Present Tense Possessive

 

Turntable heat,

Spike in reverb,

The needle running in your grooves.

A hot shot, fever dream

Jealousy ornate, elliptical like

Your lower lip, your tongue,

The exile you become when your face is turned.

 

And I can’t recall your exact taste at all,

But still smell you in the air,

Catching the scent I first caught in your hair,

And I breathe you in through the listing windows

 

And the slow leaks of spring,

Fountains smoking in the night,

Marble cold your palm,

Your forehead warm to the touch.

The small of your back, my cupped hand there, and here.

 

I’m too much in love, no ventilation;

Now’s about the time I fuck things up entirely.

 

Lizards’ Lounge

 

It’s you and I,

coiled as barbwire,

in the green glow of a jukebox,

the cigarette carpets,

endless daylight beating hell against

that one striped-yellow window.

I will not drop first, you might as well know that.

I’m still days away from dying.

You’ll be down before the next cough,

Before the next quarter backhands the next song.

We’re the only two left standing,

and you’ve fought a good fight,

but a hill can only have one king.

That isn’t my rule, but this is my hill.

 

 

 

Skin of Your Skin

 

The breath of your hair the skin of your skin

the heaped wet of your mouth until you breath

again and again and that sound in the throat of

your lungs open to the air opened from one tongue

to another to this hidden word you breath out from

inside to my waiting mouth and I hear you and know

I will hear you forever after even if ever after is never

and we go and we do not go on,

the sound of your whispery hair

and the wisp of your breath and the skin of your skin run

beneath the fingertips of my heart and the dark rosy black

of my eyes. The high window is open and night rustles in

and out and out and in

 

Birds

 

An ashen fluff black bird sick in a pall at the window ledge gimpy and creaking on the bow of wood below the smudge smeared soap-scudded glass cracked in panes more than one and carved in the wall washed over in paint like well water and pocked with chips and scabs and run down with seams like a tanned hide and hung with an oily photograph cinched in a deadwood frame behind smoked chloroformed glass of a sole black-suited man unsmiling unflinching on a hill of gray grass with gray sky behind and his wide hat crushed in his rigor mortis hands the cracking dark felt of the black brim and the ground of a powdered hollow scattered round with decaying pears dying from the bare brown tree beside thatched with brown nests of hateful starving birds, their shadows like spittle spattered on the futile patches made by a hapless heartless sun

 

 

Nomads in the Grip of Good Intentions

 

This time it was the radiator. In Stockton, it had been the starter. In El Mirage, New Mexico, the fuel pump. Milla, Jurg and Dram had come to view their voyaging across the country in terms of the van’s myriad breakdowns: Liberal, Kansas— alternator; Yellow Jacket, Colorado—transmission. At first a problem remedied would bring excitement, that the worst was behind them and the liberated life was ready to resume—freedom being what it was supposedly all about. But then another breakdown (Avalon, Nevada—timing belt) would strike, and besides just the leeching of resources the cumulative effect of these calamities was the mounting sense that something stalked them, something which felt a lot like doom. Each new misfortune affirmed this suspicion, turned toxic memories of earlier enthusiasm, and left them feeling like punked, dumbass kids in the bargain.
The Econoline now sat the roadside tender and lame in the bleak gloss of twilight, a bleary sun sliding out of the West to crash the horizon red, the vaulted sky already gone to glass, showing off stars. Broad expanses of almond fields, blooms like pale pink moths dying in the dusk. California, State Highway 99, about forty miles north of Stockton.
When the radiator blew—like a baby dragon trapped under the hood, hissing, spewing firewater and steam—and the van coughed itself dead on the highway’s shoulder, not a word passed between them; not even Jurg had energy left to bitch. He just climbed from the driver’s seat and crawled into the back, made at once for the music box. The lipped mahogany box with the skinned corners had once belonged to Milla’s grandmother; Milla had been fighting since the Plains states to save it from getting pawned. It played Wildwood Flower when the top was opened. This was where they kept the fentanyl stashed. The pharmaceutical pops in the silver wrapping were wedged between the gears and the tiny twinkling bell. They were down to one.
Jurg tore away the packaging between his teeth and proceeded to work the white, berry-flavored lozenge over his gums and under his tongue, desperate as a parched man guzzling from a canteen. Dram watched the silver Pegasus tattoo on his friend’s chest clench and contort with the exertions, Milla watching too, scratching at a scabby place on her cheek that stubbornly refused to heal, a twisted little pock that resembled a raspberry. Dram nodded for her to go first; she clawed at Jurg to hand it over; the lolly clacked against the stud in her lip as she rolled it round in her mouth. Eventually the shriveled thing came to Dram—he felt the two pairs of eyes on him, marking each lick he took. Throbs of cars on the highway, passing by.
But the fentanyl worked, even in such meager portions—they weren’t yet so far gone that it had stopped working. The opiate trickled and thrummed in their blood, lacing their synapses in ginger, flushing their systems with white down. And despite all the day’s hardships and hatefulness, despite the heat and no water and no food for a while now, and despite the carpeted floor powdered with broken glass and wet rags and blood-stained tissue paper, and made treacherous by the jagged ends of the brackets from which the bench seats had long ago been ripped out, despite all evidence of accumulating ruin—despite all these things or because of them—they managed gradually to turn tranquil, then drowsy, finally curling up together one by one by one and falling into a concord of clashing dreams.
The child. It was full night when he awoke in the back of the van, gurgled, and kicking off a swaddle of floor mats and flannel shirts, got shakily to his feet.
Sometimes they called him Matty; sometimes, Dimple. Sometimes they called him Shithead. The birth certificate in Akron read Matthew Miller Jorgensen. His was a circadian cycle acclimated to sleeping through the day, doing his living of a night. By now he could usually accomplish this feat no matter the commotion, no matter the conditions. As such he knew his home as much by touch as by sight—the coarse fur of the floors, the smooth sleekness of the plastic bags taped over the windows. From the shadows he heard the sounds of the grownups sleeping, their labored breaths, shallow snores. He tottered about on bowlegs, a heavy laden diaper sagging from his hip. Expertly he navigated the various piles on the floor to kneel over their prone forms, wanting to rouse them. He clapped his hands and cooed, reached out and tried to smooth the creases on his mama’s forehead.
A wimple of cool air kissed at his legs. He turned. The sliding side door of the van didn’t latch properly; a strap of Velcro was rigged to keep the thing closed. But the binding had been left slack around the track, and the gap between door and frame showed a sheaf of the night-world outside. He loved most of all the prickling feel the Velcro made on his fingertips. He kneaded at it—and the strap fell away completely, landing in a loose bundle at his feet. The door slid back a few more inches.
His naked soles on tough, crunchy gravel, a little surprised when no hand reached out to yank him back inside. For a time he contemplated the highway; now and then a car swished by, flashing phosphorous eyes, the headlights’ beams sweeping bright the air above his head. He took a couple of steps towards the curve of road, then changed his mind. He about-faced, and made for where the gravel ended and the ground turned to dirt, rising towards a stand of trees which cut an isthmus between lagoons of almond fields. His legs clambered as if pedaling. A shy breeze insinuated itself around him; he giggled and turned back to the van, calling out in his private language for the others to come out, play. No one emerged; he continued on. The ground turned softer between his toes. The trees bowing down their limbs, strange enchanted shapes elongated by the adjacency of the rising moon, letting low their hanging vines, calling to his mind the braids of his mother’s hair. A gust of wind washed him in the sweetening smell of almonds inching towards harvest, tree branches rustled like a beaded curtain. One more time he looked back. Then he parted the curtain of wood — and was gone. Grasshoppers, having stilled on his approach, picked back up their chirrups, and the fold of branches into which he vanished shook for a second, as though giving a wave, either a goodbye or a hello, depending from which side you were looking.

*****
At four-thirty that afternoon, store manager Chester Gluck finally felt able to relax. All day had been spent readying for Mr. Ward’s visit: finessing disgruntled customers, dealing with technical and maintenance problems, attempting to herd the always trying staff. There had even been a thorny situation involving a van-load of vagrants who had set up camp in the parking lot, the police removing them just minutes before the regional manger arrived. Descending on the Stockton #4 location, Mr. Ward had immediately commandeered Chester’s office, his standard practice, there to check sales reports, run the monthly numbers, make high-level phone calls and do whatever else it was upper-management types do. Any minute now Chester expected to be called in for their usual powwow session, but for the moment the store manager was perfectly content to walk the main floor and bask in the glow of accomplished tasks. Really, he thought, there is nothing more gratifying than a day’s work done well. He was in the kind of charged mood that spurs one to think up a hundred projects, ambitious to-do lists, sweeping reforms. The Produce section needed to be converted for the summer, with the oranges and nectarines placed in more visible spots. Likewise in Automotive, coolants and water pumps to be moved to the front of the aisles, the generic brands, not the low-motility premiums. Marcie, in Electronics, those long jangly earrings she wore—surely those things couldn’t be dress-code compliant, and were bound to constitute some sort of workplace hazard. First thing tomorrow he would address the Marcie situation. He was observing things in a hyper-focus, becoming almost giddy for the next day to come so that he could tackle it and all its challenges.
Fifteen minutes passed. Then twenty more. A bit surprised Ward hadn’t called him in by now. He did another round of the store’s perimeter: two dozen departments, seventy-five aisles. Enthusiasm began to wane. It was getting late.
After hedging for several more minutes, he padded through the doors off the public area—Employees Only, Keep Out—and into the back offices. Cloistered, muted air in these partitioned rooms, Chester mindful to keep his shoes from squeaking on the parquet. The regional manager was sitting at Chester’s desk, tipped far back in the special ergonomic chair Carol Gluck had bought her husband last Christmas to help soothe his sciatica. He was indeed on the phone. Ward noticed Chester standing there. “I’ll have to call you back,” he said into the receiver. “Have a seat, Chet.”
The perspective from the metal chair on the other side of the desk was slightly alien; Chester was struck how much bigger the other man looked from this angle.
“Chet,” said Ward, expelling a big breath that made his cowlick quiver, “this is a hard thing. You’ve been with us a long time….”
Later that night, sitting alone in the TV light of his den, Chester would blanch at the thought of how he must have looked as his termination was carried out. Nodding along, a milky smile congealing on his face. So programmed was he to obsequiousness that he could muster no ire, no indignation, as the powers that be casually kicked out from under him a main support of his life. He uttered no protest, was deferential to the last, inclined even then to impress upon Mr. Ward his professionalism, his admirable restraint, his sound nature.
“We’ve decided to make a change. Fact is, we’re converting over into a Superstore. We’ll be shutting this one down and building at a site down the way. When up and running she’ll be double the size of this one and we fully expect to do double the volume. To be frank, we don’t feel you’re the man for the job. We’re bringing in a young up-and-comer, guy from the training program back east we have high hopes for. Now, I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking you could stay on, maybe take a demotion to associate manager or something.” This in fact only became what Chester was thinking after the regional manager mentioned it. “Thing is, Chet, we find situations like that don’t work. Too much confusion in the chain of command, too much potential for conflict. No, it’s best for everyone to make a clean break.”
It could be an awkward matter, firing someone; Chester knew from experience. Ward, however, seemed a much cooler hand at it than he himself was. So fluid was the regional manager’s technique that Chester hadn’t even realized the encounter was over until the man was again holding the phone, waiting on Chester to leave so as to resume his calls.
Chester was almost out the door when he halted, turned, and headed back for the desk. Unclasping the name tag from the breast of his red felt vest, he set it on the desktop; then he removed the vest, folding it primly and neatly as a flag, and placed it beside. He extended his hand to the regional manager with a ceremonial formality. Memories of these parting gestures would sting him, at random times, for the rest of his life.
“Okay, Chet. That’s fine. Good luck on everything. The H.R. people will be sending along some forms. Be on the lookout.”
“I will. Thank you.”
“Okay, then.”
Chester standing flat-footed back out on the main floor, suddenly very conscious of his hands and unsure what to do with them. He remembered he had forgot to ask about his chair.
Looking around, he was struck anew at the sheer dimensions of the place. He felt like a sparrow in the basin of a canyon. Already it seemed unbelievable that he’d overseen such a titanic interest for so long, the teeming customers, the towers of merchandise. And Ward had said they were throwing up a new location, twice the size, to do twice the volume? Didn’t seem possible.
Surely there were some goodbyes in order. Alvin Trumbo, for instance, assistant manager—he and Chester had butted heads in the past, but there was respect there. And Carla, in Returns, a nice person. But probably he shouldn’t be dallying; it was entirely possible that he was under observation at this very moment—Ward might be monitoring the black-and-white video screens in the back offices, watching him loiter. Someone could be dispatched to escort him off the premises; and that sort embarrassment he didn’t think he could bear. He made to leave. And had only the most perverse sort of goodbye with the shift greeter, old Miss Appleton, who everybody knew was falling further and further into dementia but who unstintingly showed to take her post on the frontlines. Chester, adrift in too many thoughts, was without realizing it attempting to exit through the in-doors, where he was immediately swallowed up in the waves of incoming customers, a crashing, determined surf that buffeted and spun him back around. And maybe it was Miss Appleton’s deteriorating eyesight, or her faltering mind, or maybe it was because shorn of his customary red regalia her longtime supervisor was unrecognizable to her, and the current predicament he was in—engulfed in a coursing flux of patrons, body teetering like a struck bowling pin—failed to register, her brain only capable of traveling in its one well-worn groove; because she looked directly at Chester with her typical disconcerting thousand yard stare, waved one palsied hand, and chirped, “Welcome to Wal-Mart.”

*****

It was the cop who fixed the starter, this just after she’d kicked them off the department store lot where they’d been stranded all that day and much of the previous night. Dram was crouched on the hot blacktop in front of the Econoline, trying not to listen as inside Jurg and Milla screamed at each other about whatever. He spotted the black police cruiser approaching like a metallic bat covered in mirrors, the sky and sun reeling upwards in the windshield, the cruiser knifing its way through the canals of parked cars before it turned at a crisp angle and made a beeline for them, finally gliding to a soundless stop just inches in front of where he squatted.
The furious voices inside the van cut out at the slamming of the cruiser door. The lady cop had a brushy haircut, was short and compact, walked in a tight waddle, a slight hitch in her gait. She was wearing sunglasses, mirrored lenses; Dram wondered if police departments everywhere furnished them standard-issue as part of the uniform. She murmured something into a speaker mike pinned to her shoulder. Her badge glinted in the daylight, some engraved numbers and a name. Mustoe.
Milla’s head popped out the opening of the side door, followed by Jurg’s. “Hey there,” said the cop.
No one responded.
“Having car trouble?”
Jurg jumped down onto the asphalt, Milla quickly folded in on herself and sat down on the ledge of the van’s opening, letting her legs dangle off the side. Dram stayed where he was.
“Eventually I’m going to need someone to speak,” said the cop.
“Yeah,” Jurg said, “we got car trouble,” snapping off the words.
“Since when?” said the cop.
“Since when what?”
“I mean, how long have you been stuck here?”
Milla broke in, a touch of baby doll in her voice. “Since last night, ma’am.”
“Sure you’re not just out of gas?”
Milla didn’t want to give Jurg any chance to antagonize. “No, ma’am. We’d just put eight dollars in it. We stopped at the store here to get a couple things, came back out and it wouldn’t start. We’ve been stuck here, trying to figure out what to do. We don’t have money to get it fixed again.”
The cop nodded. She moved a few steps closer, into the shadow of the vehicle, removing her sunglasses and clipping them to her shirtfront. The dim inside the van was a stained yellow from the light that bled through the garbage bags over the windows. Wads of clothes on the floor, junk food wrappers, soda bottles with oily dregs in the bottom, flies whipping around and a train of red ants walking up one wall. “Well, listen,” she said, not looking at any one of them in particular, “you can’t stay here. The store people aren’t having it. If the vehicle is inoperable, I’m supposed to impound it.”
Mustoe heard the taller of the two guys, the one standing by the girl, hiss something under his breath, a mean and low sound. “Shut the fuck up!” the girl hissed back at him. Looking again at Mustoe, little-girl-lost look magically restored to her face, she said, “But, but, I mean, this is our home. You can’t just tow somebody’s home, can you? Where are we supposed to go? Please, you have to help us. Tell us what we should do.”
The cop considered the options. To impound the vehicle did indeed mean leaving these three effectively homeless, creating the potential for greater trouble down the line. Stranded on the streets of a town they were likely unfamiliar with—the van had Ohio plates—a place where they clearly had no prospects, no money even for a room, odds were good that tonight or tomorrow she or some other police would be responding to a call involving these three, who to raise a stake had done something stupid, or else had appeared easy pickings and had something done to them. Still, they had to go somewhere else. She blinked down at the one she’d seen on first driving up—he had yet to say a word. “You think you two,” and she included Jurg with a gesture, “can push this thing?”
The Econoline in neutral, Milla steering, Dram and Jurg each taking separate flanks at the back, pushing with their shoulders lowered. Mustoe paced them in the cruiser, flashers on and window down, waving cars to go around. They were headed for the lot’s north exit. There was a strip mall was just a quarter-mile away, down an access road. Mustoe remembered when, not so long ago at all, the mall had been a popular shopping hub. Now the large complex stood mostly vacant, all the storefronts’ windows boarded up and hung with For Lease signs but for one liquor store, one check-cashing place, and here at the southern end a pawn shop with bars across its windows. Perhaps a thousand spaces in the enormous parking lot, all but a handful of those empty and unused. Weeds spiked through the caked asphalt, strewn bits of broken glass sparkled like leftover confetti in the sun.
Mustoe signaled for them to halt, got out of the cruiser. The girl immediately disappeared from the driver’s seat, somewhere into the back of the van. “Okay,” Mustoe said to the two panting guys, “this’ll work for now. You can stay here awhile, until you figure something out.” Neither said anything, but the smaller one gave her a meek nod. She turned around to leave.
That’s when the figure came running from the pawn shop; a man, hunched and scrambling like a crab.
He in the deep end of his sixties, Indian, speaking in a jabber of words, only some of which were English. He owned the pawnshop, that much Mustoe could make out. And was objecting to the obvious intention to let the van camp on the lot. With a trembling finger he pointed back and forth between the Econoline and his shop, where between the slits of the bars the Open sign glowed a weak orange. He would call, make complaints, they couldn’t stay here. Private property, private property!
“Sir,” said Mustoe, “sir, listen to me. Sir,”—but the shopkeeper wouldn’t relent. “Alright! I get it. Step back. Let me handle this.” The man, understanding the officer’s tone if nothing else, sank back a few feet, but only a few feet, and watched with wary eyes for whatever the next move was to be.
The girl had returned to sit on the back fender. Must shrugged. “I don’t know what to do. It’s the same situation as before. If he says so, then you can’t stay here either.” She checked herself from saying, “I’m sorry.”
The girl and the one quiet guy both dropped their heads. But the other was staring down the stooped little pawnshop man with eyes that wouldn’t blink, arms flat at his sides like a man set to begin messaging in semaphore. Something seething in the lankiness of his stance put Mustoe on alert. The cop spread her hands along the girth of her belt, thumbs drumming along the buckle, the rings of her cuffs, the can of pepper spray, the butt of her gun. She and Jurg were separated by maybe ten feet.
“Man?” It was Dram speaking, barely above a whisper. “Hey man, c’mon, forget it. We’ll figure it out.” He reached out and touched lightly the side of his friend’s arm. Mustoe just caught what he said next: “It’s not worth it.”
The other one knocked his hand away—a motion so quick it made Mustoe flinch. “Nothing’s worth it,” he said, spun around, and like a sickly wolf slinked away, to stand with his back to them in a gulch form where two seams of pavement unevenly met.
“What did it do?” said Mustoe. “The van. When it wouldn’t start, what sound did it make?”
The girl seemed to have lost interest; a harsh aspect had come over her face. It was Dram who said, “It made this clicking sound. Real rapid, over and over again. Click-click-click-click-click.”
The cop rubbed her chin, looked around her once more. She pulled the MagLite from her belt, twirling in once in her palm so that the wand extended outward. She went to the open driver’s side door. “Where’s the key?” she said.
“The slot in the dash. Where the radio used to be.” Dram and Milla watched her climb into the driver’s seat. They heard the rattle of the key being slipped into the ignition. The ignition turning—nothing, save the little clicking reports Dram had described.
This was now followed by a tapping sound, the cop lightly banging the wand against the starter housing. She would turn the key, release the barrage of little clicks, then tap again, over and over: click-click-click, tap-tap-tap.
Jurg had walked back—Milla and Dram felt his presence as insistent as a hot breath on their necks. He would blame them for allowing the cop inside the van.
Suddenly a hard snort erupted from the engine, kicked into life and revving high from the pedal being pressed to the floor. It blustered, belched, and broke into resonant baritone song. She leaned out of the open door, smiling. “The starter. It’s going out, but just give it a few taps and you can get it going.”
Jurg almost knocked into her getting into the driver’s seat as she was getting out; Milla vanished inside like a wraith. Mustoe watched the shopkeeper trudge back to his shop. Only the smaller guy, only he thanked her.
She watched them pull away. Static played over her radio.
By rights, she should feel alright about this: she had managed the situation, defused some awkward moments, kept a couple of citizens happy and sent a few drifters packing. All in less than an hour. Except for one thing that needled her; a little thing, probably nothing. But when she’d been in the van, she heard, she thought she heard, another voice. Coming from somewhere in back. No discernible words, but a high, tremulous, human sound. She stopped for a second to listen; didn’t hear it again. Then she gave the housing one more tap, and that was when the engine started up.
Again, likely it was nothing. Yet it nudged at her, cajoling her like a misplaced memory, calling out for recollection. She watched the Econoline make a wide, looping left-hand turn onto Mariner’s Drive, where it immediately vanished in the swells of traffic. A vague unease lingered behind. That she had permitted something vital to slip away.

*****

His day began at 7 AM, but the store never closed—it continuously writhed with patrons, staff, the banging of shopping carts, the blips of the scanners. And the fluorescent lights always hummed, day and night, were never extinguished, never slept, the huge canisters hanging from the ceilings, the tubes and tracks mounted to the walls, trilling constantly their low trilling dirge, in a register you didn’t so much hear as felt, in your spine.
There was a lot to do before the regional manager arrived that afternoon. While Mr. Ward invariably found some deficiencies during his stopovers—Chester understood that, no doubt the man did the same at every store in his domain, it was his job to keep the ships in the fleet running at optimal efficiency, and this required and unstinting attention to detail—this time Chester was bound and determined to having things run as near-perfect as possible, a model of efficiency, every guideline in the Operations manual fulfilled to a tee.
By eight o’clock such shimmering visions had been thrown overboard and Chester Gluck was just trying to survive. Problems sprang up like geysers. First off, he was working with a skeletal crew: twelve no-call, no-shows—and that wasn’t even counting the scheduled sick-day of Darlene Pettis (diabetes, dialysis). He would have to do some juggling, move Beasley into Electronics to help Janelle and Toby, shift Rosaria over from Outdoor Living to open up a sixth checkout lane, trust that Carla, a seasoned pro, could run Returns single-handed. Leaving the lawn and garden area understaffed worried him somewhat—it was a section prone to being overrun at a moment’s notice, particularly in the spring months—but he had no choice. Worse came to worse, he could requisition one of the stock guys to help out.
That is, until discovered that the warehouse was also running at partial strength— four no-shows there. This necessitated a trip to the cavernous warehouse wing, a prospect he never relished. He was, by expertise and experience, a front-of-the-house man; stepping into the arid, clogged air, onto that cement floor, under the corrugated ceiling, the brittle smell of cardboard, paper and dust, he felt less a holder of authority than an office hack, the square who accidentally shows up at the wrong party, the stiff who is always “it”.
“Who didn’t show today?” Chester asked.
“Ah, you know,” said Duhon, “a few guys.” The floor supervisor was a tall black man, so lean he was seemingly made out of nothing but sinew, his face a taut network of corded muscle sporting a exactingly etched goatee, trimmed as if by laser, and eyes as inscrutable as two copper-colored marbles.
“Did they call out?”
“What’s that now? No, don’t think so. Maybe Javier did. Yo’ Bell, Javier call out?” Bell, a whale of a man sitting atop a stationary forklift, just shrugged. Duhon turned back to Chester. “Bell don’t know.”
“Well, the 4th of July displays need to go up today.”
Duhon and a third guy of indeterminate race, leaning against a stack of pallets, cloth cap cocked sideways, shared some kind of private laughter. “Firecrackers?” said the third guy.
“Nah, not firecrackers,” said Chester, trying to play along.
“Roman candles, yeah. Big M-80’s.”
“ Nah, don’t think so. The sales signs, the displays. Home office sent them last week.” In one corner were a pyramid of boxes, already growing cobwebs but the labels readily visible. The tagging read: 400404//2012CAStock3881. Promo Mtls. 4July
“Haven’t seen them,” said Duhon.
“Those M-80’s are bad news, boss,” said the third guy, face broken open in a jackal’s smile. “My cousin blew off his thumb with one of those things. Mucho dangerous.”
Chester had spent the week trying to impress upon these guys the importance of the regional manger’s visit, how today of all days they needed to be on their game. If they don’t respect me, thought Chester, they could at least respect the job.
“The displays have to be up by noon. The set-up charts are in the crates.”
Duhon crushed out a brown cigarillo under the sole of his work boot. “Gonna’ be tough. We’re short-handed today.”
“Mmm-hmm,” said Bell. “Few guys didn’t show. Javier ain’t here.”
“No Javier, boss,” said the third guy. “Mucho work.”
Chester was sure he caught some tittering as he walked back through the swinging doors.
Striding through Home Improvement, through Furniture, through Pets and Baby, Chester’s mind busy all the way with retributive fantasies: he’d fire Duhon, fire that other one, fire them all; he’d walk into the warehouse with the appropriate paperwork, dismiss them all summarily, show cause, deny them any chance for unemployment. They’d beg him to relent, plead for their jobs back. But he would stand firm. He would break them.
He entered his office. All employee no-shows had to be entered into a shift log. This was done on an Excel spreadsheet on his office PC. When he went to open the file, some icon popped up telling him the file was corrupt. Chester was hopeless on computers. He tried turning the thing on and off—“rebooting.” Another icon appeared, telling him the system had performed an illegal operation, had not shut down properly; clicking on the bullet promising more info, he was notified that some data might have been lost or damaged. Then the machine initiated what it called a Systems check, to retrieve all lost data. This might take a few minutes, it warned. That was when the fire alarms in the store began to blare.
The piercing screeches were riotous, like air-raid sirens. Infants all over the store began to harmonize in shrill cries. An elderly man pitched forward from his walker, taking down a discount stand of Mini-Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with him. In the hemorrhaging din, Chester had the chilling thought that he had caused this, monkeying around with the computer like that.
Eventually the alarms were stilled. No handles had been pulled; the cause for the alarms’ triggering remained a sinister mystery. Chester went to deal with the felled shopper — the man’s hatchet-faced wife was braying lawsuit. He managed to pacify the lady with a fifty-dollar store credit—redeemable any time, non-assignable to any discounted merchandise. As for the old gentleman, he seemed blithely unaware of any hubbub, no more cognizant of the fact that he’d fallen than that he was not still on the ground. One gold-foiled Reese’s was nestled inside his flabby polyester collar, winking like a charm.
Over the next several hours, a shoplifter made it out the doors with an IPOD, a police report was filed; a little girl vomited in Frozen Foods; the self-checkout machines went on the fritz. Chester himself opened a seventh checkout line, customers immediately falling into a line two dozen deep.
It was a relief when at about two o’clock Chester, broom in one hand, dustpan in the other, went outside to sweep up the parking lot. Before there had been a service which came daily for upkeep, a crew armed with leaf-blowers and industrial sweepers; cutbacks in the maintenance budget had curtailed the practice to Sunday only, and during the interims the asphalted acreage was subject to all manner of desecration. This would be the first thing Ward saw when he pulled up, and, despite the fact that it was the regional manager himself who had issued the edict suspending the cleanings, he would still expect the lot to be pristine.
Chester was struck by the beauty of the day, the sky an open dome of blue, pure blue, baby’s breath of fragile clouds barely grazing the lower portions. A mild breeze fluttered his vest. Even with all the steel and glass of the multitude of cars, and the lot tacky with the residue of spilled sodas, crushed aluminum cans, cigarette butts galore, a spent condom or two, and the traffic grinding over Mariner’s Drive, the setting had a touch of the pastoral to him. It was perhaps the aromas drifting from the open-air lawn and garden area; they reminded Chester when, in his early twenties, newly married, he’d had a job at a plant nursery. Working the soil, digging up the rich, chocolaty beds with a spade, spreading the mulch and cedar shavings. Caterpillars crawling the ground, the gestating bulbs. The smoky green house, the exotic tiger lilies and orchids. Each day he brought a lunch from home; Carol made turkey and muenster sandwiches with spicy mustard, wrapped them in wax paper, put two Clementine oranges in the brown paper sack. He would eat the oranges in their crescent segments, watch the sprinklers soak down the assorted plants and flowers—Japanese Anemone, Golden Columbine, the Bellflowers and Red Stars—in a fine, replenishing mist. The ferns, bland though they might appear, were his favorite; thirsty plants, always in want of watering. The moisture on their serrated leaves glistened and wept glassy green beads. A soothing thing to watch, to see them take their nourishment, to know they were building up reserves of strength to draw upon later, when perhaps water wouldn’t be in such supply, when there might not be such ready relief from the sun, wouldn’t be anyone like him around to nurture them. All that hoarding of nutrition took place inside the veins and circuitry of the leaves and stems and roots, and only revealed itself in the fact that one day to the next there be more leaves, more tangled stems, a fuller green on the leaves, a bursting bright emerald green. The rewards of life proving itself.
He swept a dead bird, flattened by a car wheel, into the dustpan. It was then he spotted the van, sitting hobbled in the southwestern quadrant of the parking lot, its hood raised. Chester vaguely recalled seeing it as he came in this morning. Two figures stood around it—freaky-looking young guys with Manson beards, dreadlocks, the bigger one with a blobby silver tattoo across his bare torso, the other holding some unwieldy thing in his arms that resembled a broken surfboard. Well, he couldn’t have this, today of all days, a couple of vagrants using his lot for a campground. He would march right up and tell them to leave. Then he thought on it more, eyeing the two of them, and reconsidered. He deposited the bird carcass in the Dempsey-Dumpster, went inside to phone the police.

*****

Jurg awoke, cold and sweating in the sunlight infiltrating the van with a migraine white glare. Fumbling around for his pouch and rolling papers, remembering only then that he had smoked up his last the night before. He must have said something; Milla, lying on the floor beside, muttered, “Shut the fuck up,” voice ragged with bad sleep. Oftentimes he imagined breaking her jaw.
Picking through spent butts in the coffee can, searching for one still salvageable. A couple that might work. He flicked his lighter to flame; but none of the smokes would draw, only left the stank taste of wet tobacco on his tongue. Jurg ripped loose the Velcro strap binding the van door and stepped down barefoot onto the parking lot. And found himself marooned in a sea of cars. Heat began to nip at the soles of his feet.
“I’m thirsty,” came Milla’s voice.
“I don’t care.”
“Jurg, get me some juice. Cran-Grape. Pleeease! I’ve got some quarters.”
Ignoring her. His feet were burning but he was determined that he wouldn’t be bullied into moving. He pressed down with all his weight, grinding the pads of his feet and the nakedness of his toes into the scalding blacktop. A tear welled up in one eye.
Milla again. “Where’s Dram?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“Did he take the sign?”
“Fuck if I care.”
On outlasting the pain, he felt primed for another challenge. I’ll fix the van, he thought. The hood was still raised from the previous night, propped open by a piece of mop-handle. In the light of day seemed to be an easy enough proposition—how hard could it be? Surely the problem was a simple one, the solution obvious, looked at with rested eyes.
But instead of the rudimentary equations he thought he’d find, he saw only the same bewildering apparatuses he always did when looking at an automobile’s innards: a cubistic mélange of valves, caps, hoses, plugs, points. Everything hidden in grime, disguised with grease. Fucking conspiracy, thought Jurg. They make this stuff so no one can figure out. That way they can take your money, bleed you dry, plant another little time bomb so down the road everything goes haywire again. He tried hocking a big gob onto the engine—but he had no spit and only a rail of gummy saliva made it through his lips, sticking in his facial hair. He swiped at the piece of stick and brought the hood down with a crash, missing his fingers by centimeters.
“Jurg!”
“Shut up.”
“You shut up. Shithead’s sleeping. I was up all morning with him while you were passed out. Don’t wake him up!”
A jumble of terrible things to say mashed together in his brain, too many to disgorge into words. He needed to get out of here, escape. Everything was another prison, everything and everyplace and everybody. Her, Shithead, Dram—all of them anchors. Milla. Christ, look at her. Twenty-six and she looks like an old woman, even has that hump between her neck like old women get, makes their heads jut out. Body gone all lumpy, mouth starting to cave in. And he was supposed to stay with this, for what, forever? And Dram, been carrying him around since we were kids. Here he comes now, walking up like he doesn’t have fuck all on his mind, carrying that sign. That stupid goddamn sign, their beggars’ board. Fashioned out of a plate of balsa wood they’d picked up along the way. Dram and Milla had to get all arts and crafts on it, with their finger paints, painting on flowers and Chinese lettering and Buddhist sayings and a couple of verses from Psalms, until it was all a crazy collage nobody could even fucking read. Who knew the thing was even asking for handout? They should have gone simple, poster board, a Sharpie, some big block letters—Need Help, Anything You Can Spare. White kids, put Milla and Shithead out in front, you couldn’t miss.
“Hey,” said Dram, toting the unwieldy thing under one arm, one pointed end almost scraping the ground.
“What’d you get?”
Dram shook his head, showed his entire haul. Mostly pennies, a couple of nickels, one dirty dime, and a pamphlet from the Seventh Day Adventists.
“Fuckssakes.”
“Not many stops,” said Dram.
Excuses, thought Jurg. Milla poked her head out of the van.
The fentanyl. A constant in his thoughts, pulsing like a wound that wouldn’t quite heal. He knew they were down to one, but he toyed over and over with the notion that overnight the one had magically spawned itself into many, and that the music box would now be filled with silver packets, brimming with them, with all their attendant properties and potencies. So often did he indulge this fantasy that when he stepped back inside the van—Milla had laid back down, pretending to sleep—and opened the lid, and found the only thing that could possibly be there, that pitiful one—no bigger than his thumb, so measly, so insubstantial— he nevertheless felt stung, cheated, betrayed by his own visions. Of course, he could just take it. No one could stop him. But no, no, he would forego it, for now, if for no other reason than there was only one thing worse than having only one.
Dram happened to catch a glimpse of Jurg’s face just before his friend opened up the music box. It was the face Jurg used to have, one that on good days, in the right light, could still appear kind. It had been a long time since Dram had seen it. He dropped his head and looked away. Something else caught his eye. It was he himself, the flash of his own face reflected in the side mirror. He propped the sign—he was quite proud of it—against the van, walked nearer the mirror and leaned down to get a better look at himself. Had he also changed so much? Was his own transformation well underway? Had he aged past recognition, all the while believing that any minute now his real life was set to begin? He put his face close to the smudged glass, in the oval frame pocked with rust; and saw what he saw.
It was then that he went to crouch in front of the van, to rock himself with his arms around his knees. It was then that he saw the police cruiser approach.

*****

Diane Mustoe finally heard the screams and dragged herself by her elbows across the mattress and hit the kill-switch on the clock alarm. The temptation was to close her eyes for just one minute more, but it was morning now and the time could not be denied. She obeyed. She took her uniform from where it was draped atop the hamper, pulled down her service belt from where it hung off the closet door. The Glock she kept on the nightstand; she weighed cold cobalt heft of it in her hand as she fitted the holster into place. She cinched her belt, adjusted the bulky tools riding her sides to better balance the burdensome weight. Reflexive actions of readying performed with a brain still steeped in sleep, a dream’s echo still ringing round her head.
There’d been a railway yard, low, empty, warehouse-style buildings spread over a gravel plain speared with crisscrossed staffs of train track. And, in the middle of the plain, a small square pen cordoned off with yellow police tape. Inside the makeshift pen were children. A dozen or more, wandering inside the confines like calves in a corral. She could see them, but they didn’t seem to see her. None of them acknowledged her, none acknowledged one another, none spoke. They only stared into the void of space with uniformly grey eyes, all blinking vacancy. Behind them, in the distance over the flat beige land, a speck appeared, swiftly emerging into definition. A train was coming.
Mustoe in the bathroom, giving her teeth a few swipes with the brush, tugging down the mouths of her tight sleeves to give each pit a couple sprays of deodorant.
An antique-style locomotive, with a smokestack, the hood of whistle barrel, and a large round headlamp gaping in front like a Cyclops’ eye. The train was bearing down the center track with speed and purpose. The children continued to stumble around their pen, oblivious. The pained wail of a steam whistle.
Her shift today was the eight to four; tonight she worked her moonlighting gig as security at the gate of condo complex in Belle Forrest. It paid fourteen-thirty-five an hour; she estimated that in three months she would have all her outstanding medical paid off. Then the mortgage lady had said she could reapply for the loan.
She tried to warn the children, holler at them, but her voice was gone, stolen or drowned out by the wailing whistle.
The train was almost upon them now—like still frames in a projector’s shutter it had arrived in a few sudden flickers. The monster’s colossal shadow engulfed the children the way a storm cloud swallows up the sun.
In the kitchen, Mustoe brought out the bag of cat food from the pantry. Doolittle materialized, dashing over to her. The cat pawed at the bag, trying to hurry down the stream of bits into his bowl.
Finally, one of the children raised his head in awareness. Seeing not the train, but looking directly at her. His eyes showed recognition, a human familiarity. He raised a tiny pink hand, the beginnings of wave. Impact.
Shutting her eyes in the dream, she had opened them to the light of day, the immediate sensation being that it was an older dream she was simply replaying, or one from some time ago which she was on first waking recalling arbitrarily. Now in the kitchen, she permitted herself one more indolent moment, knelt down and rubbed the cat between his twitching ears, head muscular and flexed as he gobbled from his dish. She went to leave. And, at almost the exact same moment she closed and locked the front door behind her, the informing dream escaped her mind for good.

 

Summoning

 

 

“ … he was I thought the most self-assured man I had ever met. He just radiated confidence. Cocky, that couldn’t-be-bothered air about him. Perfect formula for me at the time. It was textbook: I was very timid then, carried around serious self-esteem issues. I’ve struggled my whole life with my opinion of myself. Thought I had my looks – some days I wasn’t even sure about that – and not much else. And he just overwhelmed me. His whole swagger, how he moved and spoke. And also he showed no interest in me at first, barely deigned to notice my existence. Of course I was totally hooked.

“Now I think of that as round one in the cycle of manipulation.

“Eventually we had sex. Began an affair. It definitely constituted affair status. See, I had a boyfriend at the time, one I lived with. So … S____ and I would meet up in hotels, in the park, we had sex in our cars, occasionally at places where I was house-sitting. I loved him, then. But god, I mean, it was like loving a mannequin. When he was sure he had me, he showed no interest in anything other than sex, minimal interest anyway. I was to be at his beck and call. That’s the way he wanted it. I knew, I believe, he loved me too, whatever his version of that was. But love in a partial way, a minor way, the kind of thing you love so long as it is reliable and stays in its place. So long as I didn’t get out of line.”

There were a few nods from some of the other women around the table. Which Natalie noted, and which she knew were meant for encouragement but which she found patronizing instead.

“This went on for about a year and a half. In retrospect, there were things about his behavior that did unsettle me even early on, red flags I should have recognized. A couple flashes of temper – also I caught him in some lies. He would lie to make himself look good, more accomplished or more, I don’t know, more dangerous than he really was. But along the way, I started changing, growing, expecting more of myself and believing I deserved more. I broke up with my boyfriend – that was sad, a sweet guy and really he had done nothing wrong, it just wasn’t much of a relationship – and actually met another man. A really quality person, a genuinely good human being. But I still couldn’t end it with S____, not then. I’m not sure why. Really I think I couldn’t bear to hurt him. Something about him … you feel bad for him. In a way I still loved him. And at the same time, I think I was frightened of him, what his reaction would be. I was right to be afraid. When finally I worked up the courage to honestly tell him that it was over, that I’d met someone else, I watched him transform. He fell apart, became this like, I don’t know, just this flailing, desperate mess. He kept badgering me – this over the course of several weeks – always demanding, always needing validation, wanting me to keep repeating that I still loved him. I felt like I had to, I was so scared. But nothing was ever enough. He was a black hole swallowing up everything I gave to pacify him, this dark and obsessive pit that could never be filled. God, it was the worst period of my life. It was really traumatizing. The only thing that pulled me through was the man I met. I’d finally found someone I respected, someone strong who could protect me. Trustworthy. The contrast to S_____ couldn’t have been greater. Eventually I cut all contact with S______. I had to. It had become truly psychotic.” A pause. “Thank you all for listening.”

“Thanks, Natalie.” Said by the group in unison.

The fluorescents of the church basement cast a broad, banal light, a cheerless glare permitting no shadows. The colors of the assembled women’s clothing beneath these lights underwent a vegetative turn, greens all looking like parsley, grays onion skin, browns potato peels.

“Hi, my name is Clementine.”

Everyone: “Hi, Clementine.” She had tiny features and honey colored hair done in a middle part, with surprisingly large hands she kept knitted together in her lap. “Hey everybody. Well, I just never saw that side of him. He just struck me as a laid back, very normal guy, a smart guy but sort of simple in his tastes. This dark side some of you have shared about – it was never revealed to me. Honestly – and look, I believe everyone here, I really do – but sometimes it’s like you’re talking about a different person. It just is. Really if anything, I remember thinking he was kind of boring. No, not boring exactly, but very … mild. I’m sort of ashamed to admit that now. Because I really liked him, I did. When he brushed me off – he was polite about it but it was pretty clear he’d lost interest, if he’d ever had much to begin with – it hurt. Hurt more than I’d have thought. And I guess I’m ashamed also, or embarrassed or whatever, well because, you know, I never did see that side. You know? That dark or obsessive side or whatever. Which I guess means he didn’t care that much. I didn’t warrant that kind of behavior.”

More than one woman had flinched as Clementine spoke, most notably at use of the word “side”, and were silently composing their own shares to redress hers.

Then she said, “That’s it really. Dumb I know. Just a little … hurt that, that he didn’t love me enough to, you know, go there. Sorry, that’s dumb. Clearly he didn’t love me at all. Anyway, thanks.”

A few spoke up abruptly even before the group murmur of “Thanks, Clementine” had died out, an overlap of self-introductions that stuttered and trailed away as they collided one with another, all except one, whose voice was louder than the rest and whose words plowed firmly on. “Hi, Mia,” the group said, ceding her ground.

“It isn’t love,” she said, looking directly at Clementine, not even attempting to camouflage the crosstalk. Mia, a veteran at this table, well-respected and even feared and the sponsor to a few of the women here tonight. “It is not love at all. What we like to refer to as love is sometimes just a romantic name we give a favorite dysfunction. His dysfunction – his sickness, his disease. S____ took hostages, he inflicted casualties. Whatever he might have called it, trust me, it was the opposite of love. Stay around this room long enough and you get to see what love truly is. It is supportive, compassionate, generous, it is the interaction between women like us who’ve been used and abused, cheated and manipulated, discarded, thrown away, women who have the scars to show for his supposed love.” She air-quoted the word. “What S_____ offered may have looked like love for a minute, but it was only a bunch of lies from a con man, bile and venom, the posturing of a lunatic —–”

Mia was hardcore, and, for all the respect afforded her here, a polarizing figure at the meeting, some put off by her militantism and a seeming taste for invective. Even those who had an equally hostile opinion of the person in question were occasionally made uncomfortable by the harshness. They privately suspected it spoke not at all of real recovery and gratitude.

But Mia was not without other modes. Still looking directly at Clementine, her expression suddenly softened, the tone of her voice too. “What’s important is not whether you hit the same bottom as some of us here did, it’s whether you were touched by the disease. If you were – and you were – you belong at this table. You qualify every bit as much as Anna and Shannon and Jaime and me. Never think you don’t have a place here just because you believe you haven’t gone through enough fear or turbulence. You have, you have. Everyone of us is glad you are here, and we welcome you. You belong.”

Murmurs of assent and welcome, Clementine appearing perplexed, but touched. Watery rims shimmered around her eyes.

Mia had a counterpart in the room, however, a mighty opposite, a woman who had come to the fellowship only within the last year but who had made a significant impression. She grated on some (Mia for instance, and Mia’s cadre), but had enough supporters that they formed loosely another clique.

“My name’s Dahlia.”

“Hi, Dahlia.”

She was young, small and sloe-eyed, had a pageboy haircut. The tattoo of two black snakes entwined circled her sleeveless left arm. “For me, I don’t believe in giving the disease so much credit. Truth be told, I come to these meetings, at this point, to learn more about myself. To carry any experience and wisdom I find here to other aspects of my life. The relationship with S___ was a catalyst, sure, but to me it’s not about him. He was never that important. Yeah, he was a textbook cheater, co-dependent, probably a sociopath, and sure, afterwards I was spent and a little traumatized. But – it was a breakup. Rougher than some, but nothing unprecedented. I cut it off with him, after all. Even dealing with it strictly on my own I’d have been over it in weeks if not days. I happened to hear about this support group though, so I came here. The reason I stay is the self-knowledge I gleam —-”

At the usage of that last word, Natalie visibly stiffened.

“—- to avoid destructive relationships in the future, the reminders I get to never forget about myself again, to remember self-care, and maintain standards and healthy boundaries. It isn’t to do with him – I never think about him anymore. He wasn’t the Antichrist, although he probably wishes he was.” Hearty laughter around the room. Heartened she went on: “He wasn’t some great Machiavel, some mastermind. No, I think of him now as just sort of a sad-sack loser who could keep up the cool guy guise for a while but when the cracks started to show turned into a needy little heap. And, what do I think of him now? I don’t. And the nearest to an emotion regarding him these days? Pity. Thanks for being here.”

A woman named Eliza opened her share with a mild critique of the groups’ dialogue. “It’s always strange to me how little actual detail about him is brought into these meetings. I know some people consider that summoning, but I respectfully disagree. I think we miss the whole truth if we just stick to generalities. And there’s a certain amount of healing I think that comes with memory, a more rounded picture. For instance, even after so much strife, I smile when I think about the odd way he had of talking. How he’d throw in a word like “tangential” or “defenestrate”, out of nowhere. He might have been talking about breakfast cereal for god’s sake. And how he could be so intelligent about some things, then so dumb about others. He read people beautifully, and had this amazing instinct for when others were lying, or in trouble, when they were hiding something or when they needed help. His sympathy was pretty erratic – seemed to depend on his mood – but when it was there it was genuine. Maybe it was a heightened sense of empathy. I think he really related to people who were struggling, since he saw so much of himself in them. So in a way, even his better traits were self-pitying….”

This vein in the dialogue once opened generated follow-up shares. Cora: “He did have a knack for that. Also he was reasonably well-educated and literate. But then, you’re right – he was incapable of some of the simplest things. He couldn’t work a DVR correctly. He burnt toast. Couldn’t refill windshield wiper fluid in the car, not without spilling it. I must have shown him a dozen times how to download an app to his phone. And he has to be on the all-time list of most disorganized men in history. And that’s saying something ….” Strong laughter.

Meredith, lithe and petite and looking about grad school age, in a glossy voice said, “He was good at some things. Well, one thing anyway.”

“No, no,” said Mia. “I have to interrupt. That is definitely summoning.”

Cora said, “Here, here.”

“I agree,” chimed in Natlie. “Besides,” she went on, “I didn’t find him exceptional. I thought he was phony, selfish and brutal.”

“Here, here,” repeated Cora.

“I disagree,” said the suddenly plucky Liza.

“Here, here,” murmured Clementine. Cora snapped her head around and her insides surged with the hot onrush of a fresh resentment.

 

S______ was stationed toward the front of the room, away from the table and the women seated there. He leaned against a wall, arms crossed. None of the women observed him; none looked his way. He was idly pairing his nails.

A peculiar trait he had was that his height seemed variable. Sometimes he could look quite tall – as he did tonight. Even in leaning, his shoulders were broad and squared, his back straight, his torso long. Body unfurled and in repose. Then there were other occasions when unaccountably he would appear to an onlooker crabbed and compacted, hunched around his core, poor in posture and folded inward. It was a mystery which man might present himself at which moment – something of a mystery to him as well.

And then, she finally appeared. She walked into the room without a sound and came to stand beside him. Together they looked upon the assemblage of women around the table who remained blithely ignorant to the presences observing them.

He stole a glance at her. She stood in her singular stance, that ineffable poise of hers so paradoxical – skeptical and innocent, worldly and still smacking of youth, the sort of eternal youth nature has, how waterfalls or rain showers always carry some essence of being new to the world and maybe too good for it.

She also stood with her arms crossed. “Are they all here?”

“They are now.” That was the reply that flashed first in his mind. But he eschewed it. With her he was cautious in his words as ever, muffled where with others volubility was his default (though this did not preclude apathetic or sullen silences). “God it’s good to see you”… this was the second response that occurred to him, another he likewise put down. Instead he said, “Mostly. The major suspects anyway.” Eye contact he continued to avoid, no direct stares with her, and he wished that the tone of her question had betrayed any jealousy. But it hadn’t – she was secure and detached as ever, at least in recent history. Once before it had been different, and it continued to stir some bliss in his chest to remember it now, though it had been a long time ago.

“That one with the tattoos is very striking,” she said. “Pretty. Really they all are. How long have they been going?”

“Awhile. Meeting lasts an hour, I think. Should wrap up soon.”

“Anyone say anything positive?”

He laughed – it wasn’t self-conscious. “A few of them, as a matter of fact. More than I would have guessed.” He wouldn’t look over, but he had the distinct impression she was staring at his profile.

She said, “That bothers you, doesn’t it? That there should be any praise, or maybe what bothers you is that it was damning and faint. Bastards don’t take well to that stuff. Too normal. They need the wailing, the broken spirits and the abject suffering. Without it they’re nothing. Just any —

“ — any guy,” he finished for her, examining his boots, re-crossing and uncrossing his arms and shoving his hands in his pockets and then removing them.

She laughed lightly, good-naturedly so. “Still has to be a dream come true for you. Enough trauma committed to gather a roomful of women once a week for an hour to rehash all of it over and over again. Let me do a headcount.”

He of course had already counted, so was disappointed when she came up with the same number as he had before she entered. That is to say, she was not counting herself. The number had before struck him as something of an accomplishment, so many of them; now that she was here it seemed a paltry figure indeed.

Regardless, she had come. Here she was, and that must mean something. What does it mean?

“I did hope,” he said, voice fragile and tentative in his own ears, genuine words that rattled unfamiliar from whatever underutilized place they were borne, like the slip of a real accent after a lifetime of fake ones, “that a few more might miss me. Think back a little more fondly, I suppose. That the the last, worst impressions wouldn’t be the primary ones, as if they somehow were more real than whatever good ones had come before.”

Her gaze was still on him. “Weren’t they, though?”

“No,” he said, a more common tone returning. Well-grooved and polished over the course of years and years. “No,” he repeated, when “I don’t know” is what he meant.

“Too late now, anyway,” he said, when what he really longed to say was “Tell me why you’re here. Tell me why you’re here. Tell me why you’re here. Please.”

I’m Dying Here

 

 

…but that couldn’t be the case because I had not left the house in five days. Something like five days.

 

I have no need to leave. Not yet. Not so long as supplies last. Supplies. Rations. It is at the concept of rationing that I usually meet my match.

 

There is a hole in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and one day Australia will be seen squatting in a silty puddle. Medicines will disappear from shelves in the nighttime. Searchlights will scour the sky and the cavities of cities. There will be looting. Martial law if we’re lucky.

 

Food is a Ponzi scheme invented by farmers. Before man worshipped god he worshipped the grain, doing so ever since Dirk Monsanto’s great-great-great-great-great-great grand pappy said he should.

 

Lo the noon hour, the day’s raging peak, its disco ball of barbarous noise and screams, its incitements, its threats naked and pluperfect. Diamond scratches against the corneas, penitent hands atremble in the zealotry of light. No cellar can shunt it entire. Noontime makes muzhiks of manor lords, turns even great dictators into a mere men mumbling to the amanuenses of their vanity mirrors.

 

I do not believe the NSA has bugged my house.

 

I find reading helps. I read a great deal about gin and a lot about bourbon too. I pull them out at random from the pile by my bedside. I read about pills and tablets, tablets and pills. Blue and pink and little purple pills. I study up on psychopharmacological powders and other smelling salts. I drink Jim Thompson often, along with Ross MacDonald. I drink the occasional James Crumley. I knock them back with some Simenon, as much as four or five a day. When I am feeling nostalgic — this the wee hours, the train-in-the-distance hours, when cats creep down alleyways and pick their teeth with fish bones, when stars fall from their traces, when monks and masons snuff candle wicks of their flame and pull back their hoods and habits and climb into import cars for the long slog home — I roll up a bill of Monopoly money and snort up my high school yearbooks.

 

What I wouldn’t give some days for a Jehovah’s Witness.

 

But this is impossible. I don’t have a sprinkler system.

 

Something about the term “fruit flies” is endlessly funny to me. Really think about it.

 

A sleek ebony Cadillac steals up the street, the moon a racing stripe across its roof. Rendezvous, assignations. Champagne sins, plush lush liquid leather upholstery. Chauffeured by a coachman named Klaus. Lenore in the backseat, in her old world wedding dress, skin powder-white as a geisha, razor lips corded by a silky, petal-thin poinsettia tongue. Smelling of formaldehyde. She will be beautiful forever. Her escort for the evening is the fortunate son slouched beside her, who currently is checking his reflection, clocking his profile hits.

 

Contra Chief Justice Potter Stewart, I do not necessarily know pornography when I see it. I am looking at some right now and have no idea what this shit is.

 

I crawled inside the slit of a light socket, likely looking for some sort of illumination. But, you see, the wiring was dead. So it was a shock when I tried to leave the way I came, and owing to the fact that the face of the outlet was plastic and sheer, slid down and out and landed splat on the floor. And cried. Needless to say, Freudian.

 

Curious that there can be survivor’s guilt when no one has died.

 

Inventory. What have we remaining in stock? Why, this won’t do. Somebody needs to go on a reconnaissance mission. Let’s see a show of hands. Don’t be shy now. No takers, eh? Fine then. Be that way. I shouldn’t be expected to do everything around here, you know. Everybody takes, nobody gives. Everyone wants to go to heaven, no one wants to die.

 

What did the carny barker say when he walked into his home to find the strongman fucking his wife? “Brutus, you can’t do this. It isn’t fair…”

 

Several years ago I bought an elf, named him Reuben. Reuben is incorrigible. He drinks my booze and smokes my stuff. He suffers from insomnia, narcolepsy, and displays distinctly anti-social tendencies. There is also a glitch in his fight or flight mechanism, one or the other. Nowadays Reuben weighs in at about twenty-eight stone and is over seven feet tall. Got fists like John L. Sullivan, fangs like the teeth of a bow saw. Bad elf. In his best Seamus Heaney he repeats the same dirty limericks over and over again. Bad elf.

 

Under the bed, reading Under the Volcano. The Consul — he’s got issues. His wife — she a bitch. I bet Mexico was lovely that time of year.

 

Attention fellas, we’re down to the last one. Somebody has simply got to volunteer.

 

Narrators are often reliable enough; it is the authors who are not to be trusted.

 

We are not sovereign beings. We are the deus ex machina by which ink pens flee rooms, by which ashtrays achieve transport, by which artifacts come to be disinterred. We are the MacGuffins with which god peppers his Book of Ideas, the notaries who stamp angels’ affidavits.

 

The expression “pathetic fallacy” strikes me as very harsh.

 

Dii me exilium aut reditum suum de memoria cordis….

 

Being as there are no heroes among you and no choice in the matter, I will go. When others beg off, I step up. Others whimper-whimper; I bang-bang.

 

The crack in the drapes reveals nothing promising. I open the front door to confirm; hasps verily croak from disuse. Exit here.

 

What’s all this, then? Armageddon and apocalypse are not strictly synonymous — I am not certain which has transpired during my sabbatical. One or the other. The landscape ashes and char, tomahawk smoke, everything savaged and scorched. Before the world was dying; now it is dead, lost while I was being thought by my thoughts, the earth howling and innocents and children boiled alive in burning seas as I lay dreaming sad dreams about some girl(s). Not that I could have saved them (her).

The second human being was forced to invent the word for death. First ever event for which pointing would not suffice. Almost immediately said human then invented the word “resurrection.” For one word begs the next. Every vaccine proves the virus is real.

 

I’ve got Eastern dreams

And Western Eyes,

You’ve been in my periphery

This whole time.

 

So you drive where the compass leads,

When the desert hits the windshield

You roll up your sleeves.

I’ll count the refinery towers

On my way out of town,

We’ll meet in the middle of Missouri

With our sleeves rolled down.

 

You keep LA and New York friends

Walk to the divide

Where our continent begins.

Waters crashing on our separate coasts,

Meet me where the waters can’t go.

My left hand shakes,

From what my right hand holds.

The fault lines quake but the center holds,

The fault lines quake but the center holds.

 

Aaron Aaronson probably should have been an Erin. Her parents hadn’t realized the Aa-spelling of the name was typically reserved for the masculine but it looked so appealing on the birth certificate with the double a’s of the last name that her father, amateur semiotician, professional poet, a man who though pretty much safe with a low lottery number nevertheless volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam so as to have something to write about — his slim volume of war verse, Baptisms in the Ben Hai, won a bevy of awards, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer, and was perhaps the last book of poetry to sell over fifty thousand copies — a person enamored with the couplings and mingling of letters on the page, preferred it anyway. Aaron Aaronson was born on December 31^st, 1984, which she forever argued was the worst day of the year to have a birthday (much worse than Christmas). The story went that her first word was “dada”, her second “mama”, and her third “quatrain”, although she had been staring out the window at a rail yard at the time.

         She was an only child if you didn’t count her siblings. Which she didn’t. They were halfsies anyway. Three sisters, triplets, Grace, Harmony, and Charity, were born to her mother Peg and Peg’s second husband Troy more than a decade after she and Adam Aaronson had divorced and quite a few years after Peg had turned forty. Several rounds of in vitro and voila!, a gaggle of three freshly-minted baby girls, sixteen years Aaron’s junior. Now the Tomlinsons resided in Delray Beach, Florida, and the triplets were finishing their sophomore year of high school. They gazed upon Aaron as if she was some alien life-form come to call from the Planet Millenial, which perhaps they’d heard tell about in the blogosphere, or Western Civ. During her last visit there Grace had slipped and called her “Aunt Aaron.” It was all enough to make a thirty-one year old woman feel old.

         Another thing that will age you: a dying parent. Not a dead one per se, not a one killed in a car crash or felled by coronary thrombosis or drowned in a riptide. No, the dying, the decline, the lazy switchback of gradually encroaching illnesses. Adam Aaronson’s dying was composed of several components, a generalized entropy: gathering emphysema from years and years of heavy smoking, an ailing liver from years and years of hard drinking, some erosion to his nervous system — the drinking again, and pills, and the PTSD that due to the era was never properly diagnosed (modest royalties and eventual tenure at Hunter College had not come without a price) — to go along with the gastric distress caused by his peculiar eating habits (he didn’t) and worsening glaucoma, which no amount of Acapulco Gold or Lebanese hash had been able to stymie. Still a handsome man in his weathered West Texas way, he didn’t come off especially older than his sixty-two years, so long as you didn’t note the egg yolk yellow of the whites around his eyes, or mark how his hand trembled when reaching for a ballpoint pen or highball glass, or listen too closely to the humid sound of his inhales and exhales, the shallow, puddled quality of them.               

         Her favorite of her father’s poems was one called “The Collaborators”, from a mid-period collection cooly received by critics (“formerly one of America’s more interesting young poets, a direct descendent of Lowell both in the Confessional movement and his engagement with public topics, forgoing, however, free verse in his first works to employ a tightly controlled, almost formalist style having much in common with the realist school of minimalist literature, Adam Aaronson has too long now been mining a terrain where his innate gifts for the pungent phrase, the unsparing viewpoint, and an empathy with hard human truths are simply not to be found, under sway as he has been to the looser, elliptical abstractions of Ashbery, Lauterbach, Schuyler, et al….” So read The Kenyon Review’s assessment of Rheingold Dreams, a review her father had cut out and pinned to the cork board above his desk, as he did with every pan he came across, the thing now so glommed with scraps of paper it looked like the kiosk of a student union). Fairly frequently Aaron sat down with her guitar and the poem carefully copied out into one of her composition books, and tried to work up chord changes and an encompassing melody for the words. For years now it had defeated her. Admittedly the whole enterprise was pretty perverse; “The Collaborators” was indeed free verse, had no formal structure, no consistent meter, no music ready-made to leap out of the lines. Her own original songs were poppy and punchy, taut and economical. Her father’s earliest poems would have been more conventional candidates for recasting into song form , disciplined and streamlined as they were (even if she couldn’t quite hear herself singing about bandoliers and rucksacks, frag grenades or buck privates named Bobby). Why she’d chosen this particular one she really couldn’t say; at some point the notion came to roost and was still hanging around, always cawing in the background. Perhaps the attraction stemmed from it being such an absurd quest, and because “The Collaborators” was so unlike her own work. She revered it as something she could never herself conceive of doing.

         They lived together now, she and her father. Rather, she’d moved into his place, a rent-controlled two bedroom on Columbus and 97^th. A perfectly good apartment, albeit musty, cluttered and dim, as was his way and as had been hers ever since leaving spick-and-span, duvet and dust-ruffled Peg’s house at seventeen to attend SUNY at Stony Brook. In short order from then had followed two semesters of academic probation, ultimately expulsion; then a studio apartment on Avenue C shared with with her three band mates at the time; a record deal with Matador; some gigs opening for Sleater-Kinney on a leg of their North American tour; a dalliance with heroin; getting clean; then a two-year relationship with a Chinese-American woman named Li that ended in more devastation and heartbreak than even a willful relapse could salve. One night she loaded up too much into the syringe, laid down on the rug in the bathroom, and commenced to stare at the ceiling light. Next thing she knew fluorescents were whipping overhead as her gurney was being hustled down a hospital hallway, her throat scorched and her blood on fire,  Aaron narrowly plucked from extinction by happenstance when a roommate’s girlfriend got up in the middle of the night to pee.

         Was the O.D. intentional or just a mishap? Did she actually die for a few seconds, or only almost? After the ordeal she wrote a song called “Turning  Blue” that attempted, if not to answer those questions, then to at least mediate them, give voice to their relative importance. Conclusion? They weren’t very important at all.

         Neither was the song very good. In it she’d worked with an extended metaphor — the notion of sadness, the “blues”, in the aftermath of romantic disintegration, interwoven with the details of an overdose. But it hadn’t come off really, felt labored and too clever by half. It did however give her the first real taste of how exquisite failure could be, the poignant attachment you could have for a creation that didn’t quite succeed. An admirable failure, a song that almost touched another place, a place she’d never before been. Also it sported a killer lick she’d nicked from a Split Enz’s B-side to go along with a good recording, muddy and raw, engineered by a guy named Dillweed in a defunct taxidermy shop in Bay Ridge repurposed into an analogue studio. “Turning Blue” did nothing in the States but became a minor hit in Central Europe. To this day, at random unexpected moments, a check would arrive, cut by some subsidiary label in The Hague or Bonn. the last one was for four hundred and eleven dollars and forty-seven cents. Maybe the money was negligible, but gratifying was the reminder that some seed of hers had found purchase in a far off part of the world and there had flowered, a tiny, tattered puny little rose—pretty nonetheless. Something had happened.

        

Her father rarely got drunk anymore; his stomach couldn’t tolerate it. Adam Aaronson more or less subsisted on a daily basis in a benign fuzzy state of tipsy. Nursing a Lord Calvert with two ice cubes and a splash of soda water, averaging one every couple of hours, seven to ten a day. For a terminal case, Aaron thought, it really isn’t so much, not when you break it down. The cigarettes were a different story — those he was unremittingly suicidal over, smoking one after the next with the avidity of a kamikaze pilot making for the nearest aircraft carrier. “What,” he’d say, or croak, gurgle, wheeze or hack, depending on the hour, after she’d once again scolded him, “they found a cure for emphysema?”

         “I hear it’s scheduled for this time next year. You’ll want to be around for it. Give the Reds a rest.”

         “Great. Health tips from the junkie.”

         “I quit. See how that works?”

         “There’s no point living just to be miserable. Let’s say I toss them, live an extra five years. That’s five years, fiending nonstop, thinking ‘goddamn, sure could use a smoke.’”

         “Come again,” said Aaron. “Didn’t quite catch that last part. Voice got sorta wispy there at the end.”

         He sang a snatch of the tune to The Yellow Rose of Texas, inserting “Go to hell, go to hell…” in place of the opening lyric. Leaning forward in his swivel chair, he rubbed at the fine burr of white-flecked stubble nestled at the corners of his mouth, pushed the half-moon reading spectacles up the bridge of his nose and peered close at the sheet of paper in the cradle of the manual Smith Corona on the desk.

         He clicked up the roller, opened the lever and pulled free the paper. “See what you think,” he said. “Just started it.”

         Thus far it was only five lines, no breaks. Five short lines, unlike the rolling, free-flowing verse that had been characteristic of his work for a long time now. Still, Aaron was forced to count out the syllables silently; truth be told, she was often stumped by poetry, had trouble on first read gleaning the music in it. Sometimes she thought it all a bluff — there was no music to be had. And she was often challenged even by the rudiments of versification. Meter was difficult for her to ascertain, the fall of the stresses on the syllables striking her as arbitrary. Without a melody to unlock the form, she was pretty much a novice.

         The five lines here were all six syllables. And, the poem rhymed, a true rarity in the Aaronson oeuvre. Aa, bb, c…The fifth line was Calm eyes has the crazed dove.

         She handed him back the sheet of paper. “Well, it’s a beginning. You’re rhyming. That’s different. Listen, take it from the songstress. Whatever you do, don’t use ‘love’ to go with ‘dove’. You’re in hack territory then. You’re Hallmark.”

         “It’s not about the rhyme,” he said, folding his hands over his stomach. She could tell he was feeling expansive. “That’s the challenge. ‘Love’ would be fine, but the words that come before have to validate its presence. Have to vindicate its use. You can fall into the trap where you’re just contorting yourself, using whatever dreck beforehand, whatever filler, to get to the rhyme. No, can’t be done that way. Has to appear all at once, organically, the way these first five lines did.”

         “So, any ideas for the sixth yet? Organic ideas, I mean.”

         “I’ve got one percolating. Not going to rush it. I’ll fix a drink first, let it steep.”

         “Sure. Go ahead and mix your metaphors while you’re at it.”

         He turned his head to her, all blithe boredom. “Do you know the great weakness of your generation? An addiction to glibness.”

         To parry this, she said nothing, even two or three very glib rejoinders sizzled in her brain. She stood and he held out his empty glass. In the kitchen she dropped in three cubes of ice, poured in half a tumbler of whiskey, and topped it with an extra spritz of soda water.

         In the study, he’d already taken up a book and was reading. The crow’s feet around his eyes flexed in the intensity of his squint. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. She read the story’s title along the top of the left page. “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”. Without looking up, he took the glass from her. “Thank you, sweetie.”

         More than once he had announced his intention to wend his way back through his favorite books and authors, giving them a final loving reread, before his eyes, or he himself, cashed out. She watched as he read. The authors he was revisiting were almost entirely American, and outside of Twain and Melville, almost all twentieth-century. All prose — he read very little poetry these days. Of course in his youth he’d been smitten by Keats and Shelley and Byron, by the Beats, by Rimabaud and Verlaine and Valery, then later Paz and Neruda. It was typical of the dichotomies within him that his truest, most sustaining passions were for authors who worked in basically a different medium from his own, his current reading a stroll in the field of fiction which he himself had never plowed, earnestly finding fulfillment in that which was recent (but not so recent), close to home (and yet very far away).The novels of Faulkner’s great period, Bellow’s Augie March and Henderson, Cheever’s short stories, Dos Passos and Eudora Welty. That which was so foreign to his work, and yet so familiar to his self.

         But then he had always been an outsider, or outlier, in many ways. Never quite fitting into a movement, a period, stubbornly resistant to embrace even by something so consolidating as geography. He’d been in the city nearly a quarter of a century at this point, after years of moving Aaron and her mother across the country as the teaching jobs arose: Austin to Champagne, Illinois, to Charlottesville, Virginia — and still he seemed distinctly un-New York. In the aisles of a Gristedes he looked like some provincial dad in from the sticks, bewildered by the artisan cheeses and gourmet foodstuffs. He’d done readings at the 92^nd Street Y, at the KGB bar, attended PEN conferences, had known George Plimpton, used to talk to him regularly on the telephone. There was a rumor that he’d once bedded Susan Sontag (Aaron had eagerly inquired more than once; he remained coyly noncommittal on the subject). And yet he remained impenetrable to cosmopolitan seepage and literary culturing, the stamp of western America indelible upon him even after all this time. He favored flannel work shirts, jeans and chinos. He always looked as if he should be standing on the porch of a cabin, sipping his whiskey from a coffee mug. Relatively sedentary as most of his adulthood had been, the life of a poet and academic, still he had broad shoulders and thick wrists, pronounced veins coursing up his forearms.

         “You have a birthday coming up,” Aaron said.

         “I’ll take your word for it,” he replied, never taking his eyes off the book.

         “Do you think that sixth line will come soon?”

         “No, I think not.”

 

                                                      ***

 

Aaron unpacked her guitar. Candy tightened down the high hat on her kit. Wittier thumbed the low E string of her Rickenbacker bass. Dum, dum-du-dum.

         Around them Jorquis was adjusting the microphones, getting levels, running back and forth to his MacBook Pro. QuickenDed was his baby, and he’d been running the podcast out of his parents basement for a couple of years now. A disjointed enterprise of love, catch as catch can, some weeks three or four episodes aired, then there might elapse a whole month of web silence.

         Aaron hated in-studio performances. Hate, a strong word, one she knew generally served as a pseudonym for fear. What are you afraid of? This was an exercise recommended by a former therapist to be undertaken in any situation which she found daunting or in which she felt herself uncomfortable. Aaron was supposed to answer it specifically. Actually the therapist’s exact recommendation had been to ask, “What am I afraid of?” But, being herself, Aaron had tweaked it, rendering it in second-person,  a common songwriter device, to mitigate some of the solipsism and lend the question a double-edged, accusatory quality. A small shift perhaps, but one she found congenial.

         I am afraid of the naked quality of live performance without an audience. They were recording live — Jorquis didn’t do multiple takes. So without crowd noise, without monitors feeding back and muffled acoustics and room echo, without beer, there was nowhere for her to hide. I am afraid because I am not a good guitar player. No phony self-deprecation there; she knew it was just the humble fact. She’d started playing around puberty and ceased advancing on the instrument about the time she got her learner’s permit. Primitive rhythm, strumming, banging out some chords to serve as ballast beneath the vocals — this was pretty much the sum of her proficiency. Every so often she tried to pick up a new tuning, or work some arpeggios into her technique. Progress: minimal.

         The current band was called Diamond Jill, and, regrettably, it was a three-piece, Aaron carrying guitar chores alone. Once upon a time a girl named Renee had handled lead duties. A total hot-shit player, only she insisted on bringing her cats to rehearsal, all four of them. Freed from their crates the cats would hiss and mewl, scamper over amps and claw at the power cables. When Wittier, Diamond Jill’s resident hard ass, confronted her on the issue, bespectacled Renee, looking like nothing so much as the world’s cutest librarian, flipped open a Spiderco and cut loose with a torrent of savage, unhinged threats that froze even the felines in their stances of blithe mischief. So — delicately, diplomatically — the lead guitarist was told, hey, no hard feelings, you know, things aren’t working out, let’s just go our separate ways. This Renee took exceedingly well; violent mania vanishing in an instant, she corralled Measles and Mumps, Romulus and Remus back inside their crates, took up her guitar case, and even laden with all that cargo had somehow managed a goodbye wave as she went out the door. What Aaron wouldn’t give for that sort of dexterity.

         An impromptu decision had been made to start with “Stomp in the Name of Love”, to be followed up by “Chain Stores,” before wrapping up the mini-set with “Hausfrau”. Each presented their own perils for Aaron. “Stomp” in its recorded version kicked off with a choppy, start-and-stop riff, not complex but staccato, and for this performance Aaron asked Candy to click out time with her sticks and give the snare a whap before Aaron hit the first down stroke on her guitar, nervous that otherwise she might goof the opening and mess up the song from the get-go.

         But it went fine. She fell in with Candy’s beat, stuck herself like a limpet to Wittier’s bass line, and found a suitable yowling register for her vocals, not opening up the throttle too much lest she overwhelm Jorquis’s close-miking.

         As ever a decent rendition of a song relaxed Aaron considerably. And “Chain Stores” started out with a bass and toms groove, requiring only a few blurps of random guitar squall on the verses before the explosion of a righteous power-chord chorus, two chords and all attack. That she could do.

         What are you afraid of? The true issue, thought Aaron, is I’m not a performer. Not really. I’m a writer. In fact she’d maybe never been a performer, not at heart, and had only survived her first fledgling decade as a front girl through a combination of youthful bravado and smack. Those aids having long-since fled or been disavowed, now she stood stripped in front of a Neumann mike, and her wasn’t a matter of fear, at least not solely so. I’m just not that into this. It bored her, playing live; she no longer enjoyed it. The guiding principle of music, her kind of music at least, was passion. Passion and authenticity. Any ebb in the former and you utterly lacked the latter.

         She didn’t think this realization was necessarily a bad thing. For a certain type of temperament, life can seem a steady shutting of doors. A process of paring, abnegation. It meant only that one’s calling was becoming more channeled, concentrated. You are not this, not that, are not this other thing either. You say no to a bunch of things so that to one thing, one glorious thing, you can bestow a huge unreserved YES.

         The possibility this might be a rationalization for the encroachment of apathy was not lost on her.

         Her defense against said possibility was to write. Constantly. All the time. She wrote a minimum of a couple of hours every day, usually much more. Knowing other songwriters and musicians (other than her father, they were the sum of her acquaintanceship), proved to her how unusual this was. Other peoples’ songs were generally written in rehearsal, occasionally sound checks, in beer and pizza jam sessions late at night after everyone had gotten tired of bashing out covers on their acoustics. A few of the tech heads composed on their computers, using software, rhythm tracks (completely valid — she was no purist). But regardless of method, for everyone else it seemed the writing came in spates, in certain contexts, in the intervals between things. For her, increasingly giving a lick and a stamp to everything else, the creating was the centerpiece, what she did and what she built around. The means and the end. Maybe I don’t know how else to spend my day.

         So the pages and notebooks piled up, as did the DAT tapes (laughably archaic as those already were). Some songs she didn’t even record — some of them good ones. She just wrote them, played them to herself in her bedroom at night, and released them to the ether as an almost Dadaist joke on the idea of permanence. Other songs she never finished, or hadn’t as of yet. Third verses or middle-eighths — her sixth lines — were still percolating, would one day come to a boil, or not. Anyway, she was in the process of surrendering outcomes.

         The usual format of QuickenDed was for a band to play two songs, then settle in for a few minutes of an informal interview with Jorquis before the closing number. Patter tended to be very glib indeed. She being the singer and main songwriter, there was the tacit understanding that Jorquis would basically be interviewing her.

         Jorquis: “You played where last week? Arlene’s,wasn’t it?”

         Aaron: “Yep. Arlene’s.”

         Jorquis: “Good show.”

         Aaron: “Good venue. Oh sure, we were stellar.”

         Jorquis: “What’s your favorite place to play?”

         Aaron: “My favorite place? That would be my bedroom.”

          Jorquis: “Public place, let’s say.”

         Aaron: “Oh, let’s just go ahead and say Arlene’s. I’m sure the Beacon Theatre is very nice, but we wouldn’t know.”

         Jorquis: “Haven’t broken through to the Beacon yet, huh?”

         Aaron: “Not yet. But it’s on our bucket list. And can’t forget Madison Square. I hear that’s a good one.”

         Jorquis: “Yeah, Kings of Leon told me the same thing.”

         Aaron: “See, I’d have thought they were Hollywood Bowl types.”

         Wittier, chiming in off mike: “Staples Center, I bet.”

         Some laughter. Aaron: “Yeah, right. Sure. Staples Center. They’re those kind of guys.”

         Jorquis: “Ok. So what next for Diamond Jill?”

         Aaron: “Where next, or what next?”

         Jorquis: “Either/or. Or neither.”

         Aaron: “I choose neither.”

         It came off as more curt than she had intended, yet she didn’t attempt to elaborate or add to the answer. The interview ended on that awkward note; the recording picked up the slightly uncomfortable titters of her band mates.

         The song “Hausfrau” dated from early in the previous decade, and was probably Aaron’s most widely-known song — a very relative term. It had a distinctive double-tap drum break, verses with a quasi-nursery rhyme quality, and an exploding one word refrain that had all the insistence of a Gregorian chant in 4/4 time. “Housewife!” Most people indeed thought this was the title. Aaron had performed it probably two hundred times. Which did not prevent her from royally fucking it up now. She stroked the final chord change to B7 flat as a flapjack, didn’t recover from the flub fast enough, lost her entire strum pattern for a second and slid a quarter note behind the rhythm section. Wittier and Candy tried to adjust, tried to ease off the tempo just a tad, but of course at the same instant Aaron was scrambling to catch up, sending the performance at first wobbling and then careening and then capsizing it altogether, the entire mess finally stumbling to a halt not with any ragged grace or defiance but rather meekly, apologetically, as the band simply quit the song to the mortified embarrassment of sterile studio silence.

 

That night she lay back on her bed, notebook beside her, guitar in an open tuning. And again she tried to cajole “The Collaborators” into being music. And failed. Again. This on its own wouldn’t have been so bad — wasn’t the first time after all. But with the guitar laid by, as Aaron tripped off to sleep, she heard it, the elusive, impossible song, heard it of a whole, distant but crystalline, like the sound of laughter coming from the opposite shore of a lake. The song was there, across some dreamy expanse, allowing her to eavesdrop as it serenaded itself.

 

                                                      ***

 

Adam Aaronson’s sixty-fourth birthday fell on a lovely and warm April day. Aaron mandated a lunch date to celebrate. This was done to at least get her father out of doors; an always hermetic tendency had of late begun to drift into agoraphobic territory.

         An organic fusion place with patio seating. They ordered wine, Adam got the jerk chicken with sweet potato frites, Aaron a cup of cucumber gazpacho and sides of tabouli  and bok choy. The world of the Upper West Side went by their table, and she watched it less than she watched her dad watching it, slowly following the passersby with his ailing eyes. Only if they were blonde and pretty, and nowhere near celebrating their sixty-third birthdays, did his eyes evince any interest.

         On his second glass of Malbec he turned more talkative. “You okay for money?”

         “After springing for lunch, no. I foresee red in my account.”

         “Christ, I’ll get lunch.”

         “No, I got it. You only turn ancient once. My treat. I’m broke anyway, let’s all have steak.”

         He leaned forward a bit, looking down into his wineglass. “What are you going to do when I’m gone.”

         “No, no. Absolute nyet.  We’re not going there. Balmy weather and talk of the shroud go together not at all.”

         “Really,” he said. “Seems a natural association to me.”

         “What is this? Birthdays usually don’t get to you like this. I mean, you’ve wanted to be an old man your whole life. What is this elegiac thing you’re doing right now?”

         He shrugged, sighed, sat back. He looked small in his seat. “It’s my eyes. I don’t always realize how bad they’ve become. It’s as if everything is wrapped in clouds.”

         She had the urge to reach out and take his hand in hers. But didn’t do it. What are you afraid of? “Meh, just an optical illusion. Your eyes are adjusting to the sun. They’d forgotten what it looked like. Too long in the cave.”

         She had been heartened when on receiving the food he started in eating right away. After a few bites this dwindled to just pushing slivers of chicken around with his fork. Then he lit a cigarette, though the patio, along with the city, was non-smoking. Which made her very anxious, on behalf of the server. She herself had spent years in the restaurant industry and this had made her distinctly sensitive on the matter of patron etiquette. Adam Aaronson for his part seemed unaware he’d even lit the thing. He took a couple of automatic puffs, then just let it smolder between his fingers, ash dropping onto his shirtfront. “Spoken to your mother lately?”

         Aaron suspected there was a breed of divorced men who were always asking this question, or always wanting to, a reconnoitering for information about the ex, hungry for details about the loves and life of the once-significant other — for all she knew they comprised the majority of the species. Adam Aaronson was decidedly not of those. Never in Aaron’s memory did she remember him appearing wistful or nostalgic for his previous life as a spouse. For a long time Aaron had credited this to a natural reticence, before concluding that these feelings were not being concealed, they were non-existent. On the subject of his marriage to her mother, Adam Aaronson expressed only indifference or relief, and even those were rare.

         “Yeah,” she said. “Last week or maybe the week before. She’s fine. The same. Chirpy.”

         The answer apparently striking him as entirely sufficient, he pursued the topic no further.

         Aaron recalled a conversation — even more brief — from several years ago, when it had been her asking him a question. Sometime in her late teens she had finally grown curious about his work, having to that point known basically nothing about it, a dad’s job description always a dull thing for an adolescent even if that job happens to be lyric poet. She spent a summer reading through the corpus, in chronological order. And like the commonest of critics found herself at first liking most the compact early pieces, the gritty, true-to-life stuff. So she’d asked him one day, foolishly she now thought, naively, why he didn’t write poems like that anymore.

         “Because I love poems like that too much.”

         And how this answer struck her then in a similar manner: entirely sufficient.

 

 

The following night he fell in the shower. She was in the kitchen at the time. There was the sound of running water, then came two hard thumps and a wet-sounding smack, this in turn followed by a hollow sort of clatter.

         She opened the door to find him sprawled on the floor, naked and thrashing beneath the fallen shower curtain.

         “Sonofabitch,” he grunted, trying to push himself up.

         Aaron turned off the water and bent down to him.

         His bottom lip was split open and bleeding, and already his chin had started to swell. “Sonofabitch, goddamn sonofabitch.”

         “Easy,” she said.

         She put her arms around him and tried to pull him upright. A rending gasp tore through him, and he heaved and spilled out of the embrace, flopping face down.

         “Where are you hurt,” she said, trying to keep her voice even and assured.

         He was wheezing now. He gestured at his left side, from hipbone up and down again.

         “Here, just lay still.”

         She tugged the shower curtain free of the last remaining rings on the rod and spread it over his waist. His feet stuck out, white as tissue paper from the ankles down, the toenails turned to horn, hard yellow husks. She positioned herself behind him, brought his sopping head and shoulders into her lap. The soaking fringe of his hair fell over his brow, clung to his cheeks.

         Even the slightest movement triggered a clench and a shudder. He’d almost certainly broken at least one rib, maybe cracked his pelvis or hip. “Here, calm down,” she said. “Calm down and try to take deep breaths.”

         “Hurts like a sonofabitch.”

         “I know it does. Just slow your breathing. In a minute I’ll call an ambulance.”

         Grunting, he said, “Don’t need one. Don’t need a doctor.”

         “That’s nice, Hemingway. I’ll be the judge of that. Go ahead and put the stoic doll back inside the box, and breathe.”

         The tiles of the floor were washed over with water; her pajama bottoms grew soggy.  The room was silent for a minute except for his pained breaths and a drip from the faucet echoing down the drain. She observed his pale, freckled shoulders, still fairly-well muscled but knobby at the bones, the skin webbed and scalloped.

         She said, “I’ve been trying to set one of your poems to music.”

         For several seconds he didn’t respond. When he did, the words came haltingly, between the catches of sharp breaths. “Which one?”

         “The Collaborators.”

         More silence. Then, “I don’t …I don’t remember it.”

         This surprised her. “Really? You don’t?”

         “Wrote a thousand of the things. How old?”

         “It’s from the Rheingold Dreams collection. I think, ’85, ’86.”

         “Okay,” he said. “Start it off for me.”

 

The Collaborators

Close the afternoon down and board it up,

Grab hat and coat, spike the lemonade.

Bamboo gardens, fig feathers, amethyst house plants,

Grab them.

The white apples, the red grapes — grab them.

 

 

We spent Saturday setting stones

And digging Spanish moss, talking

To mosquitoes, shaking hands with

Our fists; Sundays spent

On the roof, pointing her to

The Rhymney bells and hiding

Aesop under the mattress.

 

Demotic bliss, grab it, it comes

In shards. One day I’ll say goodbye

To all of this, and will remember more

Than ever was there, about

 

how my allies and I used to pitch our tents

In corn fields, how we redrew constellations

With two fingers, how we scoured the vegetables

For faint magic.

 

My associations all will one day end,

Partnerships dissolved. The collaborations though,

They endure. What we wrote in seconds,

Each taking a word, trading off meaning,

Shaking free the sense. In the easy grasses

We named her, her syllables

Yours, mine, ours, her own.

 

Here it is night, now comes the night,

And June bugs pop

The window screens.

I hear the name, and its sound

Is my sound.

I am always leaving, I always remain.

 

 

         She hadn’t realized she had memorized it. 

         “You recite well. I’d forgotten all about that one.”

         “Well trying to make a song of it might be the dumbest idea ever. It doesn’t circle, there’s no repetition. Each time I try it’s just some meandering improvisation, no structure. I’d have to be Charles Mingus or somebody to pull it off.”

         His grunt sounded like an assent; a chuckle gurgled somewhere in the back of his throat. It was cut off by another gasp. “Don’t be afraid, the clown’s a-a-afraid too. But, yeah. Yes. Tough task you picked there.”

         “I couldn’t tell you why I’m so drawn to it. I don’t have the foggiest what it’s about.” This she said despite cringing that even in his injured state he might embark on one of his patented polemics on how poems aren’t about anything, how understanding is a fallacy. And so on.

         His breaths had perhaps calmed a bit. “Sure you do, darling.”

         He called her “darling” maybe two or three times a year. Whenever he did, only then would she realize that she wished he’d say it more. “Alright,” she said, “I’ll bite. What’s it about?”

         “Darling,” –two in a row!—“it’s about you.”

         We named her…pointing her…I hear the name, and its sound…Aesop….Obvious when you know.

         “It’s about me,” she said. A statement.

         “Well, sort of. It is, and isn’t. Started out about you, became what they’re all about.”

         “Which is what exactly?”

         “Itself. All of them really are about … about themselves.”

         She patted the crown of his head, stroked back his hair. “There there, shut up. Your first answer was better. Think you can get up now?”

         He couldn’t. She called 911. The paramedics arrived and lifted him onto a stretcher; by the time they loaded him into the ambulance the gasps had petered out. She rode in the back with him to the hospital.

         It was after three a.m. when she returned to the apartment alone. In the kitchen she made one of his drinks, stiffer than the ones she mixed for him. She went into the study, sat down in his chair, inhaled the room’s strong cologne of him, his cigarette smoke, his abiding atmosphere.

         Switching on the desk lamp. The Smith Corona, the same sheet of paper in the cradle. Still just the five lines. He’d never gotten the sixth one down.

         But she had one. It tumbled from the preceding five as an inevitability, snapped into place like a jigsaw piece. No other line could have fitted.

         She tapped it out on the keys, counted out the syllables to be sure, guessed at where the stress marks belonged. And it worked, it scanned. It even rhymed.

 

I. In Which Abbey Wishes She Were Sicker

Abbey Anders was wishing she were insane. No offense to true-blue sufferers, but at the moment it seemed an easier row to hoe. The insane had bursts of euphoria, yes? Fantastic blips of bliss, wild sensorial hallucinations, misfiring neurons that brought visions and radical insights, epiphanies and delusions of grandeur. And what can be better for enervated self-esteem than a first-class delusion of grandeur? Insanity: the lows were low, sure, the valleys dark and deep, but the mountains must be noble and majestic; one good wave of mania and she might find herself delivered atop some breathtaking summit somewhere, glimpsing a wider horizon. Delusion, schmelusion. Anything different had at least something to recommend it.

Of course rational Abbey knew that mental illness had many genres — phobic paranoidal, pathologic schizophrenical, psychological dysthymical, dissociative bipolarity, disorders general and specific — all, hell unlimited. Only Abbey Anders and rationality were not much on speaking terms these days.
Her hell was close, confined, hell as a studio apartment, an efficiency, a sleeper berth (a roomy hell is hard to imagine). There were no peaks for Abbey, no vistas, the impacted space of her brain strictly horizon-less. Rather than see what was not there, she saw all too well what was: humdrum and hollow, an anemic and indifferent life, trite … only her newfound penchant for writhing seemed notable. Days currently consisted of futile attempts at distraction, frenetic activity, rampant anxiety. Stomach cramps, jittery fatigue. Creating chores for herself to make another quarter hour, ten minutes, five minutes, one, serviceable for living. Never had so little laundry been in her hamper, never had the bathroom tiles shined so. But there was never any satiation or relief; no sooner had one task been discharged than next up in the queue came despair, refusing to be put off any longer. And now she felt herself faltering, fracturing, motivation fleeing along with her powers of concentration as the relentless tension continued to tighten. She was tumbling down the rabbit hole. Insanity, here I come.

II. In Which Abbey Was Buried Alive

Her problem was Finter. Or really, her problem was that she was not Finter’s problem, not anymore, if ever she had been. She believed she had been once, for a not insignificant length of time, though that seemed a long time ago now. How long? Well, the seismic shift had occurred the week before last when Finter mentioned — off-hand, oh so casual — that he was seeing someone. Someone else. “Abbey? Hey. Don’t look like that. I’m sorry. Hey, c’mon. I’m so sorry, Abbey. I had no idea you would react this way.”

Abbey hadn’t either. It was like looking up and seeing an avalanche suddenly charging downhill towards you and realizing you are armed with nothing but a parasol. She felt ludicrously unprepared.
And, she felt stupid. It was part of their arrangement, you see. Always had been. For two years, two months, one week and a day now. An open relationship. No obligations. Abbey had never once availed herself of this freedom. Neither had he, she didn’t think. Not until now. Yet recently there had been signs, obvious and tell-tale in retrospect. Finter had seemed lackluster,
kind of disengaged; he called a bit less, texted a bit less, responded to her own calls and texts with something less than typical Finterish fervor. Showed no particular urgency about seeing her.
All this she’d been fine with at the time. Had not even thought to suspect anything. She hadn’t wanted more. Not then. Not necessarily. Not before the avalanche.

III. In Which Abbey Considers Slaughtering Her Co-Worker

“Abbey, you’re so Type A.”

Lizbet said this in the teacher’s lounge of Humanities Department’s, just as Abbey was silently noting yet again how her colleague never could manage to pour a cup of coffee without sloshing it everywhere. She watched Lizbet absently dab at the spill, the soggy piece of paper towel left to lay there as the woman brought the dripping cup over to the table where Abbey sat, took a chair, and set the coffee down, stamping a brown ring on the canary-yellow formica. How Abbey yearned for the days when this would have incensed her, the carefree days when this was the kind of thing that would have mattered.

“Type A, right-brained, OCD, anal retentive,” said Abbey, deftly dipping a bag of black currant in the steaming water of her own cup, “these terms are too trendy to even apply to anyone anymore. Terminology as cliché. You show the least bit of conscientiousness or a taste for organization and you get tagged with the Type A thing. I mean, is it a diagnosis? Look at my car sometime if you think I’m Type A. The back seat. Type B, B minus, at best.”

“Well I’ve seen your syllabus and your lesson plans. Definitely Type A. Every day of the semester planned out to the minute.”

No one’s ever seen yours, thought Abbey. “I enjoy making those. I don’t expect them to come off exactly so — I’m not naive. I just like doing them.”“Exactly,” cooed Lizbet, somehow making her eyes smirk while she blew at the coffee to cool it. It rippled over the brim and coursed down the cup. First, thought Abbey, I’ll throw this hot water in her smug face. Then I’ll brain her with my chair. Next I grab duct tape and an extension cord from Mr. Edney’s office, stash her in the supply closet. Come nightfall I return really get down to business with a couple of bunsen burners and harsh astringents. I’m so Type A, they’ll never find a speck of DNA.

Then, unaccountably, Abbey heard herself saying, “I think my boyfriend broke up with me.”

This startled Lizbet, who again splashed her coffee. Onto the table. And some more, on her sleeve.

“Oh Abbey. I’m sorry, girl.” A pause. “What do you mean, you ‘think’?”

“Well, he hasn’t yet. Not fully. But he’s seeing someone else.”

“He is? You caught him?”

“No. He told me.”

“He told you? Well shit, you should be breaking up with him.”

“I can’t. You see, we have an arrangement. We aren’t exclusive. We have … have an open relationship.” Something was melting in her sinus cavity.

“An open relationship. For how long?”

“The whole time we’ve been … together.” Her bottom lip, quivering.

“How long is that?”

“Two years…two years and two months and….” She gave way.

“Oh Abbey. Come here girl.”

IV. In Which Abbey Gets Details

Nicolette. “Niki.”

“Niki.” A brand identity developer at the same software company where Finter worked. Abbey had no idea what a brand identity developer did. She looked it up on Wikipedia and learned basically no more. Sounded specious, sounded specialized. A technocratic argot of streamlined nonsense, cool, confident and current. The two of them probably spoke an idiosyncratic language Abbey wouldn’t even grasp, a nomenclature of cutesy, coded shorthand, unbearably hip, infuriatingly relevant.

“Thank you for telling me, Finter. I presume it is getting more serious, then.” How the words and her own tone rang bloodless in her ears, repressively poised and shrewishly clinical, dry as a wafer and unattractive in the extreme. Asexuality of the soul.

So they saw each other every weekday, Finter and “Niki”, co-workers turned couple. Surely there were all sorts of snags and pitfalls inherent in that, opportunities for overexposure, professional complications, a situation that could very soon burn itself out for any number of reasons. Abbey would deal with the situation. This can all work out, she told herself. I just have to be patient. I just have to be patient. I just have to be patient. I just have to be patient. I just have to be.

V. In Which Abbey Phones Her Sister Nine Nights In A Row

LIlla lived in the Pacific Time Zone and Abbey in Central. In the wee hours, the post-midnight hours, Abbey still stood a good chance of catching her sister awake and coaxing her to talk, as she had nine nights running.

It was mostly a monologue by Abbey framed as a dialogue. Awful pressure would build up over the course of each dreadful day, and the phone calls were to vent these poisons, in the nick of time Abbey felt, before her soul cracked like an overheated reactor. Lilla on the other side of the country was a sympathetic audience; also Abbey relied on her to vet the situation, her sister as doctor who was to listen to the symptoms of the situation and make a nightly prognosis of reassurance and solace.

Abbey was very thorough. She took Finter quotes and relayed them to her sister. Finter said this, Finter said that. Most of these were then appended with questions of Abbey’s own devising: what do you think he meant by that? Do you think he’s telling me everything? He’s always been honest before, don’t you think? Maybe he’s just using this girl for sex. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. Using is the wrong term — I don’t mean that pejoratively. I’m not judging. He called me today, out of the blue. It was a nice talk. Fluid, you know. Our old rhythm. Has to still be somewhat interested, don’t you think? And he almost always responds to my calls. Always calls me back eventually. Does it sound like he’s stepping back to you? Please be honest. I mean, we have an open relationship, yes, but it’s still a relationship. Even with this other girl in the picture. We still see each other, almost as much as we used to. Monday nights, and Thursday nights. Weekends are still in the mix. God, don’t I sound stupid to go on and on like this. Pathetic. I’m sorry, sorry to keep bothering you like this. You have got to be bored by now. It’s just, it’s just that….

Lilla’s responses would barely register with her, at least not until well after the conversation was over and they had finished for the night and Abbey was left alone in silence once more. LIlla gave a few opinions, offered up some advice. But Abbey found all of it maddeningly vague, non-committal. There were rare moments when her sister said something concrete —“I am sure he still loves you. That doesn’t go away overnight.” — and Abbey clung to such comments like the pronouncements of an oracle. Of course he does. I’m being foolish. Then though she would continue to parse Lilla’s words, and if there had been anything which sounded ambiguous on the chances for a happy resolution, i.e., tramp deposed, formerly devoted couple reunited, Abbey would be seized by the urge to reach across the country and cellular space once more and force her sister to elaborate, give specific and ranked reasons for why she’d said such and such. If instead it sounded positive — “I am sure he still loves you…” — it still was never enough to keep Abbey upright for long; she sank under the platitudes and consolation, what surely were mere condolences meekly offered under the auspices of encouragement. She is trying to shield me, Abbey thought. Doesn’t have the heart to give it to me straight, when it’s so obvious, so laughably obvious. Abbey did virtually the same thing after any of her talks with Finter. In both cases she heard more what was not said. What was not said was a great deal; it spoke volumes.
There was a maw of silence all around her in the night, and into this cave came calling some animal, an ugly thing with teeth, always hungry and ready to feed, devouring any hopes she tried to hold to.

Abbey contemplates, Abbey debates, Abbey broods, Abbey thinks and thinks and thinks while the animal adjacent chews on the hours, masticates the minutes, swallows seconds one at a time.

VI. In Which Abbey Shocks, Mortifies Herself

Finter lived 4.6 miles from Abbey’s house. South on McCleod, right onto Burnham, stay on Burnham until the right onto Lancaster. A full mile on Lancaster, then a left onto Norfolk. Fifth house on the left, the cottage-style one with the hedgerow, taupe siding, white trim, front porch with lattice work knee-high around the columns and a fern hanging on each side of the steps.

Tuesday nights, Wednesday nights, and maybe/probably the weekends. She had pinned down with fair certainty that these were the times he saw her socially. These were the nights Abbey drove by; not directly in front of the house — what if they’d been on the front porch? — but around it, circling the block like a buzzard or a surveillance drone, scavenging clues. Abbey and Finter still saw each other, but their times together had not been going well. Suddenly estranged, an abstract distance but one impossible to traverse, lots of second-guessing, restive smiles, forced casual exchanges, passive-aggressive questions, stilted groping, and every now and then a curt, ugly exchange. Still somehow the real matter was never dealt with, and they were unmoored from each other, the bows of two vessels adrift in the current bumping clumsily, then drifting further away, one from the other.

Tonight was a Tuesday. No cars were in Finter’s drive. Fine, a date. Restaurant, movie, knowing Finter a documentary. Stings, but ok. Abbey drove by again around 10:30. And there was only Finter’s orange Prius, no other car. Couldn’t have gone that well.

There were unsettling possibilities. Abbey had not witnessed the return, so couldn’t swear this Niki/Nicolette was not in there with him. Perhaps she was; perhaps he’d take her back to her place in the morning before work. Or maybe they were shameless enough to just saunter into the workplace bathed in last night’s indiscretions, the cheeky pair. Nonetheless, she doubted it. Instinct told her Finter was in his house, and his bed, alone. This was altogether the best outcome her reconnoitering could have brought back.

For that night, sweet relief. She was liberated, momentarily reprieved from having to think about faithless Finter and the detestable Nicolette. It was the next best thing to being with him — for tonight at least, on par with it. Tension uncoiled. Her appetite had been sketchy at best since the whole ordeal began; she cooked up a late dinner of spinach and ricotta pierogies and scarfed it down. Not much of a drinker, she drained two glasses of slightly corked Chianti to celebrate. It was a glorious few hours.   Into the next morning, even with the ruby of a headache lodged behind her left eye and her mouth feeling freshly upholstered in naugahyde, the carefree feeling persisted, only beginning to wane around lunchtime, when it occurred to her that she should have been bold, knocked on his door, dumped out the contents of her full and cluttered heart before him and begged to be loved anyway.

Best-case collapsed the following night when a sable-black Accord was parked in front of the house at 7:42. And at 8:38. And 9:14. And at 9:54 and 10:17. At which time the house was dark except for the porch light and a weak lamp burning behind the white curtains in one room. Finter’s bedroom. At 10:51 the lamp still burned. By 11:29 it did not. The Accord was still there. As it was at 11:37, and 12:05, 12:22, 1:36, 2:02….

VII. In Which Abbey Goes Rogue

Now at the midpoint of the semester, Abbey did something unheard of for her. Radical. She revised her syllabus. The official title for the course was Modes of Authority and Power in the Later Works of Shakespeare. Covertly, Abbey was introducing a new theme for study: Jealousy. Really, much the same thing.

The play currently under study was Othello, which fit perfectly well and in any case could not be changed now. What she did however was slow forward momentum on the reading, scale back and slow it to a crawl. She wanted the class linger on the ruthless machinations of Iago and the disintegration of the Moor. She had the feeble but holdout hope that rather than regurgitating remedial paraphrases of the passages, the class discussion would break new ground and Abbey would hear something she needed to hear. One of her student’s might even break the norm and offer up something vital, profound, some unwitting epiphany to break her out of her situation. At the very least, for ninety minutes three days a week, Abbey could mandate that discussion she was involved in would center on what she wanted it to center on — jealousy and agony, the conspiracy of doubt, sexual madness, the gradual seep of insanity — the only subjects to which she had any inclination or ability these days to devote.

Next — this was the radical part — she dropped The Tempest altogether, substituting The Winter’s Tale, particular attention to be paid to King Leontes’s descent into the madness of the sexual maelstrom (though Abbey did really hope that the moment at the end of Act II, the random bear attack on the coast (!) of Bohemia (!!), would still make her laugh out loud, as it had never failed to before).
Most of the students had already purchased, or downloaded, copies of The Tempest; Abbey went out of pocket to supply everyone with cheap paperback copies of the new play. This itself was a minor calamity, or comedy of errors, as she was not able on such short notice to locate eighteen of the same edition. So some got Signet Classics, some Folger’s Library. The page numbers differed between them. She assigned the readings accordingly.

She kept to the shadows with her change of plan, did not inform anyone.

This itself was so unlike her that it exacerbated her already high agitation, and she was drenched in cold sheen of fear whenever the department head walked by her classroom.
She was studying what she needed to study, desperate for some sort of insight or revelation that could save her. For Abbey had drunk, and seen the spider. Always she’d heard that we go to literature not for answers but for the appropriate questions. Well, she had been a voracious reader since age five, a devotee of serious literature since adolescence, and had been teaching the great works, particularly those of Shakespeare, for almost a dozen years. At this point, Abbey felt, she had earned at least one fucking answer.

VIII. Abbey Anders

Stakeout. 11:57 in the p.m. 917 Norfolk Avenue. Sable-black Accord in driveway, along with desert orange Prius. No activity.

The porch light on; it never went out. A lamp as yet weakly glowed in the bedroom window. Once and only once tonight had she witnessed them, at around 10:30, two languid silhouettes moving behind the white scrim of curtains. Toward the bedroom. Since then, nothing. No stray flickers, no passage, nobody leaving. Ensconced beneath her sightline, tucked away together. Maybe at least turn off the lamp now, Abbey thought. Must you see every part of each other forever? Dawn will be here before you know it.

By this point in her activities she was a veteran and had come prepared. The furious downturn in the quality of her life had been going on neigh on two months now, and that was too long to still be abstaining from food. She had dropped eighteen pounds. Yeah, yeah, I look great,
she wanted to respond to those who complimented her on the recent weight loss. Just think, I keep up this pace and I’ll be dead in no time. However, diminished appetite — read: starvation via anxiety — had eventually surrendered itself. On the passenger seat beside her was half a meatball sub with provolone in a wad of wax paper, an open bag of kale chips, a Granny Smith apple with several bites gone, and an Eclair from the bakery near campus. She drank lemon grass tea from a thermos

Also on the seat, a pair of binoculars. But she suspected there would be nothing more to see tonight unless it was one of their hands broaching the frame to switch off the lamp. Maybe there were still engaged in a prolonged congress of sexual acrobatics and lascivious doings, well-shielded by the angle of the window; or else, more likely, they had already fallen asleep (knitted together). Finter was an early to bed, early to rise type. Abbey once had been also.

She had no real purpose in mind with continuing this vigil — read: voyeurism, read: stalking — outside of one. She wanted to see him. Not in the light of investigation, not as a subject for monitoring, but just as Finter. Finter as Finter. Finter with his lanky leanness, his long limbs and long neck, Finter with his chin beard and the tufty hair perpetually in need of shaving along the back of his neck. Finter in his drainpipe jeans, his chinos, the top button of his shirts always buttoned. His ambling gait that was the walker’s equivalent of whistling a show tune. She missed him. That simple truth had only recently presented itself, oddly enough, a frail little beacon in all the darkness. Finter’s long, slender nose that ended in a tiny nub; when they were first together, the nose presented a logistical problem in kissing, as she tended to come in straight ahead, and was forced to alter that approach to accommodate the elongated Finter schnoz. Awkward the first few times, titling her head to one side to reach his mouth. But how  quickly it became natural, the right and appropriate angle. How she missed it, missed planting the fine tip of her nose on the bobbed tip of his. Will I ever do that again?
And too the way he draped one of his long legs over her torso in his sleep, like a sloth scaling a tree. And the way he had of popping his knuckles when sitting down to start work on his laptop. How animated his face got when he was reading a book, a panoply of expressions: widened eyes, narrowed eyes, puckered mouth, nibbling on his bottom lip, a grave set to his jaw if the subject matter were anything troubling or tragic (Finter read a great deal of anthropology, world studies, geo-political tomes about tribal displacement, ethnic cleansing, deforestation, malaria). She missed it. His passion for raisin toast; she missed it, the sweet heightened smell of powdered sugar and cinnamon and toasted raisins that would forever be Finter’s smell to her, as official as if he had his own line of cologne.

I might never be around him again, swaddled with him, making breakfast, browsing around the stands at the flea market.

In the front seat of the car tucked away at the end of the block, Abbey Anders was in tears. Crying unfettered, a gurgling spring. Yes, it was heartbreaking, but contrary to the poisonous, unmitigated agony of the last several weeks, it was not a terrible, wasn’t abject, did not feel toxic. No, it was emboldening almost, enlivening in its poignancies, fortifying for all its sadness. It felt like life, yes? The pangs and throb and ache of it all, the beauty in it — this had to be what life felt like at its most authentic, when lived to its breadth, not dodged or anesthetized or mediated, but with arms wide-open to the whole shebang, exposed to all the junk and jagged edges and sharp points and blunt bludgeonings.

She chomped on another bite of apple, bit off a big hunk of the meatball sub. She felt absolutely famished. Time for nourishment, to gorge herself. Eat, drink, be heartbroken

There was a thought she wanted to bring up in the next class. Shakespeare being a playwright, a reading of his texts uncovered a simple but subliminal poetic device, assimilable only by dramatists: stage directions. The entrances and exits, the comings and goings. No matter the edition, these were always uniform, always relayed in brackets and always in present-tense, little clips of navigation, these perfect present-tense nuggets lodged between soliloquies and blank verse reveries, rhapsodies of impossible eloquence, the immortal lines, the stage directions, there to push the action along, birthing characters onto the stage, killing them off, provoking event, making something happen. Enter ghosts, exit people.

She started the engine. Buckled her seatbelt. Backed out of her spot down the block, shifting into drive. Exit Abbey Anders down Norfolk, taking the right on Lancaster, pursued by peace.