Out a dreaming rider stares, window glass rattling bumps in the rails. Tilts her head up to disappear the city behind the pane and formless only water spreads out, out. Not tunneling into metropolis she coasts a Neptunian sheet. Though she thinks of home, or to and from, her thoughts are these packaged away in the closet of a day dream: that ahead is only foamy wash and a very long swim.

Hand in box again. Flip rattle flip flip stack rattle corners press against cardboard walls and soften and dull flip rattle flip stack flip he can feel the film slipping against film and backing and the corners fraying as he delves for another halting image, his hand plunged into the polaroid sea like looking for a puzzle piece the same as all the rest, or a single Lego, or a lawyer’s business card in a desk drawer. Mansion facades, children in graduation caps, sunsets, and dogs. Dogs in the dozens. Flip. Flip. Shake the box. Rattle. He puts the scene of the woman on the train into his shirt pocket and drops the orange shoebox on the coffee table’s glass. He checks his watch. He leans back into the couch and turns on the TV. He puts his feet up and the buzzing voices upturn the small hairs around his ears and he loses the dialogue and his mind wanders. It takes off, actually. The countdown’s inevitability in 10… 9… 8… a lit fuse fizzling a winding path and the cannonball, fastened to his mind by a thin wire, fires whoom up through the roof and into the night sky. Ballistic arc over and then down, over the river and down into Red’s where his used-to-be-friends are sitting at this same moment in time. And he sees his error repeated, he has been pulled along by that wire and the TV is gone now because he’s in the bar and saying words again that darken faces all the while urging himself silence. 

Back again, he bends his knees, repositions his feet in front of the box, and slides his heels forwards, pushing it off the table. Dogs tumble and scatter.

 

He falls asleep. He knows this not because he wakes up the next morning, but because he can see himself. He hovers in a false mirror just above his own visage and can see the pupils dashing behind the eyelids, dragonflies zipping the surface of summer water globes. He can see the thin brown eyebrows, the jutting chin, the deep-placed eyes and the uneven nostrils. He sees the hair, almost shoulder-length, splayed darkly crepuscular, haloing the pale face. He has the urge to pick his own nose. He can see the thing, right at the cusp of the nostril, a thin white slug. Will he remember it’s there in the morning? He floats a ghost above a ghost. The cold clothes, shallow breaths, the temporary departure of sentience. He moonlights as a dead man.

Now the dream flips him up, right-side up so he sees the ceiling fan, and he is dropped into himself, in shock of infinite freefall.

 

Sunlight.

Sunlight slashes across him through the blinds. He lifts his arms and moves his hands among the motes of dust and they strobe softly as they float from slotted light to slotted light. He puts two fingers into his shirt pocket and pulls the stack of pictures. Putting them between his curled lips, dry, he sits up and unbuttons and removes his shirt. He stands, steps over the legs of a man sleeping face-down on the floor, and goes into his bedroom. His hand smooths the corner of a movie poster, uselessly asserting fuzzed masking tape. He tosses the shirt vaguely towards a laundry hamper and pulls the photos out of his mouth to swallow saliva, then drops them onto the nightstand. It holds them up with its black-coated metal, spindly curls daintily tangential against the carpet. He reaches over another man, naked in his blankets, slides his hand over the sheets and pulls a flannel from them, buttoning some of its buttons. He brings the photos into the pocket of this shirt.

He steps through the torn screen door into the outdoor kitchenette (fun and energy-efficient, this fully-equipped outdoor kitchenette will take any party to the next level. With three hidden compartments for beverages, an automatically retractable awning, and decorative strings of tasteful white lights, is there a better way to reinvent the summer gathering? You choose the tile, you choose the paneling, you choose the life you want). Two men hunch over the frosted glass table, sharing a plate of scrambled eggs dotted with hot sauce and they greet him with laughter as they tap their bare feet on the scuffed ocean-surf-sapphire tile to the fiddle of folk radio. He counts the rent, a pile of bills under a quartz crystal on the cocktail fridge. He finds his boots on the stovetop and he takes the stone walkway to the picket fence gate, off-balance on the melted rubber heels. 

Sidewalk squares sedentary and even, road wide so the noise of the neighbors’ garage doors doesn’t shut-shut-shutter the silence of a 6pm dinner sit-down, lollipop trees with ample berth for the telephone wires. The 6mbps wires gliding on sex into home offices and screeching back to their creators delivering the details of internet shopping habits. The sun is wrinkling wind-rolled shards of tree bark and the smell of their vitality almost reaches his nose before instead he takes inthe reek of sprayed and beheaded astrolawn. He wipes his nose on his sleeve and picks a low-hanging leaf from a lollipop tree to wipe away the evident snot, folds the leaf, and blows his nose on the back. 

He stands at the bus stop in a bowl of summer light and leafblower drone and low howls from the highway over the berm. The sky meets his smile as he turns his head back, squinting at the noon sun, staring a moment too long. The after image is a smeared purple stain which blocks the bus until it grows to fill his view. He trips up the steps and hands the driver a five, keep the change, dropping to sit next to a man reading a newspaper. The man is wearing shining brown leather shoes, gray suit pants, and a silver watch. He has no shirt, and the bottom edge of the newspaper is hovering in the thick gray hair on his stomach. In the corner of the left page is a small ad for a storage sale sponsored by a methodist church and he decides to see what is available at the sale.

When the bus stops at a depot under a hotel he transfers to another going into Jersey City. He tells the second driver he has some change somewhere here, let’s see, then he grips the railing of the bus dizzy sorry that’s the heat getting to me and the driver waves him on sternly. 

In the seats in front of him two women discuss their husbands. “Frank’s a fucking psycho” and truly has no place being around those children but they love him and his transience; his absence cultivates fondess and forgiveness. “I wish Raj ever came home at all,” says the other. “It’s weeks in Tokyo, hours in London-” meanwhile strip malls are suds carried past in the roadside riptide. The world is a car dealership. We are all the last donut in the box or a floppy dollar in the coke machine, signs with jagged speech bubbles, triangular flag strings sales announcements folios ties black shoeshine urinal spray branded pens radiant fillings. Drawers hiding antidepressants. Business cards. We are frenzied pitches and hem-hawing hesitations, squatting appeals to children and canned jokes. There’s a script for everything and what can I do to put you in the leather seat of this car – designed by NASA by the way, did I mention that? – and watch you motor away, today? We are thin motivations and waxed-and-buffed tile floors and desks marooned in the middle of the antiseptic sheen “-just minutes at home and the whole time his phone is on and flashing work, work. I tell him ‘Raj you can’t keep doing this to us, have one fucking conversation with your manager that isn’t an expression of servility’ and he brushes me off with some roses and toys for the kids.” Frank’s wife: at least he’s good with the kids.

 

The women get off in New Brunswick, now in an argument about organ replication. The driver is laughing at radio jokes. In her laughter she’s spit some of her soft pretzel onto the windshield and the bus lurches when she leans forward to wipe it off. It lurches across the tamed Passaic and the sprawled, bowing Hackensack. The pavement of the bridges is dry and brown, an approximation of clay. Behind the trees and the apartments and across the golf courses and swum out into the Hudson Bay is a large copper statue whose human form startles an eye attuned to corners and glass.

He asks the driver to drop him at Mercer Street. Sorry sir, I just go to the terminal. Or: Which Mercer Street? He asks her to stop now, in that case. She pulls over and he takes his time on the steps, holding himself in the door frame to test the air. The driver hits the horn hard. He is startled, so he apologizes, and meets the sidewalk with his warped bootheel.

He faces an old man leaning with one hand on a walker, the other clutching a Black & Mild. The stench of the cigar fills the convenience store awning under which the old man stands sentinel. Later tonight, when the man smokes the cigar’s counterpart in the pack in his shirt pocket, the streets will be radiating the heat of the day and the moon splashing a flag’s shadow across the sidewalk, and he will balloon the awning with hot, moist lung-expelled smoke, finally enough to pass some buoyancy threshold, and he and the store will rise in a slow roar. Ripping progeny pipes apart from their mycelial mothers, the concrete nest will levitate exposed, and dropping gravel in the wet plains west of Secaucus it will shake in the wind and begin to plummet with some grace, thundering to wedge itself in the comfortable and zoning-ordinanced space between two confused suburban homes and the store’s owner will have to build up a new supplier network to provide the requested goods here, the right kind of craft beer and the Ms. Meyers soaps.

Next to the smoking man there are three vacant beach chairs arranged in a semicircle. The man grins. The man coughs. The man takes a drag. The man spits. The man asks him for change. No sir sorry sir what flavor is that sir? Vanilla that’s right thank you. And he leaves the walker and cigar and shining sweaty forehead behind in vain search. Then he turns around with a doorknob question:

“Hey, you know where the methodist church is, on Mercer Street?”

“Take a left, then another left, then another left, then another left. Hee hee hee!”

Complying, he strides up the block, a steeply inclined street and he feels sweat dripping onto his hips and back as he climbs. He reaches an intersection and turns left around a laundromat that is empty, but it seems all the machines are running. He looks ahead and sees he is on the peak of a small hill, and across the way he sees a fence overlooking a trailer park and behind it a small, man-made-rectangular bay. Supported on the top of the chest-height fence by screwed planks is a damp wooden sculpture, a ring about 4 feet tall and 1 foot deep. Broom handles are attached around the outside of the ring. He reaches into his shirt pocket and looks through the photos. He finds the one with the boy sitting perched within a ring, just like that one, with water and trees behind him just like here, with an older couple, probably grandparents, standing in front, taking a picture of their boy. In the photo, these three are unique among the other families in the park behind them because of their generational gap and their lack of a dog. He had salvaged the photo from a nearly-discarded scrapbook at a cousin’s funeral service.

Prostrating neuter before a boy Apollonian aloof in a wooden scythe-box ascended front of the sun, which drowns itself in the darkening canopy. A thin arm in a sagging sleeve is wrapped around a curled back encumbered by flesh and air. But the greatest burden lightens daily because the bowl of life is atilt, the water is pouring out into the dry soil and the lovers grin to know of their sweet deaths.

He walks past the wooden ring above the fence, comparing it to his picture. The coincidence confirms some meaning for him. The road dives down ahead, merging in a swoop with the windstream migration of Rt 78. There are no left turns except an alley next to a closed-down theater. Nailed in the brick of the alley’s opening is a green street sign too worn-down to read. Two girls and a young boy come out of the alley with hockey jerseys slung over their shoulders give me the phone you dumbfuck I’m telling mom you said that word go ahead but you want ice cream later, yeah? they start running when they escape the shade of the alley. He turns in. Steps over a wet garbage bag spilling out from below a dumpster. At the end of the alley a wooden boardwalk is raised above the littered, urine-soaked pavement and hosts the shackled stalls of a hidden market. It stretches to either side along another alley crossing the first in a T shape. He climbs the boardwalk’s wooden stairs and follows its path to the left. He passes hung t shirts, stacks of cabinets, pinball machines, lamp shades by the hundreds, televisions, books; the faded curled spines of brown books. A dark-stained wooden cross with a mirror finish flashes above the mayhem, hoisted out sideways by iron supports drilled into the brick wall and below the cross a sign with a pictorial representation of a chapel and below that a laminated schedule for the storage sale. He ducks his head under a towel hung across a stall entrance. The stall is full of towels on wooden rod hangers in rows, stacks, layers. Multitudes. There are white towels offwhite deep red cool gray and the vivacious nautical botanical patterns that you find slashing like wounds down the shore. As he walks among them they brush his shoulders and they shudder and the disturbance causes the rods to tilt and towels to slip, sliding to the end of the hangers and they fall all around him to cover him and he’s smothered in their soft plush and their rough vinegar smells and he continues walking under the weight of multitudes of towels, a flood of them. He is descending into a towel tunnel and he breathes through the fabric, laboring air into his lungs. There is no sunlight down here but a glow grows at his feet and he kneels and begins to pull towels out from under him, excavating the light. A guitar melody meets his ears through the thick fiber walls and every towel he removes reveals another layer of a song and he can hear the words

An-da-lu-si-a with fields full of grain

I have to see you again and again

Take me Spa-nish caravan

Yes, I know you can

and after a pause the panic rises in their instruments and in his throat and he is spiraled down, wrung-out in a now all-white light. He blinks, again and again. He is staring at a lamp bulb. Looking away at the stall’s attendant – hey buddy, what’d you do that for you tryin’ to blind yourself? – whose face is covered in a purple afterimage, he puts down the lamp. Got any film equipment? Yeah try the stalls down the opposite end the church there. The attendant props him up by putting hands on his shoulders. They’re warm, and steady. They hold him up and push him out. 

He looks up at the buildings that back into the alley. They’re brick and concrete and stucco. They have windows and false barn doors and fire escapes. They’re two to three stories high. They are topped with water towers. The sun has skated past the opening overhead and seethes light on the top row of windows while the bottom of the alley darkens. He finds the booth with the cameras, the film, the lights, enough for a few professional studios. The attendant is an older woman in jeans with a t-shirt picturing a man with rumpled hair. Over it, a long white cardigan. She is playing a greatest hits album on a turntable. She sits on the edge of a wooden bar stool with her arms crossed and one foot on the stool’s peg, the other on the boardwalk floor.

“Come on in. Take a look around,” she says.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Nice day.”

“If you say so.”

He examines stacks and boxes and cartridges. 531, 235, Karat, 828. He doesn’t know what any of it means. 

“What do the numbers mean?” he asks.

“If you don’t know, you probably don’t care,” she says.

“What if I want to learn?” he asks.

“You don’t,” she says. “What can I do for you?”

“Pictures,” he says, showing her the stack from his shirt pocket. She nods. Then again more vigorously. She is jutting her chin in the direction of the table he is leaning over. He realizes that she is indicating that he should lift the tablecloth and look underneath, and that though what he’s looking for is under there, she doesn’t have the patience to watch him go through the piles of photographs, the rubber-banded albums, the framed and the torn, the stained and the defective. He gives her a dollar and throws as many as he can into a plastic bag and she flips her record as he backs out of the stall.

 

Slouched low in a beach chair outside of the convenience store, he shares the awning with the man with the cigar as he rifles through the pictures. Flip flutter. He waves the smoke away from his face as he pulls pictures of dogs and sunsets and wedding parties from the bag, dropping them into the garbage pail in front of the store. Those your folks? asks the smoking man, gesturing briefly with his left hand before returning it quickly to the walker.

“No,” he says.

“Why are you throwing them away?”

“They’re not mine.”

“The fuck you looking at other people’s pictures for?” the man asks.

“I’ve got chips in the pool,” he says. “Which one do you like?” holding up a pair of photos. The man leans forward.

“You’re going to miss your bus you keep it up with those photos.” He looks up and down the road. The bus is waiting for the light at the end of the block. He jumps from the chair and dashes up the hill, stumbling then throwing himself up off the pavement straining his wrist then he’s knocking politely on the bus door. The driver looks at him and she’s unwrapping another soft pretzel with one hand and pushing the lever to open the door with the other sir this is not a bus stop you realize? and he hands her a quarter what the fuck is this, 1925? but he is already in the back and there is no way she’s getting out of that seat to force him off the bus because she wants to get home in time for the debate. She’ll be in the dog house if she can’t speak intelligently about it and without those morning coffee talks with the captain her career’s over so she just lets this bum lay down in the back.

He raises his hips, thrusts out a leg and uses his boot toe to turn the reading light on as the bus hums onto those silent, smooth, thin roads, fluent  through the meadow stalks, cutting the curtains of the smell of nothing dying. The moon strokes the top of the bus like an absent-minded lover and the silent passengers bounce in their fabric chairs, embraced by the disco hotel carpeting and the thin, underdeveloped plastic chair arms while their legs shrink to fit their allotted areas. A man answers the phone, says nothing, the voice on the other end says a lot, and he hangs up. A boy can’t decide how far back on his head his sweatshirt’s hood should sit. The driver laughs suddenly to a joke played through her headphones and the bus lurches and rides the rumble strips and though it doesn’t slide off the side of the road what if it did? and just tipped into the swamp there and bubbled into the thick deep.

Here’s one, he thinks, here’s something: it’s a photo of a man with a red trucker hat and a red flannel shirt and a thick red beard holding a glass flagon of beer with a hand on someone’s back – only their arm is visible – and a face of apology. Or: it’s not a photo but a hole in space and the cabin of the bus decompresses explosively throwing him through the tiny square hole into a bar called Red’s.

 

As he pushes the bar door inwards, brushing snow from his hair, he has the feeling of doing things in the wrong order. Inside, a bouncer sits on the edge of a stool with large forearms crossed at his chest – the man recognizes him, and recognition turns to wariness, following him with its glare as he makes his way to the bartender. She is a woman with long blonde hair tied behind her head. She is wearing a black polo shirt with the Red’s logo (a red-feathered bird with inexplicably long legs). She’s polishing a glass while listening to an old regular retell stories of their young and grossly overpaid boss’s old and creepily amiable boss’s time-theft.

He gestures to the bartender, holding up two fingers then tapping his head with his middle finger’s knuckle. A young man at the bar sees this and elbows his friend. They are laughing as they pick up two wiffle ball bats leaning against the wall below the dart board and the bartender pours two generous shots of vodka, then slides two yellow hardhats over the bar to him. He loops their straps over his wrist and then picks up the glasses. He turns to the crowd in the bar. Most are huddled in pairs or alone with their jackets pulled around them to shake the memory of the cold winter air. A chaotic slavic polka rolls out of the speaker system. He finds the red trucker hat and begins to navigate – followed by the two guys with the plastic bats – between purses slung on chairbacks and cavalier elbows stuck out in attempts at confidence.

Along with the red hat hover the faces of three women above a round hightop towards the back of the bar. He approaches as their conversation stalls. One of the three women sees him and sits up, torn from talk by his appearance. Before the man with the red hat can turn around to see who she is looking at, the hat is pulled off. In a familiar motion, he fits one hardhat on the man’s head, slipping his wrist from between the straps. 

The sitting man turns around and pulls the helmet away. “Fuck off,” he says, when he realizes who is standing behind him.

“Old time’s sake,” is his reply.

“You shouldn’t be here,” says the woman who recognized him. She has dyed her hair with a purple streak and a blue streak. He likes it, and would like to be able to say so. She looks past him, refusing eye contact. He turns back to the standing man.

“I should be here. We should be here. None of you can take a joke,” he says. Though nothing he’d said when he was thrown out of the bar months before had been a joke, it wasn’t meant to be entirely serious. He’d only conveyed the words with vitriol, the kind of dark dissatisfaction that grows in the gaps between people. The standing man puts the hardhat on the table, arms crossed, refusing the drink.

“More for me,” he says, and throws back his head to pour down the first glass of vodka.

The moment the alcohol hits his throat he is smashed in the back of the head by one of the plastic bats and the two guys behind him are now both bent over laughing. Everyone in the bar is chanting some Russian word. He never bothered to learn what it meant. He sways on his feet, dizzied by the impact and holding back vomit. He adjusts his hardhat, turning to face the guy who hadn’t swung his bat, and lifts the second shot glass as if to perform a toast. He smiles, tipping his head back the way he’d do, months later, while waiting for the bus, smiling in the sun. He smells trees’ bark, though he doesn’t recognize the scent. The man with the bat sways uncertain. He looks for guidance at the people sitting at the table but they are all looking past things, wishing in their minds that this wasn’t happening, uncomfortable with the outcome of events. The smell of the bark is fading, pushed up and away like a front of warm air by a new smell: discarded grass, recently mowed, unable to pull moisture from the earth from which it has been severed, yet smothered by a heavy blanket of dew, carelessly slated to evaporate.

When he is hit in the head a second time his vision goes. He stumbles into the red flannel shirt and hugs it to him like a blanket. Or: He hangs off of it like fitting his fingers through the schoolyard fence. He recovers just before sliding to the ground and pushes himself up, using his old friend’s chest for balance. The room’s spin jerkily slows and stops and he is offered a plastic bat to hold himself up. 

“The hole you’re digging yourself into is starting to look pretty roomy,” says the man as he fits his trucker cap back on.

“Let’s go outside.” It is the bouncer, arisen from the throne on the edge of the stool in front of the door. He feels the bouncer’s large, heavy hands wrapping around his shoulders and feels himself pulled backwards to the front of the bar.

“Put it on his tab!” he shouts to the bartender, pointing back at the group of friends. He shrugs off the heavy like cement hands and, theatrically using the plastic bat as a cane, walks out into the street. He is unused to crying and is glad when the tears come to wet his face. He tries to catch them in his hand but it makes him dizzy to try to do so while he walks, so he lets them drop to the ground. They melt into the snow, a vanishing trail.

 

The bus from Jersey City drops him off at the bus depot and the driver is speaking with her colleagues as they prepare for the next scheduled departure. He knows he will not be allowed onto another bus and he begins to walk home. He is sweating in the summer mid afternoon sun.

He could be in a prehistoric swamp. He can ignore the buildings, the lights, the roads. He can ignore the lollipop trees, which are not really trees but a concept of trees designed by someone who grew up in a concrete-and-glass booth looking out at other booths and generally content with the stolid existence of all of the booths. Ignoring these things he needs to simply pluck a stalk of onion grass growing alongside the sidewalk, chew on it until his saliva turns green, and smell the air for a draft of marshy decomposition. Then he can be in the swamp.

In the prehistoric swamp things are nameless. If there are people, they are also nameless, and really there isn’t a distinction between things and people. In the prehistoric swamp, he might see all things as people: The way a person reacts to rainfall – feeling its tiny impacts, feeling it brush the dirt from their arms, taking in the splashed-up odors of what is around them – is no different from the way a real tree or a stone reacts to rainfall. 

All the people out in the swamp, the ones huddled among the tree roots and the ones bathing in its streams, in turn are merely other things. The way a stone forgets the destruction of a nearby stone is the same as a human who forgets the splitting open of their kin, though it happens right in front of them. Though a stone is split open by a rumble in the earth and its crumbled half, no longer rooted but instead compromised with a new network of cracks and separations, leans against its neighbor, its neighbor stands still in the rain and continues its slow journey from dirt to shape to dirt again.

 

Arriving home, he walks up the driveway having taken off his melted-rubber boots, soles of his feet stinging with the grit atop the pavement. He falls into the cracked white leather of the outdoor kitchenette’s sofa. The porch light is on and illuminates his hand and drops his hand’s shadow onto the sapphire tile. Looking at his hand’s shadow – the silhouette of a great oceanic mammal in a great sapphire sea – makes him feel like his mind is loose at the places where it connects itself to the inside of his skull. This feeling is not unpleasant. The bag of photos slides off of the couch as he loosens his grip, feeling very tired. A photo falls into his view.

Two golden rings, lit with the flicker of a shrine candle, intersect with two more golden rings, the twin shadow of a man’s glasses frames in the double pane of a dark window. His stare conjoined with that of his bisected soul disestablishes the one. Without access to his own reflection, the truths and surety of optics are a well-made raft, like bamboo rope and sapling ply, on which he too easily drifts through the unwarped glass.

I was in prison in March. They called it camp. We said to each other “how long have you been at camp?” and Jefferson, for example, would say “66 years.” There were six of us. The cells were arranged in a circle. Each had three walls made of mud bricks. Facing inwards there was no wall, only iron bars. Everyone’s cell was visible this way, though in order for you and your direct neighbor to see one another, you both had to stand right up against the bars. The floor was made of the same mud as the walls and it was cool in the night. Lying on our backs, we listened to each other breathe.

Before Dorothy, we didn’t know each other’s names. I had a view of the park outside my window and they would ask me what I saw and I would say “kids” and, mostly, that was that. Thirteen weeks, three days and seven hours into my time at camp – this exact measurement was given to me later by a man I would come to know as Mohammed – my door slid open and I fell through it because I had, at the time, been rattling the bars violently with my kicking. A burly orderly caught me, wrapped me in a tight cloth, and walked me down the stairs that spiraled through the center of the tower that held our cells. Eventually we came to a level of the building that sprawled out into offices and I was led down a hallway to a door that had a plaque: “Social Worker” and below that “Dorothy Leide.”

Dorothy was a new addition to the program. She gave me a career aptitude test and told me I could be a writer. Well. She encouraged me to start a journal, which I never did. At first I would say this to her and she would make a note. “No judgement,” she said, “but I do have to write it down.” After a few months of sessions I started to lie and say I was making entries regularly. When she asked me to see some of them, I told her they were too personal. She seemed to approve of that. I didn’t like lying to her, but I’d started to like the sessions and didn’t want to get them canceled. I’d heard that Donovan wasn’t allowed to see Dorothy after his first day, when he told her he wanted to fuck her. This was his traditional greeting, I learned, but that didn’t matter. While the orderlies still had to spray him down and clean his cell and take him down for court dates, Dorothy, it seemed, could be rid of us like scraping salt off a pretzel.

Donovan was my cellmate to my left. Jefferson was directly across from me. Al was to his right, adjacent to Donovan, and on my right was Mohammed. On Mohammed’s right was Cass, short for Cassandra. While four of us saw Dorothy, excluding Donovan of course, Cass was being taken to a different social worker named Steven. Before each of us had come, the others insisted, our cells had been empty. Later, when Jefferson died, and then Al, they were never replaced. It seemed that we were the only six ever meant to be here. So I remained in the unique position of forever being the newest camper.

As I said, it was only after Dorothy that we came to know each other’s names. She told Al to tell us his story first. Al was a short, young man, to some of us only a boy. He was 22 years old when I arrived, and though he grew to look more decrepit than Jefferson in the last years, he was still the youngest of us, and never stopped seeming boyish. He was nearly bald but boasted a thick, brown beard and – I’m only a little ashamed to say I’d noticed this, watching him in his cell doing exercises with his shirt off – a very furry shoulderline. He looked like he could be a young maniac, someone whose social anxiety and dark inclinations fed into each other like a snake eating its tail, keeping him from friends and drawing him to internet blogs that extolled the virtues of genocide. I should append that description by noting that when I first arrived at camp I thought everyone to be a terrible murderer, approximating that they were criminals a degree-and-a-half more criminal than me. It was an unfair judgement, if only because I made it based on appearance alone, or perhaps only to set myself apart.

Al was born in a suburb of Indianapolis and was there with his family a short while before his parents split up. He was five years old then and his father, having taken custody of the child, moved with him to Northern California. They settled in a small hillside town and Al would spend an hour and a half every morning on the bus to school, being the first child picked up, and an hour and a half every afternoon, being the last child dropped off. He had, he said, much time to think on those bus rides, as they wound their way through mossy, garbage-strewn forests and pre-fabricated neighborhood developments.

It was on one of those hot nights that Al spoke up. I was jammed against the side of my cell to eke out the last bit of coolness on the edge of the floor next to the wall, after having moved all about to find a place that hadn’t been warmed by my body. The top pane of Jefferson’s window was just beginning to glow with the dawn. Our bodies were restless and it was usually at this point that we would not be able to get any more sleep, but did not want to move yet in the hopes that we could, just once, drift off again. Sensing everyone’s awakeness, Al cleared his throat.

“I’m Albert,” he said, choking on the last syllable because of his dry throat. He coughed again and swallowed. “I’m Albert.” Again, this time louder. I heard the subtle sounds of necks raising, turning towards his cell. “I’m Albert and I want to tell you how I got here.” He told us about Indiana, and the towns in Northern California.

“I’ve always been the fucking ‘new kid.’ Somehow, even in high school, when everyone from Appleton Junior High and Strausberg Middle and Athens Middle came together on a new campus, when basically everyone was new, I was still the new kid. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t, like, lonely – there’s a popularity that comes packaged with that status. I had a few girlfriends in my day. I played on the squash team. I even hosted a party – it was a fucking rager, to be honest – when my dad was out of town. But it felt to me like everyone else had a history together. Their parents knew each other, or they’d all visited the same state park over the summer, or they were all friends and mutual friends online.

“I don’t know if that’s what set me up to be some kind of psychopath. A terror. I don’t really think so. Everyone’s got high school woes. Everyone’s yearbook has that page they don’t want to turn to, that they put glue all over and close it up so that when they open it again later they can’t get a glimpse of it when they flip through the pictures.

“Even when my hair started to go, I don’t think it was particularly setting me up to get here. That was a scary thing. Tufts of wet fur in the bathtub drain. My dad took me to some doctors. I don’t know what they said. It was a developmental issue. Nobody at school said anything. I started dating Sandy around that time. She felt for me, but the pity was hard to deal with. It was a gross thing between us. We couldn’t do anything but leave it unsaid. I dumped her for it. I dumped a girl for pitying me because I saw all the other couples who didn’t have that between them. Sandy was pretty, with red hair she wore in a messy bun sometimes. She started dating a football player whose name was Randy. Actually fucking Randy. You can’t make this shit up.

“I took a book out from my closet around that time. It was the gameplay guide for a Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG. My mom had bought it for me in a bookstore when I was so little. All I had liked about it was the colors on the cover. I started to create a character using the book’s instructions. He was a half-orc, an ugly guy whose sense of honor was twisted by the murder of his two older brothers as a child. Real nerd stuff. I didn’t have anyone to play with. I designed a storyline for this guy, this half-orc named Sardock. Sardock lived in a shack in the mountains and attracted passersby into his hovel so he could steal their things, cook their flesh and eat them. It didn’t make much sense, really. Now I realize it was an embodiment of the rage I felt that I couldn’t put a finger on. I still don’t get how that rage got me into trouble exactly, I mean, how it all started – as I said, everyone has that page in their yearbook, and everyone feels some kind of anger.

“When my dad went away the summer after junior year, I wanted to have a party in our house. A teammate from the squash team provided vodka from his mom’s liquor cabinet. When word got around, I had a few guys come up to me with ideas: a live band, a scavenger hunt, a spin-the-bottle game. The band brought all the sound equipment and set up on the fucking roof. It was like something out of an 80s teen movie. Naked girls. Naked guys. A lampshade on a dude’s head. A fucking paisley lampshade on a dude’s head. Most of the time I wandered around inside, cleaning up after the football team. Randy at the center of the cluster.

“When Sandy came upstairs and started nosing around in my room and came across my notebook with all of Sardock’s stories, his statistics, his high strength and low intelligence scores, she sat down by my bed and read the whole thing. When I found her there, we talked. I remember the whole thing word-for-word:

‘Hey, Albert,’ she said. ‘Hey, what the fuck is this?’

‘Stupid stuff. It’s a roleplaying game.’

‘Who do you play with?’ She asked. ‘Do you play at that comic book store above the Panera?’

‘Yes.’ I lied. ‘It’s nerd stuff, though. I don’t go there anymore.’

“(At this point I was fingering the baseball bat that was leaning behind my door. I think she saw me doing that because she slowly closed the book and stood up, backing away from me.)

‘I need to go downstairs, Al. I’m sorry.’

‘No, it’s fine, Sandy. The band’s starting their second set. You should go.’

‘I’m sorry Albert. Here.’

“She tossed me the towel that hung on my closet door. It must have really reeked. You know the smell of a towel that you don’t wash in time? One fucking week you don’t put the towel in the wash and it smells like mildew forever. I was embarrassed about that. I put the bat down and I guess I wiped my face. I guess I had been crying. I think that’s a moment that I like to remember because it showed I was still human, right? I looked like a half-orc with my hairy back and my disgusting patchy scalp and my hunched posture, but I had that going for me, that I could still cry if a girl went through my shit.

“Later, Randy punched me right between the eyes. I had said something to him, vodka sloshing around my stomach setting fires. The next morning I woke up on the couch. The house was pretty clean, all things considered. Lamp shade back in place. I only had puke chunks on my shirt and on the towel, which I had clutched around my neck. Somehow, none of it got on the couch.

“My dad found me like that and took me to the doctor again. The developmental thing was worth taking some meds for. Those made me sleepy and sick in the morning. I didn’t have the energy for Sardock any more. I didn’t have the attention span to read about school shootings online. It didn’t matter, though. They still busted into our house one night and wrangled me to the ground. Planning that shit these days is enough to get you locked up. I wasn’t planning anything, I said. Most of the case against me consisted of character references. All my classmates. All saying I was a twisted, tortured dude. Sandy didn’t need to take the stand. Everyone already knew the same stories about me. She was a talker, as it turned out.

“The jury pitied me. That turned out to be our fucking bonafide defense. Pity. Mental wellbeing at an all-time-low. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work anymore. Too many prissy white killer boys being offered a second chance. Getting out at 47 and first thing they do is buy a gun and find their old teachers. So they lock you up for good, I guess.

“I’m here because I’m a freak who fell into all the wrong activities. I lied about being on the squash team. I was never on a goddamned squash team. It really was a squash player who brought the vodka. I’ll never forget the sight of that lanky dude with the squash team t shirt (believe it or don’t: their logo was an actual squash). And Sandy and I did date a few times. I’m supposed to remember that, that I had an important life experience before I got in here. Because likely, I’m never getting out. Meds or not, my hair’s going, and my back is going. What I want in the end – this is where you assholes come in – is to get out from under the weight of all this stupid, insolent, post-modern pity that forms that all-important support beam in the scaffold of normalcy.”

Cass snapped her fingers at this last, eloquent outburst. I recognized the gesture from poetry readings. We’d all sat up as we listened and by the time Al was done the rising sun was glaring through Jefferson’s window and the beam of light rested on the top of my head. It had gotten so warm that I was sweating down the back of my neck and I started to get a headache. We remained silent. Dorothy would later encourage each of us, in turn, to tell our stories. Al had broken the silence of our first few months together, and soon we knew each other’s names and what we each saw out of our windows – a different view for each, as we faced outwards radially from the tower. As I had the park view, I did the most work describing what I saw. Mohammed’s view was obscured by an air-conditioning unit and a billboard, though he could, with some stretching of the neck, see a sliver of the park himself. Nevertheless, it seemed everyone came to rely on my descriptions of the view: the park had a wide, flat pond in the center that was surrounded by winding, root-covered paths. Large boulders dotted the sparse woods and often I would see children climbing on them to the distress of their parents.

One morning that looked like a Sunday an insurance company had set up a table in the farmer’s market in the park and was handing out plastic, clacking noisemakers. All day we heard the clack clackclackclack clack clackclackclack as children ran from tree to rock to father to water fountain to playground gym to grass to pond edge with their little hands grasping a rod attached to a box and they spun it around and around and clack clack clackclackclack. That day, Mohammed told us about the car bomb his teacher encouraged him to build. He had more than a hunch that it wasn’t simply a research project, but he went through with it anyway. Mohammed insisted that the orderlies shave him daily, and I thought it had something to do with religion, the way he was so vehement, but I never found out the exact reason.

Cass had been a pirate. She was the second oldest next to Jefferson and had come to camp as a young woman. At eighteen she was up in the rigging of a frigate, which had pulled aside a merchant cargo ship and latched on for boarding, firing pistol shots down below. At fifteen she harpooned a shark that was flopping around the deck, muscling itself with surprising agility towards fear-paralyzed pirate boys. Cass’s true aim skewered one crewmate’s leg on the way to the shark’s brain, the rest of the boy mangled up in the endless rows of teeth.

Mohammed, Al, and Donovan maintained that Cass was a good storyteller but a fabricator. Her social worker, Steven, may even have told her to fill us with bullshit. I liked to listen to her. She had little shame about her past. After she spoke I and Jefferson remained, and it was implied we would share as well. Dorothy pushed me to. “Give them your history,” she said, “because it’s all you have left.” Jefferson didn’t seem to know what was going on. His breath rattled in his sleep.

Outside of us and Dorothy, there weren’t many others at camp. A few orderlies would take us back and forth from the offices for our appointments. One, a very large man, had this blotchy skin. His arms were darker on top and pinkish on the bottom. His head was tan down to the base of his neck, where, if his collar was loose, which some days it was, you could see the same pinkish skin. He walked me down the stairs to see Dorothy one day and we stopped between two doors, one leading forward to the main offices and the one behind us closed on the tower. We stood in a limbo space that provided unexpected privacy. But a privacy in jeopardy of being shattered by the swift and routine opening of either door. He pulled a paper from his breast pocket and unfolded a painting. It was an abstract pattern made of green shapes – twists and blots and curvy vines. He pointed at me and smiled. I said it was nice. It was then, four years after I came to camp, that I realized he did not speak the same language as me.

Never before, and not until much later, did any of the orderlies try to communicate with me. This episode was an isolated incident, but I noticed, as the weeks slipped past us like water over stones in a brook, that when Jefferson and I were brought down those tightly spiralled stairs it was always the large orderly accompanying us.

One night, I dreamed.

* * *

I am not where my body is supposed to be and it’s not nighttime. That’s how I know I am dreaming. A bike rattles along a path cut into the side of the river’s flood wall. It’s a wall made of eroded dry clay, with roots sticking out and tufts of grass poking over the top edge. The bike rattles because it is a bike in a dream and I am assuming the path is rocky. Strewn with rocks covered in a full layer of red-brown soil. Or maybe the soil is more yellow. Creaking metallic sounds.

Rattle it rattles

    Rattle it rattles

    Rattle it-

    “What?” Dorothy says.

Another hint it is a dream: she knows what I am thinking.

“I was imitating the sound your bike was making, and I did it so many times it started to sound like words,” I say, too truthfully.

“What did you say when I asked you about your cellmate Jefferson? I couldn’t hear you.”

When his name came to me with clarity, and when Dorothy called him “your cellmate,” I might have been crying. Maybe she couldn’t hear me because I was crying.

“He wakes up in the night,” I say, “or he jolts during the day on his morning walks around his cell. Or he stops in the middle of a word and won’t talk for the rest of the day. And I know why. And I’m not telling.”

The boat we were apparently on tips on its side and we fall into the water. Lightning licks across the sky, an instant in separate frames, and lances the bright half-moon. I float in the water. Waves are slapping the sides of the upside-down boat frame. Dorothy holds me under my arms and paddles to shore with her free hand.

“How do you know he wakes in the night? Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asks.

“He just stops talking. I see his eyes fill with fear. Like a child realizing that things pass, that yesterday isn’t the same as today.”

“I don’t understand,” Dorothy says. “Can you swim?”

The water isn’t cold. That’s how I start to realize I am no longer dreaming. Dorothy’s arm is large and hairy. Her skin is blotchy. It isn’t her skin.

The orderly flips me onto my stomach. He straddles me. I can tell because his thighs feel like thighs, pressing my ribs inwards. I think he has been hitting me. I feel sore, like I had been working the day before, lifting stones and cutting down trees with a dull axe and climbing rope ladders.

“Rattle it rattles. Rattle it rattles,” I am saying. I am whispering this. For some reason, I don’t want to wake the other campers. They are probably awake. But I don’t want them to hear my sounds.

There is a feeling of something moving across my back. I know it is a paintbrush, with cold smooth paint. It traces an unknowable pattern. The paint is green, I decide. I remember the pattern. Abstract twists and blots.

* * *

I woke up. Sunlight flowed around the bars of Jefferson’s window. I woke up facing the wall and I put my hand out and touched the clay. My fingernails found purchase in its wrinkles and I began to pick at it. It crumbled easily. Dust filled the lines of my fingerprints. Obscuring my identity.

“Rattle it rattles,” I whispered, again and again.

When I stood up, Jefferson was looking at me. It was unnerving to be looked at by Jefferson, since usually he stared straight through you, straight through you and the wall and the surface of the earth and space to the end of the universe.

“Turn around,” he said. “Let me see that.”

I turned.

“It was that orderly that did this? The splotchy, big one?”

I nodded, knowing but also realizing again that the orderly was real, and that the rest was a dream.

“Did he say anything?”

“I couldn’t understand him if he did,” I said, turning around to face Jefferson again.

He was leaning against the wall. Limp. He was crying. His gaze drove right into my eyes. He told me his son used to paint like that. Zig-zags and spirals. Green was his favorite color. Jefferson’s eyes wept. He held his hand up and looked at it, grasping something small and spherical. He opened his hand flat and closed it again, closed it around that unseen object.

“Christ, Jefferson,” Cass said. Everyone was listening. “Did you kill him?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember much, anymore. Do you think I did that? Is that why I am here?”

“What do you see?” I asked, “when you’re staring out to the end of the universe?”

“I am dreaming as I stand. As I walk. As I talk to Dorothy. My mind isn’t all there. My memories come in and out like they are real. Nothing is vivid, so everything could be – or could be not. In my memories I am young. A young father, a young boy. The visions can last for hours. Then they disperse. It’s horrible. Then I am trapped here, decaying with nothing to live for but the next lapse in my day in which I can dream of what was and could have been. Sometimes, I’ve realized, my mind makes it up. I’ve been here 66 years but sometimes I remember getting awards at my company and having a second child, a girl. Things that never will happen revive me then leave, taunting my old mind.”

He moved to the bars of his cell while staring back at me unceasingly. He slipped his ragged, papery hand through the bars. I could see his pale fingertips. They came closer and I could see the flakes of skin along his fingernails. He stretched farther and farther, his hand now halfway across the gap between our cells, hovering above the door in the floor that led to the stairs. With a groan he pushed his shoulder between the bars. He was so thin, emaciated. His face was shoved against the metal and it made impressions in his cheeks. Tears ran down the bars and wet his shirt at his shoulder.

“Trevor. I can see my boy! I can see his hand holding the brush, criss-crossing your bare back. I can see his small shoes. If I look down at my hand, it is young and supple. It’s gripping a baseball. My feet feel the grass. Trevor! Does he know he is loved? He sits and paints and doesn’t look at me. But when I am not looking at him, I can feel his eyes. We just can’t both look at the same time. Is this by choice?”

Jefferson’s eyes rested on an invisible figure behind me. I heard a crack as he pushed his collarbone through the bars. He screamed. His fingers wavered, but continued inching towards me. The door in the floor slammed open and two guards – the first time we’d seen guards since I’d been brought in – clambered up. One held Jefferson’s arm steady while the other unlocked the door. He was taken downstairs blankly staring upwards. Donovan swore. I looked down at the park.

Jefferson was absent from his cell for over a week. Dorothy had stopped pestering me about my background, my psyche. It felt strange to be missing our cellmate. Though he wasn’t the most alert, we’d gotten used to being visible from those angles – I used to see Jefferson, Albert, and Cass fairly easily. I caught their eyes, from time to time, and through these glances we’d always hosted a wordless communion. With one member gone, the balance of our circle was thrown off. And because Jefferson’s window faced East, the sunlight that came through in the middle of the morning always fully opened into my cell, and Jefferson’s shadow, which occasionally projected its occupancy into my space, was noticeably absent.

The large orderly, too, had gone, it seemed. I wondered if he’d been connected to the scene of Jefferson’s disappearance by more than hallucination. It occurred to me that Trevor might be only as real as Albert’s orc Sardock. I pictured the big orderly, resting in a tent, painting the bodies of his victims as he cooked their meatier bits. I even conjectured that the orderly was Jefferson’s son, painting those green tattoos as he’d always done. Any fantasy only surficially mitigated the horror I felt when I thought of Jefferson’s lapses that ripped him between happiness and desolation, between a youthful hope and a cell locked on senescence.

One evening a bomb went off outside of the school that Cass could see from her window. The explosion brought guards to every perimeter of the prison. The smoke shot into the sky and languished there like a dark fog through the next morning. Mohammed knew that the bomb had arrived in a van. He knew this, it seemed, just from the sound, and from the way Cass described the wreckage of the school’s facade. Albert had two theories on the kind of explosive device that was used. I was surprised at how thorough his knowledge was until I remembered bombs would have taken up a large portion of his research on mass killing. We’d taken to speaking more freely. It seemed, for a brief two weeks, that we could start to hold conversations unprompted by Dorothy’s counsel.

“Will you tell them now?” Dorothy asked, when I related all of this to her. “It’s your history, it’s all you have left.”

“What about my writing?”

“You don’t do that,” she said. And I knew she knew. She watched me pick at a splinter in my chair’s wooden seat.

“I will start, now,” I said. And she said “good,” and she knew that I was telling the truth, and she told me that patient confidentiality really had her hands tied. She gave me several sheets of paper and a short pencil, the kind you write your scores with at the bowling alley.

We were lying down on our floors, circling like cats to seek the evening’s’ cool spots that would cradle us to sleep, when Jefferson was finally brought back. His arm was in a cast up to his neck. They had lain him in bed, but when the door closed he struggled out of the cot and stood in the center of his cell. We asked him about Trevor. He said “no, I don’t associate with his type,” and looked out of his window, past the bars and past the roofs of houses and past the treeline and past the place where, in the morning, the sun would begin its crawl onto the sky.

It started with a phrase that he heard inside of his head, a woman speaking to someone else. “I am sorry” she was saying. She was thinking, “I don’t love you.” Lucas was on a hike when he heard this. He didn’t know where he was, and he attributed to that aimlessness the opening of a creative conduit through which strands of light soared, pouring from the void behind his eyes up into his hollow cranium, meeting and flocculating, glowing ever brighter. They formed a ball of light, like a rubber band ball made of white, white negative space emanating purpose as a lightbulb would heat. The work started this way, and Lucas came to understand it as his vision.

 

He heard his name called from behind the curtain. The director’s skeptical, accusatory tone used to scare him. His first and only play had made it onto the director’s desk only by a favor, one that his aunt would regret granting once she saw the production. In their first weeks working together Lucas explained his changes and preferences to the director tentatively, suggesting shifts of focus, refinement of details. As the work continued, though, and the play began to look something like that big ball of light in Lucas’s mind – the coalescence of his vision – he bulldozed over the theater diplomacy and politics, making sweeping, unexpected alterations to the production. He recognized the trope of the demanding artist: he wanted his story told, and he wanted it told his way. It was the story of a trillion souls.

The director watched the rehearsals from an old aluminum stool that he dragged across the stage and throughout the theater, to see the show from different perspectives. Those at the right end of the front row saw a completely different show than the middle-back (the make-out section, he called it, though nobody was ever known to make out during this theater’s performances). Some audience members had the experience of being spoken to, looked at, engaged, pleaded with. Others ran the risk of feeling entirely omitted, so that the show needed to be designed to project in what the director clumsily called “3-D.”

The stool he dragged around would scrape across the floor, the rings connecting the legs together rattling against each leg, loose at every joint, sticking out metal scraps that snagged the director’s cardigan, whose holes grew larger and more numerous with every rehearsal. Approaching Lucas, the director had actually stuck his hand through one of these holes, inadvertently, while putting his hand in his pocket.

“You’re renaming the war?” he asked, lifting his clipboard into the air with his free hand, a pantomime of frustration that petered out before it passed his shoulder.

“Yes, it’s an allegory,” Lucas said.

“Are we changing the uniform or the Truman recording?”

“No. Please update everyone.”

The director, now accustomed to these surprises, chewed it over for a moment (chewing literally, though he had nothing in his mouth) and turned away. Assistants flocked to him, lanky students who had drawn their notepads at the sight of the two of them talking.

Lucas was no great writer. The play was a patchwork of unaffected speech and bizarre hallucination sequences. Much as he was charmed by the avant garde motifs of his creation, he also knew that he needed to simplify, to make the message explicit wherever possible. His recent changes were attempts at clarification. It was important that the protagonist, Sasha, wasn’t involved in a war of trauma, something remembered and historical, a global scar. Here, it was a war of discovery. In the opening act he’s ready to show himself off, to meet his girlfriend on the tarmac in a fantasy of triumph, breaking four excruciating years of written correspondence.

 

(All soldiers in the cargo hold of a military plane are asleep in cots except for Sasha and his friend George.)

SASHA: (showing George a picture of Anna): She is the other half of my eternal soul.

GEORGE: (looking at the picture): How can you limit yourself to just one woman? I’m going straight to the pub when we land.

SASHA: You may think of it as limiting, but my union with Anna is a shattering of boundaries. Now that we’ve finished The War of the Self, I’m ready to fulfill my coupled purpose. Before I shipped out, we were drunk of infatuation, much like your buddies in the pub. But things will be different now. More than carnal love.

GEORGE: You’re young, Sasha. I won’t try to rain on your parade. I’m excited for you.

SASHA: Thank you. Let’s get some sleep.

(Sasha and George pull their blankets over themselves. Lights fade.)

 

Sasha and Anna’s first few moments together are sweet. They walk in a Parisian garden. Anna enjoys the initial bliss but Sasha is too familiar with her. His time away has incubated an out-of-proportion sense of relation, of ownership. She herself, three years previously, had questioned the value of exchanging love letters with a man she hardly knew. Though she can point to no particular flaw of Sasha’s, she is wary of his sincerity, and things begin to go awry.

The play was abstractly autobiographical, and text arrived on the page so quickly that Lucas lost control of things. His own thoughts comprised a vivid foreground that he could report with clarity and detail. This drove the work forward, an incessant engine, but he felt he was writing a journal entry rather than a work of art. He came to this conclusion after he’d already written a third of the play. Daunted by the idea of a re-write, he started mining his dreams for material. The often absurd results gave the play its color and were the sole reason the director could be convinced to put the damned thing on.

 

* * *

 

Jane picked this show because it wasn’t Shakespeare, because the theater was nearby so Stanley wouldn’t be stuck in the car with her too long, and because it was opening night – a rare opportunity to go see something which had no reviews to scan, no ratings to anchor expectations. It was an adventure, in a way. That was Stanley’s word, adventure. Since Felix had gone to San Francisco for his internship, they’d been left alone together. Their couplehood was a played-out thing that came back to them in startling, uncomfortable newness. Hence date nights and sex play and saying yes to going to parties. And adventure. If she agreed with the idea, the word itself was childish: it sounded like Tolkien and cartoon shows and unemployment. She knew it was mean to think those things about Stanley’s word, but to give him the benefit of the doubt – to say that she knew what he meant, anyway – felt like the adult position, a too-large investment in preserving her husband’s worth and an uncomfortable height from which to look down at him.

The new system of reconnecting with each other was ruthlessly deliberate. But she was doing her part. She’d chosen to buy the tickets to Lucas Codd’s “Edge of Fantasy,” the play whose set photos, though nestled in a 90s-style website with a pale yellow background and typefaces her interns had already figured out how to purge from their hard drives, exploded with color and vibrancy and weirdness. Still, it felt like a chore. Without Felix in the home, their lenses were turned towards one another. Like two mirrors held parallel, the depth of reflection was near-infinite – she not only saw Stanley, but she saw how Stanley saw her. And when she silently chastised herself for letting Stanley see her unhappiness, she could see that reflected in his eyes and words and movements as well. Back and forth these impressions ping-ponged and they had to throw their attention elsewhere, slam the mirrors closed, flush with one another against the wall. But even that act felt confusing – she was skeptical of the need to turn away from each other as a way to rediscover their bond.

All of this was covered in therapy, of course. The mirrors were the therapist’s metaphor. It was a good one, so good that Jane could tell it had been used with other patients, and she’d begun to feel like a cookie-cutter failure, like her problems with Stanley were utterly common and that if she was worth her salt at all she should’ve been able to break the cycle and get out from between those mirrors that had every dysfunctional godforsaken couple on the planet incarcerated.

She took the tie out of her hair and pinched a tortoise-shell clip.

“Jane,” Stanley called from downstairs, “Felix is calling!”

“You talk to him, Stan. Tell me what he says when we get in the car.”

A pause. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Jane replied. Yes, she was sure. She wasn’t supposed to leap at the opportunity to talk to Felix. It would do them good to talk to each other about him, rather than basking separately in his energy, his conversation, his words that were a surprise no matter what he said. The healthier thing was that sometimes Stanley could talk to Felix, and sometimes Jane, and they would tell each other his news. As a sharing practice.

Stanley would forget the details, though. Jane preferred to be the one talking to their son so she could tell Stanley all of it and tell him how Felix sounded and weave in her own observations and hopes about what direction he was taking. Not just bullet points, forgotten names, topics that couldn’t be recovered because Felix had already hung up and slipped away into his happy, separate realm.

Jane finished her hair and waited until she heard Stanley say goodbye to Felix before she went downstairs. Stanley was wearing a gray blazer with black pants, shiny black pointed-toes and a dark green tie. His brown, thinning hair was slightly pushed up and back with wax (or oil – Jane noted that she had no idea what kind of hair product he used). He looked proud, sheepish, curious. He looked too hard at her, was a little too inquisitive. She put her hand out to him, he gripped it and smiled so big that all that worry fell off of his cheeks. He pulled her out the front door and across the lawn with the dew coating their toes and ankles.

In the car, Stanley’s hands shuffled over the steering wheel perpetually. Jane was supposed to be used to this.

“He said he joined a hiking club,” Stanley said. “Mostly people his age. One girl from work. They’re doing day hikes, trails around the coast. He says it’s beautiful. I’m not sure I’ve heard him describe anything as beautiful before.”

As Jane listened, the memory of her first cigarette in college emerged, triggered, maybe, by the sight of a convenience store out the passenger window. She did hear Stanley’s words but her thoughts were focused elsewhere: car rides mesmerized her, accessing the powerfully contemplative part of her mind. Her college roommate was impressively pragmatic and self-analyzing. She spun out rationalizations about looking cool, being able to quit at any time, smoking being a habit you would rarely take out of context. So that if they went off campus to a small convenience store one town over, they were very unlikely to bring smoking into their lives at school. They didn’t but they were making more frequent trips to that store as the semester progressed, until her roommate transferred schools. Then, Jane stopped altogether.

Her thoughts slid along separate pathways, linking the memory to recent events. Sometimes reveries have a reason. It sounded like Felix was growing up. His transplant to San Francisco enabled new habits, like replacing the word “cool” with “beautiful.” Probably he wouldn’t take those habits home with him, and would start to see life with his parents as a thing that held him back. With the absence of their son, Stanley and Jane were looking to find those old habits – the touches and the smiles – that had disappeared when they became a household of three.

“Did he say anything about Olivia?” she asked.

“No,” Stanley said. “I didn’t want to push him if he wasn’t going to bring her up. I’m sorry. I know you want to hear how that’s going.”

“You boys got to talk. That’s enough.” She pressed her forehead to the window, silent for the rest of the ride, thoughtless except for regular estimations of how much silence remained before they arrived at the theater.

 

* * *

 

Assistants padded around backstage, rolling setpieces across the boards and whispering instructions to one another, their notepads always on hand. The director was outside, talking to influential audience members. Lucas’s aunt had a front row seat. Felix walked past the wardrobes. A rack of period clothing from the 40s and 50s. Humanoid animal costumes. Scuba suits. Double-length pants for stilts. Behind these were two sedan-sized shimmering orbs made of wire and wrapping paper. He tapped his knuckle on one, watching the paper ruffle, waves of motion sending convulsions of light across the body of the jellyfish.

Lucas felt warm. He attempted to triangulate the source of his nerves by deciding where they were not coming from: he did not think the actors would fail, he was content with the writing, as far as it had gone. His expectations for the play’s reception were not high. He was done with the work, though. It was no longer in his hands. To see it stand on its own, without the props of his mind – this was something new. This, he thought, was a bit like parenting. Of course, he knew nothing about that.

It had been 16 months since he’d met Victoria, whose part in the creation of this play was undeniable. She worked for a marketing group one floor below his office and they became familiar over sandwiches in the food court in the building’s lobby. On their second date she’d reached across the table at a coffee shop to touch his arm, laughing. On their third she’d kissed his neck. Those moments always came to him first, then the review of the plot: they’d only gone on three dates when Lucas had to travel out-of-state on a contract. She agreed to be his girlfriend even though he’d be absent for three months. She halted contact after one, apologizing for being impulsive, for misleading him. She was never in the food court after that but he occasionally spied her in the mornings, squeezing into the elevator with a tin lunch box. The magnitude of the resulting turmoil was unexpected, and he picked up a habit of walking for hours every chance he got. He walked until he was exhausted, then turned around and went home. He’d walk what felt like halfway across the state. He once decided to walk due north. Aiming to ignore roads and barriers and rivers he even brought his passport, thinking he might cross a border. He was stopped by the fence of a huge naval air base.

These walks put him into a trance. Most of his thoughts bounced around in his skull until they lost momentum and were silenced. If he listened to music he would stop hearing the words. Inevitably, he began telling stories in his mind. They started off as imagined conversations between himself and his boss or Victoria or his aunt. They became more solid, opaque, and turned into narrative day-dreams. In a pivotal moment he was no longer a character within them. When he landed on the character of Sasha it stuck, and he memorized Sasha and Anna’s story word-for-word as he paced. He’d get lost, paying no attention to his direction or surroundings, surprised to find himself arriving on his own doorstep at two in the morning, having left after breakfast. When the story got too large, when the plot of what would become the first two acts of the play was spun out, he started putting down the words. At work the lines of code, like the words in the music he listened to when he walked, lost meaning and his thoughts turned to Sasha and Anna. So he wrote.

Then the thing lost steam. He hadn’t decided what would take place between his characters. And he was very aware of the autobiographical element: he was living out a fantasy, or revisiting trauma. It was self-serving, introspective and unappealing. Each word that came out dragged on the floor of his mind like a kite that couldn’t take off. Outside of those trance-like walks his imagination was a dry, colorless thing. Looking for another source of inspiration, something that could fuel a novice writer, he pulled a malaria prophylactic out of a suitcase in the attic. He’d been given it when he went to Phnom Penh on business. His coworkers told him the drug induced particularly vivid and strange dreams. This spooked him more than the prospect of malaria, a disease he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine contracting.

He began taking the pill – twice a day with meals – and waited for the dreams to come. Before bed he would prepare himself by reviewing Sasha and Anna’s current plight: by the end of Act 2, Anna has told Sasha that she doesn’t love him, and he’s returned to his family’s farm in the countryside to recover from what felt like a physical wound. His father had died during the war so he takes on the old man’s duties around the house, but finds himself ill-prepared. He can’t get the tractor running and loses sheep often when he takes them out to pasture.

Lucas started a dream journal. The first few silent nights left him with shapeless impressions. He waited patiently for the visions to come. When one finally did, he found himself watching events unfold on a mountainside. Watching from the fisheye, occasionally wobbly perspective of Sasha’s tired old horse.

 

(In a pasture, a horse stands downstage left facing upstage. Sasha kneels in front of a baying sheep.)

SASHA: It’s foot is broken. It could be our dinner tonight if I kill it and bring it down the mountain.

(Sasha cuts the sheep’s throat and blue smoke billows from the incision. It forms the shape of two huge faces in the sky above him. One is clearly Anna’s while the other is dark and featureless.)

SASHA: Anna! Anna? Who is that man? Is it me? Was it someone else? That you come to me now tears my heart open again. I don’t know where I fit in. I don’t know who to look for. Wait! Wait!

(As the two faces dissipate, the horse sits down and whinnies. The dead sheep deflates, turns to ash and is blown offstage by a gust.)

SASHA: I’m no use here anyway. I’ll go back to the city one more time. I need to know for sure.

(Sasha stands and looks downhill, pulling his scarf around him. He walks offstage, whistling for his horse to follow. Lights fade.)

 

For this scene the director had two large plastic faces custom-built and a smoke generator filled them with blue fumes. Clever lighting illuminated the curvature on the plastic and the faces’ contours were vaguely visible, near-perfectly matching Lucas’s vision. The faces separated at the seam to disperse the smoke.

Journaling his dreams imparted some lucidity to them, and Lucas discovered that he often thought of Victoria while he slept. She didn’t take a central role: she was an element of the dream only insofar as he thought about her while he watched his visions unfold. Her presence was a distracting reminder that no matter how abstract he made the play it would always be about his story. His dreamer-self floated through valleys of giant jellyfish and burned alive in village fires, all the while getting snagged on thoughts of Victoria. This was evidence to him that things between them were somehow unfinished.

Seating lights were down and curtains were drawing up. Lucas took a paperclip from his pocket and began unfolding it. He walked near a pile of chairs in the backstage corner, pulled one down, and sat, repeating to himself the play’s first line as he heard the actor playing Sasha’s mother proclaim it from the stage:

 

MOTHER: (pushing a pen and notebook into Sasha’s hand) If your hand cramps, my Sasha, don’t stop writing. Nobody could fault you for an extra word. Each one is precious to us.

 

* * *

 

The play had Jane at turns confused, skeptical, and bored. The language was plain and uninviting and the set pieces were comically exaggerated. If it weren’t so broken and inconsistent Jane would have wondered if the storyline was a satire. There was one phenomenon, however, that held Jane’s rapt attention.

The actor playing Sasha looked just like Felix. Not all of their facial features were the same but his welcoming green eyes and slouched shoulders were an exact match. Between lines he often combed his neck-length black hair to the side with his fingers and Jane remembered their son doing the exact same thing on a video call two weeks before. The resemblance transfixed her the moment Sasha was visible on stage, bent-over, sitting cross-legged next to a coop of live chickens and tossing bread at them while looking off above the crowd. A red searchlight swept across the stage, always just barely missing him. She had looked at Stanley to see if he’d seen Felix as she had, but he just smiled at her.

While throughout the play Stanley’d been moving in his seat, exhaling deeply, often turning to Jane to lay down an inquisitive look, he now stared hard at the actor playing Sasha as the fourth act opened. Jane thought it was because he’d finally noticed the resemblance. Sasha wore jeans and a white t-shirt now, sitting centerstage on an egg crate, strumming a guitar. He was playing slow, sad chords and mumbling incoherently. The rest of the stage was pitch black until light bulbs began flaring on, glowing dimly. They dropped slowly from above the stage, lighting up at random points in their fall. Jane thought of raindrops in low gravity. Dozens of bulbs were dropping now and Jane had to squint as their collective glow grew. All above and around Sasha these dim bulbs hovered while he played the guitar. She realized that he had been incrementally emphasizing his words more and more until finally, suddenly, they were all-at-once distinguishable.

“When you fly tomorrow,” he sang, “above the skytops and the trees, will you spot me way down here, alone with my dreams?” The lights above his head to the left brightened and illuminated a balcony. From under the balcony a cascade of fluffy, gray feathers was falling continuously, pouring down into the darkness of the unlit stage floor. A window beside the balcony was open, green wooden shutters with flaking paint swung out to the sides, and Anna’s face was visible within.

“When you fly along, will you carry me with you, will you take my words on to the valleys beneath you?” He played and sang while Anna stared out of her window, expressionless, looking out at the first few rows of the audience, avoiding eye contact with Sasha.

The egg crate was sliding to the right and the balcony to the left. They were moving apart so slowly that Jane only noticed it when Anna’s face had almost slipped behind the curtain completely. Just before she was gone, though, Anna put her hands through the window and slammed the shutters closed. A gust blew the feathers at Sasha, getting caught in his guitar strings while he still played, interrupting his chords. The lights dimmed and rose once again out of sight. Sasha strummed with one hand and with the fingers of the other he combed his hair, now staring straight out at the audience. Straight into Jane’s eyes.

When Felix was six he asked Jane why she loved him. The day before she had shouted at him for breaking a lamp as he dashed around in the living room with a ribbon in his hand. She was so used to forgetting what happened day-to-day, since this was the only way to keep up with her son, that she hadn’t at first connected the wrenching question to the incident with the lamp. She’d told him what she could – that he was hers, that he was sweet and smart and funny and she wanted to be together always. She was angry with herself for making him question that bond. He said “okay” and turned away to his colored pencils.

 

* * *

 

(Lights up. Sasha is stepping down from a floating stone pathway into a narrow, smoky street. Buildings are lit by orange sunset glow. A bus rolls forward obscuring Sasha, stops to let off a single passenger, and moves on. A woman stands in the street with Sasha.)

HOPE: Do you know where I could catch a cab?

SASHA: No. I’m not sure how I got here.

(Hope is uncomfortable and backs away from Sasha, turning to look for someone else to help her.)

SASHA: But that’s not to say I can’t call you a cab! Just one moment.

(Sasha runs inside a record store with dusty windows and a dim interior called “Spun Out” and returns a minute later.)

SASHA: They’ll arrive in 5 minutes.

HOPE: Thank you.

SASHA: What’s your name?

HOPE: Hope. What did you mean you don’t know how you got here?

SASHA: I’ve been spinning about like an object in space. All that spinning and you kind of forget what direction you’re headed in the first place.

HOPE: Have you stopped spinning?

(Sasha steps closer to Hope. She puts her bag down and holds out her hand. Sasha takes it. Smoke blows across the stage and when it disperses Hope is gone, her suitcase remains on the ground. Sasha leaves his hand hanging. The buildings behind him fall away to reveal the earlier mountainside scene. The sheep with the broken foot is baying. Sasha runs his fingers through his hair and kneels by the sheep with his back to the audience. Lights fade.)

 

Lucas was sweating, noticing incongruities in the delivery of lines and the positioning of set pieces and the way his metaphors fit together. It was over now, though, and he felt those waves of energy subsiding. He wrote down a few notes for the director and slipped them in his files backstage, then started putting on his coat to make a quiet exit. As the curtains fell he heard a noise from the audience. A man and a woman were smothering laughter. It wasn’t everyone, Lucas told himself later. He told himself this not because he believed it, but because he was having a hard time getting his bus pass from his wallet, and he had to calm down to fit his fingernails behind the leather. The laughter had not been entirely drowned out by applause when the actors returned for their bow.

Two weeks later – the bare minimum – the performances were halted and Lucas had drafted an email to send to Victoria. He wrote about the show and the laughing couple. He called it cruelty, and said that cruelty made him feel nothing. Victoria hadn’t been cruel, really. Her actions made him feel anger and self-hate, emotions that began something useful and culminated in a vision, built on-stage. His letter was more cathartic for him, he thought, than it would be useful to her. If he hadn’t been so insulted, he might have felt pity for that couple in the audience, that their eyes were so shut.

 

* * *

 

At the end of the play Stanley had grasped Jane’s wrist and she realized he was shaking with laughter. She started laughing, relieved that Stanley’d found the show as juvenile as she did, glad to embrace the joke with him. They covered their mouths and stumbled out of the theater.

“Hope! Hope?” Stanley said as they got in the car. “Blown away in the wind.”

“I bet they shut it down within the month.”

Then they were home and Stanley’s arm was around Jane and they were warm under the blankets and she asked him if he’d noticed that Sasha looked like Felix. Stanley laughed and said he hoped Felix was having a better time with Olivia than all of that. He didn’t answer her question, really. He slept. Jane did not. She alternated between keeping her eyes open and then closed. She shut them carefully. In the solitude of still-awakeness her introspection found a sour taste. Laughing at the play had been part of a barricade strategy, keeping them from diving too deeply into the subject of love. They kept themselves near the surface so they could come up for air. She wondered what it would be like to sink as low as Sasha, to tie oneself to stones and glide down and convulse without air and tap into the unthinkable. She shut her eyes and willed herself to dream it.

A rule-breaker is a rule-breaker, no matter how careful, righteous or iron-willed. It only takes one crime. Then, one steps over into the other category, a place swirling with liberating and endangering notions. The grandiosity of ethics shrinks to become the simple, precipitously imminent but equally innocuous possibility of being caught, a state of mind adorned with cryptic talismans: skepticism, alienation, freedom. These are the traits carried by those who, through their vengeance or underhandedess or bumbling, become rule-breakers. They are the traits that shrink the conduit to fear and facilitate the crossing into a world with fewer boundaries.

And so Rudder came to be walking his last beat tonight – sweeping through the cemetery – with a box of pizza in his hands. You weren’t supposed to do that while you were on duty. Rudder’s sergeant always said, you’re not done working till you’ve got your slippers on. What if he needed to reach for his radio, or flashlight, or gun? Well. He didn’t actually have his gun. He’d forgotten to bring it to work. That was the start of it: today he’d been slipping down the slope that speeds you to your next not unintentional mistake. No matter how much guilt or regret he’d felt about leaving his gun at home (he’d been sweating in his collar nonstop, nervous someone would notice) he never corrected his error, and so he’d made another: buying the 18” with sausage-and-peppers.

Rudder was known in the small town for being the by-the-book guy, the 23-year cop who’d managed to accrue not a single disciplinary action write-up. He was fair, and that meant that the grocer sometimes got a speeding ticket, but so did the owner of the pickup parked in the grocer’s loading zone. His reputation for fairness wasn’t a point of pride. Rather, it was just a confirmation of how Rudder liked to do things. Now that he had the box in his hands, however, he felt like a perfectly useless police officer. Despite his years of unblemished service, it turned out Rudder was a shlub.

He didn’t exactly have the thought, “as long as I’m screwing up, I might as well buy some pizza to bring home for dinner.” But after forgetting to slide his gun into his holster, it seemed like a less treacherous decision – what’s one mistake next to another? Things really weren’t that bad, anyway. Other cops had reputations for being corrupt, abusive, dangerous (if nothing else, it was very clear tonight that Rudder was not dangerous). He told himself these things as if in self-defense, and didn’t wonder at how easily such small justifications placated him.

It was October. He could feel chill, moist air against his wrists and ankles. There was a half-moon, shining dully, doing its very best to light up the cemetery through the gnarled, leafless branches. It illuminated the tops of the gravestones, bringing out sparkling bits of their amalgams. Leaves scratched across leaves.

There was a fear in him. Always a small particle of fear letting out black radiation, quickening his heart and his breathing. Rudder wouldn’t say he was scared. He wasn’t. But he knew the fear’s presence. This was a thunderous, unknown cloud looming inside of him, so close that he couldn’t get a good look at it. Despite walking through these graves in the dark dozens of times, despite occasionally lying on the grass before heading home, looking up at the branches and never being able to memorize them, there was nevertheless food for fear in the darkness of a graveyard.

He wanted to bring a pizza home for dinner so Elena wouldn’t have to do dishes. He would have cooked something, but there would be dishes, and she would insist on washing up. This way, with the pizza, they saved time. Time was needed for other things like having tea and warming each other on the couch, talking about the garden and the seasons, pushing the minute hand of the clock well-past bedtime. She might want to watch a movie, one of those black-and-white ones with Cary Grant that her mom liked. They were wholesome at first. No nudity or gore or frightening tracking shots. But when Rudder tuned into the story and the words, they would drip with eroticism and combative wordplay. The courtships played out like a lost, perfected art, something you see in a museum without thinking, “I could do that with crayons on my lunch break.”
The cemetery was large for such a small population. Rudder wondered if it was very old, or if too much space was allocated, or if nearby towns exported bodies here. Who wouldn’t want to be taken here, in death? he thought. There are high trees and brick sidewalks and a New York-style deli, rare in this part of the south.

Those brick sidewalks were lined with street lamps placed luxuriously close together, whose lanterns rested in plastic globes – no harsh beams of light to scorch your eye. You would walk illuminated, out of the darkness where you can be slighted, harmed, neglected. It seemed that the only place you could go to be out of sight was the cemetery. Shaded by thick canopy during the day, erased by shadow at night, it wasn’t meant to be admired by passersby. These woods had to be traversed to be seen. The paved walkways were a deep blue asphalt. They weren’t lifted into variegated, enticing mounds or crevices by tree roots, nor split by sunlight, had no cracks filled with tar. They were smooth and urban. This paving, the only bit of upkeep or attention the lot was graced with, was possibly the ugliest thing about the place.

Graves were left askew and a rampant crabgrass had taken over, preventing the growth of flowers and ferns. Rudder noticed these things on his beat and wondered if beauty was here to be found, in ugliness, or if to do such finding would be an affront to the place’s obscure identity.

There were three plots: one, where Rudder entered tonight, was half-full of recent graves and half-empty in anticipation of new ones (this is one of a cemetery’s grimmest functions: that it leaves room for the living). Another plot held seven larger tombs. Six housed old families of the plantation kind of fortune, swollen with colonnades and statuettes, and a seventh was begrudgingly placed among them, a decision accounting more for impression than guilt-by-association. The third plot was in a little corner that opened onto Rudder’s street. He would walk through it to go home. It was the first area designated for burial, way back when, and it housed the weathered stones of soldiers and farmers.

 

Rudder imagined Elena at home, re-reading the same paragraph of the inevitably dull dregs of the newspaper, the savory articles all finished and tossed to the side. Her mind was wandering, signaling like a clock the shifting of moments, from after-work solitude to a night with Rudder. This is how he imagined her, at least, and how she told him she often felt. It was an image he regularly tossed around in his mind on his way home. It kept his pace brisk.

 

The main path that led pedestrians through the headstones ran directly from the center of town to the junior high school. Despite its convenience, nobody ever took this path. It was wide, and you could walk in the middle without being able to make out the names and dates – possibly pretending you were just strolling through a park. This path made most of the land accessible to backhoes and hearses.

The small trail Rudder was walking left the main one to quickly roll down a small hillside and then narrowly wind its way from the south to the northeast. At one point – Rudder had already passed it tonight – the pavement stopped and you had to tiptoe your way between the plot of a family of four and one for a single man, buried with his cat. After this it curled around a small pond that gave off a pungent organic smell. In the daylight the water’s surface was green and brown with algae and floated a civilization of waterbugs. Near one edge a sapling sprouted straight out of the water, seeming to ignore some unspoken, general rule that trees should come out of the dirt, that you should be able to sit against them and adjust your legs on their ruts and knobs. Rudder liked to shine his flashlight to see the distorted angularity of its roots, buried into gravel and silt, silent and drowning.

Tonight he didn’t, though, because he was holding his pizza and wasn’t interested in drawing attention to himself. Not that he thought there was any attention to be drawn. As he passed the water he breathed in deeply. That small molecule of fear got over-active near this opaque pond. He still would not say he was afraid, but if he was, he’d be afraid of what could come out of there, a hungry being whose mouth might be nearly as wide as the breadth of the pond, whose teeth might be stones with his name and today’s date carved into them.

After the pond the path climbed upwards again and as he approached the crest of this rise he saw a blue glow above the headstones. Reaching level ground, he spotted a shape, which he recognized as a person not because the shape was at all discernible but because he knew the light was from a cell phone screen.

Rudder bent to put the pizza box down, nervous that he’d be discovered in his laziness or negligence or whatever it was. The grass was wet with dew, and he didn’t want to make the pizza cold, so he set the box on top of a gravestone, the kind that is set flush into the ground. It was the wrong thing to do, not a nice thing to do, to put a pizza box on the memento of someone’s last rites. Rudder couldn’t seem to do anything right. But he didn’t want the pizza to be too cold for Elena. And he needed free hands for this inevitable encounter. Because it was time to do his job.

He wondered if he was in danger without his weapon in a situation like this. He would be late getting home if this person turned out to be drunk or hurt or doing something less savory than merely relaxing in a cemetery after hours. He realized he had seen nobody but a jogger on these nightly walks here, and for a moment gratitude flashed in his mind, that someone else may have an appreciation for these trees and stones and paths. At the same time he was thinking these things there was a running dialogue: he was deciding what to say to this stranger.

Rudder approached, pulling his flashlight from his belt. The light from the cell phone flicked off and he heard the sounds of rustling pages. When he reached the point where the path passed nearest to the gravestone against which, Rudder could now see, this person was propped up against in a seated position, he turned on the flashlight and aimed it.

About 60 feet away the beam lit up a young man in his mid 20s who sat against the grave with his cell phone resting on his outstretched leg. A binder and an old book sat on top of a deflated-looking backpack next to him. The man put his hand over his eyes to protect them from the light. There was a smoking cigarette sticking out from between the fingers.

Among the things he could have said: “Cemetery’s closed,” or “What are you doing out here?” or “Put your hands in the air,” or “What’s in the bag?” or “Put out the cigarette,” or “Are you seriously sitting on someone’s grave right now?” Instead, he didn’t say anything at all. He told himself he was still gathering information, checking the size of the bag to see if anything else was in it, eyeing the shape of the man’s clothes to look for a concealed weapon, checking his eyes for intoxication, searching for a wound, measuring his breathing to see how stressed he was.

“My name’s Dan,” the man said. “I’m planted here in civil protest.”

“You know the cemetery is closed, sir?” Rudder said. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Stand up slowly. Is anybody else here with you?” The man didn’t stand up. He didn’t move his hands, either. Rudder asked again, more forcefully.

“I’m alone. Nobody here but us. I’m sorry officer – I assume you’re police? I can’t quite make out your uniform with the light in my eyes – normally I would do whatever you asked, but the sitting is very important to me right now. This is my protest.” The man raised his hands over his head, squinting his eyes shut. “Please check my bag if you’d like. I’m not dangerous, I’m not drunk.”

“I’m not going to check your bag. Stand up and walk towards me slowly.” The man still didn’t move. Rudder took several steps forward, standing now about 40 feet away, holding the flashlight steady.

“Here,” the man said, looking down at his clothes, “here, I’m going to reach into my pockets, okay? With one hand, slowly, okay? I’ll turn them inside out. I’ll take my jacket off, too.” Hand went into pockets, pockets reversed out, a couple of coins fell into the grass. Jacket slid off one arm, then the other, and was tossed to the side. He stared at Rudder now, dressed in a white v-neck t-shirt and jeans, feet in white socks rolled down at the ankle, orange running shoes. Rudder looked for a familiar resemblance: brown short hair, an unkempt, scruffy, short beard, dark brown eyes and a small nose. Nobody he knew.

“What’s your full name?” he asked.

“Dan Morgan,” the man said. “My parents didn’t want to bother with a nickname by naming me Daniel, so I’m just Dan. I’m not from around here – I drove down from Akron. In Ohio. It took about thirteen hours, since I stopped to rest a lot. I’ve got a bad knee from sitting in tiny library chairs all the time. I did a little sightseeing, too. The whole time I was thinking about this guy here, right under me now.”

Rudder didn’t reach for his radio. He couldn’t be seen without his gun. He had to do this without backup. Why would he need backup? He just needed to throw an unarmed guy out of a cemetery. But he didn’t want to turn off the flashlight, and he needed both hands to search him and his things. He set his flashlight on top of a headstone carved in the shape of a Celtic cross. It took him a moment to rest it in such a way that it wouldn’t roll off the top. Now the beam of light shot over the man’s head and he lowered his hand. It seemed he could see Rudder more clearly. Rudder wondered if he noticed the empty holster. He took another few steps forward, now within about 5 feet of the man. Of Dan.

“If you don’t stand up right now I’m going to drag you out of here,” Rudder said.

“Just hear me out, officer. You don’t wanna be the guy who hurt a citizen making a peaceful protest, do you? This is the grave of S.G. Caldwell, a soldier in Grant’s army when they first tried taking Vicksburg. Or at least, that’s how he died. He was a terrible man.”

Rudder didn’t know what to do, exactly. Dan didn’t seem dangerous. He did want to search the bag. But Rudder couldn’t risk hurting him if he really was here in peaceful protest. He thought about the pizza. He thought he could talk down Dan.

“I’m just going to take a look through the bag, then I’ll hear what you have to say. Dan. Toss it towards me.” Dan flung the bag with one hand about halfway between them. Rudder walked forward to take a look. There was a half-empty carton of Marlboro Reds, two bottles of water, trail mix, a cell phone charger, some receipts and cough drop wrappers. Nothing concealed in the binder or the book. Rudder stepped back and nodded. “So what’s this protest about?”

Dan took a drag of his cigarette and re-adjusted his posture. He placed his hand on the binder next to him and looked down, away, back to Rudder, and down as he started talking.

“Caldwell advocated genocide. I have copies of his journal entries here. He names black Americans, enslaved and freed, who he targeted or wished to target. He implies that he even killed two himself. I traced their names and the information he gives. He was from a town just twenty miles from here. I don’t know how he ended up in this cemetery, so far from Vicksburg, but this is the guy. It turns out that he did kill those two, Lucy and Scipio. Those were their imposed names. It took a while to find their records. Luckily people kept a good accounting of their belongings. What they thought belonged to them.”

Rudder recognized the political angle. He didn’t have much of a stomach for talk of slavery and that time period. He didn’t entirely understand his own position, and found it hard to keep everything in his mind when he was reminded of the pain inflicted on people, human beings, in a time not-too-far-passed. He did, of course, have every sympathy. But what good did that do? He wasn’t knowledgeable on the subject, didn’t have a political stake of his own, and knew that as a southerner, he was automatically suspect.

“Is that why you’re sitting on his grave? Aren’t there worse murderers out there? Big-time slave-owners you could look up?” Rudder started to forget that he wanted to expedite things. Dan’s passion didn’t make sense. It was so oblique to come here to do this sort of thing. It was at-random. He didn’t seem to have that crazed rage that other protestors had, the kind that came with a doubled-edge. Something that looked to Rudder like embarrassment. Dan was not excited to tell the tale.

“This isn’t a very calculated protest,” Dan started again. “I’m a student. I first came across these stories in a little library over in Mississippi. That was six months ago. The narrative has been on my mind for a while. I’m not sure what sparked it, but lying awake in bed last night, staring at the ceiling so hard it became a swirl of colorful little dots – you know how it does that sometimes, the dark ceiling? – the phrase came to mind: I’m going down there to sit on that asshole’s grave. S.G. Caldwell does not just get to lie here in uninterrupted peace.” Dan took a drag from his cigarette, which he seemed to have forgotten, and smushed it out on the ground. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“It’s Rudder. Listen I have a wife to go home to. I can’t be here all night. I want to go my separate way. I’m not gonna report you or anything. Just don’t be an idiot.”

“Wait, Rudder. Please take a look. It’s a quick read.” Dan motioned to the notebook, which Rudder had placed in the grass near Dan’s feet. “I wouldn’t keep you if I didn’t think it was worthwhile.”
He didn’t think that he would be enticed to read something anywhere but here, in the cemetery. It seemed that every night he was in here the world twisted a little, twisted around its axis like a rag being wrung out. He liked the twisting, if only because everything the next day was straight as could be. And, if he was honest, more than a little dull. Students were always trustworthy in Rudder’s eyes. Not that they couldn’t be wrong. They were often dead wrong. But their noses pointed in the right direction, philosophically. He opened the binder. It contained plastic sleeves. The left side of each held photocopies of a yellowed journal, surprisingly intact at the edges but smeared with dirt and grease. On the right were transcriptions of the nearly illegible text. Rudder picked a page at random.

 

the land has become dark with a shadow close and tight. It is a shadow that cannot easily be extricated. It constricts us. I can feel it in my sleep. I know they are there around outside and in. I feel a presence in my mind that doesn’t let up but nobody sees it but me. Mother has her arm around one tonight. Father always has his arm around one. They don’t see the waste and the fury I am alone with theese thoughts. One day I hope to have my arm around one. But I won’t love it I hate them. My arm will have a knife. I want a freedom that nobody sees a freedom that isn’t shared.

 

Rudder didn’t turn the page. He looked over the words. The privacy of the journal – any journal – shocked him. He could hear Dan lighting another cigarette. Rudder’s first thought was that he was reading the journal of someone deranged and hateful but for some reason he kept thinking about the breach of privacy needed to access historical records, and how Dan probably read hundreds of journals and let himself into the houses of minds long dead. He must have a strong stomach for this kind of thing.

“Today he would be diagnosed with some variety of social disorder,” Dan said. “But pathology aside there’s an intentional prejudice in the writing. He did know what he was doing. I wouldn’t excuse his hatred.”

Rudder was surprised at the precision of Dan’s purpose. Sitting on Caldwell’s grave was a thought-out transgression. While Rudder bumbled through his day, Dan was sharp and analytical. He felt stupid to be caught in the gun-and-pizza situation he’d created. Dan was here to judge the people whose names were on the stones. Dan understood the words engraved under these branches as a representation of the cemetery’s meaning, a meaning to be picked apart and assailed by the mind. Meanwhile Rudder sought its tranquility and complexity. This didn’t bother Rudder, it didn’t change the way he thought about graves like Caldwell’s. But it did expand the distance between Rudder and Dan. The distance that lies between everybody, that gets closer with time spent together, that widens during realizations like this one: that Dan saw things differently.

Goosebumps were raised on Dan’s arms. Rudder told him to put his jacket back on. He thought about what to say to end the conversation, something that would bring things to an appropriate close, that would say what needed to be said: Rudder had to go home, Dan had to not get caught and not tell anyone about the pizza or the gun, and the topic had to be resolved. Not just the topic of the protest, but the fact that this encounter actually happened, or meant something, or produced an intended result. Rudder was in an existential rut, he supposed. It must have been the setting.

“Evil,” Dan said, then stopped, looking up at the tree branches, hunching and sliding himself slightly to the side to get the light out of his eyes. “Evil is often accidental, but that still makes it evil, right, Rudder? This isn’t a protest against evil, though. Just one man’s terrible actions and beliefs. When I hear myself say it, it leaves me with a bad taste. Protesting beliefs. Protesting a single person. It sounds both very American and very un-American. Maybe those aren’t too far from being the same thing. Probably I’m having thoughts like this because it’s nighttime in a graveyard; I’m not usually so abstract. Anyway I’ll keep up with this. S.G. Caldwell does not just get to lie here in uninterrupted peace, right? I’m sorry if I ruined your walk home, though. I didn’t intend to interrupt your peace. ”

“Dan, you can protest whatever you like. You’ve got that freedom. But don’t wear yourself out on this stuff,” Rudder said, attempting pithy wisdom. “Now I have to go home and bring dinner to my wife. If I hear you did something stupid, like defiling these graves, I’ll pull you apart myself.” He noticed the irony: was placing a pizza box on top of a grave defilement?

Rudder walked back to where he’d left the flashlight and the pizza box and turned off the light and came back to Dan with the box in his hands. He wanted to put into words the near-absolute non-contiguousness of his and Dan’s place in the world. There was no time, and possibly no language available to do so. So, he had to go. Dan had a look on his face that said the conversation was unfinished. But he had his task.
“Maybe you can tell people about Caldwell,” Dan said, “or learn more about the history of this cemetery. I’ll keep my eye on it, maybe take down some names. I don’t think it’ll be the subject of my thesis: I’m more interested in early colonial stuff. Consequences of European writings about native peoples. But someone else in the department might be interested. Hey, are you just park security or something?” Dan frowned, maybe he almost smiled too. “Where’s your gun?”

Rudder’s heart picked up speed. What could this guy do, though? There was the small chance another cop found him and he ran his mouth. Suddenly, Rudder dearly needed something from Dan. That need squeezed the rest of the encounter into a tiny space, compartmentalizing it. Experiences do that – they shrink as you put distance between yourself and them. As they shrink, they become like dreams, which are so small that you are liable to drop them in the morning before getting the chance to examine them.

With the shrinking of his talk with Dan, the silence and the shadow of the cemetery enlarged at equal pace. This void of sensation (he couldn’t see much, he couldn’t hear much) pushed against his mind and made space for that particle of fear that was always with him. It grew like a goldfish, unconfined and ravenous. It emitted these thoughts, like poison: soon Dan would be discovered by another officer. He would say that Rudder sanctioned his protest. Rudder? Yes, the officer with the pizza. Maybe he was just a park cop. He didn’t have a gun. Dan would say these things and Rudder would be pulled into his sergeant’s office in the morning. He’d be torn to pieces.

The result was this: Rudder needed to ask Dan to keep quiet. It was a different type of conversation entirely.

“Dan, I heard you out. I’m gonna let you stay. I just need a favor because I have a problem. I don’t have my gun. I could lose my job if my sergeant hears I left it at home and didn’t throw you out as soon as I saw you. If another cop comes, you’re probably going to have to leave. You might even be fined. But please don’t tell them about me.”

Dan laughed. “I think the only chance someone will hear about this is if I wanted to tell this story to my classmates. A gun-less cop with a pizza found me and I taught him a thing or two about Tennessee history. He kept me quiet with a plea. No, it’s all good. I didn’t see you, you didn’t see me.” He laughed again and turned his eyes to his binder, lighting them up with his phone. “Good night.”

Rudder was satisfied. He had to be. No harm would come from Dan; at least, no harm that could reasonably be policed. He nodded at the protestor and turned back to the path.

 

He was sweating as he left the cemetery gate ten minutes later and crossed onto his street. He tried to stick to the shadows, walking across lawns to avoid the glow of street lamps. While he lurked in the dark, he thought of Dan, proudly sitting on Caldwell’s grave with his phone illuminating his face in the middle of the cemetery. Though he was unlikely to be spotted in such a remote theater, Dan was still not afraid to be seen.

As he turned a corner, rounding downslope, tracing his way past hedges and mailboxes, his house came into view. The downstairs lights were on, the couch and chairs in the living room lit up, the light over the front door creating a golden gate through which Rudder planned to pass into safety. His fears subsided. The doom of his situation wasn’t absolute – it emerged in the despair of his fear. He was being paranoid. Easier excuses were at his disposal, probably. He could think of them in the morning. He knew he would.

As he walked the stones to the front door, adjusting his step so that his feet would land on each stone rather than the grass in between them, he stopped to check the time on his phone. They still had almost three hours before their agreed-upon bedtime. He thought about what to say to Elena when he saw her. He thought about whether to hug her and kiss her. They should watch a movie. He put his phone away and looked up. A car was pulling in at the other end of the road. Probably a neighbor. A voice on his radio bubbled up, and though Rudder thought he heard the word “cemetery,” he turned it off without listening to any more. As the car passed the house, he smiled into the headlights.

 

This story is about a man watching a broken clock. So if I announce the time and it’s the same as before, it’s not a mistake. It’s one-eighteen a.m. Sometimes it’s hard to think about anything besides thinking about what you’re thinking. Like when a novel’s main character is an author. Tomorrow I’m going to church, I think. I’ve got nothing better to do. Although church isn’t so bad; there are worse things than going to church that I could do. If I didn’t think in words I could think faster. Like that last thought – I thought of it before I formed the words – those words that I didn’t need to perform in my head in my own voice. It’s something we do to keep ourselves company, I think. But it’s not really my own voice – it’s not my own, really, because our voices sound different to us; they resonate in our skulls and wind up sounding deeper and more powerful. So the voice I use in my head is a voice that no one but me hears. I wonder if I could listen to myself on tape and learn to think in that voice, my real voice.

I’m short and skinny; people say I’m small. You’re so small! they say, when I squeeze behind chairs at bars, or when I’m picking out shirts, or when I log-roll under the coffee table to make people laugh. I have black hair. I don’t know if I can describe my face. I don’t know if I need to describe anything about myself, except that it’s one of those sounds that a story emits, like a frog’s croak – the croak is part of what makes it seem like a frog. My eyes are probably deep-set. Green. Thick eyebrows? I should pluck them where they meet in the middle. Where are my tweezers?

I want to catch the early church service. Is it one-eighteen? No, the clock is broken. I’m pretty sure counting sheep really works, as long as you imagine them vividly enough. They have to jump over the fence in your mind with their wooly sides flapping in technicolor and dolby digital and if you can do it right you can try to smell them. It takes a lot of concentration. If I stop concentrating, the sheep stop, or slide backwards in reverse motion, the curtain falls. Then I’ll be awake again, and start thinking about something like church or that other thing that’s worth saving for later. I’m summoning the scene and everything and I’m going to stop thinking words and just count. Starting now. One, two, three, four, five six…

 

* * * * *

 

… twelve. Shit, how long have I been saying twelve? That’s a damn loud bird. I can’t check the time because the clock just says one-eighteen a.m. Here I go, I am thinking, here I go. Here I go. Where? Strange how your thoughts can be incoherent when you’re very much alive and aware. Is it possible that I’m dreaming lucidly? What’s that light outside? If I lift the shade… no, there’s nothing. A trick of the dark.

I can never remember the sermons when I was a kid. At church. The sermons at church. I didn’t ever remember them. I could get caught up, sometimes, but they would just roll on and without stopping and I would daydream or think about my ass hurting and my head might start to spin. Did my head spin? So I wouldn’t take any of it with me after it was over. I watched other people shifting their weight around, too. But I have the impression that the sermons were good. That’s part of why I’m going tomorrow. That’s a part of it. That I want to see a good sermon, right? I don’t think my pillow fits.

That doesn’t make sense.

I mean it doesn’t fit my shoulder so well. Not in this position… not in any position, really.

An absolute whirlpool. A dishwasher full of clanking and banging and loosely organized things. That’s how the street will be tomorrow, on my way to church. I’ll walk so I’ll be in the thick. The thick of it. Does a dishwasher fill completely with water? Tomorrow it will be humid and soapy, hard to wade through streets of church-goers and fruit-shoppers. I think a sermon about love would be good. There’s always the connection to God’s love. For that, I think, a preacher would give good advice about relationships. A side-effect of piety.

Have you ever opened a dishwasher when it was running? A great cube of water doesn’t come splashing out. Before you have time to peer in to confirm what you already know – that you botched the job and have to go again from the beginning – water’s already draining down into the abyss and you can’t see how much had been in there. But I don’t think it ever fills completely, like a pool.

Yesterday I was nose-deep in the town paper. The news is smaller, closer, slower, but no more or less repetitive than national papers. Prone to being quirky, but also, finally, useful. Anyway I wasn’t reading too many articles. What first met my eyes were the ads. The ads! So many of them. Black and white pictures of homes. Car tires. A new pizza place opening. The images stacked on each other like tetris between the short articles about deer populations and student work projects. I don’t usually even look at the paper. I’d picked this one out of the basket in the living room where I was sitting, waiting for water to boil for spaghetti. I should have started frying the sausages sooner, instead of looking for the paper. I threw the whole schedule out of whack.

I’ve been making a lot of spaghetti. I like to cut the noodles because they’re too long and the vodka sauce slaps into your face when you slurp. Vodka sauce is the only sauce. The only good sauce anymore. Not the only sauce but really the only one I like to buy. The other ones are dark, chunky, garlic. I think. I don’t know what I think. Nothing. With the vodka sauce I make spicy sausages. I cut them once long-ways and fry them in the pan and season them and flip them and get a sear on the back then cut them into square-bottomed half-moons and fry them more and throw them in the sauce which has been simmering and pour all of that over the pasta. I don’t think parmesan cheese helps. I should try some other ones. Gouda? And use a peeler to make those larger flakes.

Reading the paper I forgot the sausages and didn’t have time to fry them again in pieces. They were softer. But I forgave myself. In an empty house you have to take on both roles: the repentant and the beneficent.

A priest is like a doctor for the soul. Maybe. What is it that people don’t like about doctors? Nobody likes being dismissed. Doctors, supposedly, say take an aspirin and we’ll talk tomorrow. I’m not sure they really do that, but it’s kind of a metaphor. Or a metonymy. Representative.

The pizza place in the paper said it had just opened. But I knew that place. It’d been open for several months, at least since the paper was printed. I know, because I’ve checked the date at the top of the page: August 3^rd. And it was March 16^th when I’d gotten pizza there with Charlie. Is it already time to think about her? Will I be able to fall asleep once I finish hashing it all out, yet again? It must be late. Well-past one-eighteen a.m.

Let’s just re-orient ourselves before getting into all of that. I’ve done a lot of thinking so far. My pillow feels like it doesn’t fit and there’s a loud bird and it seems like there’s light outside even though there isn’t and all of this because it’s after one-eighteen a.m. I have no idea what time it is – my thoughts don’t come at a measurable pace. I know I’m going to the early service. No reason re-calculating the morning routine; I just know I need to be up by seven. The street should be a real dishwasher. Charlie always liked it that way (here we go, on to Charlie). She used to point out the busy-ness of the streets. By the time we’d walked to the end of the block – we walked holding hands; I can remember the warm pressure of it – she’d have catalogued aloud only half of the things she’d observed. Out of breath, she would turn around and shout back down the street, “It’s too much!” then start to laugh and put her forehead on my shoulder so that I could rest my chin in her blonde curls and smell the herb oil she put in her hair. It was on one of those days that I came up with my dishwasher metaphor. She looked at me from my shoulder with wide eyes: “What?” I explained myself and she sighed, content, I think. Full of love, I think. I knew those days that we were in love. It was a question only taken into consideration much later, or it seemed much later. It was only a few weeks after that day, actually. “Are we really in love?”

I have to turn over, to toss and turn… and slap my pillow… I don’t like this part of the story but I approach it so quickly; I wish I could pad the front more. Weren’t there more memories from before? But they’re all dwarfed by that bruising uproar that comes later. Why should I look at the clock now? One-eighteen a.m. Maybe if I unplug it… Where’s the plug? Fuck.

What was she saying over pizza? I’m pretty sure I’ll never get the words right. That we – she spoke as if she were talking generally about humans; of course the implication that “we” was her and me was clear, despite the abstraction – tend to convince ourselves that our feelings are something we want them to be. That we (she’s a writer) irresponsibly take more seriously what is told than what is shown. And that this was an unhealthy burden, that there was a dissonance when she said things like “I love you” and then wasn’t sure she meant it. I remember agreeing with her. But more vividly I remember her brilliantly brown eyes and that I couldn’t stop myself from smiling when I looked at them which certainly made me appear to be a sociopath since I was smiling while she was busy breaking up with me.

No, that’s not the best way to frame things. I never landed on the best way to frame things there, at that point of the story. Let’s put it this way: she knew what was making me smile, because she’d commented, before, on my dopey smiles, and what she thought they were telling her, and my smiling in that moment wasn’t making things easy for her. It’s a curious thing… Yeah, I think this is right: I think that my smiling was a defense mechanism, a late attempt to reverse her retreat.

It was a real surprise to see that ad in the paper. An ad that was way past its prime advertising the pizza place where Charlie and I had last talked, where I had my last fill of her presence. What did I say the date on that paper was? August 3^rd? That doesn’t make sense – that’s today. It isn’t today’s paper. Or rather yesterday. So I was wrong about the date. Could I have saved the paper, having seen the ad, having been reminded of these events, and felt the need to pocket some of my misery in that physical memento?

I left the pizza place, having had another slice after Charlie left, with a sense that I’d really botched the job and I still don’t know what to do with that besides tuck that feeling away and hope I never uncover it again accidentally while shifting things around in my mind.

So this is why I want to go to church (I’ve really done a good job with this story, haven’t I? I rehearse it every night that I can’t sleep, always bringing it full-circle. Of course some details don’t make sense, for example tomorrow is Thursday and there’s no church service, but that always happens in a re-telling: there’s some slippage in time).

 

* * * * *

 

Will the alarm work tomorrow even though the clock isn’t moving? It doesn’t matter, I probably won’t be going to church. There’s Charlie, I can hear her coming up the stairs, softly pressing each step into the wood so she doesn’t wake me. Maybe when she gets in bed I will turn over and tell her how much I love her, but I think this will bother her because she probably just wants to sleep. She wants to get in bed with me while I’m asleep and pass the time, but I can’t give this to her because I can’t sleep.

I’ll explain myself, bluntly, before she comes in and I try to quiet my thoughts, try not to think so loudly that she can hear me doing it, because I think that is a real phenomenon: I think people can hear you if you think loudly enough. Not psychically, they can’t hear words, but their human senses – temperature, smell, listening to breathing, seeing body language – some combination of instinct calculations leads people to the understanding that this person is thinking quite loudly.

Charlie and I have not broken up. We are still making a life together and things are going well as far as I can tell. I’m not sure what purpose this fantasy addresses, the fantasy (and I don’t mean fantasy as in something fantastic and optimistic and wonderful, I just mean counterfactual supposition) that Charlie dumps me at a pizza place and I take it so hard that I replay the circumstances every night and sweat and can’t sleep and have to make the manic decision to request help from god. I am preparing myself for the end of our happiness, though it isn’t in sight. And/or, I am measuring my love for Charlie by imagining my reaction to loss. And/or drinking from the bitter waters of tumult, for which you can develop a taste when the days have been a nonstop current of viscous sweetness.

There was something else I wanted to add. I need to think for a moment… I only just realized how much I am sweating. My shirt is sticking to the sheets. It isn’t so hot, either… I actually just shivered. I only wanted to guess at the time, but my thoughts don’t move at a measurable pace. I already said that, didn’t I?

Wasn’t that her coming up the stairs? Where’s Charlie?

 

* * * * *

 

The pastor of my childhood is named Frank. I liked him. I remember him on the steps after every service. He would take my hand in both of his and press warmly with them. They were large, puffy, well-worn. I don’t think I looked him in the eyes much, when he said thank you for coming, have a blessed day, but now when I think of the memory I zoom out like a camera on a rope, whatever those cinema devices are called, and I can see Frank looking down at me, bending his back to speak to me. I think I was dismissive, afraid to meet his eyes with a smile, because I couldn’t make one up to be equal to his own.

She tried to do things the way her father did.

The chickens trilled raucously as she carefully rolled back the wire. They huddled forward, feathered flesh pressed warm, then scattered, seeking. The sun reached over the roof of the house and caught her eye in its corner, leaving a spot. She looked left and right, confirming the spot’s location. She exhaled and watched her breath move in the beam of light. Her lips were dry.

The air’s coldness was recently-descended, slid the mountainsides into the middle of the valley, and it was thick with dust and moisture, and resting just above the ground it wrapped the ankles of those who woke early to tend to things. Others slept in too-hot blankets, swaddled from the night; at the end of their lazy stasis they would grip their eyes closed and hold back remembering in order to enjoy the stifled heat, their arms around babies and sons whose proclivity for disruption and need coiled tighter as the sky brightened. But when the neighbor would walk his single cow past the yard (she saw him coming, way down the road, ambling) and the chickens would, for a second time, begin to trill raucously, their noise would drip through the unsealed windowpanes and cancel thoughts of sleeping in for another moment. Yesterday and the day to come would start to send tendrils toward one another and what was left undone had to be done and preparations made to leave more things undone for the next morning – but that morning was across an entire night, an unexperienced night that could full-stop days and allow them to try to keep their beds and stay the current of time between the days.

Her father used to be awake before any of them.

She saw, down the road, the ambling neighbor with his cow, huge with child. The road had a sense of humor, she thought; it was bumpier than the sloping terrain it traversed. Water cut deep tracks in the mud and without stones or grass to hold it together the soil caved in and formed holes deeper than a car body’s height above the ground, so that drivers opted to navigate in zig-zags, laughing about the road and wondering about the conditions of the people who walked its distance every day, who’d gotten used to it.

The cow’s flanks and haunches worked to control wobbling momentum, stepping in rills and climbing out of gullies. She tried to guess how much it would weigh after giving birth, how much the farmer could sell it for. There was an authority in the way they spoke about the property of others, sizing people and animals and homes up. Authority which she eventually, by some shrouded function of time, when she would be taller, a different shape, she would have finished school, probably, or be just finishing (older students, too, sized things up), would then finally have access to, and with the people around her she would guess how much the farmer’s cow would weigh and the price it would fetch. While she waited for such a time she merely watched, instead, the sinews under the cow’s skin as it pounded forward through the clay and she watched the dust trail behind its lazy hooves and guessing at nothing she wondered how the farmer’s cigarette smoke would smell as he passed by because though she tried to she couldn’t remember exactly.

The chicken wire rolled back, tied into place by both strings, with knots that were easy to pull open, she took the broom from where it leaned in the corner where the coop attached to the house and tightened the handle and began to sweep rocks and candy wrappers and glass and a battery and sheep droppings and picked up a sock from the path in front of the house. The air was quiet and cold but the sun, which had fully risen over the hillside, grew hot on her back and she took off her jacket. The fence had barbs, each made of two small pieces of wire twisted together with the ends cut sharp. Trying not to hook her jacket on them while she hung it on a fencepost, she saw that most of the barbs had loosened and freely rotated around the fence cable. They’d been loose for a long time, she knew; dogs, coming for the chickens, could slip between the cables. She leaned her broom on the fence and walked back to the house, carefully unclasped and swung open the metal shed door, stepped inside and reached through a spider’s web to turn on the light.

Moisture carried forth the combined air of everything in the shed. A wooden axe handle. Blankets. Shears and scissors and wrenches and pliers. Fermenting milk. Glass jars. An old motor. Engine oil. Iron pans. A tent, folded. The only life in there was the kind that accumulates around things at rest: spiders, mold, bacteria. It was a tomb, dark and intruded, protected from dust and rain, from disturbance but not from the cold air that comes down the mountainsides and holds scents: those sole means of communication for the replaced, hidden and stored.

When she was younger she would explore under the mats and tarps and behind shelves, climbing with a new body – longer arms, stronger grip – scaring herself and questioning and creating disarray, she would get dirty and swipe at webs and hide from her mother and father, but now she walked to the tools. The heavy wooden drawer had to be worked free. She searched, not recognizing the purpose of some of the brown metal lengths. They were heavy and twisted with points and wires and springs. This opened the furnace door. That adjusted the tractor’s height, though they’d rented the tractor to the neighbor two years before, and now instead they used the sickle (sharpened with this rod). While appraising three sets of pliers she heard the chickens and the cow’s heavy exhalation and took the two smaller pairs and turned, gently pushing the metal door and latching it behind her. Cigarette smoke hovered above her head and she walked around the shed to see the neighbor and his cow reaching the end of the yard.

Ahead of him the valley opened up past the farthest farm, yawning to the west. The fog it held seemed to have its back turned, driven by the rising sun. On either side rocky slopes stood imposingly solid, jutting, defiant weight of the boulders standing upright the mountains’ sides. The valley’s violent sentinels, which nested eagles and poured primordial water, and frightened those who looked up, towered over and bounded her view, driving inwards, driving the fog and the blue sky and the clay ground inwards around the neighbor, who she watched at the center of the dizzy vortex of her vision, as he picked up a rock and tossed it in the direction of his cow to hasten it. He walked on, with a wake of smoke.

When its smell reached her, and she breathed it in deeply, she could hear her father’s voice unfurl from a deep, precious repository. She crossed the yard, gathering up the woody, pungent smoke from the air and started to remember the low-ceilinged living room and feeling not quite full from the dinner, the smell of lamb in the air, and her brothers watching TV, the older propping up the younger, and her legs crossed, the scratchy contour of the wall against her back and the hum and murmur of the stove fire and the draft from under the door and a dog barking outside, lazily and infrequently, and a bandage on her thumb covering a burn from the tea kettle, the yellow glow of the ceiling light under its plastic disk and the sounds the tools made as her mother picked them up and put them down, trying to fix a clock and the way that everything was absolutely still and quiet despite the TV and the dog and her mother and the stove, that she was only partly attentive to her book, her peripheral senses trained on her father, who was reading his newspaper on the bench by the dinner table with his back against the wall, who she watched from the corner of her eye, and only when the pace of the story she was reading was picking up, when the bride-to-be started to write the letter to her family back home, did his voice sound her ears.

“You read too much.”

He was looking down at her, first severely but then with a small movement of his chin which indicated that a smile was coming, a natural smile, those rare expressions which he would turn loose when he was surprised and giddy. He seldom read anything at length and never with so much focus, in silence, and he only just remembered himself. He turned to her mother who looked up from the tools and clock and they both began to laugh. She laughed too.

He folded up and handed his newspaper to her mother with a sigh interrupted by chuckling and her mother stood up to make coffee and he put out his cigarette. As if at the end of a movie, the room and her brothers and her parents and the dogs outside all woke up, beginning to shift in their seats and clear their throats and bark and poke one another and fight over the remote and she put her book down as well and stood up to help her mother set the table. Her father got down on the floor with her brothers and took the remote and turned on the news, and everyone settled back into their positions which though not altogether different were on the close side of a chasm of familiarity.

The things she wanted to remember most – her brothers’ faces, the heat of a light summer night by the lakeside, the way her skin felt after swimming in freshwater – impassively slipped away. But her absolute gratitude for and attachment to that joke kept the memory around, and the memory’s obedient presence in her mind, safeguarded by a simple lock whose key was drifting from the neighbor’s mouth as he made his way across the valley, confirmed and deepened that gratitude and attachment.

Also like a movie, that evening had articulated, but not quite provided solutions for, questions that she was equipped neither to articulate nor to solve. Her father’s look, she decided, had been a rare pouring forth of love unmitigated by the limited languages of fatherhood. She considered, once, that the memory was randomly chosen by an indiscriminate, impulsive biographer working deep in her skull. Later, she would say that she had an unexpressive, demanding father, and that her younger self had preserved this memory for its emotional currency. Then, when her limp got bad and her vision had darkened, other details would return to her more strongly than his voice, like how excited she was about the bride-to-be or how vivid the colors and how quick the dancers in the parade being shown on the news.

She gripped and hefted a pair of pliers in each hand. Her brother was crying inside the house. The sun warmed her ear and her cheek and a breeze had picked up from the east, blowing her hair across her chin and lifting dust into the corner of her eye and noisily signaling the stronger, constant gusts that would deafen the midday. She knelt by the fence and began pinching the ends of the wire barbs with the pliers and pulling them taut. She did not notice the speed with which she addressed the task, how many barbs in how many breaths, nor the growing pain in her palms. Her brother still cried and the chickens whistled and paced around her, but she forgot the sounds as quickly as they came, singing past her into the empty valley.

The height of the sun and the growing weight of the pliers reminded her to eat. She’d finished with one side of the fence, having reached the gate at the end of the yard. She lay the pliers in the grass by the gatepost and lifted her jacket to take inside. As she entered, she saw the older brother stomping around, back and forth from the kitchen to the sink to the closet to the kitchen, and the younger watching him with short, breathy, wordless chuckles, forgetting the cookie in his hand and dropping it into a coffee cup. He cried for her and she held his hand and played with a spoon and gave him another cookie. The low-ceilinged room was dark; her mother had gone out, her brother did not know where. He had to help the neighbor – the one who was using their tractor – with the grass, he said, and she told him to dress his brother up so she could watch him outside.

She turned on the TV. A buzzing sound came out of the left side and she ignored the repeat news. The house was quiet and dark. The three of them ate and drank without speaking, her brothers watching the screen without understanding its languages. She, too, didn’t know the significance of the angry protestors, only that they were in a city over the mountains and that they did not come from the valley. The TV buzzed. The light overhead flickered under its plastic disk. The stove’s shadow against the wall and floor disappeared and reappeared. Her toe was wet where she’d pressed it into the carpet to prop herself forward on her chair.

“I have to go now,” her brother said.

“Dress him,” she said.

She shuffled to the other side of the table to the window. Her hand loosely held the curtain back as she looked down the road. She saw a car coming, serpentine avoidance of potholes, lurching. She could feel the wind through the windowpanes pushing the tiny hairs on her arm against their grain. On the news, the protestors had reached a park. There were heavy, tall trees, and thick grass covered the ground. Recent rain brought out the greens and dark browns, and wildflowers were visible briefly between the marching bodies. Outside, the car made its circuitous route through the clay, from which sprouted only those dry, brittle, gray brushes.

Her brother ran outside, throwing the door closed, and bounded down the hillside. With his coat and pants but no socks or gloves her other brother cried for her and she picked him up and resented him without guilt and pressed her cheek to his without pretention and told him to go find his gloves! go find his gloves! and pointed to them and he stomped over and held them up and she fit them on his hands and fitted his socks and shoes on and tucked his pants into his socks. They held hands and they went outside.

He played with rocks and sticks and mud while she continued to address the barbs on the fence. She could hear the car’s motor now as it tore over the clay and hooked around the last bad ditch in the road. She adjusted the barbs so they sat at an even distance from one another.

Her mother and two women and two men tumbled from the car in front of the house. She watched them from the fence. Her brother ran to them, crying. They filed through the doorway, taking off their hats and shoes. They were laughing. The windows of the low house lit up, yellow, and soon the chimney was throwing smoke up into the wind. She lingered by the fence, moving slowly across it and twisting the barbs, her hands growing cold in the wind, her dress getting caught on the wire so that she had to lift it loose as she strafed between the posts.

It was good, she knew, to have guests. A guest’s gratitude is a lasting and eager kind of debt. Caring for them, welcoming them, however was a kind of labor for which she had to manufacture her own motivations, from a well of generosity whose capacity did not grow at the rate required of it. A voice carried from the house, calling her name indistinctly.

“We don’t have enough to drink,” her mother said from the door. “We need onions too, and some sweets from the store.” She was handed a ball of greasy paper bills.

A neighbor who lived down the hill ran a small shop attached to the side of their house. She left the pliers in a wet, wooden box on the porch and began to leave.

“Where’s your brother?” her mother asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, and walked to the other end of the yard where there was a gate. She untied the string that held it closed and felt the moss-covered, moist fencepost. It crumbled under her fingernails. Chill moisture clung to the surface, soaking it, but the soft wooden flesh was warm underneath. Her baby brother cried in the house; the men and women laughed. The valley sucked in the air, drawing it across her in vicious, punching winds. A cloud draped itself over the sun and the heat disappeared off of her neck. The chickens warbled in the yard and the guests laughed and the wood was mossy; though down the hill five houses heaved smoke from their chimneys and cars were parked in the street, the wind blew sound away and silenced the scene and the clouds took away its light and the walls were decayed from that mountain-spilled air that invaded nights. Lives persisted in their heat and steadiness, rendered in secret and opposite footprints.

She navigated the path down the hillside, which led away from the gate to the street below, with bored familiarity. On either side of the path were a few wild willow trees, twisted and brittle. Dust clung to her shoes and she sidestepped every jagged stone nestled in the dirt.

A man she knew sat outside of the store. He was half awake, staring down the street at the cars. She moved past him quickly, pushing open the wooden door and stepping inside onto the cardboard laid down for dirty shoes. She exchanged the money for two onions, a bottle and a bag of candies. Yes, everything at home is fine, she told the woman behind the counter. Everyone is healthy, healthier, but there is always work. Her brother is down the street helping with the grass.

“Good. Goodbye,” the woman said, and walked back into her house to serve tea to her children.

With the bag in her hand she walked outside. The man was waiting for her and they looked at each other.

“Remember me?” he asked, struggling for a moment to gain his feet.

“Yes,” she said, continuing to walk.

His voice asked her to stop. She knew she had to. “I went to school with your father. We are classmates,” he said. She nodded.

“I have a son,” he said, smiling. “He is working, herding sheep now, but he will be back in the summer.” His words buoyed a deep, familial affection, in their way. She reminded herself of this, intending to slow the advance of a tightness in her throat.

“There is a lot of work at home. My brother is still a baby,” she said. He nodded and wished her well and shook his head and walked into the store, shouting deep into the house.

She walked through a yard and over an irrigation ditch to reach the path back to her gate. She stopped under the largest willow tree. The sunlight in her eyes and on her head and her neck drew something from her. A fortitude that had to be regained. She steadied her vision, staring at the rocks and the dirt and the tree roots. She tore open the bag of candy and ate one, not daring to look up into the windy glare, tossing the paper back down the slope. The tree made little shade, its thin branches designed to hold up its cottony seeds in the summer as high as could be managed on the scarce breakfasts of the brittle clay. Beside the path was a spigot. She took a drink from it. Its water chattered across its concrete base and sunk into the pavement, trailing down the hillside in dark spots where grass might grow.

The wind bullied her and she staggered to stay upright.

She did not remember walking the rest of the path. She lifted the gate from the dirt to pull it open and retied the string with the bag hanging from her wrist.

She was inside. She left the onions on the table in the kitchen and poured the candies into a dish. As she walked out of the kitchen, bottle and dish in hand, she saw the door to the room across the hall, ajar. The faint smell of mold and blankets and coughing traced the doorframe. Inside, the two men who had come out of the car knelt by the bed. Her father’s voice, its timbre not lost but its volume so diminished, hovered over their heads, barely. They were nodding. She did not register what he was saying. She walked to the room where the other two guests sat with her mother and her younger brother.

The women welcomed her.

“You have grown so beautiful.”

“Have you finished school?”

“What did you bring us from the store?”

Her mother asked her if she had seen her brother.

“He’s helping with the grass,” she said. “I didn’t see him.” Her mother swore.

“Sit with us,” said one woman, whose dress was purple, whose hair was in a bun, whose body sat snugly between the table and the wall, whose eyes glinted and inquired and welcomed and comforted, whose boots were taken off to give her feet room, whose glass was already full from the bottle.

The other woman, skinny, short, diminished, hair under a cloth, was refusing a drink from her mother. The purple woman urged her on.

They were discussing the new house being built in the village center. As she listened, she held her mind taught on its leash. She did not want it to wander. Jokes must be kept track of, questions answered, guests made to feel welcome. She did not know how to talk with women, but she could listen, if she held her mind taught.

“Three bathrooms, with toilets!” the purple woman shouted gleefully. “I saw them running the pipes. New, shining copper pipes. Three men from the city came to do the electric wiring.”

“My cousin from down the valley did ours,” the smaller woman said, almost in a whisper. “The lights go out every week.” She paused to laugh, waiting to observe her companions.

Her mother offered an estimate of what the house was worth. The other women gasped.

“It was probably more! They are rich!”

“We could barely afford to buy our son books this year.”

“You should go to the small shop behind the shoe store. Their books are cheap.”

“They’re used, though. All the answers already written in!”

Another round was poured. Her grip on her mind’s leash weakened. The patterns in the tapestry swirled. She asked her mother for water. She was told to get it herself, and she stayed seated.

When the conversation slowed and they started new cups of tea, the woman in purple sighed and said money could become a problem without working men in the house. The other woman shrunk down into her teacup, looking sideways at her hosts.

She no longer had her grip. She lost the conversation and began thinking about the barbs on the fence. And the chickens. Then his voice came back to her. What he had been saying to the men in the side room, she realized, had not made sense to her at first. Words can sound as a different language when they don’t make sense. He had been telling them about the moon.

“Do you ever see the moon,” he had been saying, “in the middle of the day? The sky was bright blue in the morning, empty and pale and a deep blue without clouds and bounded by the mountains and heralding of summer but also cold and restful and I looked up and saw the halfmoon, staring at me not half a sky away from the sun. I don’t know if that is strange. Isn’t it strange to see the moon in the middle of the day? But there it was. And I thought to myself, ‘if this is the way it is, I am not sure I can remark on it as if it is strange.’ I wanted to ask you, though, because you are here and because it is on my mind.”

The two men had entered and sat at the table and poured drinks. They told stories of her father in school.

“He rolled up the test and jumped out the window,” one said.

“He didn’t!” The woman in purple leaned forward. The smaller woman laughed and pecked at her tea and laughed.

“He brought it to my brother’s house,” said the other man, opening a candy wrapper. “My older brother finished it for him. The teacher didn’t know the difference in their handwriting. My brother was good!”

“And he jumped back in through the window?” her mother asked.

The men nodded, chuckling, red in the cheeks, pouring more drinks, one of them hovering too far to the side, too close to her. He had been smoking.

She cleaned and napped and half-slept, bothered by the glare of the setting sun. The guests slept heavily in blankets strewn across the floor, the men with hats over their faces, her mother cradling her brother. Dizzy lights crossed behind her eyelids. Her hands were cold.

Metal banged against plaster. No one woke, but she felt a pulse go through her, barely contained in her veins. Boots hit the hallway wood. A man shouted. Before she heard the words she knew what it was about. Her mother and the two men moved with haywire electricity. They dressed, barely, and left the house and it grew silent but for their shouting outside and the car starting. The tractor had caught his leg. He was in the hospital in the next village. He had to be taken to the city but they would wait for her mother. The messenger’s fear had stayed in the house, an overhanging, overlarge uncertainty. Her feet couldn’t touch the floor, her hands her coat, without speeding her heartbeat. Her guilt flowed from her sides to behind her ears like frigid blood.

She sat on the bench in the driveway and watched the sun depart behind the mountains. There were no more cars on the street down the hillside. The guests’ car bounced across the road, the driver recklessly ignoring gullies and ditches and pits out of haste and distraction.

She went into the house and went into the side room. Her father was sitting up in his bed, watching her enter. She turned her back to him, taking a toothbrush from above the sink and spreading toothpaste on it. She opened the tap to let some water onto the bristles, then brought the toothbrush and a basin to the bed. He took it from her and slowly worked it around his mouth. He spat in the basin and took a drink from the glass by the bed and spat again and looked up, exhaling deeply. As she put everything back by the sink, he spoke.

“Did you know that where a candle is hottest and where it is brightest are different points? That the light and heat of the flame are distinct?” She answered that she did not. Her mother called. They would stay in the city for the night. The doctors were working on the leg.

“It’s bad,” her mother said. “It’s a bad wound.”

The sun dropped below the lip of the mountain. Across the valley, where there was a gap in the wall of rock, there was still a triangle of land lit up yellow. It was there most distinctly that the mountains gave the impression of teeth and that as the sun set, the mouth of the valley was closing on the village.