Skyward and Stranded

 

The paraffin sky,

That silly buttress

Where I left you to learn

 

Regret’s only lesson,

That you shouldn’t have done it.

 

Make me an amends or

Make me a fist.

Makes no difference to me.

 

Sunday Morning in Saturday Night Clothes

 

Whiskey sun materialized uninvited and the cagey circus bears awoke.

Diomedes lived while Hecuba’s heart broke.

Pagan power lives in the crooks and crannies of sidewalks

And gutter gleams, time, memories of last night’s nocturne,

When the radio clatter was cluttered with epilogic babble.

We watch, we two, the dewy dawn descend,

Hearing salvation’s sweep in the bells across the river,

How they chime and condescend.

Full-morning throttle to follow fast after,

Commercial insurgencies and papal chatter.

 

 

The State As Obsolescence

 

An enormous compassion in seeing a mammoth thing fall down.

Heartbreaking, poignant, leaves you with a white scar that lasts forever.

Brings big men to military-type tears. The vulnerability in a naked paunch.

The pathos of hubris exploded.

The State courted me with braggadocio, with ten-gallon gifts,

With hot checks and expense accounts and courtly gestures learned

From bad movies on AMC. The State is too old for me, has been

Crippled by multiple divorces, punitive alimony payments, bypass surgery.

The State drinks too much, and has a drunk’s sagging jowls and ailing eyes.

When deep in the scotch he sometimes exposes a “creepy uncle” quality.

The State is hopeless with technology, chicken-pecks at a keyboard.

Can’t post a status update. Can’t tweet. Thinks a blog is something to do with

A septic tank. Is bewildered by the constant battery of information,

24 hour news cycles, instantaneous bursts of current communication,

Causes it to think paranoid thoughts, to panic, to want to grab his gun.

When the State is especially afraid, he becomes shrill, and his hands shake,

And his superhero chin trembles. Says outlandish things.

I believe the State may be suffering from dementia.

I can’t stand to see him like this.

I have no love for him, and never will, and deep down he knows this.

But sympathy, God how I have sympathy. It geysers forth.

Sympathy, pity. Because, there was a time, not so long ago,

when he was indeed formidable.

May he believe that now is still then, and he is back there,

When he was still cock of the walk, the good sheriff in a bad town,

And respect was printed like paper money.

Nostalgia

 

I’m that sepia-skinned kid, with his ma’ams and manners,

I’m the kindling’s first crackle, the figure inside the glass,

 

Too earnest heart, watching wide-eyed, arms wide-open to the world.

I am the he he was not destined to be, the destination he never dreamed of,

Divergent point, the maiden conscience before it took on freight.

 

I am the family crest, fallen. Self-educated, fiercely.

After the better angels were countermanded, after the floodwaters receded.

 

All the good in him I gamboled away, kept a kernel, a plum’s stone,

From which bred a new garden, of edges and angles and alien fruits,

 

While he remains trapped, one more hunk of statuary,

Surrounded by the harmless friends from then,

Who were born in full bloom and started dying the very next day,

On his face I see the beginnings of the prude’s latent scowl,

 

Just the sort of face I cannot trust,

Over born with breeding, undercooked in defiance,

An aluminum glint to the eyes, begging for regulation,

 

A counterfeit of innocence. He is me,

Prepped for translation, me before I overshot his visions,

Reached back across the dial and rescued him from contentment.

 

Whereas I keep on becoming,

Becoming even as a star becomes,

 

In thrall to that thing I create new every day,

And were I to so choose the sun would have no choice but to orbit me.

 

My antecedent belongs to yesterday—and he can keep it.

All nostalgia is delusion, all piety, false piety.

Reverence is the original sin.

This is today’s creature talking.

 

Good Night, You

Together we fall and together we lie,
You and I, spent, empty as clothes
Hanging on a line.
Silence in our mouths, stone-still our tongues,
Belying frantic blood. Speaking for me here,
Because I can’t speak for you; anything I say
Likely would be the opposite of true.
You keep your dreams yours, I’ll tend to me and mine.

The scent of my sweat on your flesh, the way your shoulders shine with brine.
Would be nice if it mattered.
But my thoughts are elsewhere—
Somewhere my body is not supposed to go—
And there they are not alone.

God Of Fortresses
We’re the collier town God sees outside his lovesick window,
We’re the vibes that play somewhere out on the nightstruck prairie,
We’re the vices of dreams.

Petals on a silken flower, we are perennial,
Weeping for all we’re worth, we negotiate, we parlay,
We  are the responsibilities that should not be ignored.

Too many of heaven’s canaries have descended by now
For us to be a mystery. No, we are known. We’re an open secret.
And yet, He does nothing.

This Way Up

 

Chapter 1

April, 2001

 

Hud Harper was idly wondering, not for the first time, how he’d fucked his life up so badly.

This was a question he carried throughout his daily sojourns around the verdant grounds of The Mary Gasaway Chamberlain Center for Restoration of Hope in Olivett, New York, upstate along the Hudson. For six days he’d been domiciled here, for six days had attended a guided morning meditation and seminars and group sessions and individual therapy with Dr. Bascombe. In random, arbitrary moments over that interval he thought he’d come close to answers – or The Answer – but such epiphanies proved fleeting, based more on wishful thinking than anything, and in any case, Bascombe or some other enlightened brain would in short order make the ambiguous claim that there were no answers anyway, that it wasn’t about that, and the whole enterprise would collapse into a heap of common sense. What exactly it was about had, for Hud, yet to be determined.

There was a serenity walk done in a horseshoe shape around the southern wing of the complex of buildings – fittingly it had been a mental hospital back in the day until Reagan came along and the federal tap was turned off and the place got shuttered. There it had remained dormant for the better part of a decade until the Gasaway-Chamberlain estate bequeathed an auspicious sum to revive the facility, spruce it up, go over it in pastels and marigold shades, furnish it in a bunch of wicker furniture, sculpt some hedges, scoop out some manmade ponds and send out for mallards and swans. Now there weren’t patients – there were guests. And the cost of stay was well over four hundred dollars a night. Whatever the hell visited upon the former patients from 1936-1983, surprisingly little bad juju remained; the atmosphere was if anything too bucolic, frictionless, airy. Quiet and calm had its place, sure, but quiet and calm weren’t meant to be constant handmaidens – this was Hud’s thinking – and any day ought to carry some sort of charge or kinetic jolt.

Life is a rampaging state of affairs, not all mindfulness chimes and safe spaces. He missed already the flux and turmoil, the rapacious drama, conflicts and collisions. He missed the City. In place of Brooklyn and Tribeca and the hovels in Alphabet City, he had poplar trees and wavering elms, birdsong and mulched paths. Koi pools, tippling fountains. For some reason at four o’clock this afternoon he was due to see a visiting acupuncturist. He was close to a complete nervous collapse.

He’d already indulged in one of his coping mechanisms – he’d slept with someone. How Dr. Bascombe would have frowned upon this – his severe, steel-rimmed glasses, his feathered pate, mushroom bisque eyes. “Do you believe that was a healthy activity to engage in?” The man had a bevy of framed diplomas hanging on his office walls and yet could never resist ending every other sentence in a preposition.

“Probably not,” Hud would have said. Shrugged. He did a great deal of shrugging.

“Why did you then?”

Boredom would have been the real answer, near as he could come up with one anyway. But in the interest of imitating the habits of seemingly well-adjusted people, he might instead have answered something like “I was scared. I went with what I know.”

“And what do you know, Hud?”

Women. That would have been the simple answer there. Which was a total joke. He didn’t know women – he didn’t really know anyone. If there was any level of self-knowledge he’d come to in the days leading up to this one, the willingness to admit he didn’t know anything was it. Before that he hadn’t known he hadn’t known.

Around arcadia again, juniper bushes, passing the colored-glass-and -seashell-mosaic commemorative display listing the real heavy-hitter contributors to the Retreat, people and organizations who’d given somewhere in excess of fifty thousand dollars a pop. The money was dizzying. You took the Gasaway-Chamberlain endowment, added it in with all these donors, combined that with the patie…guests, totaling fifty-six when the place was at full capacity, each giving upwards of three grand a week, and still it seemed the place was running as a non-profit. Of the myriad things Hud was bad with, money had to be near the top of the list, but this fiscal structure especially made no sense to him. What were the overheads? How much do swans eat for Christ’s sake? There was equine therapy up the north hill, a stable with two broke-down nags named Lolly and Pepper. If one of them were to blow out a fedlock right now the entire place might go under. Anything money discovers one day it will the next just as easily forget.

 

*****

 

Sabrina was on the observation deck in the hale, green-appled sunlight of early afternoon, and Hud nodded with his chin as he came up the steps from the serenity path. She stretched back on a deck lounger, bare feet beneath her swirl of gauzy peasant cloth and wraps. He could never readily ascertain her clothing – and he’d unwrapped it from her body on two separate occasions – what was a dress or a shrug or a robe or a scarf. All of it seemed somehow of a piece and yet folds of differing fabrics with no clasps or hooks causing them to cohere.

Others were milling in. Craig and Midas and Jasmine and Jessa and Violeta. Another group session was imminent.

He sat near her feet. Sabrina offered him a Dunhill, though she knew he didn’t smoke. Oval-shaped sunglasses concealed her eyes and gave back only two orbs of dark sun. Jessa sent a vexed glower their way. He declined the Dunhill.

“Did we have a nice walk?”

“It was a lot like the one I took this morning, but not nearly so much as the one I took yesterday.”

“I’m worried I’ll never play the oboe again.”

He patted one heel, and cupped the back of her foot in his palm. Applied a platonic stroke to her toes. “I know. You will though.” No matter what front she tried to put up, Sabrina had only one omnipresent thought: if her music would ever return. His omnipresent thought was if Hadley would return. The pair of them were two cartoon balloons giant above two diminutive stick figures, each bumping heedlessly into their surroundings, knocking against other people, twisting like kites, making the rounds, but never surrendering their behemoth selves towering above their nut-headed little hosts, casting these huge shadows over once sovereign lives. Hud felt sympathy but wasn’t too worried about her in the main – he genuinely thought she’d be able to play again. He genuinely never thought he’d see Hadley again.

He’d again and again played chess with himself on this issue; a hundred games by now or a thousand. No matter what, he was always in checkmate. She’s gone, brah …

“What makes you so sure,” she asked, her head perking up as if it was the first time he’d ever said so. In fact, it was far from the first time; in the five-and-a-half days since they’d met, he’d reassured on this score at least a dozen times. But he was happy to do it again. “Give it some time. You’ve had a minor breakdown. It’s only been a couple of months. This might have been your brain telling yourself that you need a break from playing, allow the cells to regenerate. You didn’t just lose it overnight; it’s just in hibernation right now. When it comes back, it’ll come back stronger. You’re going to think back on this one day and be glad it happened.”

She stretched out further, like an appointed cat, straw hat released from her auburn hair. He envied her the few seconds of genuine relaxation and optimism. “Thank you,” she said. “You have an odd gift for comfort. If I was capable of it, I might almost love you.”

“Fair,” he said. “Would you like a mineral water?”

“Why not.”

Jessa’s glower followed him to the ice tub of floating glass bottles, sparkling water and flat. The Center was very big on hydration. All Hud wanted to do was get lost in his hopeless reverie again, slip down the rabbit hole and back into the swaddle of brooding or simulated elation, but the intensity of her look crawled up his cheek like a black fly.

He nodded, he shrugged, tried a smile that he suspected was less than winning. A notch for authenticity: Hud was incapable of an actual smile when he wasn’t genuinely happy. By chance he’d glimpsed a couple of times into reflective surfaces when one of these faux-smiles came upon him; he came off looking like a man working over the distress of an abscessed tooth.

“Jessa. How’s things?”

Now she contrived to ignore him, turned her head away in a flounce. It wasn’t jealousy – not exactly. They’d done nothing together. Rather it was the indignation of the newly converted – Jessa had in her short time here become militant on the Center’s protocol and etiquette, turned true believer in matters of serenity and private healing, and this had virtually overnight made her zealous and vigilant to any breach of conduct, seeing them as aspersions on her stunning transformation in the last moon cycle. He and Sabrina’s obvious coupling was anathema to her. What she was here to recuperate from, Hud didn’t exactly know. The Center had some straight up addicts – heroin, pills, occasionally humdrum drunks – but its primary clientele trucked in non-specific malaises of mood, spiritual listlessness and pan-anxiety. There were three guest residents who know one ever saw. Celebrities, two pop stars and one Emmy-awarding winning actress. All that was known for sure about their condition was that they suffered from “exhaustion.” Jessa was sharp-faced, twitchy with unchanneled intelligence, had splayed curly hair that winged out like lightning bolts of impulsive thoughts, and sat exclusively with her arms crossed tight to her chest, clamped like boiler plate. “Mineral water,” he asked, weakly, holding out a bottle.

There was a word for the look in her eyes. It felt alarmingly close to hate, and Hud shuffled back to Sabrina.

The group leader today was Elliot. He was young, had cherry blossom cheeks of baby fat, wore khakis every time Hud had seen him, kept pens in the breast pocket of his button-downs, and had a walk like a bear who’d been raised by border collies. “Hi everybody.”

Sabrina pitched her cigarette. “Let’s each do a check-in,” said Elliot. “Go clockwise around the circle. Tell the group how you feel: physically, emotionally, mentally.”

I got to get out of here, thought Hud, to himself. Always to himself.

 

*****

 

Romantic equations are the only kind that spontaneously occur with the entrance of two variables, and often nothing else. How so many elements could spring from only two factors defied mathematical constancy, an important lesson again that human beings are neither fixed quantities nor rational actors.

On the first night of two couplings with Sabrina, his third night at the center, in her room with the window raised and she over by the window while he lay in bed staring at the drop ceiling. The nights were cool at the advent of April, a flinty breeze eking into the room; it was the nearest he’d felt to serene in some months. He grazed fingertips across his own chest – detesting the smell of cigarettes he tried to ignore the smoke from Sabrina’s Dunhill wafting back into the room, lest it hamper his equipoise – and managed to attain some easy grace there with the sheet across his stomach, listening, for the initial time, to the story of the oboe.

She was a second oboist in the New York Philharmonic. It was a prestigious spot, a hard-won spot, an opportunity she’d aspired to since coming to the country as an adolescent, only her mother making the voyage with her. The father … here even forthcoming Sabrina got very vague; her curled, Eastern European dipthongs downshifted into a purr. They’d come from the former Yugoslavia, Montenegro in fact, and why the father didn’t make the trip was unclear, as was his whereabouts now. There were strong hints from her that he’d made a political choice that was untenable to the family, and joined up with the far right nationalists. Milosevic was mentioned once, in a voice Sabrina used that was primarily a guttural hiss, like a peasant woman uttering an oath making the sign of the cross when the undertaker passed through the hamlet.

There was an indiscriminate hum of night bugs and tree frogs crooning outside the window. She was clad only in his black tshirt that rode past her hips. One day, thought Hud, a pleasant drowsy fugue settling in his brain and over the carapace of his skin, I’ll tire of looking at the figure of a barely dressed woman in repose. One day it won’t mean much. One day it won’t move me. But he didn’t believe that – he was only twenty-nine years old and somehow still foresaw that for all the life changes that might occur and the shifts and mutability of desire and dreams, this would be a constant companion, on into infinity. He didn’t want it any other way – and that itself might have something to do with the resilience of the vision – but at the same time, in light of all that had happened, it now struck him as a more complicated yearning, an inclination that would have to be dealt with on a continuous basis.

The cigarette dropped out the window, she rose and honey light from the lamp spilled onto her hips, dipped in shadows the turn of her thigh and the shallows of her stomach. She stretched – from that angle it looked like her fine, long-stemmed musician fingers might graze the ceiling. Then she looked at him and pulled off his shirt, letting it fall to the floor.

Under the sheet with him, she said, “Your heart feels nervous. It bangs away in there.”

“I’ve heard something similar recently.”

“You are troubled.”

He lifted his head to look at her. “Well, we are basically in a mental hospital.”

“Why are you here?”

That was an elliptical question. He declined for now; this little meadow of calm had been too long in coming not to savor it some longer. “Nevermind me,” he said. “Go ahead with what you were saying.”

“I’m worried I’ll never play the oboe again.”

She had been playing since she was six years old. Average practice time daily: four hours. Calloused fingers, hard rinds to the edge of her upper lip. Tutorials, auditions, rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal. Symposiums. Rehearsal. Performances, auditions. Lincoln Center. 2^nd chair at the Philharmonic. The concentration and dedication and the sheer doggedness in pursuit of one calling, one task, was far and away the mainstay of her life, the bulwark and motor.

Which is what made it so startling when after thousands of hours of practiced mindfulness in the craft, it was the mindfulness that turned on her. Suddenly an acute awareness of what she was doing flooded in; the naturalness evaporated. Every press on the reed, every fingering pattern; she was intensely conscious of it. She thought about it – really the thoughts thought her – how she was doing this thing here, now, and what an odd practice it was. The music turned artificial in her mind and therefore from the instrument; like the word you repeat over and over until it stretches itself free of sense, music degenerated into sound, her ear wavered, her technique collapsed.

Any efforts to reverse the paroxysm only worsened it. Mindfulness increased to a painful, then agonizing, degree. And the nightmares: somewhere in the ordeal she was visited by a recurring dark dream – “before that,” she said,” I thought recurring dreams were just so much bullshit. What does it say about the limits of a brain that has to repeat its own dreams?” – of a raven or crow, appearing in her room at night and staring at her with glassy, shining eyes, opening its maw and giving a melodious rendition of snatches of Telemen’s Concerto for Oboe and Strings in D Minor or Bach’s Sonata in C Major. The bird was unruffled, sat primly on her stack of magazines on an end table, the only sinister thing about it the blithe unconcern with her presence there, and complete indifference to the howl breaking across her face that she couldn’t expel from her mouth.

Rehearsals became the crucible awaiting her during the day. Sweats, dry mouth. Nerves jangled, worry became dread. By the time she entered the building she was almost out-of-body, barely making headway into the hall, oblivious to the patter of her fellow musicians, the conviviality, the sound of the individual tuning. She attempted to breathe – breaths did nothing. All her fear was focused stage right, from where the maestro always entered, and she quailed with knowing his presence meant the actual making of music was imminent. And enter of course he did, and her attempts to bluff didn’t work. Soon the reading was underway, and there were parts for the oboe, on the third page, and the tempo was moving with locomotive charge, and discovery was nigh, and the reed was alien between her lips and her stomach was knotted in cramps like a vice. Drool escaped down her chin.

And she blew the most shrill of notes. The rehearsal reared up, silent. The other recurring nightmare she realized she’d had before. A roomful of musicians, staring at her, wondering what the hell she was doing there.

She nuzzled inside the bend of his shoulder, absently kissed his clavicle. He was telling her how she’d definitely, certainly, no doubt play the oboe again. She gripped him, but if it was out of gratitude, it wasn’t an exchange or transaction. She pumped him as she slid her open mouth down his chest.

“You are sure you don’t want a cigarette? Aren’t you a rock musician or something.”

“No,” he said, “and no. I write about music.”

“But you have to go to those clubs and stuff to do that.”

“Sure. And I get plenty of the second-hand from there. I haven’t had a smoke of my own, tobacco I mean, since I was fourteen. My dad gave it to me.”

“Ah. You could be Serbian then.”

“What did I refer to you as before,” he said, raising up.

She smiled at him, a forgiving smile. “Croatian. It’s ok. I knew what you meant.”

“Sorry.” He settled into place again. “It’s difficult when you’re an American – you spend your childhood learning the world from the globe in your room, then this series of events comes and the old globe is out of date. The textured countries in all the cool colors that you used to run your fingers over, they don’t exist anymore.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “So extraordinarily hard being an American.”

He sighed. “Yeah. I feel sheepish.” And he laughed.

“As you should,” she said, all brio, and pulled the sheet over them.

The rooms at The Center were dorm-style, spare in an inviting way. Each had its full bed, a night stand, a small round-top table by the window, a dresser, a writing desk and a couple of chairs. Every other morning fresh cut flowers were delivered in a plastic vase. Each was an individual room, no one had to share. Hud had an aversion to his room – he had an aversion to being alone. Here he was then, in Sabrina’s, which was strictly against policy. Punishable by expulsion. Neither of them were overly concerned about that, but they did attempt to keep the noise to a minimum and when they did speak, it came in whispers.

“Tell me why you’re here.” Her words were humid against his chest. “You know everything about me and I hardly know the first thing about you. What seems to be the trouble?”

“You sound like Dr. Bascombe.”

“And you sound like a man who’s diverting.”

He inhaled deeply. Why am I here, why am I here? In moments like this fluency with words evaded him entirely.

“I’m here … because too many of my memories involve me walking out of rooms and leaving women inside them crying.”

“Ahh,” she said. “Yes. I believe I grasp where you’re going. And what did you do to them, bad man Hud?”

“I don’t know. I never intended to hurt anyone.”

“But you did. So what – intentions mean nothing.”

“No, you’re right.”

“I know I’m right. What did you do? Be specific.”

“You sound like Bascombe now for sure. Ok. I took their dreams and buried them in the soft mud on a riverbank somewhere. I changed them from what they were and what they wanted to be. When I have them I ignore them, when I don’t have them anymore I feel like I’m dying.”

She raised up, pulled her legs to her chest. Her auburn hair hung over her face like a shade. “This is a problem. You don’t know why you do this, do you?”

“That’s the idea of coming here. I guess.”

“May I say? You are not here because women are crying in rooms somewhere.”

“No?” He raised up, genuinely curious now. This suddenly felt like a threshold to enlightenment.”

She shook her head. “You are here because you feel like dying. If it was just these women hurting, you’d never have done this.”

He lay his wrist against his forehead. He heard the pulse-fast ticking of his watch. They were silent for some time. “That doesn’t speak so well for me, does it.”

She kissed him full on the mouth. “You are not special, snowflake. There is nothing new under the sun and you have done nothing a million men haven’t done before you.”

How do I stop? Can I stop? Hadley. Go on, stick with a man who don’t need to go after goodness like it’s the golden fleece. Who has it already dangling from a lanyard he keeps around his neck at all times.

“I’ve acted like an idiot lately. In addition to wanting to die, that’s why I’m here. I’m humiliated, and I can’t stand to be humiliated.”

She chuckled softly, kissed him again. “Nothing new under the sun.”

At this very moment the lights were on in New York. The last Atlantis left on planet Earth was glowing like a continent of phosphorous in the sea. Life was teeming. Six million souls were searching, finding, missing, loving, dying. They were pouring whiskey neat in the Blue and Gold. Central Park was humming with nighttime spring. The lions were lording in front of the Central Branch Library. Taxi cabs were pulling up Columbus Avenue. The subways were rolling. Beacons atop buildings, tugboats in the East River. She’s there somewhere; maybe she’s looking for me.

“You know what helps in these moments? Music.” And she jumped out of bed and went to the small radio atop the dresser. Turning it on she spun the dial – the frequencies were surprisingly strong. The sound of strings flowed from the speakers, smooth bows of sound, patient crests and swells of symphonic music.

“Do you know this piece,” he asked.

Naked, she stretched to her full height, shaking her hair. “But of course I do.” She thickened her accent intentionally. “Do you?”

“Uhm, Mahler?”

“No, indeed. Not even the correct century.”

“Strauss.”

“Getting colder.”

“I don’t know classical music very well. At all, actually.”

“What music do you know?”

“Well, I am a rock critic.”

“Ahh, yes. Let’s see if we can find your poison.”

But the nearest she got was a classic rock station playing Steely Dan. How he loathed Steely Dan. “Pass, go back to not-Mahler.”

“No, I think not. You are unsettled.” She turned the dial until she landed on a news station, WBUR out of Boston. A man was talking about the Bush legislative agenda. Tax cuts were in the offing – that was the cornerstone of the new President’s plans for Congress.

“Seriously,” he said, “no. I’ll take Steely Dan over this.”

“No,” she said, laughing. “This will soothe you. There’s comfort for you here.”

Somehow she was right. He loathed the new President more than he did soft jazz fusion, and yet here he was, getting lulled all over again. He felt moored to something stable, a firmament that was not necessarily welcome but at least fixed. All I’m ever listening to is the voice of America.

 

 

 

 

 

Lazarus Had to Die Twice
Attendance at my funeral was lackluster. My parents were there, of course—my poor aged parents, how the years have ravaged them. All atremble beside them in the front pew was a nonagenarian aunt of mine, as much vapor these days as flesh and blood. One surprise among the congregated: an old schoolmate of mine, Landon I think is his name. I was ashamed to see him, because I wasn’t always so nice to him, used to mock him mercilessly in front of other people, would borrow money off him that he, in hopes of buying a friend or buying a reprieve, was always eager to give, and that I knew I would never be paying back. Yet there he was, a woman on his arm I can only assume was his wife, and not one to be ashamed of either, from the looks of her—good for you, Landon.

In the back of the place was a smattering of others, none of them of any consequence whatsoever. Shepherding the whole enterprise along, a priest—doing a most underwhelming job, by the way, his eulogy nothing more than a tepid and sanitized synopsis of my too-brief life, his choices for readings every bit as pedestrian, what with the obligatory ashes-to-ashes bit and the most predictable of passages from the Psalms. I myself would have voted for the Lazarus story, but then I was not consulted. A bit later, at the graveyard, two hired men stood by, slouched against their shovels. Here endeth the spectators.

My women. I had thought they would come in droves. That they would descend on the service like a flock of black-clad doves, veiled, clutching tissues in their pretty painted talons. I imagined fainting, hysterics, unbridled weeping, wanted very much for at least one to leap into the mouth of my grave and refuse to let go of the casket. In the years to come they might make solitary pilgrimages to my resting place, sit and run their fingers in the grooves of my name, talk to me of things which were and things which might have been. Autumn would be the most suitable backdrop for these visitations, a pale sun suppurating behind banks of woebegone clouds, the ground covered over with the brittle husks of fallen leaves.

Not a one showed. This is patently unfair—I was never as bad as all that, and one would think that if ever there was a time to put the past in the past, this would be it. What can I say? Death has its little disappointments.

Still, in the days and weeks to come, after the shock subsides, after some time passes and equilibrium returns, there is a chance that they might come to see me, some of them, or a few, or at least one. At the moment it is high summer, the days mottled and mangy and tranquilized with an earnest, fly-specked heat.

But I am not uncomfortable. On the contrary, lying here is most pleasant. Cool and dry. I’m quite proud of the expense incurred on my behalf—no pine box for me. The coffin’s interior is plush, well-padded, feels all in all like top of the line accommodations. It is even somewhat spacious, dare I say roomy, inasmuch as that is possible. Once upon a time I believed myself to be claustrophobic (a condition, I was certain, stemming from an hour as a child spent trapped inside a coal bin, a cruel prank perpetrated by sociopathic cousin). Seems I was mistaken. (I also used to think I was afraid of heights; don’t suppose I’ll ever have the opportunity to disprove that one.) There is even the aural accompaniment of lapping water, the serene sound of an underground spring or stream running nearby. So lulling and steady is the gentle trickle that it serves as a sort of serenade, like a fountain’s happy chortle. Most therapeutic.

It occurs to me that my recent demise did not exactly make News of the World, and that this might explain the truancy of my women. They don’t know I’m gone—could be as simple as that. Unfortunately, I died in a very ordinary way, not under the splashy circumstances I’d always hoped for. My ideal end would have involved a suspension bridge, a busload of endangered children, an incapacitated driver (stroke or seizure, the exposition tends to be a bit hazy). The bus teeters along the bridge’s precipice, front wheels spinning in air over the thousand foot drop into some choppy bay. Onlookers point, shout, gesticulate—I alone act. News crews in helicopters above the scene broadcast the entire ordeal live—how else will all the right people see the stunning act of heroism about to be performed?—as I clamber aboard the wobbling bus (this is especially impressive given my widely-known acrophobia) and rescue the children. One by one I tote them on my back, I bear them on my shoulders, take their little hands in mine and lead them to safety And just as I push the last one—a particularly adorable little girl in a blue dress and straw-colored pigtails—clear of danger, the bus tips over the edge. Alas, it is too late for me; I am lost. (The driver has been forgotten at this point.) Community, city and nation are galvanized; posthumously I am awarded numerous medals and citations. Any individuals who during my life had underestimated me are forced to live out their days guilt-ridden over their irrevocable error in judgment, while for the women I loved my untimely end ushers in an era of peace and equanimity, a parting gift from me to them. Granted, there is considerable overlap between these two factions, and in this soufflé certain disparate ingredients alternately commingle and clash; many of the women in the aftermath of my supreme act of self-sacrifice grovel after an impossible postmortem reconciliation, sequestered forever with the consequences of their own misdeeds, and yet also flourish and bloom under the golden bough of my memory, walking forever after in an eternal sunrise supplied courtesy of my martyrdom.

And to think a simple breakdown in communications has put a crimp in all these sublime, if muddled, visions. Foiled by the unreliable grapevine. Would that I had designated an agent to spread the grim news: “In the case of death, dismemberment, or catatonia, immediately notify the following….”
But Landon had been there; and if poor, perpetual outsider Landon had gotten word, surely they would have. My women must know by now. (They are always women to me, incidentally—“girls” are two-dimensional things, props, bedazzled objects, puppets for advertisers to pull and tug and make to dance. “Girls” are plastic. Women, on the other hand, are of this earth and out of this world, tangible and ethereal, prisms of endless possibility winking undiscovered light from every new angle.) So if they know that I am no longer extant, then where are they? Would all of them rather stay home to lick their imaginary wounds and nourish their incidental hurts than come to pay my remains the proper respect? And how many exactly are we talking here? I cast a fairly wide net. Several, to be sure, whatever number several is meant to indicate. To say a hundred sounds like bragging, fifty not much more modest. Let us say, for the sake of saying, twenty. Probably that errs on the conservative side—but would it really matter if it were less? Would it make any difference if it were only one? The absence of a one leaves as much voided space as the absence of a twenty. One heartbreak is in fact the greatest tragedy of all; twenty heartbreaks, a mere statistic. There is no justice in this world, the saying always goes—turns out there isn’t any in the next one, either. Which is not to say that I am heartbroken. Not at all. Given my recent advancement, I am beyond feelings. Any phantom pangs are only the imprints of past hurts, a species of sense memory, much like the amputee who swears he can still feel the throbbing in his missing limb. No, it makes not a scintilla of difference whether I ever see her again, her daisy head, her dandelion face, her clover smile. It could neither enhance nor contaminate my quiescence.

Winter is here. It stole upon me like a thief while I was deep in my daydreams. Here is the sky, in gray Baltic sheets, here is the landscape, heaped and burning white with snow. The trees groan under the weight of it, their limbs straining. The autumnal idylls previously envisioned will never come to pass, for it turns out that I have been buried beneath a stand of evergreens. There is a blunt irony in this; a more paranoid man might find it suspicious. Viewed from below the spiny tines of the coniferous branches peek out from the hummocks of snow like sprigs of mint swaddled in cotton. A scant wind whimpers. Stray squirrels work reconnaissance, foraging for food, burrowing, chittering, bounding away. It is in this landscape, down the glistening aisle between the rows of granite headstones, unwashed bodies beneath starched white caps, that I see the figure approaching. A shimmering outline, blurred but gathering definition with every step. As yet I cannot make out a face, but I know she must be here to see me. Patience brings rewards.

A serious person. She always was. One can tell that much from her gait, the deliberate way she moves, stately as a floating palace. A reverent air attaches to her, as befits the circumstances. But I am confused, because now her outline has begun to subdivide, and instead of one I now see two, two figures walking side by side, so close that their borders meld and ripple.

I recognize the one of the left to be my father as soon as I make out the flat-cap. He took to wearing them during his middle years and hasn’t ventured outdoors without one since. My mother has a hold of his arm. They cling tightly to one another as they limp across the treacherous, icy ground, in the faulty assumption that should one stumble, the other could break the fall, when in reality it would only insure that both crash down together. They are stooped, they are hobbled, they each are bundled in winter clothes: old musty woolens, mufflers, mittens and scarves, all dark-colored with mourning. My mother wears a threadbare black kerchief over her bluish dyed hair. The two of them stop and start, peer around, confused and blinking; they are unsure which marker is mine, and to be fair, headstones do tend to have a very similar aspect. They inch along, plot by plot, stone by stone, until at last they locate me.

Oh Christ, he’s weeping. Her tiny eyes are strained and red, and no doubt she has been crying, but he is outright weeping, wracking sobs with his mouth wide-open, his chest heaving. Mama, you shouldn’t have brought him here. You know he can’t take things like this. He isn’t strong enough; the man tears up at old photographs. Neither of you should be here, not in these conditions. You’ll catch pneumonia, you’ll slip, break something, be stranded out here. I would be of no help whatsoever. Please, turn back. Turn back and go home. This isn’t necessary.

Under her arm is an arrangement of flowers wrapped in a cone of clear plastic and crepe paper; white flowers, though their shade looks yellowed and peaked against the pristine backdrop of the new-born snow, the silky ends of the bell-shaped leaves tinged the faintest pink. I know them well—Lilies of the Valley, my mother’s favorite. She kept vases of them all over the house, in all seasons, on tabletops, on window sills, on the mantel, their saccharine scent stinking up every room. The water in the bottoms of the vases would be colored a lime green after an assortment had been left sitting a day or two. Now she is resting them atop me—for God’s sake, would you be careful, you are going to fall I tell you! I just know something terrible is going to happen!—so that I should be consigned once again to live under a regime of them, bouquets and bouquets of Lilies of the Valley, the familiar perfume bearing me on into perpetuity. She finally straightens upright, stiff as a minute hand trying to crank counter-clockwise, turns and leads my father over to a little stone bench across from my spot. With her mittened hand she sweeps it clean of snow, guides him to take a seat, then lowers herself next to him. There they sit, huddled together, faces ashy and caved, jaws working over mouthfuls of grief, and, eyes full of ghosts, stare straight ahead.

Leave me alone, do you hear? Why are you doing this? This solves nothing, you know. Can’t you see it’s not my fault? It wasn’t my intention that the two of you should outlive me. You aren’t going to saddle me with this one. I absolutely will not feel guilty about this. I have my own problems. I’m the dead one here. Please, be reasonable, you’re going to freeze to death out here. Truth is, I’m expecting someone. It won’t do to have her come and find you here. Listen to me!

But they don’t budge. They stay on that little stone bench and bear the brunt of the day with all its unforgiving weathers over their bowed heads and shoulders. The sun drags the hours behind it like a mule dragging a plow. The dark stitches of their clothes collect the snowflakes, the tears in their lashes turn to crystal, the drops on their cheeks to diamonds. We stay like this for quite awhile. An awkward silence stretching across chasms, me screaming and pleading all the while.

And when they finally do make to leave, rising quivering to their feet, she folding down his collar which has come upturned, pressing his cap down tighter over his ears, wiping her own eyes, each taking the other’s hand and beginning the long retreat away on the path lain between other dead sons, other dead daughters, a lifelong impulse reasserts itself; for immediately I am sorry to see them go. Don’t leave, I didn’t mean it. It’s a difficult time for me, you understand. Come back, sit awhile. But they continue to recede from me. Listen, don’t feel badly. I’m fine, really. I’m very comfortable here, all thanks to you. Take consolation in that. The casket, the scenery, everything, just perfect, I know it couldn’t have been cheap. Don’t cry over me. Everything will be alright, I’ll make you proud, I promise. I’ll become a guardian angel, spend eternity doing good deeds, saving the innocent, protecting the weak, whatever it takes. This is only the beginning, you’ll see. Know that I miss you, too.

They limp heedlessly on, diminishing ever more, until finally they fade into charcoal smudges on the watery purple of the horizon separating frozen earth from frozen air.

They never vanish entirely, however; from this vantage I am able to see for long distances, miles and years, and I watch them recede out of the cemetery and into a late thaw, into false springs, on into Indian Summers. A trick of the eyes or a trick of the brain. My mind, if the term is still valid, does things like this nowadays—runs the same visions, the same regrets, over and over in a maddening reel, ever diminishing in clarity, the recycling of remnants from the life I led. A minor life, I am forced to conclude, given the meagerness of memories and concerns available to me now—had I known it was going to be this way I would have cultivated a more varied existence, had a richer crop of obsessions to harvest. But like the leftovers of any old humdrum human being, what I have is what I have; what I am, I am.

Speaking of regrets: perhaps I was too hard on that priest, unimpressive though he was. No one can so often be a proxy to death and not become a little desensitized; dreary professionalism is as effective a coping strategy as any for a life spent lurking in the shadows of mortality, constantly hearing the beat of the muffled drums, wearing the most somber face possible. I concede to him his run-of-the-mill prayers, his bland readings, his use of mediocrity as shelter in the endless onslaught of tragedy and duress. I see now too how the Lazarus fable would be disastrous at such occasions, for all involved. For the officiator of the service like our priest, it would only be a gibe at his modern-day impotence, a tale of ancient/mythic powers currently offline for him to tap. The time for the palpable miracle has passed—from here on the supposed triumph over death happens off-stage, with no witnesses around to dispute it. Which is convenient. For the credulous, the true believers among the mourners, it would only be a cruel taunt, because obviously nothing of the kind is going to occur—the corpse is not going to rise and come forth, not going to spill from the coffin in a coughing fit, to look around at with a dazed expression as if awakening from nothing more than a heavy anesthetic. And for the unfortunate dead, resurrection anecdotes cut especially close to the bone, and not for the reasons one may think, not from any disappointment that the ultimate long-shot hasn’t come through.

No, and speaking only for myself here, it is because the notion of being brought back to life provides no comfort. Injustice is never a comfort. Do all of this over again? Thanks but no thanks. Take this Lazarus fellow—poor bastard had to die twice. And death is very much like heartbreak. Once is already one time too many.

.

Missing Children

 

He rented the house on the cliff side of Lake Champion, northwest Oregon, for four hundred and forty dollars a week. Off-season, the pogonip hanging like a bridal veil. He was staying there alone.

The town was a mile and a quarter down a two lane road. The town was called Tack. From the grocery-cum-bait shop he bought a dozen brown eggs, a loaf of rye bread, six apples, a jar of peanut butter, a twelve pack of Lowenbrau, four rolls of toilet paper and one roll of paper towels, a bag of dark roast coffee beans, an electric grinder, and a cheap, lightweight French press and last month’s copy of Barely Legal.
He brought it back to the house and set the sacks on the counter in the dark kitchen, only the green clock on the stove glowing, only the refrigerator humming.

The waitresses at the diner were too plain for pretty and not horrendous enough to be interesting. The hash tasted like something called hash would. The news in the local paper was no news at all.

The house was furnished, spartanly. Utilitarian. You could sit on the chairs, lie down on the bed. The blankets worked.

Apprehensive mornings still miming nighttime, from the porch he heard fish jumping in the lake below, glassy sounds, shy shatterings. Bass, bull trout, flatheads maybe. The coffee mug in his hand had red-white-and-blue lettering that read, Pimco Firearms Show, July 19-21, 1998, Mt. McKisco Fairgrounds. Come See What All The Noise Is About. A star-spangled .45 automatic in profile. He’d found it in the back of the cupboard, a petrified spider inside.

Gnarled swards of Sitka spruce brocaded the crags of the shoreline. He left the sandy path, made his way up a makeshift trail of damp rock and lichen-pelted boulders, crawling as much as climbing, finding hand holds and pulling himself up. Hemlock and patches of wild blackberry, remnants of frost in the shade beneath the bushes.
When he felt he was high enough, he turned around. But the pitch looked almost gentle from here, an easy decline, never really falling, just rolling away. The sun was weak in the sky and out on the water, the seal-gray lake, the light whimpered on the surface for brief instants before dying away in the murk and cold ripples.

It was an A-frame house with a split-level foyer. He stood on the fourth step of the carpeted staircase and looked upward, blinking. More than twenty feet off the ground a huge brass chandelier, dusty and dinged, hung from braids of heavy chain, links thick as a baby’s fist.
At the hardware store in Tack he examined the selection of ladders. Step stools and step ladders, extension ladders, and finally an eighteen foot aluminum twin ladder. Two hundred and sixty four dollars.
Behind the counter were string, twine, and rope for sale. Cut to order. He pointed to the Polypropylene rope, asked the man in bib overalls to cut him a length of eight and a half feet.
The man rang him up for two hundred and eighty eight dollars and seventy seven cents total.

Late in the evening, he came across a soft-backed copy of a Good News Bible in the top of a bedroom closet. Closing his eyes, he leafed through the pages at random, opened his eyes and read where his finger happened to land.
2nd Chronicles 31:11-13
On the King’s orders they prepared storerooms in the Temple
area and put all the gifts and tithes in them for safekeeping.
They placed a Levite named Conaniah in charge and made
his brother Shimei his assistant. Ten Levites were assigned to
work under them: Jekiel, Azaziah, Nahath, Asahael, Jerimath,
Josahad, Eliel, Ismachiah…
He closed the book.

He sat on the edge of the dock, working the length of rope between his hands. First fashioning an S shape, compressing the three rows until only a couple of inches separated them. Then pinching the center of the rows between his index finger and thumb. Next he took the third strand of rope and began winding it around the bow-tie shape he’d made, right over left, right over left. He brought the cut end of the rope through the loop of the original S.
Two blue heron flew lazily over the water, their wings spangled with light. It was a clear day, the wind cold as a gem and crystalline and scented with pine; the sky was azure and the only clouds were far distant in the western horizon, a bank of them above the peaks like a second mountain range composed entirely of snow.
The sound of vacancy as the wind whistled over the water, and the lake lapped against the piers of the dock. The shadows of the two birds seemed to be slightly slower than the birds themselves, and lagged behind, skimming the water, floating across the lake at a dreamlike pace, tilting as the birds turned in flight, dissipating as they flew farther away, diminishing, before finally vanishing altogether just after the heron disappeared over the line of evergreens.
He knew he was supposed to find all this beautiful.

Rotterdam and Belle Park

 

 

He watched as the fallen leaf of a white oak, long-lashed and red, grazed the windshield. In that instant three things happened: the radio cut out, the clock on the dash went black, and the car engine gave a hard chuff and snort. Then it fell dead.

There was enough momentum for him to guide the car a little, and he made a sweeping right onto Belle Park, managing to maneuver the vehicle to a gliding stop on the curbside of the quiet street. He sat for a moment.

He had finished his doctor calls early that day, had figured he’d do some aimless driving. It was a half-thought that even led him here; his last clinic was in Barrymeyer, and wanting to avoid the interstates, he detoured south, ending up in the old neighborhood. He had not been to this part of town in many years. It was the midpoint of autumn, coldest day of the season thus far—they were calling for a chance of snow—and outside the car the leaves on the tall trees had turned, dogwoods and maples and white birch dressed in burnt orange and raging gold. Belle Park was deserted, no other cars passing by, no one jogging or walking a dog. Only the large old homes, Victorians and speckled brick Tudors, set well back from the street on great rolling lawns.

He pulled his out his cell and called home. It rang four times, then he heard the voicemail coming on, Jackie’s voice: “You have reached the McIntyres— Tom, Jackie, Joey and Denise. Leave us a message and we’ll call you back.” Then some muffled, scraping sounds as his wife coaxed Joey, three years old at the time of recording, to say: “Have a nice day,” a high flutter of a voice unsteady on the cadence of the words. Then the beep.

“It’s me. The car broke down, just died on me. I’m not far from a service station, I’m going to walk over and see if I can get a tow. Probably faster than calling it in, I don’t even have any heat right now. I’m on the cell, give me a call.” He was surprised she didn’t come to the phone—it wasn’t her day for the carpool and Joey was due home from school anytime now. But he had to admit that there was a lot that went on in his house at these hours of the day with which he was unfamiliar.

The heat leaking out and the cold creeping in, he got out of the car. He opened the back door and grabbed his coat from the seat. Then he took his samples case, feeling light today from his visits—the clinics in these tony areas were always hungry for the latest anti-depressant or anti-anxiety med to hit the marketplace—and deposited it inside the trunk. He locked everything up with the punch of a button on the key ring. Pulling his coat tight around him, zipped to his chin, he stuffed his hands in its pockets and set off the opposite way down the street from where he had entered.

Belle Park ran as far as he could see, but he remembered it let out onto Rotterdam, a major thoroughfare, not much more than a mile ahead. West down Rotterdam, maybe another mile, was Haney Plaza and a cluster of commercial spaces. He used to pass through there all the time as a kid; there was a pet store, Kiley’s or Riley’s, a bakery with the cakes displayed in the window, a little grocery. And on the north corner a service station, Zeke’s he thought it was called. He remembered Zeke’s was where his father used to always take the family cars to be serviced.

Walking. It was odd, really, that he hadn’t been back in so long, nearly fifteen years, not since returning for Christmas break his freshman year of college. Before that, he had lived all eighteen years of his life in the A-frame house on Caufield Street in Haney Springs, a neighborhood almost adjacent to this one; the houses were a little newer, many built postwar, and not so grand as the ones he walked by now, more ranch-style places, but otherwise the area was virtually indistinguishable from the Belle Park region. After that Christmas, Tom back at school, his father accepted a transfer to Florida, selling the house and moving south with his mother and sisters. Following graduation, Tom first hired on with a medical-supply distributorship, spending two dry years in Pasadena. The call from a recruiter soliciting a rep position for a large Southern pharmaceutical company, at a considerably higher salary, had been a welcome one, and completely coincidental that the available position was in his hometown. He leased a loft apartment, complementary to a bachelor in his twenties, in the resurgent, gentrifying eastern side of downtown—a crime-ridden, impoverished, no-go zone during his childhood, now a desirous urban community with new bistros, bars, vintage stores, and pricey ethnic restaurants springing up seemingly every other day. Within a year, he had met his wife and married; two more years and Joey was born, Denise following eighteen months later. They bought a house in Chapel Heights, a suburban extension of that same East End area, and had been there ever since.

Even in the years he had been running this same territory, making visits to the same doctors and the same clinics and offices, he had never until today—never even thought of doing so until today—made the return trip five or six miles west to the staid, staunchly conservative, strictly respectable environs here: Belle Park and Rotterdam, and his Haney Springs westward of that, the land of Mitchener Elementary and Hamilton Middle School and Hamilton High over on Westlake, to Carraway Presbyterian and, some time later, after a young minister less to parents’ liking was installed there, all told, this had been the staging ground for the entirety of his youth. And a breakdown for his trouble; what, he wondered, was the message in that.

He walked past Beagley, then Clinedale, the houses on their expansive, tree-dotted lots, long winding blacktop driveways winged by rows of manicured hedges that led up to garages and carports, basketball goals with nets flapping in the rustle of the wind. The houses themselves were all two or three stories, ivy crawling up their sides, huge gables and arched dormers, and steep-pitched roofs with the thumbs of red chimneys rising above them.

It was in silent recognition and walking in the crispness of the day that the stranded memory restored itself to him: he was ten, maybe he was eleven, and was riding in the black Pontiac with his father. It was…yes, he nodded, walking up to the green street sign, it was here on Scarbury. He remembered it was cold that night as well, riding along in the passenger seat, tucked deep into his puffed coat, the car vents rattling as they fanned out the warm air. The interior smelled faintly with the musk of his father’s cologne, which was always applied liberally to his shirt-fronts—an odd aromatic mélange hovering somewhere between citrus and saddle leather. He may have been asleep when the tire blew. The sound was just a small pop, like a champagne cork popping, but the car gave a hard tilt to the left and a deep rumble rose beneath the floorboards. He remembered his father—calmly, expertly—working the steering wheel and the brake, navigating them to a stop at the side of the road, where to Tom they were nearly in danger of rolling off the precipice and into the trough of a ditch. He smiled now at the coincidence—only twice in his thirty-three years had he been in a car breaking down, and the two incidents had been less than a thousand yards apart. Rotterdam and Belle Park was proving to be an unlucky vicinity for the McIntyres as motorists.

Putting the car in park, his father stepped out and motioned for him to do the same. The sky that night was starless and pale gold rings circled a blue, almost full moon. The porches and eaves of the homes were banded with Christmas lights. “Good time to learn to change a tire, Tommy”—he was “Tommy” eternal to his father, in the same way he knew he would never call his own son “Joe.”

When the spare was taken from the trunk, the boy thought it must be a mistake. The thing looked so scant, so slight, fake even, that even a bum tire surely would be preferable to this puny thing. Then his father grabbed the lug wrench and jack from a compartment in the trunk bottom. The flat was on the rear-driver side, and here the two knelt down, spreading their tools on the pavement in front of them. They were positioned directly under a street lamp, and the light was ample.

“Here,” his father was saying, “you have to place the jack under something solid, something thick. You just put it under a bumper or something and you’re more likely to crack it and have the whole thing drop on you. See what I’m saying?”

Yes, he nodded. He understood.

His father, profile black in the silhouette the light made of his face, set the jack somewhere beneath the frame, just off from the back door. It was an old-style crank jack, and he slid the steel rod into the notched fitting on the device. He gave it a couple of turns, then handed it over to the boy. “Easy as that. Now you do it.”

But there was some trouble at first: the hooked handle at the end of the thing kept wanting wedge itself against the pavement when he tried to crank. It made a scraping sound; he couldn’t muster the clean rotations his father had.

“Start higher with it,” he was being told, “and pull back and up when you crank.” His father pantomimed the needed motion, which he managed to mimic precisely and with success. “Yes, that’s it.”

When the rear of the car had been raised—miraculously it seemed to him—a couple of feet above the street, his father nodded for him to stop. The man grabbed the lug wrench, two iron shafts bisecting each other at center, like a centered T. “You loosen them by turning counter-clockwise. To the left. Always left to loose, right to tight. You just find the right size on the nut”—demonstrating, placing a cylindrical slot over one of the lug nuts—“then turn it. No here, better let me do this part. There’s some rust on them, they’re going to be hard to undo.” Tommy sat back on his knees, the cold coming through the thin material of his pants, feeling chastened that his father did not think him up for the job. And it must have been difficult work as plumes of foggy breath huffed from the man’s nostrils and his open mouth as he heaved his bulk against the tire iron. One by one, each nut gave way. Tom had felt like applauding.

The rest was simplicity itself: dropping the bolts into the upturned hubcap, dislodging the old tire with a run of tread flopping down, then mounting the spare, replacing the lug nuts and caps, his father letting him tighten each one down, himself only giving each a final, reassuring twist. Tom remembered wanting to let the jack down too, but it had grown very cold by then and his father seemed ready to get moving; he swiftly lowered the car to the ground. They both stood and returned the tools to the trunk, along with the bad tire, the boy slamming the lid down with vigor. They were on their way again— he now had no recollection of where they had been or where they might have been going. Probably just out on some trivial errand. But what did remain with him from that evening, undiminished and maybe even sweeter from the years, was the cresting swell of well-being he felt when the car resumed its way down Scarbury, the warmth rising from deep in his stomach and his beating chest, up to his throat and flushing cheeks. In the seat of that car, his father behind the wheel, the vents rattling again, traversing the parameters of their world, one of safety and benevolence, the holiday lights shimmering on the windshield, the Pontiac rushing down the nighttime streets, sounding strong and more right than it ever had before.

He crossed to the other side of the road, walking at a brisker pace. Now at Rotterdam, he pivoted left. There were sidewalks here, and for the first time since setting off, he was passed by cars. The evening traffic was beginning, making swooshing sounds as it funneled by. For the flash of an instant he considered hailing someone down, to see if he could catch a ride the rest of the way, but immediately thought better of it; he had a shyness about asking for help, and besides, it was not too cold and not so far to his destination considering the pace he was keeping, although he was embarrassed at how hard his breath was coming. Clouds of it rose in front of his face like frosty steam.

The phone buzzed in his pocket. He flipped it open—home. “Hello.”

“Tom?” Jackie, her voice sounding blurry, faraway; the cellular signal was weak.

“Yeah. Did you get my message?”

“Tom…can you hear…”

“I can hear you, can you hear me?”

“I can now…hear me…Tom?”

He had stopped, closing his other ear with one finger and turning his back to Rotterdam.   “Did you get my message, I said.”

“Yes, I got it…” then she was saying something more but the words were so distorted as to be indecipherable, at intervals disappearing altogether. “Do…the car…me to drive and….”

“Jackie, I’m losing you. You’re cutting out. If you can hear me, I’m all right, I’m walking…” The phone chirped three quick bleats and their connection was lost. He cursed.

He stood for a few seconds with the phone still against his ear. He pulled it down— the screen said it was searching for a signal. He shoved it back into his pocket, then rubbed his hands together, trying to warm them. He put them back into his coat pockets and resumed walking.

The houses fronting Rotterdam were even larger than those on Belle Park, they looked like country manors, each an acre or two shy of an estate. They had broad, full expanse porches, with alabaster columns and stone steps. The one nearest him: a domed gazebo behind the big house, and on the close hewn grass of the lawn, the first cycle of fallen leaves had already been raked and stuffed into black plastic bags, a dozen of them spotting the grounds.

Danny Delaney. He felt the name on his lips before his mind could recognize it. Danny Delaney: red bushy hair in a perpetual bowl cut, loads of allergies, a tall, awkward body with elongated limbs and oversized hands and feet, everything moving akimbo as if held up by wires. Danny, parents divorced, living with his mother in a huge house on Brandywine, one block from here. The two of them had become friends in seventh grade; they used to ride their bikes up and down these streets. Danny—for some reason he always seemed to be missing teeth, but he smiled constantly, revealing dark gaps of the absent teeth in the black recesses of his mouth, just behind the silver-filling glare of the remaining molars. Tom remembered him in the hallways of school, in front of his locker, that big, cracked smile working, heavy step thudding the floor as he trudged around with his book bag and bagged lunch. And how he was always sweating, not just after riding bikes—which by the time of freshman year had grown quite passé, what with learners’ permits and drivers’ licenses visible on the horizon—but anywhere, anytime, a sheen of light, copper-scented perspiration always on his pale, pinkish skin. He recalled his voice, that hoarse, croaking quality it had, as if it had snagged somewhere one the eve of adolescence and was lost between breaking and never to be broken in. Before Tom had hit his growth spurt, the early maturing Danny Delaney seemed to him like a giant. He was the first person he had ever seen dunk a basketball that was not on television.

Then one day, he was gone. Tom did not know where to, or could not now remember precisely when. He could not, in fact, recall it even registering with him at the time. One day, Danny Delaney simply ceased to be a presence in his life. Gone from the neighborhoods, gone from the classroom, gone from the hallways. Gone. Somewhere along the processional line of childhood, he silently vanished. Probably he just transferred schools, or moved away with his mother to points unknown. Such a departure was not uncommon—the same happened with many acquaintances and friends in those days—but what Tom thought extraordinary now was that the complete abduction of Danny from his own existence had not been so much as noted. This was a friend, a close one by the standards of that age, and he could not recall ever having footnoted the vanishing act in his mind before this very moment. An illusionist’s trick … and Danny Delaney was no more. It was as if a band of climbers had started a difficult trek together, in adverse conditions, up a steep peak, had finally made it to the summit, and only afterwards had someone remembered to count heads and realized that one of their number was missing, either fallen away or left behind.

His head down, watching the tips of his shoes as his steps carried him on; he felt soft, stray brushings on his face. It was snowing, a flurry, and the flakes swirled around in slipshod patterns on the furrowed breezes around him. Through the canopy overhang of the high treetops, he saw loaded, flint-colored clouds hanging low to the earth. And he breathed the undiluted air of winter mustering, and it stung his brain when he inhaled.

A certain kind of person, a particular type, one who set stock in things like the unconscious and its ruling design for behavior, would have said there was some greater reason for his taking this route today after work, besides just the surplus time and wanting to beg off the interstate. He was not such a person. It was not necessarily that he didn’t believe such things, he just never considered them. So he detected no readily discernible motive for returning to these former haunts, yesterday’s precincts; subtract the car trouble and he doubted he would still be driving in the area. There had not been, for instance, any notion of continuing the two or three miles farther west to take a look at his old house. And yet, walking here now, he felt a peculiar charge in the surroundings: the familiar scents(magnolia leaves curled up in the cold air, pine needles starting to fall and browning on the dying grass, the odor of earthy mulch and cedar shavings), the whispering sounds of the wind trolling the ground that was blanketed in scattered leaves, snapping branches ringing like distant bells, the dim light bouncing off the dustings of snow gathering in the hibernating flower beds—striking him with an inevitability that he should find himself in this place, at this moment in time.

Now he was at the corner of Swan Lane, another tidy street, which retreated from him a few hundred yards before bottoming out in a tight cul-de-sac. There— he put down a reflex to point—just above the dead end, over that slight hill: there was an electrical substation tucked away behind a little cleft of woods. It was a frequent summer hangout during the latter half of high school. He and a few friends, either on off days or on days cutting out from whatever jobs they might have had, would shimmy through a tall rip in one section of the chain-link fence, and spread a blanket in the sun behind a low cinder block building and rows of green painted poles strung with thick cable. A stank, smoldering joint typically would be passed between the five of them, everyone sitting Indian-style or stretching back on propped elbows. There always was the sound of lawnmowers in the distance.

Donnie Eversall: graduated salutatorian, went to MIT. Had a purple birthmark covering the back of his neck.

Jimmy West— big guy, good athlete. Enlisted in ROTC in college. Rose to the rank of Captain in the Marine Corps. Killed in a helicopter crash the two years ago in Iraq, Tom recognizing his name and photograph on the evening news.

Melissa Weinhoff— pretty girl, but with bad acne scars. Tom was pretty sure she was a lesbian; maybe, he thought, she has since come out. He heard somewhere that she was now a kindergarten teacher.

And Lynn Baxter. She wore bandannas in all seasons, black ones with silver paisley figures, or cherry red ones with the same pattern, or ones of cauliflower blue with yellow stars, and his favorite, the straw-colored one with a glittering lavender eagle stitched on the crown, its wings spread wide. Her long brown hair would shoot through the folds in the material. She wore tank tops mostly, light stains in the fabric under her arm pits, and baggy jeans always at least two sizes too large; sandals or flip flops made white tan lines on the tiny brown feet peeking out underneath the cuffs, the toenails always painted some extravagant shade, the polish it seemed always days old and flaking away.

Plastic bracelets running up and down her wrists and forearms, eyes of an indiscriminate color that always looked to be squinting from some bright light and which already were developing faint tracers of crows’ feet around their edges. She had a high forehead and a small mouth with large teeth which made her cheeks look like they were straining to a point of splitting when she smiled. Her voice sounded to him then to be without accent, but utterly unique, as individual as an ink fingerprint on wax paper—throaty and a little torn and mellifluous and pristine.

She was the one who knew about the hidden spot on the hill; her family lived on the street. He was walking down Swan’s Lane now, moving slower, the trees hanging even lower here than on Rotterdam, their limbs stretching until they nearly touched overhead, the shadowed path they made looking like the throat of a cave. A short piece of solitary street, just a dozen or so houses on the right and left.

Was it 913 or 915—they looked virtually identical, both Tudor homes, both with the same glazed gravel driveways, same brick framed mailboxes. But then he recognized the willow tree—grown huge with the years, reaching up to block the gabled window on the second floor of what once had been her bedroom. The back yard was cloistered with a privacy fence—had that been there before? He thought maybe it had, although the wood, cypress or pine, looked fresh and young. Possibly they tore the old one down and erected another in its place. For that matter, there was no evidence the house even belonged to the Baxters anymore. He took a few halting steps up the drive. The opaque windows of the front room shone back only the reflection of a full-grown man standing in the darkening afternoon.

Fourth of July. Around midnight. The odor of gunpowder still in the air. There was a tree house, perched on the cradling trunks of two black walnut trees, latticed sides unpainted, a coned roof like the perked peak of a gnome’s cap.

She was arched back against the latticework, jeans rolled up to her knees. Fluffed clouds were hovering over a split yellow moon—in the bare light, he could see the inside lining of the denim, soiled and darker from the wet summer grass. Another panel of light falling over the top of her face, over one eye, from the floodlights at the back of the house, so one eye shone diamond bright and the other was completely invisible. Everyone else had gone to their homes or gone to their beds.

Some sort of quiet words were passing between them. They were friends, he supposed, but he sensed a newness to her now, a foreign quality. Eager and a little nervous, something untapped. He looked down in the dark at the dim flexing of her tiny ankles, and smelled the purple pollen of her sweat, and the slick pebbles and lilac scent floating from Mrs. Baxter’s gardens underneath them.

Cotton between the nestles of his fingers, the planks of the tree house floor on the undersides of his arms, her grunting with her back against the same. The jeans were button-snapped, she had to undo them. And the high walls of the humidity toppling in like a building collapsing.

Moths fluttering in the rings of light, crickets talking back and forth down on the planet.

Hissing words soon afterwards:

“… no, hand me my jeans …”

“… if we could just …”

“… no …”

“… if I could …”

“… you’re fine, it’s not your fault—you have to go now.”

“… maybe tomorrow …”

“… maybe …”

“… so, tomorrow …”

“… maybe, I said—God, how I hate this place.”

“… me too …”

“… can’t believe I was so stupid to think you …”

“… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

“… I know you didn’t mean to … stop it, I said it’s fine …”

Then she was gone inside the house, the back door closing shut behind her, and he let himself out through the back gate.

A gate. There had been a fence.

He drove home and heard stray firecrackers popping off. Lost, and it was as though having to go home was the ultimate repudiation. He was not returning, he was retreating. Settling for the only place that would have him. Making his way through the same rooms, not bothering to switch on the lights, down the sickeningly familiar hallway with the closed bedroom doors of his sleeping family, into the usual bed and those detergent stinking sheets and the trap it had all become to him. Life in stalemate—never after this would the creaks of the place be reassuring, or the voices that echoed from other rooms ring of anything to him but pathetic failure, his embarrassment, his regret ….

A few more feet and he would have been on the steps of the front porch (he had daydreamed and wandered that far—what the hell am I doing!). Now he about-faced, brushing his sleeve against the snares of a hawthorn bush, and ran away—with any luck before someone had noticed him, before anyone came outside, before anyone, god forbid, recognized him. And as he ran down the driveway—it now seemed impossibly long— he knew that he would never know if he had been spotted or identified. It was another ambiguity always to chew over fruitlessly, another jagged spoke to prick against, another stinging humiliation that the thought of this house would carry for him forever more.

Over to the other side of Swan Lane, back down to Rotterdam, now clogged with traffic. He did not stop running until he got there.

Palming his phone— two missed calls, which he had not noticed. Both from Jackie. He put it back in his pocket. Without thinking of anything, he was at Haney Plaza in no time.

But it was no good; it was all different now. Most of the old buildings had been razed, a fresh, glittering multitude of new structures to replace them: large office buildings and office pavilions with glass towers, six-story parking lots adjacent to them, a strip mall of outlet stores. There was a car dealership in a spot where before he could recall absolutely nothing at all, in his mind it having been just a blank white smudge— it was as though they had actually added land here. The traffic, the headlights, the turn signals, the traffic lights—these things had all multiplied. And of the handful of modest storefronts still in existence from back then, here on his left, there was not a single one under the same ownership. Now an electronics place where the bakery used to be, an expensive-looking wine shop in place of the old grocery, an antique dealer instead of the pet store, all the wares behind the wide display window— marble figurines, china plates, Byzantine lamps and Persian rugs— bathed in a gauzy, glutinous light. Looking across the street….

It was gone too; the service station, Zeke’s. Now there was a standard gas station, rows and rows of pumps and an automated car wash, and a colossal convenience mart with neon signs for an ATM, and discounts on soda and beer, and a hundred product logos plastered over every available exterior space. Above the double doors of the entrance a pair of three-foot plastic slushy cups mechanically spun in slow circles. Customers scurried in and out, all looking beleaguered, and one kid wearing a fleece pullover and a red apron lazily swept the lot clean of cigarette butts and wrappers.

The phone was buzzing again. Four full black bars on the screen, a strong signal, full service. He did not answer it.

He crossed Rotterdam at the red light and walked to Carnival Caravan, the place with the spinning cups. It was at least warm inside, and he loafed up and down the aisles of the place for several minutes, casting his eyes over all the assorted candies and colas and solvents and salves. Several rounds of customers came and went while he ambled around, the people shivering and knocking the dandruff of snow flakes from their clothes. Only when it occurred to him that the staff was going to perhaps soon find his loitering suspicious did he make a grab and a purchase; he plucked a pack of oatmeal cookies off one wired shelf, first thing to come to his hand. $2.19. He went back outside.

The temperature was dropping steadily, the day draining swiftly to night. Wishing he could catch sight of somebody he knew or something he remembered, he kept to the side of the place, eating one of the cookies, tasting nothing. Everyone here had their heads down, and what he could see of their eyes was only hollowness and the vacancy. Rank strangers all.

The snow falling fast now. Up the avenue he had just walked—the bleak trees with their branches wavering in the thickening of snow. A line of cars drifted slowly down the way, a hundred headlights glowing. It looked like an evacuation. It is a strange thing, he thought, when others descend on the stamping grounds of your memories. They settle in easily, like uninvited guests, like freeloaders, ignorant of the cost these seemingly mild corners of geography demand, and ignorant of what they are worth. When this was a different place—from Haney Springs to Rotterdam to Belle Park, twelve years, fifteen years, twenty years ago—he remembered giving occasional thought to the future rolling out before him, and all the myriad discoveries and rewards that surely awaited him there. And how at the time he had no doubt that his life would be happy indeed.