said goals by more than fiver percent. One quarter last year he had been awarded the blender. He could come up with no particular use for it, so it remained still in its original box, tucked away in the ominous gap between his refrigerator and the wall.

He looked out the windows, the bus chugging down the industrial drive, and wondered for the thousandth time, and counting, about the palm trees on the west sidewalk. They were planted palms, transplanted palms, interred in little squares of earth cut out from the concrete. During all the time he had passed this way, he could not see that they had grown so much as an inch; the tallest still standing no more than nine feet. They fronted a long stretch of chain-link fences, the fencing topped with malicious loops of barbwire, guarding a series of repo car lots and adjacent lots loaded with the hauling trailers of semi-trucks, and lots of roofing supplies and canvassed sheets of sheetrock, and one lot which contained nothing but was completely fenced anyway. Impregnable. Which came first— the palm trees or these bounded spaces? Were the palms some idealistic city planner’s notion of urban beautification, some slight effervescence of nature to offset the blatant eyesores of the hodgepodge repositories, or did the delicate, runty trees once embroider a lively, fresh produce market, or a promenade of curio shops and trinket stores—some healthy, pulsing artery of congeniality in the city that had long since been severed and removed for the forlorn pens here today? He looked around at the other passengers: sleepy-eyed, head-bowing, isolated stumps of people, and he wondered for the millionth time, and counting, if he was the only one who insistently picked over such minutiae. Am I really so alone?

Riley had one ritual besides the penitent fits at night; every Thursday after work he went to the ocean. The long isthmus of the pier stretched out from a defunct shipping port, located less than a mile from the TransWorld building. He could not recall just when he had begun this, or why the practice was restricted to Thursdays exclusively. But he looked forward to his seaside visits, and moved now over the sun-baked black tops and beeping crosswalks, over to the waterways and up the cement stairs onto the weathered wood planks of his destination. At the entrance was always the one stooped, aged vendor, a man with rashy, wind-burnt skin and frizzed salty hair stiff as ocean coral, who leaned against his cart and sold the occasional hotdog and soda, taking the bills and handing out the change with nary a word escaping his pressed, inverted lips. Today the vendor nodded at Riley as he passed by, a weird, surprising gesture which Riley was not sure how to take but to which he nodded in reply. The man must have known his face by now, and recognized a fellow fixture. Riley had a horrible thought and looked behind him for anyone else the man might have been silently addressing. But there was no one and he was relieved to know that his own nod had not been a blunder.

It was not a popular spot; the air was especially briny here, with the lingering scents of garbage barges and diesel fuel, and he walked among the usual strays: a couple of kids with balloons tied around their wrists, their misplaced parents clutching wind-buffeted city maps or checking their Smartphones to try to locate a genuine beach, and a juggler in mime makeup tossing up bowling pins and softballs. And at the end of the pier stood a few fishermen with their rods wedged into stands bolted to the dock rails, gossamer strands of line unfurled into the bobbing water.

An empty bench faced out to the Pacific, and Riley took a seat.

Perhaps the sun has it in for us, he thought. It certainly seemed up to no good — one couldn’t turn on the TV or read the paper without hearing about ultra-violet rays, the rising statistics of skin cancer, the epidemic warming of the entire planet. Icebergs melting, plant life dying, the sun beating down and bullying everything from San Simeon to the Serengeti. He wiped the sweat from the back of his neck and looked up at the omnipresence in the sky— yes, it looked like a wrathful thing, a vengeful entity, buzzing up their like some truculent, psychopathic bumblebee. Even glancing into it was unwise. It would burn you, blind you. Riley quickly averted his eyes.
A flat line of green water met the darker green of sky out on the borderland of the horizon. Distant sails of far-off boats, the figures of birds sweeping over the water in bunched formations. A pair of seagulls flapped to a landing in front of him, their heads boggling, pebbled eyes scanning the surface of the dock for any dropped foodstuffs. He had formerly brought bread or a few crackers to throw the birds but a waterfront cop on patrol one time called him out, pointing to a sign that said “No feeding of the birds.” Riley was embarrassed — he had genuinely never noticed the sign before — and he had thought long and hard about never returning here. He was surprised, and it was one of the only things he privately credited himself for, that in fact he did return. The first few times he had come back here, although of course he refrained from feeding the birds, he actually felt brave.

The beach such as it was consisted of nothing more than a narrow slit of dingy sand, a few hundred yards long on the south side of the pier. It was not a place for sunbathers or swimmers, and mainly served as a repository for all the junk the ocean didn’t want: globs of seaweed, tin cans, buckets, rusted hooks and lures, dead jellyfish. Every now and then a life-vest or old tire. The tide was coming in, and he could hear the lap of the waves smack on the shrunken shore. It was a noise he had to concentrate hard to hear, faint and slight under the surrounding reverberations of city noise, the people walking with heavy steps on the planks, people chattering about nothing, the traffic helicopters over the freeway and the bombardment of vehicles motoring along the nearby overpass. Gulls cawing, somewhere a jackhammer pounding, the harsh bleats of car alarms; he closed his eyes and listened close for the whispers of the sea as it overtook the land. If one could submerge beneath the miasma of multitudinous distractions and the legion cacophonies, the sounds of those waves were hypnotically healing, the Pacific as mantra.

Head lolling. Drowsy. This was the time of day, the only time, when he felt like sleeping. The panics and terrors did not come now, the exhaustion was too great and it would override his frail flightiness. He generally tried to fight off his daily fugues, walking or running errands, in the persistent and vain hope that he could stockpile the weariness for that night, and could sleep a few hours free from his episodes. This did not work but still he tried. So here in this place, every Thursday, he would relent for a bit, and steal some rest in the shadows of the mischievous sun.

Dozily, he questioned his sanity—not for the first time. He did not feel insane, but then insane people never do; they walk around with the delusional idea that they are perfectly normal and it is the rest of the world which is cracked. Riley did indeed believe the world was damaged, but was under no illusions that he himself was healthy and rational. For all the secrets no doubt seeded within the strangers he saw daily, he knew that his nightly struggles with a nameless, monolithic fear were not the norm. Whether they qualified as earmarks of the insane, or any of its attendant courtesans: the schizophrenics, the depressed, the paranoiacs, he did not know. Perhaps, he considered again, I am simply malfunctioning—I have some sort of glitch, like a car that keeps slipping gears, or a piano with a broken foot pedal. I should take myself in for a tune-up, maybe give therapy another try.

In the past he had sought psychiatric help, from three different doctors: one a strict Freudian who asked Riley vague and pointless questions concerning his childhood (which he could barely remember) and his dreams (a moot point since he slept so little dreaming was an impossibility); another a strict psychopharmacologist who listened to him talk for two minutes before making a grab for the nearest prescription pad; and a third who was strict about nothing and kept canceling their appointments. Ultimately his insurance declined to cover anymore visits to mental health professionals and Riley had to discontinue the search for help. In his stolen half-sleep he shuddered at the thought of how much curtailment a return to the couch would impose on his already tight finances.

His head was sagging forward against his chest when something stirred him. It was not a noise, but the absence of one; it seemed everything around him had gone quiet all at once. He opened his eyes, rubbing them, and looked around. The only people still on the dock were the fishermen, and they were huddled together now, looking down to the beach. One old crow of a man among them cawed and pointed wildly with one stubbed, blackened finger. Riley stood up and went to the railing.

A small crowd of people had gathered on the sand, and more were at the barrier of the retaining wall. Nobody getting too close. All looking to the same place, there at the breakers of the surf.

He could not tell at first what the shape was, although it was certainly large—a great dark mass that rose a dozen feet in the air, and what was exposed from the water must have been twenty feet long at least, but it had no obvious beginning or ending. It was just bulk, a bulbous blob without definition that gave the impression of density and weight; Riley thought at first it was the wreckage of a strange schooner, one made of rubber. Then the thing emitted a lonely baritone moan, and shot a spray of watery mist from its rounded top.

Walking down the dock, moving around to the landing of the stairs running to the beach, Riley listened to the excited clamor of the onlookers: “What kind is it?” “It’s a blue whale” “No it isn’t. Blue whales get to be a hundred feet long” “It’s a baby.” “Shut up.” “No, no, I took a course in marine biology. That’s a sperm whale” “I thought sperm whales were gray” “Well, what color does that look like to you?” “Looks blue to me.” “See, I told you so.” “That isn’t blue— it’s off-white. Like an eggshell.” “Oh my god, I think I’m color blind.” “Poor thing must be pregnant. They come onto shore to have their babies.” “What are you talking about?” “Really, I saw it on the Discovery Channel.” “You’re thinking of something else. Whales don’t have babies on dry land. They’d die.” “I think it is dying.” “No, I mean the babies.” “Both. Both would die.” “Fish lay eggs anyway.” A battalion of voices in unison: “It’s not a fish!”

He did not take his eyes from the thing. The glare of the sun was harsh, it was difficult to make out any particulars on the animal—he could not see any eyes, or the flippers, and the tail was underwater. A considerable wave crashed down around it, and the great bulk seemed to levitate for split second, carried along in the rush of current, before settling down again a couple of inches further ashore.

“Who do you call for things like this?” “Animal control” “You call animal control for a stray dog, not for a beached whale.” “Still, they’d know who to contact.” “The beach cops will call someone, probably already have.” “How do you know, I don’t see any cops around.” “They’ll be here.” “Poor thing, it looks so pitiful.” Somewhere from the pack of people a child started crying.

And a cop did come: a young tanned guy, wearing a uniform of blue shorts and a short-sleeved blue shirt and riding a bicycle. He skidded to a hard, authoritative stop and jumped from the seat. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses with rims shaped like lightning bolts. Riley thought he looked familiar, thought maybe it was the same guy who berated him for feeding the birds. Riley unconsciously sank deeper into the crowd.

On appraising the situation, the officer seemed as perplexed as everyone else. He looked at the shape in the shallow water, and looked around the crowd, as if wondering what proper procedure was in a case like this. After a minute, he grabbed his walkie-talkie and turned back to his bicycle. Riley could not make out exactly what he said, but his voice sounded nettled and aggrieved.

Now the whale was clearly trying to breathe; the rubbery husk of its body rose up and down, like a balloon continuously filled with air and then deflating. Another groan, more immediate and beseeching than before, inhuman and yet so like a baby’s wail, filled the eardrums of the assembled. Many shook their heads, some had to look away. There was the sound of a bowling pin clanking off the pavement. The waves were picking up in strength, cresting higher and collapsing around the stricken animal, pushing it further and further inland. Other bicycles came pedaling up, more sunglasses and blue uniforms staring at the stranded whale and then conferring with one another. Their arrival was followed by a helicopter whirring in the sky close above the scene. A news helicopter — Riley could make out Channel 4 emblazoned in black lettering on the side.

Spectators multiplying at the barricade wall, asking questions and exclaiming at the sight before them, some creeping down the beach stairs to get a closer look. Riley looked at the backs of the beach patrol. Then he moved around an older couple in matching visors sharing a pair of binoculars and walked down the steps and onto the plush of the sand. He moved a tentative few feet closer to the water, the whale still a ways off.

He could see the different shadings of its hide — it was a kind of blue on its back and the bulge of its head, a murky cobalt color, but with a pearly hue on its undercarriage, a color that looked softer, fleshier, more vulnerable. Ribbons of mealy seaweed were strung across the heaving surface, and for an instant Riley thought he spotted an eye, glassy and reflective in the glimmer of the afternoon which revealed it. Then the spot disappeared, and he questioned whether he had really seen it. Birds landed nearby, some gulls and pelicans, a few pigeons even. They nosed forward cautiously, bewildered with their clicking heads, attempting to take in the dimensions of this misplaced life-form, trying to comprehend anything so large that breathed just as they did. Some time passed.

Above him on the boardwalk, he could hear the officers talking among themselves, the scratched sounds of their radios: “Control has dispatched marine rescue…” “How long before they get…” “They have to come over the Santa Monica Freeway…” “Christ, that’s going to take forever…” “That thing will be dead by then…” “Maybe its dead already…” As if on cue, the whale cut loose another moan. “Guess not.” “We’re just supposed to do crowd control.” The first officer grabbed a bull-horn. “Please disperse. Move along. Emergency vehicles are in route. There is nothing more to see here. Move along in an orderly manner.”

It was a redundant order; already interest in the impromptu sideshow was waning. Riley noticed the main throng of the crowd had diminished since he had come down to the beach, much to the chagrin of the old hot dog vendor, who was just pushing his cart into place in the thick of things. The several remaining had disappointed eyes, the sight apparently not as fantastic as they had first thought, in fact quite underwhelming if this was to be all there was, as though the whale ought to next stand upright on its fluke and do back flips like the orcas at Sea-World. The once high-pitched squeals of the assemblage had dwindled down to subdued stray chatters. The old couple in visors shuffled away. The hotdog man scratched his sun-scorched forehead under his sweat-streaked cap and looked to be pondering a return already to his old reliable spot. The juggler’s makeup had begun to run, greasy tear-tracks sliding down his face, and he had put away his implements and was smoking a cigarillo. The cop continued his obligatory bellows into the bull-horn.

But those already on the beach were left alone, law enforcement apparently not to come after them. It was a few kids kicking up cakes of sand and talking absently back and forth, a couple of Latino laborers in painters hats, each sipping from silver cans of beer, and one woman with a shaved head, a multitude of tattoos, and a camera with a long lens; she pirouetted and squatted, crouched down in the sand, waved her arms wildly, snapping picture after picture of the marooned animal. Riley looked to the north and north east, to the visible band of the bordering freeway overpass, and just above its brim were the shining surfaces of the tops of the cars in traffic, flashing and motionless, completely stuck in the logjam of urban rush hours. Santa Monica to here, at six-fifteen.

Then he was going forward, the shape of the grounded mammal growing closer. His footfalls on the sand, the sand growing wet and smooth as he neared the ocean. The sun continued to bang away; it now had drawn level to the horizon and balefully eyed the western coast and its shores and this beach, hanging in furious judgment and aggression. Riley felt frontally attacked, and when he was close enough to the whale, he was ducking for cover beneath the shade its body offered.

The odor was salt, vegetable-like, chummy and pungent and flooded with excreted panic and fear, a smell like pickling, and against his face and arms he felt what he thought was the greased hot huffs of the poor beast’s exhales. The breaths blasted him, along with the hyper ocean winds. And the form of the animal, within an arm’s length, was in opposition to perspective’s chief principle: it was more modest now that he was before it—the behemoth seemed graspable, measurable, condensed. The surf wash splashed over Riley’s pant-cuffs, and he heard the braying, mechanized voice calling out from where he had just left: “Get back! Get back! Step away, right now!” He glimpsed the first patrolman’s addled face superimposed on the whale’s protuberant surface—in a hallucinatory moment the hide shined so bright it mirrored everything behind him, that cop, the gawkers, the backs of the warehouse buildings and the towers of the offices and the arches of the freeways. All reflected in the parcel of blubber glossed with the stains of the animal’s apathetic homeland. The sea had cast up a one of its own, a habitant, a citizen. The citizen was ill, the sea was expelling it, for it to do the business of dying on other premises.

This was what raced in frantic snatches through his mind, and it touched Riley and angered him. At least a creature should be permitted to die in the only place it had ever known, and such a banishment knifed at him in an indignant, nervy place. When he touched the body of the whale, it was at once warm and cold, like a clump of burning coal doused in frigid water, and he could not restrain himself from embracing the thing. He extended his arms as wide as they could go and tipped forward, to rest against the animal emitting the pulsating beat of its own warm blood through the grainy patina of the skin. And in the ragged breathing of the maimed mammal, he felt his own pulse and heart begin to beat in approximation to its life-rhythms. He was oblivious to the litany of protests still being directed his way from the mainland.

“Sir, back away from the animal!”

“What the hell is he doing!”

“Must be some sicko! Sicko!”

“Step away from him now!” To the cop, all big things must be “hims.”

His head against the whale, turning his gaze to look at them. The crowd was reforming: many of those who had wandered off were now gathering again— this was the flashy climax they had been so eagerly awaiting. The visored couple was there again. The old vendor had wheeled his cart back into the fray. Riley noticed for the first time that the man’s head shook continuously—poor guy, thought Riley, he was never nodding at me, he clearly has some sort of palsy. He’s a parkinsonian; how could I have never noticed before? The young cop was at the point of the crowd and was the one doing most of the yelling, his palm unaccountably on the butt of his gun. “Back away and get down on the… ground.”

Riley turned his eyes back to the sea, and comforted his head against the beating of the whale’s big heart.

An eye showed now for sure; it opened high above the furthest reaches of Riley’s hand in a rump of mossy flesh, a little wrinkled crevice, like a hole bored into a sponge. The crevice watered, the pupil and iris and surroundings all a brown pool. It showed nothing really, only the loneliness of a thousand years. For a time, one mammal stared at the other. Then the whale slowly closed the eye. Along the stretch of hide just under Riley’s chin were the sprouts of a few coarse hairs; they tickled and pricked at his cheek, rubbing one side of his face raw.

The photographer was bursting with excitement, hopping from one stick leg to another, clicking pictures at a furious pace. She gesticulated wildly, flailing her arms — exhorting Riley to rearrange himself, to stand in front of the whale, to lean one direction and tilt his chin the other. Give me sassy, give me quizzical. She scratched at herself, and kept looking up at the drooping sun. She was losing light.

He wanted to block the animal from her view. Block it from the view of all the voyeur eyes. He felt the animal was aware of the spectacle its expulsion to ground had caused, that its echolocation was now attuned only to shame, and that this whole sad burlesque was inflicting more discomfort than was the beaching. He sloshed up to the head, turning his back to them, and tried to spread his body like a quilt over the entirety of the thing, to stymie their spectatorship. The wind was picking up. The news-channel chopper apparently liked what it saw: it had lowered nearer to the beach, rotoring like a crazed hummingbird and spitting the sand around in great funnels. It made the water smack the air.

The tide was up to his knees now, and he clutched tighter to the whale and thought he detected the breaths becoming more faint, more shallow. He sank down in the water, and lifted handfuls of the salty stuff and poured it onto the prone body. Cupful after cupful, splashing it onto the drying skin, tossing it higher, attempting to reach the most vulnerable parts at the top, the layer smelting in the sun—he could feel the animal’s thirst, its dehydration. And now he was on his hands and knees, shoveling the water, attempting to soak the animal down. Heaving up the sea to create a saving rain.

Desperately he rammed his chest into the breaking waves, hoping the collision would drench the whale. Now he heard nothing from the crowd; even the helicopter noise had died away. Only the water and the waves, and that fragile, timid breath coming in spurts. He kept pulling up more and more of the Pacific, relentlessly trying to save a life, whichever life that might be.

Finally his arms gave out. He collapsed into the lap of the ocean. As the shadows grew longer, it was for several minutes just the two of them in their exclusive communion. No one yelled anything he could hear, no one would come near them.

When the rescuers finally arrived, he was promptly ushered away to the rear of the beach. The rescue crew was young and enthusiastic, and they unpacked their water packs and kits and gear giddily, as if a beached whale was their proper due after so many emergency calls on already dead seals or the occasional gutted dolphin carcass—this was what they had signed on for. They dressed alike in matching canary yellow windbreakers, cargo shorts, and all were blond headed, shooting vivacious talk back and forth between them, and Riley was swept away as an irrelevancy so that the stage could belong to them entirely. They set to work like they were buzzed, their machinations simultaneously intent and reckless, somewhere between heart surgery and a house party.

Somehow, in all the activity, he was not arrested. The cop made a move toward him, hands uncertain whether to draw his ticket pad or his hand restraints, brows wrenched into curlicues over his lighting bolt shades — but here Riley was the one rescued. A pretty female reporter intercepted the officer, a cameraman behind her, needing a quote from an official on the scene. He seemed to quickly forget his authoritarian ire. He even smiled as he talked to woman, and his sunglasses seemed to wink. “I spotted the fish, and I knew immediately it was in trouble…”
Riley could not tell whether the whale was still alive; it looked especially inanimate as the rescuing naturists scaled up its flanks like spider monkeys up the rungs of a scaffold. There had been no more groans for a long time. But the young crew worked and worked, and Riley hoped that for them to labor so fiercely must have meant there was some life left. He looked close, hoping to catch sight of an eye, or some rising in the chest of the animal, but he was too far away now and the scurrying figures of the rescue team obstructed the view. He felt like a child who had been escorted out of a sickroom. The news crews ignored him. He sensed he had been pegged as a derelict, just an awkward accoutrement whose molestation of the whale would only detract from the pathos of the mini-saga. An agreement in the collective unconscious had been reached to excise him from the account. He slogged away after a minute or two, and the last thing he saw of the scene was the shaking vendor passing a soda to the mime.

He walked towards the bus stop, down the drive with the palm trees, which he had never before seen at such a late hour. The twilight stained lavender on their fronds, and in this light even the links of the fencing had a majestic glint, like precious ore twinkling in the bottom of a miner’s pan. When the bus rolled to his corner, he heard every sound it made, the engine, the hiss of the air brakes, pristinely and perfectly. He boarded and tried to settle himself into the seat, his pants starched stiff from sea-salt and sand.

In bed that night, worn down from the labors and the sun, he forgot to prepare his fear: neglecting to summon the trepidation at the imminent onslaught of his nightly terrors, they did not come at all. He only realized the absence as he was swimming off to sleep, lulled by the guiltless vibrato of his heart. He did sleep, and when he did so, he dreamed.

I was nine years old or maybe I was ten the day the man in the suit coat knocked on our door. My daddy went out to the porch and the man told him how our house had been sold and how he worked for the new owner. This was the house on Elvira Street, the yellow brick one with the black-painted chimney—the thing looked like a big bumblebee. Maybe we would have to move, the man said.

He was, looking back on it, a young guy, younger than my daddy anyway, though I’m sure he seemed plenty old to me at the time. It was nearing supper time when he came and from where I crouched inside the screen door I could hear grease popping in the kitchen, could smell the fat frying. My sister Daisy wasn’t much more than a baby then, this was all the house she’d ever known, and she just bobbed in her bouncy chair, chewing on her passy and staring at cartoons on the TV.

Daddy had taken off his cap and he used the bill to rake some sweat from his forehead. “Mr. Joseph never mentioned anything about selling. I told him a time or two how I might be interested in buying the place myself.”

“Well,” said the man, “he wasn’t exactly planning to sell. The house went into foreclosure; the bank took it over and my employer bought it from the bank. Most of Mr. Joseph’s properties have been placed in foreclosure.”

“Well, now.” I watched through the mesh of screen as my daddy rubbed at his belly, as if to make sure it was still in place. Earlier he’d been working on a Plymouth we had then, being good with things like that, and now his smeared hands worked motor oil and engine grit into the threads of his shirt. The other man glanced down now and then at the muddy patterns Daddy’s hands made. This all happened somewhere in the deep end of summertime, the sky behind the men’s heads still soaked through with pure blue daylight and evening just beginning to curl up lavender around the edges.

“Really wouldn’t care to move,” Daddy said, “if we could help it. We been here awhile now. We always paid good.”

“Well” said the man, looking the house up and down, looking at the porch, which sagged a little bit, stepping back to look at the roof, which I remember was dun-colored with speckles of mica in the shingles that glittered like polished dimes when the sun was high, “it might not come to that. You never know. We’re keeping our options open. I’ll need to give the place a once-over inside. Hope I’m not putting you out.” The man spied me at the screen and he grinned at me and nodded.

They came inside. The screen door clapped shut behind them. Daisy looked up with boggling blue eyes. The man appraised the front room with his hands on his hips. The room had beige wood paneling and a green carpet; the TV fronted one wall and against the opposite wall sat a sleeper sofa stitched with green and gold flowers. The window above the sofa was wedged tight with one of those old-style fan units that looked like a tin suitcase—a breeze would shudder and the fan blades would turn a couple of clicks, then stop. The man pulled a handkerchief and wiped it over the back of his neck. He was some taller than my daddy—already I reached up to Daddy’s chest, but on this man my head barely came past his belt.

The floorboards in the hallway gave their familiar creaks that grew louder even than the cartoon noise on the TV. And Mama flew into the room on a tailwind of fried fumes, wringing her hands on the towel she kept tucked in her waistband whenever she was cooking, the wings of her hair gummed back with flecks of flour. Her eyes, always worried and alert and a little wild—later in life they’d grow more so—fastened onto the man, narrowing to pinpoints, as if already knowing just who he was and why he was here. Likely she’d been hanging back and doing some eavesdropping herself. She never broke stride and waded right between them and up to the man’s chest, saying, “Did Joseph sell us out? I want you to know we paid him two months in advance sometimes, always paid regular. A lot of this work you see we done ourselves, ‘cause last year that floor in the bathroom fell in ‘cause there was a leak and we put in that brand-new bathroom floor you see in there and lots more besides.” Daddy scratched at his scalp with his fingers bunched. “My brother Willard lives down the way and he brought over a load of gravel and we smoothed it out and made that little drive you see out there ‘cause before it was just grass and weeds and we don’t park on our grass like some others you see around here. We always paid Mr. Joseph regular as clockwork and he said we was the best renters he ever had.” The man had fallen back an inch or two, trying to nod along with Mama, a pale smile stuck to his mouth.

“Well,” he said, “I’d just like to take a quick look around—” Daisy all at once broke out crying, a high splitting cry, the passy slipping her lips and tumbling down her chest, rolling onto the green carpet. Daddy went over and lifted her from the bouncy chair, cooing and clucking his tongue at her “—need just to eyeball a few things. Won’t take long….”

We trailed behind the man like boxcars bumping down a line of track. Daisy rode over Daddy’s shoulder with eyes watery from tears, breath gurgly, lips rimmed with a puffy red rind. Into the hallway, its bowed floor, the doorways that all seemed out of plumb to the walls. The first room on the left belonged to me and my brother Cruk, but Cruk stayed a lot of the time with some cousins we had out in the country. He still had some clothes here though, his jeans and jersey shirts in piles in the corners. Some clothes too hanging out of the big mahogany chest of drawers, atop which there was a little RCA black-and-white, the rabbit ears extended full length so that the silver wands nearly scraped the ceiling. Twin mattresses sat directly on the floor— mine was rolled out with a sleeping bag. The next door down was to the little bathroom with the new floor; Daddy had laid the floor over with a mustardy-looking vinyl, and the shower stall was covered with a pink fiberglass wall-liner pieced around the slit of the small window, the sashes and sill of which had once been painted white and where moisture now had caused the paint to peel away from the wood in broad, browning swaths that looked like tobacco leaves. Mama clung tight to the man’s back as he went about his inspection, jabbering on: “… we didn’t know the toilet was leaking … the floor caved in, nearly broke my neck … we bought the plywood with our own money, fixed it up good … Mr. Joseph said he wished all his renters….” The man looked at the bathroom. He stood in profile to me and I watched his one eye, blinking.

Mama and Daddy’s and Daisy’s bedroom was the last door on the right, then the hallway branched leftwards, dropping into the kitchen that took up the whole rear of the house. The place had a good-sized kitchen. A gingham curtain hung over its doorway. We had pivoted in that direction when the smoke started trickling through the curtain’s split—a metallic kind of smoke carrying with it a harsh stink. Mama cursed and elbowed past the man and into the kitchen. Daddy handed Daisy over to me and jumped after her.

Bologna was burning in the skillet, the smoke pouring out and billowing around the room. Grease exploded from the pan and rained down on the stovetop, the ruddy drops ran every which way. Mama screaming, the boiling grease hissing at us. Daddy knocked the skillet square with his fist and sent it skittering across the floor, meat and mess spilling out along the way. Mama with her towel smacked at the stove knobs until finally the burner cut out. With Daisy dangling from one arm I went over and opened the back door to let in some air.

Things settled down. Smoke and stink drifted out the open door, a slight breeze blew in. The grease sorted itself into plump bubbles that for a time continued to gnash and crackle, then gradually cooled and calmed and finally faded out. We all looked at the wall—the hard heat had streaked the plaster above the stove with a spindly black burn, resembling the skin of a racer snake. The man lowered the handkerchief from his nose; with the other hand he produced a tiny camera from the pocket of his suit coat. “Sorry,” he said, to no one or everyone, and started snapping pictures of the scorched wall. I heard Mama murmur a quick something and then she bumped into me and with her head down and arms clamped tight over her chest she hurried out through the gingham curtain. Her steps down the hall were rushed and heavy, and we heard the bedroom door slam shut. Daisy squirmed and breathed wet against my chest, Daddy dabbed at one reddened knuckle with his tongue, his eyes down. The man looked over at him. Told him not to worry about it. Things happen. Mama didn’t come back. Eventually the man wandered out the back door and we tagged after him, leaving charred scraps of bologna laying like dog turds on the linoleum.

Those lots on Elvira Street were long and deep, and I remember that backyard seemed to go forever. It didn’t end until the ground dipped and the grass grew tall and waving and flowed into patch of poke plants, then on into the shade of some hackberry trees. The hackberries barricaded a field of electrical towers—the peaks of the towers rose much higher than the trees and floated there in the sky like the masts of sailing ships. The power lines hummed all the time and of a night you could reach out your hand and feel the humming in the walls of the house.

The man now was taking pictures of the rear exterior. The back roof was flat-pitched, rolled out with black asphalt roofing that was as buckled and rippled as weathered tarmac. The gutter was loaded with powdery leaves, its aluminum bent and dented, the fascia board behind shot through with rot. Dandelions surrounded the cinderblock stub of the foundation in thick clusters. The man looked up from his camera; he motioned for Daddy to step out of frame. It took Daddy a second to grasp the meaning of the gesture. He gave the man a thumbs-up and came over to stand by me. I tightened my hold to Daisy and took off further into the yard, sitting down Indian-style in the grass and setting my sister down beside me.

“I rolled out this roof myself,” Daddy was saying as the man continued with his picture taking. “Couple of springs ago. Even scabbed in a new rafter. I’m not a half-bad roofer, you ever need any work like that done.”

The man nodded.

“Anything you and your boss need around here, I can get her taken care of for you. She’s a good old house, but I know she could use some spit and polish.” He put his cap back on and took it off again. “I don’t mind helping out.”

The man didn’t seem to hear and started around the side of the house. Daddy made to shuffle after him, but for a second he stopped and looked over at me. And he sent me one of his winks. This was something he did a lot—he had an active face and was always flashing grins and scowls and fake grimaces, or puffing out his cheeks and making his eyes bulge to get us kids to laugh. The winks were especially common. When he changed a tire and I happened to be around, I’d get a wink. The time he managed to replace the water heater, and us both watching the water run from the spigot until steam started to rise, knowing then he’d made it work, I got a wink. If he traded in a car, and wanted to show me he’d got the better of the man on the deal, I’d get a bunch of winks, three or four fat ones. Look at your daddy boy, he’s one sly fox.

Now, though, it was no good. The thing leapt from his face same as always, fluttered a bit, then died dead away, falling like a moth with one wing into the pigweed and cheatgrass. Daisy crawled the ground around me, giggling her baby giggles, talking at the dirt, beating the packed earth with her tiny fists. I looked away. I didn’t believe him anymore.

The man left just as the sun was setting. He’d wanted to check the crawlspace—but Daddy worked on lawnmowers some times and stowed their stripped skeletons and motors underneath the house, so there was no room to wiggle inside or get a real look at much of anything. Then he’d wanted to see the attic. Same thing—the man opened the pull ladder, and an avalanche crashed down around him—old toys, busted lampshades, clothes hangers, extension cords, garbage bags full of odds and ends. After he’d gone we sat around the TV and ate from a plate of cheese sandwiches. Daddy talked and laughed and pulled faces, and said how all told the man had seemed a nice-enough fella. A good sort. Mama didn’t look at him, didn’t raise her eyes, just kept jabbing forkfuls of cheese sandwich at Daisy’s mouth. Me, I had to agree with Daddy. About the fella in the suit coat. He’d been alright. I’d kind of liked him. He had seemed like a good man.

I was concluding my latest round of dry heaves in a bathroom of my mother’s house when through the Queen Anne’s lace of the window curtains I spied the three of them. Two had already infiltrated inside our wrought iron fence and were standing on the sandy zoysia grass. The third was still on the sidewalk, holding up his phone to take a video of his friends mugging there. They were all of them clad in chinos and motorcycle boots and band tshirts and fur-lined, thrift store hunting caps in the ninety-one degree heat. Fans of mine.

Stentorian midday clouds rolled leeward off the Gulf, mammoth shadows cruising over the beach roads and lanes like homesick transports; trees dressed in Spanish moss flickered and darkened beneath their voyaging. Peals of distant thunder. For the fifth time in as many hours I rummaged through the medicine cabinet, futilely as before. I gobbled three stale antacids for wont of other additives and proceeded to commit pedestrian self-abuse over the vanity sink.

The mirror tried hard to catch me in an expression and once or twice nearly succeeded. But I was too canny for it. After I took the appropriate cleanup measures, I ran some cold water, put on my sunglasses, and departed.

 

 

If you’ve seen one stuffed marlin, you’ve seen them all. Blue, marlin-blue, glazed as cheap plastic; even their genuine white underbellies shimmer in artifice. Once they were proud and alive and soared atop the crests of waves, before getting hooked and reeled and gutted and finally rendered the ultimate indignity of spending the rest of eternity gazing down upon on a gaggle of dicksplats eating breaded shrimp.

The server brought my strawberry daiquiri. I had a bitch of a time coordinating the action of the straw – red foam coated its length and it stuck to my fingertips and candied up my lips and stubble, this when it wasn’t otherwise lolling unaccountably free of my clutches, listing around the rim of the chalice-sized glass like a marble on a curved track. I put back on my sunglasses. I don’t know why I ever take them off.

The other customers on the patio were rooting into baskets of fried calamari, fried grouper, French fries, fried oysters. A couple of tables over an especially stout patron swallowed a packet of tartar sauce whole. I kicked back on the bench with my legs sprawled out and looked dead-eyed at the sun through tinted glass.

The server was blinking down at me. “Sir, wake up please. You can’t sleep here.” Next to her stood a man in a clip-on tie who could only be the manager.

“Why not,” I asked. I was genuinely curious. They appeared perplexed but I thought it a legitimate question.

“That’s our policy.”

“Fair enough. May I finish the daiquiri?”

This threw them; furtive glances were exchanged. A call to corporate headquarters might be necessary, to check the guidelines, give the policies on troubled guest protocol a gander. I hate creating awkwardness for anyone, especially folks in the service industry, so I thought it best to beg off. Standing upright on the bench I hooked my legs over the patio railing and made a valiant leave. I sauntered north along the sidewalk.

Boulevards of hacienda-style houses and mock Tudors broiling in the sun. Lilac scent, palmetto bugs, lizards with red bubbles beneath their chins, palpating and deflating in molasses-slow reptilian respirations. It was the cop Pendelton who eventually drove along beside me.

“Craig, hold up a minute.”

“I’m walking here, Pendelton. If you want to come over for supper you have to ask mamma. Her house, her rules.”

“You robbed Salty Pete’s back there. Ten dollars and fifty-seven cents, with sales tax.”

Halting. “Alright, first of all, that wasn’t intentional. I was just trying to avoid a brouhaha.”

“I know that. Why don’t you get in?”

I commenced again to walk. “Piss off, Pendelton.”

“C’mon, Craig. I’m not hauling you in for dashing on one drink. Get in, I’ll drive you home.”

Home. At times it sounds like the only noble word in our English language. Home. I got one of those.

 

 

Pendelton courts my widowed mother and delights in any opportunity for sundry services he might be able to provide. He’s always flourishing his statutory knowhow and working knowledge of city ordinances, goes out of his way to inform her of housebreakings even when they occur on the other side of the island, diligently giver her detailed reports of stolen trashcans or BB gun battles in the dead of night on the public park baseball diamond. She stood with him just outside the screen door as I crabwalked up the carpeted staircase. My stomach had seized up on me between the first flagstone and the front porch. I was four or five days into detox; this we hope is the post-acute phase. A modest corner of social media was aflutter with wonderment as to my current condition and whereabouts.

 

TMZ

@TMZ

@Craig Calais is off his meds and off the grid #bigtimeburnout

 

Loudwire

@Loudwire

The Bella Donnas frontman thinks R’N’R needs another junkie suicide. Maybe. More than it did his last album anyway #kidsdontfollowthebellas

 

The Bella Donnas

@thebelladonnas

C-scape, you got brothers in arms who love your crazy ass. Kick that shit and get your yawl back. #rawk4ever

 

Mr X

@mrx

Who the f&#% is @Craig Calais?? #mytitteracct

 

 

I managed to make it to supine position in the bottom bunk of some bed, not one I recall ever previously having habituated. For the second or third time this day thus far, I looked up to see a human face peering down upon me. The visages of people in faint bewilderment is becoming quite commonplace.

It was my nephew, hanging bat-like from the bunk above. “Whatcha doing, Uncle Craig?”

“Just trying to catch a little shuteye, Fozzie.”

“Ozzie, Uncle Craig. My name is Ozzie.”

“You’re a funny bear, Ozzie.”

“Uncle Craig, are you ok?”

“I feel like the world’s most reamed out sock puppet, kiddo.”

He is a towheaded boy of eight, my sister Fanta’s oldest, pale and wispy as a dryer sheet, brown eyes big as sausage patties. “Tell-me-your-ma-jor-mal-func-tion,” he said. Occasionally he adopts a robot voice. Quite often really.

“Having a mite trouble keeping food down.”

“Oh yeah. What have you been eating?”

“You’re a smart bear, Ozzie.”

Down in the kitchen his mom was fanning herself with one of those complimentary community newspapers tossed weekly onto driveways by invisible elves. Fanta was set to pop with her latest child, third and counting, this one’s father purportedly working on an offshore oilrig in Port Arthur, Texas. Baby Emilia was on the floor, lifting up the skirt of a remaindered ragdoll and scooting her bottom across the linoleum that was brocaded in designs of cabbage flowers and donkey carts.

My sister sipped mint water from a jam jar. “You’re maybe looking improved today, big brother.”

“That’s curious,” I replied, heading toward the faucet and imbibing water mouth-first from the tap. A radio sat on a shelf above the spice rack; a woman’s plaintive voice called from the trebly speakers, keening and elegiac, mourning tenderness misplaced, soft favors left unreturned, sacrifice that by definition was destined to be doomed. The singer had been left with naught excepting a broken heart, overdrawn checking account and possible syphilis.

My mother entered through the back screen door, bearing clean laundry stuffed into pillowcases. She dumped them out on the kitchen table in front of Fanta. “I wash, you fold.” My sister set in upon the unmentionables.

My mother, Ronnette, Ronnie to most everyone other than her own mother, swept a wing of hair frizzed by the laundry room and humidity back over her forehead. “I caught another psychopath peeking through the hedgerow in back. Little geek mashed down some of my zenias. Your fan club had better steer clear of mamma’s cabana or she’s liable to hunt down the shells for her .410.” Some years back, my grandmother had come memorably close to plugging a Seventh Day Adventist full of buckshot after he had the temerity to still be hawking his leaflets door to door after dusk. “Craig my boy,” said my mother, “you look like last week’s dogshit.”

“See,” I said to Fanta, “told you so.”

“No, you didn’t.” She set down a pair of Ozzie’s briefs and brought baby Emilia onto her lap. “I’d told Craig I thought he looked better today.”

Mama’s family name is Riordan. Her face is broad and blunt and intelligent, her natural skin tone Irish pale and smattered with the requisite freckles, the irises of her eyes green wedges. She appraised me, the unsentimental stare of a fish monger or arson investigator, taking into her gaze my cellophaned soul and squeezing it like a cow’s udder. “Nope. Not yet anyway.”

The gargantuan, double-door stainless steel Frigidaire she stood in front of now was a gift from me, purchased from the royalties off a song on the soundtrack to a summer movie that still did only passable business in the States but was an absolute dynamo in the Far East. I also paid off Fanta’s LeSabre and some of her lingering medical bills from the pre-eclampsia she’d had with Emilia. The air handler that serviced the second and third floors of the house – that was me. And also I got my grandmother the Rascal she claimed she wanted, though to anyone’s knowledge she’d yet to take it for a spin. I wondered if any of that largesse then was paying off in dividends of patience and roughhewn tenderness now, prepayments currently affording me a wide berth for my courting of death and the misuse of my Calais/Riordan-given body as a pharmaceutical gumbo pot. Didn’t strike me as cynical even if that was the case; seemed very fair, evenhanded, right as the mail.

 

On the front porch I smoked one of my mother’s Benson and Hedges and rested my head against a plaster pilaster while she dug out the baked dirt from a pot of elephant ears. Spade in hand, she hacked as if with a grudge. Bags of potting soil, plastic trays of mums, stood at the ready beside us.

“Do you know if Tygre is still around?’

She stood and smacked dirt from her hands, mopped the sweat from her face with the front of her tshirt, canary yellow, iron print advertising some regatta back near the turn of the millennium. “Well,” she said, “I doubt he’s serving his country overseas or doing much in Silicon Valley at the moment.”

“Mom.”

“And likely the funding for his one-man show never came through.”

“Ok, Mama.”

“Never did so far as I know score a patent on any of his inventions.”

“Jesus.”

“That silver mine went busto.”

“If you know, you know. If not – ”

“So seeing how we never got word about any big doings, I’d say he’s still around Largo somewhere. What are you doing on the porch anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be keeping a low profile? Isn’t that what they call it?”

I waved it off. “None of them seem to be out right now anyway. And I’m not big enough for any real media to care.”

“I come out these days, I half-expect one of them to be in the gum tree, holding binoculars.”

“Think I’ll go for a walk.”

“Yes,” she said, “good idea. Your latest.”

“How’s the fridge?”

“She’s a beaut, baby. Thank you again. Craig, honey, you should maybe catch a shower.”

Absurd suggestion. Water nowadays burns my skin like hell’s own rain.

 

Crestview to Sienema, Sienema to Mangrove, Mangrove to the boardwalk. I figured Tygre likely to be somewhere near the water. Tygre is my oldest friend. He was the drummer in my first band. We were terrible. If Tygre had not been such a wretched drummer I believe we had a real chance to be merely bad. The other guys wanted him out. I said no way. This forged the two of us tight as brothers. Bangkok Ass dissolved.

He went on to become the wretched drummer in my next terrible band. We played precisely one show and the rec center asked us never to darken their door again, not even for pickup basketball.

Tygre gave up music right after that but began to brilliantly ply his true calling, that for erranding and entourage. Hypeman, wingman, sidekick especial. Tygre got the tires rotated on the van, bought the weed, worked the door at the all-ages shows, photoshopped the fliers, hawked the first EP at the skate park and arcade. All of which makes it very curious that I didn’t take him with me to LA. The record company had signed the Bella Donnas and slipped us a decent advance. He did come out a couple of times but, in retrospect, I believe I made him feel a little less than a baller. He was expecting more, I know. It broke his heart. Then, he went and did what he did, and everything exploded into injunctions and lawsuits, parties of the first part and so on. That was four years ago; nada since then as far as contact, friendship, brotherhood.

I cruised the surf shops, the skate shops, the vape shops. I didn’t ask any of the people working the counters about him. Too daunting. How private detectives do that kind of thing, I’ll never know. A tasti-freeze stand, beach shop, tiki bar, a homeless man with terrier mutt in tow, panhandling for loose change while attempting to push a tune out of a didgeridoo. Confirming on closer inspection that he was not Tygre, I moved on. I slogged across the intersection, over the main drag of the strip, heading toward the marina.

A word now about my deceased father. I think of him whenever I see boats, sails, masts. Not because he was a sailor – for all I know he hated boats and never set foot on deck – but because I wish for his sake that he was sailing now, freed from work at the pipe fitter’s plant, fat pension rolling in, floating on the water with scorched melanin and a Styrofoam cooler at his feet. I was eight years old when he passed of the “minor” heart attack that wasn’t supposed to kill him but sure enough did.

In much the same way, Tygre makes me think of my dad, because they never met. I wouldn’t pal up with him till freshman year. But everything that occurred post Craig Sr. is bathed in the same fatherless hue, the no-dad tinge. Dadless Craig learns a C chord, dadless Craig becomes a rock star for approximately nine months, dadless Craig Calais Jr. delivers a set at Coachella that might go down as the absolute nadir in the annals of live performance. I told the crowd we loved them after the third song, walked off then in the belief that we’d finished up the encore. About fifteen thousand people, the ones who weren’t booing, had already decamped at that point. I was not in the best of voice.

Dock master, bait shop, the marina’s restaurant, Tygre, schooners and cigarette boats bobbing in their slips. I turned back around. I went up to the open window of Cocoanut Kate’s Bar and Grille. He was poised at a round-top table adjacent to a Rockbot digital jukebox, the remains of a cheeseburger and a ribbon of onion ring drowned in a lake of ketchup evidenced on a greasy paper plate. He was easily thirty pounds heavier. He had jowls, a man-bun. Maybe he got some of my former mass in a kind of spiritual swap meet – at this juncture in life I bear a strong resemblance to a rake handle.

He saw me approach. I was hoping it would take him a minute to recognize me. It didn’t. “You then.”

“Hey, man.” No one’s eyes got dewy, not his anyway. There might be a term for his glare but gentle would not be it. “I’m back for awhile,” I said. “Came back to get well. Came … home.”

“Whoopti shit.”

“Tygre, I really wish we could put the past in the past.”

“And I wish a rat would snap off your nuts.”

“Bygones, and that stuff.”

“I rent out inflatables for kid’s birthday parties. Go fuck yourself.”

Actually my eyes were moistening nicely right about now. The aroma of beer, the sudsy slick of it, the pungent vapor of frying oil – my sinuses were leaking like a sieve and a light case of the spins was underway. “Look, you had no business putting out those tracks. Those were my songs. That shit was embarrassing. Demos I did my bedroom – I was just a kid learning my craft – and then that they’re all over the web. If you needed money, you should have asked –-”

“I need money.”

“Fuck, man, not now. I don’t have any money now. I’m broke as hell.”

“Yeah well, better to have loved and lost.”

Things deteriorated from there. At one point, Tygre, at considerable personal risk, ran to the gallery of dart boards and took up some steel-tipped darts and commenced to winging them in my direction. The third and most errant struck a cocktail waitress in the left tit, just below her nametag. (Deidre.) The tray she carried was loaded –- two full pitchers of beer and stacks of frosted mugs crashed to the floor. Full on melee. Any dignified getaway was righteously spoiled when I slipped in the suds and went down hard. Sunglasses clattered out of sight. My chin broke the fall.

 

I was sunken into a Papasan chair in my grandmother’s house, a renovated detached garage behind my mother’s home. She sat in the Lazyboy adjacent, footrest up, thick feet clad in cloth slippers, her wide shins ridged and shiny. Law and Order SVU played on the television.

Behind the drapes, twilight descended purple. There were footfalls and assorted racket from the rest of the family on the back patio. The scent of charcoal warming the grill. Mamma was laying on chicken breasts in barbecue sauce. I believed my condition was improving, because while food stuffs as actual matter and substance still struck me repulsive, as a concept, an ideal, eating was starting to seem at least comprehensible again. As yet I wanted nothing to do with it personally but did not disparage the lifestyle choices of those who did. Also, I was shitting again.

Throughout the interior of my grandmother’s house there hung a scent of lemon, which I had mixed feelings about, either from furniture polish or the ponderosa tree in the side yard.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve seen this one already, too.” She said it with declamatory authority, as if delivering her final verdict after much deliberation. She drank from a tall glass of sweet vermouth and club soda, resting the glass against her belly between sips. “Your face. What happened there?”

“I was in a sorta fight.”

She squinted like a rancher eyeing livestock at an auction. “Your hands, the knuckles. Raise them up to the light.”

“It wasn’t a fight like that really. More … sillier or something.”

She turned back to the television. “All the better for you, I’d suspect.”

“No doubt.”

Lowering the footrest, she heaved herself upright. A baker’s dozen of arthoscopic surgeries and joint replacements had left her with a dragging gait and her slipper bottoms scuffed across the slab floor as she walked. Pulling back the drapes: “Ronnette oughta have that chicken burnt up about now. Even with the cataracts I can see the flames jumping from here. She’d run them down with the car too if we let her. C’mon now, let’s go pay our respects.”

Arm in arm we made our way outside. She was no more unsteady than me, that diamond-hard generation of hers still lending the last of their reserves of strength and will to mine, hoping that in the little time that remained some might yet rub off. How I loved her, this rubber-tough, bobcat-fierce old woman, literal steel in her bones, wizened eyes in a shrunken apple face. Sooner rather than later I would have to bury her – provided she didn’t have to bury me first. Whatever the chronology of our respective rendezvous with the inevitable, for certain there was only one of us who would have exploited the grief to underwrite any no-account bullshit.

We stumped towards the patio table that was set with plates, plastic cutlery, blue glasses crammed with melting ice, condiments, a roll of paper towels. The children were squirming in their seats, Fanta was furiously texting on her phone, Mama was stubbing out another butt in the pot of an aloe plant. And the old lady at my side suddenly halted and took up one of my two idle hands, disreputable pair that they were, and smacked it with a dry kiss, a nuzzle of indomitable love.

For supper I managed two sweet potato frittes and three quality bites of the chicken. Curiously enough, I found sucking on lime wedges to be quite fortifying.

A rustle over by the hedgerow. Another gawker had penetrated the perimeter. A sallow kid, sleeveless, lobe gauges and mouth wispy with a Jesus beard. He appeared stuck; his reedy legs had gotten entwined with shoots of the privet. The gig was up – his eyes met ours and he realized we were all staring his way. He stretched out his hand, fingers spread open like an eagle’s claw, a wave in its own fashion. “Yo, Craig. You’re alive! We love you, man.”

My grandmother spat into the fescu. “Before my time on this earth is past, I sure would like to know what it is like to kill at least one person.”

What the hell. I loved him too.

 

 

 

 

I have a host of friends, which for a solitary sort such as myself can be faintly embarrassing. Question: am I the solitary sort? I always thought I was, said I was. A natural observer, reluctant participant. Is there a chance that is total bullshit? If it’s true, then what are all these people doing around me? No explanation for how I accumulated them. So evidence would suggest I’m gregarious and social, even while denying being either. All this time I believed I was working diligently on my standoffishness, really tried to construct an aloof edifice. But it comes across as shyness and affability, vaporous affability.

And, even hermits get lonely sometimes.

Also I have a girlfriend. Actually I might have two (verdict is out on that; kind of depends who you ask). Lischey is the official, confirmed girlfriend. We more or less live together, though we split the time between her place (92^nd and Amsterdam) and mine (on the edge of Washington Square Park, the only building far as the eye can see not owned by NYU). Mostly mine. I prefer to stay at mine. Because it’s mine. Granted, it is smaller (though neither place is an aircraft carrier), but still it is quite nice, gets good natural light, and I have a fine eye for feng shui if I do say so myself. Also, for my money it is located in a better neighborhood (though both neighborhoods are a lot of money. Ha!).

Valia; she is the X-factor. Combustible. Indeterminate. More on later …

I do have female friends. Chastely so. Several in fact – and if there were unchaste moments they occurred well in the past. No harm, no foul (sure, I say that now). There is Tania, who looks like a Jessica. Gina, who looks like a Jenna. Brittany, who looks like a Bridgette. Cassandra, whose name more or less fits. Bridgette, I mean Brittany, does sting a bit even now, but hey, sometimes I miss 90’s rock too. Then I hear The Gin Blossoms.

Valia is electronica. She’s Daft Punk. Lischey is folk music, and one would think that’s timeless. Certainly been around awhile. But is she Dock Boggs, or just one of The Kingsmen?

And what music do they like? I’m kind of an Alt-Country guy myself. It’s maybe telling that neither of them listen to that.

My mind regularly returns to my women, over and over to them, one or the other, though ironically I’m still thoughtless. Generally my mind will be on the one I’m not with at the time. “I’m going down for a smoke,” I tell Lischey, and step out into the hall. Down one flight of stairs, down the next. Going outside to call Valia. I don’t actually smoke, not anymore. (Three years, two months, and twenty-one days, but who’s counting?) Luckily, there’s Mendolsohn, my first floor, clarinet-playing, jazz musician, reefer-fiend neighbor, who never leaves his place unless it’s to perform a Tuesday night gig with his “combo” at a place called Smoke (Ha!), or to trawl the record shops downtown for Chet Baker imports, and who is always willing to puff on one of my American Spirits while I dial up Valia. I buy a pack about every month and a half.

Knock-knock. Through the door I hear Bud Powell going crazy on Un Poco Loco. The cacophony erupting from the hi-fi drops in volume when I knock again.

I am hit with the rainforest musk of Mendolsohn’s herb, peppermint incense, patchouli and his idiosyncratic cooking: green onion and turmeric vindaloos with fish heads, a certain gumbo he does with egg yolks and these particular banana peppers he has to order off the dark web (something about an embargo). Mendolsohn stands there, panther-lithe in a port wine turtleneck, shaven-headed, soul-patched, wearing octagonal shades. “Phone time?”

We walk outside. I give him a cigarette. He smokes them like they’re joints, pinching them between his thumb and middle finger, taking quick little tokes and scrunching up his face. “Goddamn,” he says on the inhale, before blowing some of the smoke on my clothes for verisimilitude.

I phone Valia; she rarely answers. Rarely means almost never. Or never. One time she did in fact answer, and sounded shocked I was calling her. “Marlon?”

My parents’ favorite movie was Last Tango in Paris. Which is disgusting. “Valia,” I said. “How are you?”

“Marlon, wow. I mean –” Then some noise I couldn’t ascertain was coming from the background.

“Valia, what’s – how are you?”

“Marlon.”

“Valia.”

“It’s just – give me a second, okay sweets?” And she put down the phone, I guess; there was an amplified racket like she was trying to scoop out the mouthpiece on her side with a teaspoon. And behind that din, I believe I heard the sound of voices. Two. One hers, and another.

Eventually: “Marlon,” she said.

“Valia,” I said.

“Goddamn,” said Mendolsohn.

“This is such a surprise, my man.”

“Why is it such a surprise? I call every Wednesday night. You just never answer.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. You said my voicemails are your favorite part of Thursday mornings.”

“I thought that was Thursdays.”

“It is. It is Thursdays. That’s what I said.”

She giggled, I presume at something off-stage. “No, no. Friday mornings I meant to say. My favorite part of Friday mornings.”

“Wait, that makes no sense. We see each other on Thursdays. Thursday nights, I mean.”

“What’s that, my love. Yes, exactly. My favorite part of Thursdays.”

“I – are we still talking about voicemails? My voicemails.”

“Oh, did you leave me a voicemail, baby? I didn’t check it.”

“Valia.”

“Marlon. Listen, lover, I have to –” And she was giggling again, and did I catch once more the murmur of that mystery voice, masculine and tuned low? “—go. I’m late. For Zumba. I adore the daylights out of you. I can’t wait till Friday.”

“No, Thursday. Valia –”

“Perfect. Good night, my man. I’m going to be late. For Zumba.” Then she was gone, the connection cut, the phone cold in my hand. To myself I whispered, “Zumba. But it’s eleven at night.”

“Beautiful, ain’t it, brother,” said Mendolsohn.

“What is?”

“What do you mean what? Look around. The snow.”

And it was snowing, a perfect, slow-falling snow, huge flakes, pinwheels and diamonds and pinafores parachuting to the pavements. The obsidian New York sky was filled with hovering apparitions, sailing down between buildings, floating through the halo glow of street lamps. It was magical, beautiful, the kind of beauty only the anxious can fail to notice and only the heartsick can truly appreciate.

I tried her three more times that night. Three more smoke breaks. Mendolsohn was developing a cough. On my final defeated return to the apartment, Lischey called out to me from the bedroom while I was numbly drinking a glass of water in the kitchen. “You know, you need to be more careful.”

My winter-raw ears perked up. “What do you mean?”

“I’m worried about you. The cigarettes. You really need to give it up.”

“I know. You’re right. I know you’re right. I need to quit. I really, really need to quit.”

 

 

*****

 

Now when I’m actually with Valia, it’s a different story. Because she’s awful. Terrible. A pretentious, insipid, vapid mess. Valia is gangly and elongated, like a medium-sized person who’s been run through a loom. She quotes from famous people without giving attribution, and these she takes from a quote book, one that I got her. She only watches foreign films if they’ve been nominated for a Golden Globe, has the poseur’s, or sociopath’s, tic where she mimics – poorly – the accent and cadence of anyone with whom she comes in contact. Her own speech is a mélange of metropolitan dipthongs and the non-native but deeply entrenched Manhattanite’s ironical breeziness. She wears jodhpurs, clogs, body stockings with thrift-store velveteen jackets, biker boots and suede pumps. She is a sculptor, at least technically. Her pieces are done out of rebar, chicken-wire, fiber mesh and chain mail. They should be funky, quirky and interesting. Instead you look at them, see the parts and none of the whole, the materials and none of the art, and have to fight down the urge to take them apart and rearrange them into coherence.

Consistently mispronouncing the word “insouciant” does not prevent her from using it several times a day. And she never orders the same cocktail twice. An inveterate pursuer of the latest trends, she scours mixology blogs and websites for the most esoteric concoctions possible, so that in some Tribeca club with no name above the door or in a bistro in the Meat Packing district she can insouciantly ask the hapless bartender for a Madame De Farge or a Cobalt Crème or an Esprit De Luce; and when of course the poor sap doesn’t know the recipe, she reacts in head-slapping disbelief, stunned at the ignorance. She does this every time.

“Behold,” she said. “My latest.”

I stood before the piece, a ginormous thing that looked like a jungle gym constructed of whittled car aerials with charcoal cockroaches skewed to the tips. It was shockingly hideous, without being powerful, and within a few seconds I had to look away as I felt the crepes suzettes I’d had for dinner turning on me.

We were in her Soho studio, which is larger than the house I grew up in. How she afforded it, or her apartment on West 9^th, I had no idea. Trust fund, maybe?

She handed me a bottle of mineral water. “Well, tell me what you think. I’m calling it All Tomorrow’s Parties.”

“Good title.”

“It has an ecology theme.”

“Oh yeah.”

Her eyes are very small, and dark, and they glitter like black confetti. Whatever her IQ, she is canny, and has a preternatural instinct for slights. “You don’t really like my work, do you?”

“Of course I do. It’s yours, so I like it.”

“But,” she leapt in, “if it was somebody else’s you wouldn’t like it?”

“I would. Just not as much.”

This was the boot-licking, or pump-licking, posture I often was in with her. And it’s not her fault, not exactly. It’s a matter of chemistry, pheromones, hormones or the like. Something in the muzhik in me responds to the czarina in her. For all her shallowness, superficiality, soullessness, she possessed two qualities that proved irresistible to somebody like me, so disposed to love more fervently from afar. First, she was so removed and distant, there in her Valia temple, infrequently observing me, much less engaging with me, that whenever she did bestow a modicum of attention or desire, the effect was dazzling, incredible. To a man trapped in a mineshaft for days and days, the glow from a ten-watt bulb at twenty paces is blinding.

And also, a peculiar quirk, either to her or me. She is more beautiful in memory and fantasy than she is in the flesh. And this is curiously bewitching. Her stringy frame, her long neck, her narrow shoulders, her legs which were the width of pipe cleaners, had a gawky awkwardness in person but were contoured perfectly to align with the curves of erotic imagining. Arms and legs like tentacles, hands like a concert pianist, concave stomach.

She didn’t believe me about liking the sculpture. Valia is fine with being lied to but does not like not being liked. A super-majority of the time this would have resulted in a severe sulk or a vendetta carried out covertly over weeks, but one so well-heeled it had the plausible deniability of nonchalance. Tonight however, her reaction was different. Because also, she is mercurial. The camo vest she was wearing was the first to go. Followed by the suspenders. Next her buckskin blouse hit the floor. Her dark eyes shined, avid with something that an ungenerous person might call malevolence. She started to wiggle the breeches over her whippet hips, beckoned me with a finger shaped like a rattlesnake bean.

The point of all this being, it was then I started to think about Lischey. Five foot two Lischey, who as a teenager in New Hampshire had been a camp counselor during the summers. Lischey, who knew how to sew a button back onto a shirt. Who’d been unsuccessfully trying to stop biting her nails since she was seven years old. Who was afraid of crowds – they caused her to tremble. Lischey, who tucked her auburn hair back behind her ears in a gesture of pensive gentleness. All fragility, except not. She worked at a legal-aid office in Morningside Heights, flinging herself day after day against the immovable bulwark of systemic injustice. Yet, she managed to be chipper about it – in this she had an unbowed quality, indomitable and naturally courageous. She checked her social timidity and descended five times a week, ten hours a day into the mire of the urban berserk. And never succumbed, never drowned. It neither hardened her personality nor pruned her spirit. I think they call it character.

At home of a night – hers or mine – she wore wool socks, pajama bottoms and a Vassar crew team sweatshirt. She popped organic popcorn on the stove. I picture her now, padding around the apartment, a cup of steaming tea, holding the ceramic cup at the rim between six fingertips. How warm it looks even from here, how safe, to be ensconced between those walls with her, punching in on the laptop another episode of the latest Greatest TV Show Ever friends had told us we just had to watch. “Let’s just stay up and finish the season.” Frost collected on the windowpanes.

The shrewd boxer anticipates the uppercut, the left hook, always tries to be wary and mindful of the forgotten arm ready to strike. It will not be Valia but Lischey who leaves me.

 

 

*****

 

I once counted all my male friends. I came up with the number fourteen, not including friendish work acquaintances, friends’ friends, and Lischey’s born-again brother Milo. And not including Mendolsohn actually – not because I wouldn’t have counted him but because he wouldn’t have counted me. Mendolsohn moves free and easy, in an egalitarian swing; in his personal universe either every cat was a friend or no cat was. When it came to the brotherhood of man, he was basically a soloist. I admired him so.

Fourteen, then. Too many – that was almost certainly too many. Query: what does a man need with fourteen male friends? Response: absolutely nothing. I couldn’t even tell you what we used to do the majority of the time, just committed this chronic marauding through Manhattan, en masse, or else broke apart into various prides and packs for more minor jaunts. Really, no memories come to me, only tag words emblazoned my brain: Silver Tequila, the Rangers, Louis CK Quotes, Half Marathon, Tits, Go Fuck Yourself.

And then, one day, there were only seven. Half of our crew fell hard off the face of the island. The culprit was Brooklyn; Brooklyn culled our herd. Wives and all of a sudden, children, were responsible too, but mostly we blamed Brooklyn. Bed Stuy, Williamsburg, Park Slope, Cobble Hill. Renovated brownstones and newly-erected townhomes gobbled up our buddies.

So the seven of us, this depleted band, drifted about in a daze, wondering who next would be disappeared. But the new pace was better for me. Instead of raging unto dawn, or last call anyway, we caught some of the mellowed contagion that had consumed our brethren. Nights ended earlier and earlier, lunches came and went without alcohol, chest bumps dissipated, and hitting the gym was fast becoming a matter of maintenance rather than vanity. And as I say, busy as I was hopping between an ignored woman and an ignoring one, the downshift into a bottom gear of male-bonding, barely above an idle, suited me just fine. The only dispiriting part was that our gatherings were pretty blasé now, pretty anemic. It had all been said.

A patio table on a Saturday afternoon, a tapas place on the Upper East Side, drinking mint iced tea, Rory popping the last lamb twist into his mouth, Garrison pushing an apple blossom around his plate, Dane drumming his fingers on the tabletop, hooking his sunglasses on the front of his shirt before then putting them back on again. Today we were four.

A lull entered our conversation, a more and more frequent occurrence. Garrison despised silence and in no time said, “You know, I work like sixty hours a week. You guys ever notice how its like no one you see in movies set in New York ever has a job?”

“Everyone notices that,” said Dane.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And everyone comments on it too.”

Garrison shrugged, looked away. “Well fuck me for walking then.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Dane, looking at Rory, who with a spoon was scraping the bottom out of an emptied bowl of endive bisque. “You want to give that up, already? All gone. Finito. We ordered ten things between us, Concentration, and I bet you took down six of them.”

We call Rory “Concentration”, as in short for Concentration Camp. Which is wretched and offensive. We call him that because he’s so thin – not Concentration Camp thin, really, not even runway thin, just skinny. And that’s notable because his appetite is so large. He eats like a thresher chopping through wheat stalks.

I dreaded what was coming, but was powerless to stop it. Here he went: “Sorry, guys. I’ve always had this freaky metabolism. I can eat anything, never gain a pound. Nutella, chili dogs, Eclaires, Bolognese. Been like that ever since I was a kid. My dad used to say—”

Garrison: “You’re dad used to say his son ate like a D-lineman, looked like a ballerina. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we’ve heard.”

“And,” I said, “once they thought you had a tapeworm and sent you to Boston to see a specialist.”

“They tried to get you on diet.”

“Your mom said that was crazy.”

“Said you needed to gain weight, not lose it.”

“Anyway,” said Rory, looking off forlornly. “I eat a lot.”

Although he was wearing sunglasses, something in the tilt of Dane’s head let me know he was following the progress of two girls walking down the sidewalk, both blondes, both in sundresses. Dane is our requisite rake. His conquests are considerable but have taken up a significantly smaller percentage of his life next to the amount of time he’s spent boasting about them. Significantly smaller.

“Look at them,” he said. “The one there, on the left, that tattoo on her neck. Goddamn that’s sexy. You remember that one girl I was with?”

“Nadia,” volunteered Garrison.

“No, Kylie,” said Dane, but the mistake pleased him, that such were his stats it was very easy to lose track of which girl was which. “Kylie had the scorpion tattoo between her shoulders …”

And he was off, describing the anatomical details and personal aesthetic of a girl he hadn’t seen in years. He was off, and so was I. My body remained in my seat but my spirit lit out, making for the astral plane. It rose like a balloon, floating up and away. I scaled up the faces of buildings, racing parallel to the bars of sunshine striping the tinted glass, New York unfurling before me, the cupolas and water tanks and rooftop gardens, spires and antennae; below were the compact blocks of granite and limestone, the streets of the grid like lines on graph paper, to the west the massive green of Central Park, the lush, rectangular heart of the city, pumping invaluable oxygen. Gazing south, the vapor and smog and glare of Midtown, a shrouded view – no way to see all the way to Brooklyn, land of deportees and decamped friends, unless I rose higher still.

But it seems my spiritual ascendency had a ceiling of about two thousand feet or so. My head was scraping ether and clouds were getting into my hair; the low sky was allowing no purchase. A force field covers this city, and even a flight of fancy was limited by New York’s gravitational pull. Like the recognition of a dream’s essential flimsiness even as you’re in the middle of dreaming it, I came to, and plummeted, like a hammer or a feather, back into the bored body of Marlon, slipping effortlessly back into that human costume just as Dane finished the final anecdote from the “Kylie” file. Clincher: He never called her.

“Let’s get the check,” I said.

“Where do we go from here?” someone asked. It could have been any of us.

 

 

*****

 

I am riding the 9 train local uptown, going to Lischey’s place for the night. Before heading down to the station I called Valia. Three times. Left two messages. Texted twice more. It was a relief to descend into the underground and lose cell service. That meant that for a few blessed minutes I had to be out of contact, could not check my phone, and might step out onto Broadway and 88^th and feel that buzz in my pocket, the alert that she’d called or texted back. Not that , truth be told, I really wanted to talk to Valia. Not that I really wanted to read a message from her. (Valia’s texts are outstanding for their almost ominous lack of solace as well as their anarchic illegibility, are written in a bizarre code of abbreviations and acronyms, an inscrutable symbology. Sample: I kd = U +moi?? LOL, LOL. NoTSo! Hoo,an,hoo, XOXO. Not one person I’d showed it to had been able to parse it.) But to receive either would mean that for a little while at least, I’d be able to forget about her, stow her away out of mind, and be present with Lischey. The notion of even the vaguest effort on Valia’s part was enough to liberate me for a few hours, possibly an entire night.

The 9 train clanked slow, heaving, feeling every ounce of its own weight and the bulk of human cargo it is forced to carry. All day long it had been raining, and the passengers had brought the rain in with them, damp clothing, dripping coats, puddles pooling on the car’s floor, water swirled with grime and street grit.

Three NYU students of three different races; multi-culturalism in miniature. A delivery man for a Thai restaurant. A beefy, hardhat union guy, lolling in an out of sleep, occasionally rubbing his salty goatee. A matronly, highly educated looking woman with two heavy-looking bags from The Strand at her feet. Two pre-teen African-American looking kids, both with earbuds, both all energy, hands and heads constantly moving. A Puerto-Rican woman in nurse’s scrubs, reading off a Kindle that was needless to say more than a few years old. An elderly white man in loose corduroy pants and a sweater vest – he had an extraordinarily pronounced Adam’s Apple. A mid-management, account executive type, in an off-the-rack Brooks Brothers’ suit, nervously looking about, perhaps fearing the parent company had hired a mercenary to stalk him around the city, downsize him somewhere well away from the office. A very attractive Asian woman managing to stay perfectly balanced as she stood in six-inch heels throughout the tugs and bumps and rocks of the train on the tracks. Her arms were folded and she held onto nothing for support. There were others in the car too, many of whom disembarked at the 34^th Street station and even more at the Times Square stop but who were replaced by many, many more in number, flooding into the cramped enclosure of the subway car.

We were a conveyance of a hundred backgrounds and a quintillion hopes and fears, one-of-a-kind features and universal struggles, loves and qualms and secrets and joys and attributes that if stacked one atop another would stretch past the boundary markers of the Milky Way. The car was crowded now; and my personal self was brushing elbows with strangers and sapiens, the bristle of contact, the meaningless nothing of touch.

The aroma of the gathered humanity was all at once heady when I inhaled. Now, it should be said, I have just the slightest touch of claustrophobia. I believe it comes from the evening news when I was a child and for a time then in the part of the country where I was raised it was a reasonably common occurrence to hear of children who’d been trapped inside refrigerators that were located in front yards. I’ve never been able to shake the thought of such an eventuality – somewhere in my brain I am forever jammed inside a defunct Frigidaire, hollering for help, my distress signals buffered and quashed by the sturdy assembly-line craftsmanship and solid materials of American manufacturing of the time.

In the tunnel just before the 51^st Street stop, we ground to a halt. Whatever, happens all the time, especially during the late evening rush. We didn’t resume. Some static issued from the speakers but no announcement from the conductor followed. Beneath us was the hum of suspended motion, the vibrations of inertia; then there was the pneumatic hiss and the train seemed to settle itself in for a long wait. A few people were looking around now. I started to breathe through my mouth.

The overhead lights switched out – flickered once, flickered twice, then went out altogether. This was officially out-of-the-ordinary. A few murmurs from my fellow passengers, a few oaths and curses, a generalized atmosphere of unease rising. It grew stronger as we waited there, and waited there.

I cannot say how long we’d been motionless when my legs began to buckle. I’d like to say it was a good long time, but it might have been no more than a couple of minutes. I felt myself giving way, managed to catch ahold of the metal pole in front of me; I knocked a couple of people back. Oaths and curses again. I maintained for a few seconds but then all at once everything started to revolve; the floor tilted beneath me, and I was careening sideways. For the flash of a second I glimpsed an image from youth – loud band, beer in Dixie cups, mosh pit. Then, I was down.

On my back. The flourescents overhead were still out but there was some illumination, the coal-red glow of dim emergency lights fore and aft in the car. In that sinister glow faces swam over me, fleshy crevices and hollowed crannies sharpened by shadow.

I was suffocating – a Datsun was on my chest. I had to be dying. Do you know what one thinks about in the throes of dying? If you think family, friends, childhood, love, you’d be wrong. No, one breath, that’s all there is to think about. Inhale, find a way to capture one more fucking breath.

I was only vaguely aware that my collar was being loosened, was barely cognizant that fingers were undoing the buttons of my shirt. I somewhat heard an authoritative voice barking: “Get back, everyone step back.” Hands were on my face and then a mouth was on my mouth. Breath was being blown into me. So hungry was I for air that I sucked at the inflow, tried swallowing it back into my throat, making myself gag. A thumb and finger were on my wrist. Somewhere not too far away, a baby was crying.

More mouth to mouth; then it was like some peak was overcome, a zenith reached, and I felt myself sliding smoothly, picking up speed as I sped downhill. Not towards any sort of damnation and not to the entreaty of any white light but towards somewhere closer to regulation identity. Back to myself. And once again Marlon drifted into his body, present and accounted for.

It was the Puerto-Rican nurse who’d been attending me. Her round face hovered just over mine, intelligent eyes that were almost mirthful, the strong scent of floral perfume, warm, pudgy hands. Angels never come this down-to-earth.

“You okay, mister? Talk to me.”

“Yes,” I said, in what sounded to me like a surprisingly strong voice. “I think I’m going to be alright. You saved my life.”

She laughed a little. “I think you had a panic attack, mister. I didn’t save your life. You weren’t dying.”

For a moment it was as if there was no one else around; she and I were isolated like the homecoming queen and king in a sheltering spotlight, albeit one tinted the hue of a blast furnace. “Just lay there a minute,” she instructed,” placing her hand on my chest at seeing that I was attempting to rise up. “Get your breath.”

“I don’t know what happened to me.”

“You got scared. Nothing wrong with being scared.”

“Good,” I said. “Because I’m scared a lot.”

“Oh yeah? That’s no good.”

“I don’t like tight spaces.”

She nodded. “I understand. You get in tight spaces a lot.”

“All the time. And then I never know how to get out.”

“Mister, no offense, but maybe you’re in the wrong city.”

“Maybe we all are,” said a voice from the pack of onlookers. “Amen to that,” replied another.

“I can’t leave,” I said. “I’m in love.”

My nurse laughed again. “Oh yeah. Who you in love with?”

I sighed, really thinking the question over. “I’m not sure. Nobody. Everybody.”

She and a couple others got me into a seat. Eventually the lights overhead came on, eventually the train began to roll again. There was clapping from the passengers. I was spent, wrung-out, but at least had the wherewithal to feel slightly embarrassed, which I took to be a stabilizing sign.

I thanked the nurse one more time as she was getting off at her stop at Lincoln Center. She looked pleased, and pleased with herself, which was no bad thing – she had every right to be. It was tougher to see her go than it should have been. I almost wanted to send her an arrangement of flowers or something.

I let my stop pass on by. Then a few more stops as well. On legs still wobbly I got out at the station at 116^th Street. I walked uphill on Broadway and turned into Columbia’s campus. A light rain still misted the air. The steps to the library were glossy with rain, the dome of the building stippled in the liquid light of an evening sun managing here and there to break through the low-slung clouds. In Bay Ridge some bus driver drinks the heart out of his home in a bar two blocks away from the apartment where his children sit awaiting his return. In Fort Washington an ancient Greek woman still dressed in the black of mourning grieves afresh on this, the ninth anniversary of her husband’s death. An actor on the Lower East Side starts the dinner shift, tries to memorize that night’s specials while at the same moment a backup point guard for the Knicks contemplates for the umpteenth time telling his agent to demand a trade. A glass shatters on the third floor of a co-op on Lexington Avenue as down near Gramercy Park a nervous girl flubs a note in an oboe recital. In Staten Island an eleven-year-old kid gets dropped by a bullet meant for the guy on the sidewalk behind him and in Yonkers a thirty-six year old woman says “yes” to a man she doesn’t love. On Canal Street the owner of a fish market realizes that he’s finally saved enough money to send for his younger brother; at PS 35 High in Hell’s Kitchen a ninth grader with headphones and an open spiral notebook sits under a dripping eave next to the basketball court and puts the last word on the best lyric she’s ever written, so far.

 

He hung up the patient phone.

“D_ _ _ _” said the nurse from behind the station. “It’s time to take your vitals again.”

She wound the Velcro sleeve around his arm. Digitized numbers began flickering on the monitor, a whir of them. Sets of three digits, up and down. The whirring slowed into steady bleeps, numbers still ticking inexorably upward. Finally they halted.

“Not good, huh?”

She was demure, quiet-voiced. “We need to work to bring it down,” she said, pulling apart the Velcro. “It is very high. The bottom number is the most important.”

The observation rooms in the medical wing were arranged around the fulcrum of the nurse’s station. He returned to his room, picked up the satchel they’d permitted him to check in, and took out a dog-eared copy of Wise Blood. Supposedly policy at the facility was to allow only books that were centered on recovery or which were inspirational in nature. Thus far nobody had come to check the bag and confiscate the O’Connor. Almost disappointing – a mini-debate on the inspirational vs. anti-inspirational properties of Wise Blood would have been a decent diversion under the circumstances. Any diversion would have been welcome.

He tried to read but the words wouldn’t cohere into sentences or sense. So he tried something harder – he tried writing. He pulled a moleskin journal and took up a pen. But his brain was a shipwreck and survivors weren’t a given and there was no way imagination or language was going to break through the fog. He did all he could: like a sketch artist he began to just detail his surroundings, the banal items of the room: a plug-in air freshener in an outlet, transparent, ridged and in the shape of a seashell. On a wall the print of painted gladiolas in a glass vase. An open bureau closet with a few forlorn hangers on a wooden rod, bereft of clothes. Another bed opposite him, hospital-style, tight with a mattress cover, one white sheet, one white-cased pillow. A yellow formica table, with a black plastic lamp. That was pretty much it.

He headed back out to the nurses’ station. A couple of other recently admitted patients were having their own vitals taken. A sallow-faced, heavyset young woman in a Dishwalla t-shirt and a dazed, stooped older man in a rayon orange University of Tennessee windbreaker.

He went up to the same nurse, who now looked to be doing some kind of clerical work on her computer. “Excuse me,” he said, in a voice that even he noticed was logy with Valium. “This is as strange request, but do you have a rubber ball or something I could bounce?”

It was no exaggeration to say that she blinked at him at least a couple dozen times before answering, or repeating: “… a rubber ball?”

“Or a tennis ball. Just anything I can toss or bounce. I need to move. I think better when I move.”

At that moment he became aware of another man, near his elbow on this side of the counter. “Why don’t you just rest,” the man said. “Take it easy. Don’t worry about thinking too much right now.” The man was obviously some sort of counselor; he had thinning, curly hair, wire-rim spectacles, was in the deeper end of middle-age, small frame, small hands, but with a paunch that strained outwards against the bottom of his button down.

“We don’t have anything … that bounces,” the nurse said softly, eyes switching back to the computer screen.

“Ok. Thanks anyway.” And he went down the corridor to the smoking porch.

He was more or less alone out there in the night – starlight in the sky far from the city, whiffling breeze, wooden rocking chairs on the porch slightly creaking. He dragged on a cigarette and shivered at the enveloping hush. Some distance away there were a few people milling around the grounds but the only sounds that reached him were phantom sounds, the teasing, gossamer voices of ghosts. The grounds and surrounding buildings held the same sedate quiet of the campus of a small university.

Back in his room he gave reading one more shot. Writing too. He closed his eyes for a moment and out of a whirlpool swam faces and other assorted memories. Phantoms everywhere. He got out of bed.

The nurse again – she didn’t have as many blinks in her this time. “You want to be discharged?”

“Yes ma’am, that’s right.”

She seemed uncertain, though she smacked of a veteran there at her spot behind the desk. Surely she’d dealt with this before; he couldn’t have been the first to decide to check out within five hours of arriving.

He wasn’t, and turned out she had a whole approach for situations such as this one. “Come back here and talk to me for a minute.” He pushed open the waist-high door that led to the interior of the station and took the chair beside her. She turned to face him. She had a wide face but tiny features, had the air of a true nurse. Kind, calm and concerned. He liked her.

“I’m worried because you’re very sick. We almost didn’t take you, almost sent you to the ER. In an ambulance. Your BAC was one of the higher ones we’ve seen.”

He bowed his head a bit. To think there was a time when hearing something like that would have made him almost proud. It didn’t anymore. He accepted the grim fact and nodded.

She continued: “You’re blood pressure is so high. Your pulse rate. We don’t have your blood work back yet but I bet you’re enzymes are off the chart. You need to be monitored. You need medication and care. You’re at risk for a stroke, a heart attack.”

“I understand. But I’m leaving anyway.”

She leaned forward in her swivel chair. He sensed her next resort would be to bargain.

“Maybe,” she said, “the best thing would be to sleep tonight, get in your rounds of meds, give it two or three days and see how you feel then. You haven’t really started to detox yet.”

“Yes ma’am, I realize that.”

“You’ve only had your first round of meds.”

“I know. I don’t want anymore. I’d like to leave now.”

Like a wraith, the counselor appeared again. The man was as stealthy as tomorrow night’s dreams. “What’s happening?” Speaking to the nurse.

“He wants to be discharged.”

The counselor turned to him. “You’re leaving us?”

“Yes. I’m going to do this on my own.” He knew how that sounded.

He was persistent, and really they had no choice. The nurse finally agreed to begin the discharge procedure. But he knew it was not quite over – he guessed the tactic now would be to slow-walk this part, buy time for him to be dissuaded. The nurse said the paperwork would take at least half-an-hour to prepare.

“Hey,” said the counselor, “how bout you step outside with me for awhile and we can chat while they get everything ready.”

Back to the smoking porch. Occasional souls emerged from the the lighted walkways between buildings before disappearing back into the night. The same listing rocking chairs, the same quiet: it was the aural encapsulation of mandated meditation times and Trazadone.

“Have a seat,” said the counselor, who’d already taken one of the rockers.

“No, thanks. I’ve been sitting enough.” He lit a cigarette. Now he anticipated the proverbial soft-sell next up in the queue. But the counselor seemed like a good guy, obviously meant the best. Plus the man had a strong New England brogue, and he was a sucker for that accent. They began to talk. They talked about the counselor’s own treatment center experiences, twenty-seven years previously in Maine. He’d been in the recovery profession for nearly two decades at this point. Once he’d had a sponsor who on a regular basis told him things like “It’s not them, it’s you” and “Why don’t you go out and try it all over again? We’ll refund your misery.” The counselor had a daughter who was still “out there.” The conversation flowed fluidly, and even given his current state, there was a parlance among recovery people that he was fluent in, comfortable with, and again, current state and all, in which he believed.

Somewhere they came to a pause. Here it comes: “So c’mon, hang around for a few days, get your strength back.”

“I appreciate it but in this case I finally know what I’m doing. I fell off the face of the earth for days. I need to get to work.”

“Yeah? You know what happens to the ones who leave those gates in your condition? A lot of them never get the chance to come back.”

He looked out at the road, barely a horizon up the rise of a gentle slope a quarter mile or so away, glimmering wanly in the sodium light shining from the stanchions near the open gates. He drew on his cigarette. “Yeah. I can see how that would be the case. But I’ve got to do this because it’s the only way I will make it.”

“You’re terminally unique, huh?” The counselor’s eyes twinkled.

He chuckled. “Walked right into that one.”

“You give it a chance – get some sleep, let the medical folks do their job. I talked to them. You’re in rough shape.”

He shrugged. “If it was easy, anybody could do it.”

“You’re a lean guy, you know? Too lean. The food here is awesome. Oughta be, right? We charge you enough for it. C’mon, hang out. Tomorrow night is prime rib.”

“You see, that’s it. Right there. We detonate our lives, scare the hell out of everyone we don’t disgust, leave our loved ones crying in rooms or running out like the house is on fire, leave children alone and confused and lost, skate out on jobs and responsibilities and every commitment. But it’s cool, because tomorrow night we got prime rib.”

“It’s about doing what’s best for you so you can be there for all that. And more – the last twenty-seven years I’ve traveled the world, been on every continent except Antarctica. There’s so much to see, there’s art, music, friends.”

“And I believe in all that. I do know what I’m doing.”

He knew what the counselor was thinking, knew that the man was certain he was leaving for ulterior motives, to continue on the path he’d been on the last several days. He didn’t blame the man for this belief; in a certain light he himself had been this man before, listening to other people say much the same thing he was saying right now, and how he knew then with a moral certainty they were lying, to themselves and to him, about how they knew what they were doing, the reasons they had for stalling. He wouldn’t convince the counselor otherwise and he wasn’t much interested in trying. People were always missing this about him – when he was humbled, and recognized he was in the wrong, he often had a way that seemed almost too pliable, too passive, as if he was open for a brow beating. They missed that this was politeness at heart, a sensibility that it was good for other people, themselves hurt or worried or angry, to vent on him. He could take it. It didn’t change him. What they missed was the obvious – he couldn’t be changed by anything outside himself. They didn’t see that in reality, in action, for good or for ill, he never gave an inch.

“This thing you’re doing now,” said the counselor, “what reason could you have? You think you know what you’re doing but you don’t.”

He squeezed the cherry from his cigarette, stubbed it out to the filter, curled it and dropped it back into his pack. “Everyone’s moment of clarity can’t be the same. If you think the epiphany always points in the same direction for everyone, then you’re thinking only in two dimensions.”

“This means you got to suffer then, right? Is that what you think? You think this is how you get redeemed.”

“Protestants lapse too. The word ‘redeemed’ doesn’t mean much to me unless we’re talking vouchers or coupons. Resurrection? Maybe then we’re getting somewhere.”

“Resurrection, huh?”

“Three days. 72 hours. You live through that and in some sense you have to be born again.”

“Kind of messianic complex going on there, no?”

“If you’re going to aim, aim high. Now, it’s time for me to go.”

The counselor’s eyes were slightly aggrieved, but still they had the twinkle of certitude in them. “Ok then.”

The few items he’d brought he packed back into his satchel. Security had brought up his cellphone wrapped in a cellophane baggie. Neither Uber or Lyft would come out this far, so he’d be cabbing it back home.

“Come back here and let me check your vitals one more time,” said the nurse. “Are you sure your friends who brought you in can’t just come and get you.”

“Nah, they’ve done enough. Let’s leave them alone for the night.”

“I’m worried about you. These numbers look bad. And you’re going home to be all alone.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please don’t. Please at least stay the night.”

“I’m leaving.”

“This isn’t like an opiate detox. There you just feel like you’re going to die. This is different. You could die.”

For some reason he had to stifle a laugh, hide a grin. Under his breath: “That’ll be the day.”

“You came in here crying about your son.”

He stiffened.

“How you had to get back to him.”

“I know,” he said. He locked eyes with her. “This is how I get back to him.” Then he dropped his eyes. “I can’t explain it.”

“At least take your next round of meds, the Valium and the rest.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“But this is one of the best facilities in the country.”

“Yeah. I heard about the prime rib.”

“And you already paid. Why are you going off to do this on your own? It makes no sense. People quit doing it that way a long time ago.”

Here he did laugh. Not at her, but at the synergy of it. They haven’t quit so long as I’m doing it …

+++

In the cab, when they finally were nearing his part of town, he leaned toward the driver and said, “I have to make a stop first.”

+++

First things first. He walked the dog, who’d been shut up in the house most of the day and who over the past several days had been watching as he grew sicker and sicker. They did only about a mile, mile and a half, running a lot of it but falling into a fast walk here and there. He felt the Valium receding from his shoreline; there were chills and sweats and the shakes were starting already. This was the beginning.

It was a warm night and the forecast for the next day was warm as well. Back at the house he loaded up three dishes of dry dog food and two large bowls of water, took them along with the dog out to the sun porch. He nuzzled the dog under her chin and kissed her on the crown of her head. Then he stepped back inside, the dog giving a single whimper as he shut the door softly behind him.

He took the bags from the store down to the basement, headed back upstairs. Dawn was threading gray against the windows. He sent three texts to three different people. Then he created a new Spotify playlist with twenty one songs, each specifically chosen for this eventuality. He grabbed his cell charger. He went out to his front porch and smoked a last cigarette. He needed to hurry. He stubbed it out and went back inside. Even he, even now, couldn’t stand the notion of smoking in his house, so he grabbed twelve Nicorette from the bathroom closet. He brushed his teeth. One more thing: he took along his old baseball. For thinking.

In the basement, he opened up a tool box, picked up a hammer and eight ten-penny nails. The nails he held between his lips, taking one at a time and hammering it into the basement door and casing. A pair at the top, the bottom, two along each side. He kept the nail heads just slightly protruding, maybe a millimeter apiece. As he was finishing nailing the door closed, a stomach cramp gripped him and sweat exploded onto his forehead. He went down on one knee. Waited it out. What any one person can do, another can do. He stood up again.

From the bags, he pulled out four bottles of water, three bottles of orange Gatorade, two apples, two pieces of beef jerky, and four protein bars. He plugged in his charger in an outlet on the far side of the basement and plugged the cell into that. He started the playlist, on shuffle. The Wild Rover started up, a live version from The Dubliners. Next would come a lot of hip hop, some spooky old folk from the Harry Smith Anthology, field hollers and chain gang chants.

His house was a 1920’s Craftsman and the piers were white oak posts, barreled and twelve inches in diameter. He sat back against one of these. New beginnings should never be assumed but endings are easier to ascertain. This would be the end of at least a few things, including intentionally fucking things up so that he could write stupid little stories about it.

He tossed the baseball against the floor, where it bounced upwards, ricocheted off the block walls, bounced back against the floor and back to his right hand. Over and over and over and over.

Someone once wrote that there was a law as old as the sky. And an element drawn from the elaboration of this law that followed was often quoted, plucked out from its parented context. And yes, the strength of the wolf probably is the pack. But the inverse of that was rarely quoted and more often than not ignored, and it was no less a truth, no less a guiding principle. For the strength of the pack is the wolf.

Awoke stuck to a bare mattress. An aluminum slick in my throat, a tsunami of silver fish in my brain. Splintered sun breaks through the slats of the taunting windows. A metal fan whirring, too feeble to raise the tassels tied to its grille, too weak to slice a hunk out of this thick air. Awoke alone. But someone has been here.

Somewhere behind the cardboard walls liver and onions are sizzling in a skillet. The peppery jangle of Mexican cartoons issues from the other side of the popcorn ceiling. One man’s ceiling, another man’s floor.

Look at me now. Standing upright. Isn’t that something. Go to check what the latest day looks like. Click open the slats. San Luis this time of year. Clack closed the slats. Dispiriting. No longer standing. Floor bound.

Where I find four pennies. A fifty peso piece. A dead hornet. A fuchsia matchbook from a place called El Deguello. A harmless rubber band. The scorched, corroded tip of a needle. A pink plastic earring in the shape of a flamingo. A cockroach, undead. It’s armor scrabbles as it humps across the questionable carpet. Then, a scrap of resin paper, a slip of soiled Kleenex, two stained cotton balls, a pair of rusty tweezers, and the jagged glass belonging once I believe to the neck of a bottle of mescal. Shards glitter like sequined landmines in the path of our intrepid roach.

I check my fingers. On my left hand, I’m missing two fingernails, and the remaining three aren’t winning any pageants. And my teeth hurt, all of them. Crawling now. The carpet, pungent, giving off the hallmark odors, of mole and the perfume of dead flowers rotting on a bandito’s hillside grave somewhere in Oaxaca. Where is the worm? Crawling faster now. Uh oh, here I go, getting sick. Smack face-first into a little wastepaper basket, knocking it over. Isn’t that something. Completely empty. Thank God for small favors. You can always count on the Almighty to furnish adequate receptacles for spontaneous nausea.

Rejuvenated. Standing on my own two feet. Wait, no, teetering. Wall bound. Oof, back upright. Right as the mail. Now where do they hide the doors in this place? This place: a mat on the floor. Calls itself The King’s Arms. A floor mat with a straight face. Isn’t that something. I’m an arrant knight myself, in the service of no king in particular. A flaccid sword for hire.

I once beat up a kid named Jerry Galahad. Beat him real savage-like. Years ago. Now what the hell did I do that for? Time hides our once urgent motives from us like they were painted eggs. Jerry, Jerry Galahad. Nice kid. Really didn’t deserve a beating like that. Overkill. I’d already been sleeping with his girlfriend. …Melissa? Melinda? Mindy, maybe? Definitely an M name. Had this kinky dark hair that started in very tight to her eyebrows; her forehead was about the size of a postage stamp. Tapioca skin, small hazelnut eyes. Teeth white as sugar. Not Maggie. Why did I do that to Jerry? Throw him that beating, I mean. I know why I did the other. Savage, brutal. I made a fist and bound it with a heavy extension cord and just went to work. I have kind of feminine hands, sort of dainty, and I’m bashful about them and wrapping them is a defense mechanism. For my self-image. I’ve used bailing wire, bicycle chain, whatever’s accessible. What I remember about Jerry Galahad is he wore glasses. Jerrys often do.

Bathroom light, a strictly bulb and string affair. Pull the string. Goddamn! Housekeeping at The King’s Arms has been seriously derelict in their duties. About the best that can be said is that we are needful of clean towels. Once there was a mirror on the medicine cabinet. It currently can be found in pieces in the sink. Open up the cabinet door. That’s not mine. Close up the cabinet door.

In reminiscing over dangerous situations they once had found themselves, people often say things like, “I could have died.” As if this were news. “I could have died.” No shit. You always “could have died.” You always “can.” And, one day, you “will.” You will die. And chances are it won’t be the dangerous stuff that gets you, the really dodgy or treacherous. It will be life, plain old life, that takes you out. I should know; I’ve chased death to the hinterlands, all over the dragon-tattooed frontiers of the world, and haven’t snagged the slickety son of a bitch yet. But this whole time, life has been gaining on me, second by second, minute by minute, coming up from behind, the plodding tortoise that never tires, never flags, never sleeps or pauses for breath. I not only could have died, I should have died. That was the intention, which goes to show how much those ditzy things are worth. My losing streak in this death business—it’s starting to wear on me. It saddles me with more burdens, more handicaps, more encumbrances. I cart squalor and shame around with me at all times like a rag and bone man. I’ve been made a hoarder, my existence cramped and crowded out by the accumulated regrets, so many by now that I’ve lost count. Witness:

A raven-black chiffon negligee, ripped in two. One false eyelash in a tin ashtray on the window sill. A red lip print on the bed’s lone pillow. A safety deposit box key (I haven’t a clue). Three empty glassine packets. Four flies drinking from a disconcerting puddle over there in the corner. And right underfoot…isn’t that something. Sheets of paper. Pages, from a letter. One I was writing; I have a dusky memory of doing some scribbling last night before distraction set in. The last couple of pages are blank. Obviously a working draft.

Shaking the ultra-violet amoeba out of my eyes. Reading. Lovely sentiments, penmanship could use some work. Interesting ink. I have yet to come across a pen. Check my right wrist. Quite the romantic. The words, the words are passion personified. Syntax could bear tightening up, but still. Starts off tentative, polite, pedestrian, soon though I marshal my powers. There’s an excoriating confession which comes fairly early in the proceedings, the raw daring of which surprises even me. Didn’t think I’d ever own up to that one. Cathartic. Here now, top of page three, I lose the thread momentarily. Things get a tad squiggly. But third paragraph in, momentum returns, propulsion and poetry, a demoniac burst that takes me from the bottom of that page through most of page four. A real cracker run for awhile. Soon I lose steam, and page five betrays a bit of befuddlement. Nonetheless, an admirable start. Check my right wrist. I am not a stone. I will continue. Now the only matter to clear up is who all this mercurial beauty was meant for.  The addressee. That I can’t quite recall. Although, chances are, it was you.

That sundown everybody remembers as being particularly fierce in color, red heather and blood orange gashed on the sky. The square and docile farmhouse sat alone in the dusk, sad eyes for windows.

Jacob scraped inside at the end of an undistinguished day, the door sweep catching on the terrycloth runner and causing it to bunch, and he picked up at once on the smell. An alien smell, warm and uneasy between the layers of chilly air. Through the front room he went, on into the kitchen where he hit the lights and looked around. Nothing. He waited for the odor to dissipate. When it didn’t, he reversed course and began to more purposefully hunt the source.

And pulled up short halfway up the stairs, at a sound—a scratching, skittering sound that issued from the return vent in the wall at the landing. For nearly a full minute he stood stock-still, unsettled; but with each recurrence the noises sounded tinnier, more benign, and he pictured some harmless thing trapped, perhaps a stranded starling with a snagged wing, flapping around all in a panic. He went up the last few steps and bent down to take a look.

His brother Osgood was blinking back at him through the vent grille. His brother Osgood, beige eyes pitched in a white, egg-round face, fingers straining against the metal slats of the grille. Osgood the elder, older than Jacob by two years. Presumably still was, though he had been dead now for some time. “Jacob,” he said, “get me out of here.”

Jacob wrenched loose the grate from the wall. Out his brother came tumbling. Jacob watched him get to his feet, dust himself off. The two of them stood staring at one another.

“Jacob.”

“Osgood. What were you doing in my ductwork?”

The other looked about him, scratching at the back of his neck. “You know, I can’t rightly say. Got sort of turned around somehow, wound up stuck in there. Weird.”

He smelled of camphor and bitters. He was dressed in an older style than Jacob had ever seen him before, nearly antiquarian, like something their grandfather might have worn on Sunday mornings, and he looked to have thinned out considerably, the high-waisted trousers and three button vest hanging slack on his frame as a sodden flag.

“Osgood, you’re not supposed to be here. You’re dead.”

“What? Me? No. No, no. Where’d you hear a thing like that?”

“I heard it everywhere. The state sent us a letter. Said you’d been stabbed in the showers. At the penitentiary. I mean, Osgood, I was at your funeral.”

The brother listened to this with his head slightly bowed, brow wrinkled in concentration—he looked to be going back over the information again and again, as if trying to make it gibe. “First I’ve heard of it, Jacob. Someone stabbed me, in a shower, you say. To death?”

“That’s what we were told.”

Osgood pulled out a pocket watch, the fob run through a button hole in the vest, flipped it open and studied it. He thumped the watch face with his thumb, then held the thing close to his ear. “Huh, I’ll be damned,” he said, snapping it shut again.

The hall seeming not a suitable place for any sort of reunion, they moved things down the corridor to Jacob’s bedroom. The smallish room was tucked beneath the peak of the roof and was composed more of slanted ceiling than of walls; the men had to stoop to navigate it. Jacob went to switch on the lamp on the nightstand, his brother moving immediately to take a seat on the bed. His astonishingly real weight caused the indentation he made on the mattress to brim up with shadow like a puddle brims with rain. Jacob went over to the room’s only chair, nestled between a wobbly chest of drawers and the window. The world outside had gone to night but for a tiny swab of pale gray in the bottom left corner of the window’s bottom left pane. He hunched forward in the chair to avoid hitting his head on the slope of the ceiling.

His brother was stroking a hand-stitched quilt that lay across the foot of the bed. “Is this one of Grandmother Verna’s?”

“It is.”

“I thought so. Now she really is dead.”

“Yes she is. Pleurisy.”

“Pneumonia, I thought. Oh, well, she was a good one.” They lapsed into a considerable silence.

“Osgood, I don’t understand you being here.”

“What’s not to understand? A man can’t visit his only brother?”

“But how? Where did you come from, where have you been all this time?”

The brother sighed, didn’t respond right away. “Good questions, Jacob. I’ve been doing some traveling, places you wouldn’t know anything about, places you don’t want to know anything about. Came a point when it seemed a good idea to turn back for home. Been a lot of changes since I was around, though. Hey, you remember that house I had for awhile in Shosburg, pretty blue one with the big wraparound porch? You know, they went and tore that place down. Tore it down and didn’t put anything up in its place—now it’s just a vacant lot. I could understand if they wanted to put up a store or bank or movie theater or something, but to just demolish a nice house like that and leave nothing but empty space, doesn’t make much sense to me. Wasn’t in such bad shape, just needed a little spit and polish. Made me sad, I don’t mind telling you. After seeing that, I headed for here. After all, we two are the only family we got left.

“Things sure don’t look much different here. Smaller is all. They say that happens, with childhood places. You see them again all grown up and can’t believe how tiny they’ve become.” The light fell in such a way that only one half of his face was illuminated, and on this half it was clear that he was smiling, a crooked smile in which Jacob detected all manner of mischief, while the other side of the face was completely obscured, veiled by shadow. All at once Osgood started to laugh—he had always had a very distinctive laugh, a parched cackle with something wet and slippery embedded in it—it was like a mollusk peeking out of its shell. “Remember the little twin beds, Jacob? Mine was right here, yours underneath the window there. Remember how I’d come up of a night and,” Osgood slapping at his knee, “and shriek in your ear, and you’d jump up and smack your head on the sill? Every time, I tell you, worked every single time.”

“I remember. Eventually I just stopped sleeping.”

“Good times. And you, still living here. You never married, did you Jacob?”

“I didn’t, no.”

“I had a wife once,” said Osgood.

“You had a couple of them.”

He dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “Oh, I don’t count what’s-her-name. Just one of those stupid things you do when you’re young. My life started with Rachel. I don’t suppose you ever hear from her these days.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Jacob repeated, as his eyes wandered to the nightstand. There, easily within the other man’s reach, was a small keepsakes box, lacquered cherry wood spangled with gold-foil designs, a hooped key that was purely decorative sticking out of the dummy latch of the lid. “Not for a long time now.”

“Okay,” said Osgood, the corner of his smile showing teeth.

“Didn’t realize how much I’d missed this place, Jacob. Can’t help but to think how it could have been mine. I am the elder son, after all.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have robbed those people. Shouldn’t have killed that boy.”

Osgood had turned his head, and now his face was entirely consumed by the overhang of darkness. The tone in his voice remained mild, almost fawning. “Oh, I don’t begrudge you, you understand. Not a bit. You deserve it. You always were the dependable one, so steadfast. It’s fitting she became yours.”

The particular wording made Jacob’s ears prick up, but he averted his eyes, not wanting to get pinned in Osgood’s gaze. Instead he looked down, at the other man’s shoes. They were brown patent leather brogues, like the rest of his getup seeming to belong to a different era; probably once they had been a nice pair, but now the heels were ground down and the shoes had collapsed at the toes, the leather crisscrossed with chalky white creases. Red clay or mud was smeared on the sides with a darker mud caked over the lip of the soles, as if they had tramped through a marsh or bog to arrive here. What could a man be after, what could he be seeking, to make a journey like the one Osgood had made?

He realized his brother was speaking again. “What’s that?” asked Jacob.

“I was asking again after Rachel. Asking if maybe you might know where I could find her.”

“I don’t know, Osgood.”

“Jacob.”

“Listen to me, I’m telling you I don’t know—”

“Don’t, Jacob. Don’t do it. You don’t want to mess with me on this. I need to see Rachel. You’re going to tell me where she is. Tell me, Jacob.”

Jacob jerked down in his chair, swearing—he had banged the back of his head on the ceiling. When he looked up, rubbing at the smarting place, his brother was looking right at him, face jutting outwards and fully exposed by the light, all hints of a smile having vanished. For a creeper’s minute it was a stare down , then Jacob heard himself talking: “It feel cold in here to you, Osgood? Feels cold to me. Damn furnace is a thousand years old, always on the fritz. I have to fiddle with the thermostat to get it to click on. Feels cold in here to me. Let me go down and check on it. Maybe put on some coffee. You want a cup of coffee, Osgood? I’ll bring it up. We can talk awhile, catch up, figure things out.”

For a long moment the other man didn’t blink. Then an odd, somewhat sad expression came over his face, and he sighed and turned his face back to its veiled profile. “Sure, Jacob. Go ahead. Go check your thermostats and make your coffee. I’ll be right here.”

Every step on the staircase seemed to Jacob to creak on his descent; every floorboard in the front room croaked at his passage across them, traitors transmitting signals of his exact whereabouts to the intruder above. In the kitchen, he intentionally clattered the cups and saucers, turned the sink faucet on high to loudly let the water run. Off the rear of the kitchen, through a red-checked curtain, was the old pantry, formerly the place where his mother kept her canned fruits and pickle jars, now converted into a laundry room. The back door to the house was here. Set on pegs above the door was a double-barrel Remington 12 gauge he’d had since he was an adolescent, a pouch of shells hanging on a string from one of the pegs. He pulled the shotgun down and cracked open the action. He slid a shell into each breech and levered it shut, trying to do it quietly, stuffing the pouch inside his shirt pocket. With the tip of the muzzle he nosed open the curtain, and was actually half-surprised not to find Osgood standing there, a knowing, mocking look on his face at having sussed out the play. As if for extra confirmation, the voice drifted down from the room above, directly on the other side of the kitchen ceiling. “Everything alright, Jacob? You need a hand with anything you let me know.”

“I got it. Be just another minute,” his own voice in reply sounding pinched and quavering in his ears. Water continued to erupt from the faucet—he had turned it on hot and the window was steaming up; he caught sight of his miniaturized reflection, toting the puny shotgun, and the sweat of condensation on the glass made it appear as if he were melting.

He could not go back up there. He was too afraid. Osgood might be laying for him, crouched in a corner or concealed behind a door, coiled to spring out from the dark and do God knows what. Besides, it is no easy thing to murder a brother face to face, especially one who’s already dead.

“Jacob,” came his voice again, “what you up to, son? Sounds like you’re washing dishes or something. Quit fooling around, I don’t have all night. Don’t make me come down there.” This last part was appended with his trademark cackle.

Jacob approximated the spot from where the voice issued, just above the top of the pie-safe. There was a discolored patch in the plaster there, a makeshift target. He brought the stock to his shoulder and lifted the barrels, the muzzle not twelve inches from the ceiling. A pause to steady himself, his finger wrapped over the front trigger.
He let loose with both barrels at once. The room exploded in thunder and everything went an obliterating white. Recoil reverberated through him, shoulder bone down to bowels, as pulverized plaster and shards of splintered lath pelted his face and neck. When his vision returned he saw motes of plaster dust floating around in the powder-tinged air; the ceiling gaped open like a wound, but no clear view was afforded into the room above—just decimated floors joists and a meager light barely wiggling through.

The worst of the buzzing in his ears died gradually away. “You’re right, Jacob. That furnace don’t seem to be working right. Don’t feel any warmer to me yet.” Osgood’s words seemed to descend from just a slightly different location than before, and, even in the muffled aftermath of the shotgun blast and the water hammering the sink’s iron basin, was bell-clear. “Tell you what, how ‘bout I come down and sort things out?” And Jacob thought he detected the creak of footsteps on the stairs.

Breaking open the barrels, plucking out the spent shells, he fumbled fast for two fresh rounds. Snapping the gun closed, he ducked to the side of the kitchen doorway. Then he wheeled into the dark of the front room and fired blindly, towards the opposite wall where the staircase was located, first one barrel then the other. The dim split open in a streak of lightning and for a split-second everything flared bright—the grandfather clock, the photographs of unsmiling ancestors in oval frames on the walls, the ladder-backed rocker, the porcelain Jesus figurine on the mantle—as shot careened about the room, crashed among the assorted objects and furnishings, and smashed the balustrade to smithereens.

He whipped back around and dropped to a crouch, shotgun cradled in his arms. Tried to breathe.

“Calm down, calm down,” came his brother’s voice, couched inside that same phlegmy laugh. “I’m almost there.” He sounded considerably closer this time.

Jacob out the back door, tearing down the back wooden stairs. Under the stairs, along with a length of garden hose and a couple of bags of potting soil, he kept a can of lawnmower gas. Tossing the shotgun onto the ground, he snatched up the can, moving sideways as he thumbed the cap from the nozzle. Dousing the clapboard shingles in the gasoline. When the can was emptied he flung it aside and backpedaled from the house, pulling at his pockets. His father had always told him that certain things a man should never be without. Into the grass beside the gun fell a pocket knife, a handkerchief, a cigarette lighter.

 

Now, the only other house in the immediate vicinity was situated directly across the road and belonged to a very infirmed, very obese old woman who rarely ventured out of doors and who had a grandson that stayed with her most of the time. The boy’s name was Dell and the yard around the lifeless house had become a dumpsite of Dell’s scraggly toys, most of which the boy had outgrown, but as no new ones were forthcoming he made do with. At that moment he was still out in the night, his grandma’s house dark but for the occasional flashes against the drapes of blue television light, and was trying to ride on a large, semi-inflated, canary yellow rubber bouncing ball with a gripped handle like a saddle’s pommel grown out of its top. His bulk made the thing sag in the center like a mashed loaf of bread. He stopped in his listless bouncing and cocked his head to watch upon noticing the neighbor man across the way, running around and acting strange. The man was at the side of his house, making wild, spastic gestures with his arms and hands, then dropping to his knees, head lowered. Soon the boy saw white wisps of smoke hatching from the grass, before a snake of yellow flame started up and raced away from the man, towards his house.

Nothing seemed to happen for a moment or two, but all at once a fire proper was underway. A glow warmed the air around the house from a dank, vacant black to a throaty, Pentecostal red. Flames crawled onto the porch, scampered up the posts, over the gutters, and curled under the eaves. The roof shingles started to snap and smolder. The man in the grass was lit up clearly as if he were staring into the face of day.

An inferno is an inviting thing, and eventually the boy headed over, dragging the ball behind him, over the road, down into the man’s yard. Heat radiated outwards, crackling. The boy maintained what seemed to him a prudent distance from the blaze, just out of reach of where the sparks were popping and crusts of matter like fiery tissue paper were whirling down. He went over to the stand by the man, who did not look at him. Side by side they watched the frame of the house begin to split open in yellow and orange fissures.

“You got a dog?” the boy asked.

“What?” asked Jacob.

“If you got a dog, likely its dead by now.”

“No, no dog.”

“Me neither. My grandma’s got three cats. Used to be she had four but one ate through the toaster cord.” The house gave a big groan, and lurched inwards, the glass in the windows exploding, causing both man and boy to jump.

“You gonna call the fire department? Might want to do that, if you haven’t already. My grandma’s got a phone you can use.”

The man’s head was on a swivel, looking back and forth from flame-curtained front door to the rear of the place, the back stoop smothered in thick charcoal-colored smoke like a foundry stack spewing. The skin underneath his eyes was ringed with shining sweat, and his mouth hung open in a pant. The shotgun lay propped against one leg; the boy observed his index finger tapping on the trigger guard. “Not quite yet,” said Jacob. Then, “My brother’s in there.”

The boy nodded at this. “Your brother’s in there, probably he’s dead too.”

“Probably. Probably so.” He looked over at Dell. “You got a brother?” The boy shook his head. “You’re lucky.”

When the heat against the boy’s face grew too intense, he stepped back a few feet. The cold air felt colder than it had before. High above his head the luminous half-moon cleared a wintry blue swath in the sky, and into this emptiness smoke was rising in a sculpted majestic mass, assuming a shape like a galleon with strong tailwinds filling its sails. On the outside of the blue furrow tiny stars winked in the utter bleakness of space, bystanders begging for attention. The boy looked around him; his eyes were steeped with spots and tracers, violet holograms of flames that pulsed across his field of vision. Bars and pools of firelight wrestled with the shadows on the ground. He peered deep into the flickering, switching darkness, trying to distinguish between what were only phantoms and illusory forms, hollow impersonations of the actual, and what were things of substance, things of solidity, tangible, touchable things.

A boy could be forgiven for mistaking one for the other, figments of fancy from fixtures of reality, objects in this corporeal world and those bends of light which only mimicked them, failing to decipher what might be a being of flesh and bone and blood, seeming to emerge now in front of the boy’s eyes from the roiling darkness, or might be just a mirage, a man-sized tear in the façade of this dank, dour world, exposing a florid sliver of the one to come.

“Hey mister, is that your brother right there?”

Her face looks like a map of Michigan,

And not just in the morning.

Head count of your blessings from twilight

To the dawning.

Count the rings on her fingers

And the rings around her eyes.

Her issues filling magazine archives,

Glossy and heavily advertised.

 

The mirror has got a lot to say,

But that would require listening.

Better for her to talk, talk and never let up,

That way her reflection won’t have

A chance to interrupt.

 

This time the flood, the fire next time,

Cold beds and flowers in quicklime.

A hundred excuses and a thousand yard stare,

Ad hominems and buyer beware.

 

Staring up at a September moon,

Sprawled atop the roof of your car,

Listening to Big Star,

Passing a joint back and forth,

Drinking a warm beer,

I have a distinct suspicion it’s all downhill from here.