Steve Rasnic Tem

ONION SONGS

ONION SONG

Only as the changes unwound toward a kind of conclusion did I realize they’d begun much earlier than that weekend of peeling sunburn almost ten years ago. It’s possible, I suppose, that these startling transformations began immediately after my birth, and that my life has been a slow series of reveals leading up to some final truth, some ultimate me.

Of course these revelations have been subtle, otherwise I would have noticed them right away. An overnight change in the texture of my hair, the way it lay against my scalp, or a new highlight when I looked at myself in the mirror, may have in fact been because the fuzz native to another creature had manifested itself in my scalp without my knowledge and blended in with my own.

Or a difference in the way I walked, shook someone’s hand, and mounted a chair at meals may have indicated that some ancient, time-released gene of alternative movement had finally made its effects known. Sometimes awkwardness made me appear barely in control of my own muscular and skeletal systems. Is it possible such awkwardness came not out of a congenital incoordination but out of attempts to control an alien nervous system?

From time to time I would recognize that the images in my dreams were obviously from someone else’s life, but I was always reticent to complain, neither did I recognize that there was anyone I could safely complain to.

These were some of the seemingly ordinary sensations I noticed from my early experiences in the world. But it was only after I had reached my fiftieth birthday, and fell asleep on the beach during that disastrous vacation in Mexico, that I realized their true significance.

I woke up with my wife Janet crouching over me. “Harry, get up! You fell asleep—you’re going to have a terrible burn!” She wore so much lipstick her lips looked like two bloody flaps of skin. I raised myself on my elbows to get a better look at her. No, this wasn’t my wife at all, not any wife I would ever have had. “Janet?” I said.

“Janet? Who’s Janet? What’s wrong with you? It’s Betty!”

Betty’s hair was perfectly black. Obviously she’d colored out the gray streaks. My wife Janet had beautiful gray ribbons of hair woven throughout her imperfectly balanced hairdo.

“I’m sorry,” I said, quickly getting to my feet. “I’ve mistaken you for someone else.”

“Harry? Lie back down. You got too much heat, Harry. It’s Betty—just listen to me.”

But I couldn’t lie down—I had to go find Janet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t know you.”

“Harry, we’ve been married over thirty years!”

I started running down the beach. But before I got very far I fainted. At least I think that’s what happened. All I remember is my face hitting the sand at a high rate of speed, and burning, like an asteroid hitting the sun.

I remember the way my father became old. He had always been an active, vigorous man, much more focused, more determined, than the younger men who surrounded him, who looked up to him. I’m not sure if I ever looked up to him. I was never really able to know him all that well, and I resented it.

Then one day he fell down the concrete steps in front of his house, the house I grew up in, and broke his leg. I remember how he laughed about it. “Always in too much of a hurry,” he’d said. “I’d want to be early to my own funeral,” he’d said.

But the healing had taken a long time, almost a full year. And even after that he never walked properly again—he walked like someone else. And there was something about being forced to slow down like that, having to take it one step at a time instead of two, that changed everything, that seemed to shift him into another stream of time so that he began to lose color, he began to pale, to slowly fill with white, even the scant evidence of his thought processes filling with white, so that when he tried to talk it seemed that all he could talk was nonsense, this white, sleep-inducing noise.

People stopped paying attention to my father—they no longer cared what he had to say. I saw layers of confidence fall away from him, layers of vitality and layers of sense. I don’t know when he quit his job. I’m not sure it was ever even official. He simply stopped going to work. His speech could no longer be heard by normal people, and shortly thereafter he was overcome by a creeping transparency, as his last few layers began to float away like tissue dissolving in sunlight and wind.

But before my father lost the power of audible speech he was constantly murmuring in a sing-song voice. I never could quite understand him—but it was something like, Daddy peel the onions, Momma peel the onions, chop them up, spice them right, feed all the children the onions.

The last time I visited he was like a newborn, shrunken up and asleep on one end of the old couch. He had peeled down to some sort of infancy, but there were no signs of the fresh vitality of the newborn—he was simply the remains of some depleted seed. I spent a few days in the old home place with him, then left having forgotten why I had come in the first place.

After my fall into the hot Mexican sand I woke up in a strange bed. I thought at first I was at the hospital—the bed was stiff and uncomfortable and there was too much white in the room—it hurt my eyes. But I quickly realized it was my own bed in my own house and it was me who had changed.

Betty or Janet came into the room then, carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of something on it. There were also large towels on the tray and a variety of metal instruments. “So, mister-can’t-remember-his-own-wife,” she said with a mocking smile. “Are we feeling better today?”

But I didn’t know how to answer. “We? I don’t understand. I can only speak for myself, and I really have no idea how I’m feeling. I was hoping you could tell me. My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

“I was afraid of that,” the woman who may or may not have been my wife replied. “We’re still not ourselves, are we?”

“No, no, I’m really afraid you’re not,” I replied. “I’m terribly terribly afraid you’re not.”

She put the tray over my lap. I stared down into the large bowl of clear steaming liquid. “Oh, I forgot the salt,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” This disappointed me. I was quite aware that I never wanted her to come back.

I could tell that something had been dissolved in this liquid, but I couldn’t tell what. The steam felt quite soothing against my face. The shiny metal instruments were obviously medical in nature. And the towels looked fluffy, absorbent, and, in their own way, as welcoming as the steam.

I had no idea what was expected of me and this caused me a great deal of anxiety. My face felt dry and itchy. By raising my hands and feeling with my fingers I could tell how very rough it was, how damaged. There were cracks, and here and there the top layer of skin had completely separated from the layers beneath. I remembered how hard I had fallen into the sand, and how much the hot sun had burned my already sunburned skin.

“Onion skin, onion skin, I have such beautiful beautiful onion skin,” I heard myself spontaneously uttering in a sing-song voice.

I picked up the tray and carried it awkwardly from my bed. I was still pretty shaky and congratulated myself for not spilling anything. I carried the tray into the bathroom and set it down over the sink beneath the mirror.

I examined the instruments—they looked vaguely familiar. They were obviously designed for lifting, separating, peeling. A gentle tune issued softly from my throat like a purr. I quickly realized it was the onion song. With an instrument in each hand I raised them to my face intending to debride the dying layers.

I have often awakened with the sensation that I have forgotten something essential to my happiness and sense of well-being. It’s a sense that some important event has been forgotten, some terrible reality from the past or some promising happening from the future. Around the time I turned forty I realized I had forgotten a number of important people in my life—frequently their names, and less frequently their faces with all connected associations. As if I’d shed their very existence from my memory. I could imagine my experience of them floating slowly away, no longer tethered by any immediate need for them, traveling for miles before catching in the highest branches or plastering themselves like worn-out leaves against buildings in distant cities.

Perhaps this perennial discarding is merely the mind’s way of unencumbering itself in preparation for the difficult new work that lies ahead. That would certainly be the positive view. But being a less than positive person I can only grieve the valuable relationships that have been lost. Some days it feels as if I have lost everyone.

Spontaneous song erupted from me as I stood in front of the mirror and began removing the now-useless layers of skin. I was careful not to lose any of the pieces, allowing skin and drippings to gather in the steaming bowl.

“Oh onion, sweet onion, I love peeling onions!” I sang, as my imperfections dropped off, as inexactitudes curled away in my search for my perfect sweet heart.

I wasn’t even halfway done when I realized the face being uncovered was completely different from the face I had worn before. It wasn’t a better-looking face, especially in the initial stages of the reveal, but it was far more interesting.

“Harry! What have you done?” she asked from the doorway. And it struck me that her question was strangely similar to a distant whispered plea issuing from beneath my many layers. My beloved Janet stood in the doorway, her long, gray hair flowing and beautiful against her pale, shocked skin.

Many an evening I have sat in front of my fireplace thinking of the paths I have chosen in my life. Of course there is no fire in the fireplace, nor has there ever been—local ordinances deny us both the comfort and the drama of fire.

Movies and books and all such products of the imagination are terrible things for most people because they make them believe that they can be other than what they actually are. Terrible and beautiful things. People sit and wait for the transformation, which never comes, as if they might arise from their chairs or depart the theater as other people entirely. Instead all that is left to them is to gather their addictions around them and to sing their onion songs.

But I have been lucky enough to be born an onion in a long line of onions. Every day I stare into the mirror for yet another glimpse of the one I am becoming.

I understand none of this because, although I can glimpse the one underneath, my senses are so distracted by the layers still remaining that I have no idea what I am truly seeing.

When my wife is not whom I expected I begin to imagine that she is someone else.

Now and then I burst into spontaneous song and it is like praying.

Every day I find new language in my mouth. I spit it out but every night it returns. It creeps into my head and changes the landscape there.

Sometimes I call the people I once knew but have since forgotten and I tell them stories about who I imagined them to be.

Sometimes I whisper into the mirror the dreams I will be having tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

And when I peel the onions I weep.

THE SADNESS

It creeps up on you out of the North, like some dark and suspicious groundwater, risen through the lost ruins of forgotten basements. When finally it takes form it is too tall, its folded hands too soft. It waits patiently beneath the dark trees: this malaise, this disappointment, this sadness.

You have waited for your family at the station for days. Their train has been delayed, you have been told it is the earthquakes in the Midwest, or the floods, or the wild fires. A storm has settled over the eastern seaboard and the birds do not know where to land.

Your youngest daughter cannot travel without nightmares. Your son cannot live long without the medicine a specialist provides. Your wife says she loves you but you are never sure. The waiting room is full of people who look at you with faces paled by fear.

At the edge of the platform a small boy tosses dead mice out onto the track as if seeding a sacrifice. Behind you the windows of the station have filled with weeping. Overhead the birds glide by in slow motion, still reluctant to land.

You make yourself smile and tell jokes to an old man with a cane. He taps it so rapidly against the planks you imagine some nervous disorder. Out on the platform a conductor collects tickets, tears them apart and tosses them out to join the mice. The wind blows several pieces back toward your face where they land and twitch. Gray moths, you think, as a number gather to make a beard across your chin.

All night long a distant train wails its distress but comes no closer. During the heat of the day the people who wait on the platform stretch out on the warm boards and sleep.

It is too late to be surprised, you think. It is too late to devise a backup plan. You have made so many mistakes, you think, when the sadness embraces you with its empty sleeves, an unspoken dread in the hollow of its mouth.

THE MESSENGER

Morgan staggered to the door half-asleep. Then he opened his eyes. Then he opened the door. The Western Union man was there.

Still dark outside; it was three o’clock in the morning.

“I’m… I’m really very sorry,” the messenger said, fumbling with the piece of paper in his hands. “I don’t know what brings me here. I…” He cleared his throat. “But I’ve really terrible news.”

Morgan frowned at the little man. “This must be difficult for you. But we all have our tasks to perform. You have your duty.”

The little man’s eyes darted about nervously. “But you don’t understand. We don’t deliver these by hand anymore. I don’t understand why I’m here. I’ve been behind a desk for years; I’m not even a messenger anymore!”

“You know, in the ancient world they put to death the bearers of bad tidings.” Morgan smiled grimly, then chuckled.

He let the messenger in. The man’s clothes were disheveled, his cap awry. Apparently in his rush to get dressed, the messenger had forgotten his tie.

Morgan clucked to himself softly. “Such a mess…”

The messenger was beginning to weep, wringing his hands, crumpling the paper, wiping his bald pate beneath the front edge of the uniform cap with trembling fingers.

“I’m really very sorry,” the messenger said.

“Oh, that’s quite all right. Have some tea? Perhaps some cake?”

“But I’m afraid I have quite bad news.”

“Well then, by all means, tell me. You have your duty, remember?”

The messenger cleared his throat. He looked small and vulnerable in his too-small cap and baggy, wrinkled uniform. He stared at the paper in his hands, as if for the first time, then back at Morgan. He lowered his eyes and began to read.

“Your wife and children have been killed in a fiery car crash.” He paused. “Wait… there must be some mistake. The rest of this… no responsible official…”

“Read me the message.” Morgan’s voice was firm.

“But, sir…”

“Read me the entire message. You have a job to do.”

The Western Union man read rapidly. “The bodies were burned almost beyond recognition. Their faces were fixed in expressions of… agony. Your little girl still clutched the charred remains of her doll.” He looked up. “I’m so sorry.”

Morgan sighed and looked past the messenger at the endless row of streetlights leading down into the city. “Oh… oh, I appreciate your going to this trouble for me, delivering such a personal message and all.” He stared at the messenger’s sweaty face. “You’re really too kind.”

At four in the morning the messenger had returned. He was pale, his eyes bright red from lack of sleep. “Oh… ohhhh. I’m so sorry. You see, they keep calling me, telling me to come down here. With these horrible messages. I don’t understand it.”

“And who, exactly, are they?”

The Western Union man just stood there, watching him.

“Who?”

“I… I don’t know.”

Morgan looked down at the messenger’s hands. “You’re holding the message in your hands.” He smiled at the little man. “I’d suggest you read it.”

“I haven’t slept for days,” the man whispered, shaking his head.

“You’re a very dedicated man. Won’t you come in?”

The messenger appeared suddenly frightened. “No… oh, no. I’ll just deliver the message and be off. I don’t… don’t want to bother you longer than necessary.”

“And the message?”

The messenger read slowly. “Your parents have murdered each other. They… they were found with their fingers wrapped around each other’s throats. You’re all alone now.” He opened his mouth, gulping for air. “It says here… the message is dated fifteen years ago!”

“You do well at your assigned task. Your employers must be quite pleased with you.”

The Western Union man shuffled his feet, staring at the welcome mat beneath them. “I suppose I should be leaving you… to your grief.”

At six in the morning the messenger returned. He was agitated, running his thin hands up and down the front of his uniform blazer. He squinted as if he could barely see.

“Why?” The messenger gazed at him helplessly. “Why does this continue to happen? I haven’t slept. I don’t even remember how I received these messages. I lie down to sleep and the next thing I know I’m ringing your doorbell, and you’re answering the door.”

Morgan looked at him impatiently. “You have your task to perform.”

The messenger clutched at Morgan’s sleeve. “Please. Please, this has to stop.”

“You have your sacred task. Read me the message.”

“I really need this job, you know? I have an old mother to support. And the prices these days, you know what I mean? It takes money.”

“Just read me the message. I don’t need to know all that; I don’t want to know all that. It’s not your job to relay your life history to your customers.”

“There’s so little caring in the world. We’re strangers to other people.”

“That’s simply human nature, my man. Just read me the message.”

The messenger moaned and stared at the paper. After a few seconds Morgan reached over and pulled the paper out of his hands, almost tearing it, the messenger’s grip was so tight.

Morgan began to read. “You will commit murder.”

The Western Union man whimpered. Morgan put his hand on the little man’s shoulder. “You’re a fine messenger, a credit to the company.”

“I’m really tired. This must stop.”

“Get some rest. Drink some coffee. Soon you must make your rounds again.”

Morgan closed the door on the slumped figure of the messenger and walked back into his study.

He sat at his desk. He gazed up into the memorial alcove he had prepared above the desk, at the black-framed pictures of his parents, his dead wife and children. “You do a good job, little man.”

He ran his narrow fingers over the top message scribbled hastily on his message pad. Morgan read the message silently to himself.

You will be cruel. You will have no compassion. The world has treated you badly.

At seven the doorbell rang once again. He was chuckling as he walked down the hallway from his office. By the time he reached the door there were tears in his eyes from the paroxysms of laughter wracking his body. He was barely able to nudge open the door, so great was his hilarity.

The Western Union man was down on his knees in front of the door, one hand out beseechingly, his eyes white coins, speechless. The little man was weeping.

Morgan howled with a raw laughter as he removed the gun from his coat, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

THE HIJACKER

He thinks that the stewardess is pretty enough to be a high-fashion model. “You’re pretty enough to be a high-fashion model,” he tells her in a cheery voice. She smiles at him, although he knows she must think him a pathetic youth with his greasy hair and vaguely foreign accent—obviously she has heard this many times before—and her expression tells him everything. She’s incapable of secrecy. He almost asks her to go out with him after they land—a fleeting insanity—he has never, ever, asked a woman for a date before, though he is almost thirty, and this would not be the time to begin.

He spreads his overcoat wide to show her the twenty sticks of dynamite, the coiled wire, and timer strapped to his flat, Italian belly. She falls to her knees in submission and once again he tells her she might be a model, she needn’t be here at all—in the clutches of this mad man, this human bomb—she could be modeling expensive gowns at fifty dollars per hour, courted by actors, recognized by the most casual passer-by as a real live “cover girl.” She takes this proposition more seriously now, nodding her head stonily as he dances up and down the aisles of the plane, his dynamite jiggling lewdly.

He listens to the sound of his own voice. It always amazes him, so soft and gentle. Not the voice of one who might commit so desperate an act. But, he had failed his religion, he knew that. He hadn’t had it in him to become the priest. And perhaps his friends were right; perhaps he was homosexual? What would his mother think?

His body feels very, very heavy.

He had been followed—that much was obvious. Explosives had been wired to his automobile ignition, poison laced through his broccoli and mint tea. The saboteurs were men like his father, violent drinkers, hostile toward every good impulse in mankind. He sorely wished he could have made it to the priesthood.

He thinks back to the night before. He couldn’t sleep. He knew something awful was about to happen.

The captain begs and pleads with him, a nobody, the sickly Italian lad, although a son of hearty stock who might have become a prize fighter if this had only been the fifties, to sit down, let him turn the plane back before it’s too late. The young hijacker knows that the captain has been through many such hijackings, but now he is old, his hands shake, his wife has left him, or so the young hijacker imagines, his children hate him—in short, he has lost his nerve. The co-pilot, who despises this disgusting coward, surely must envy the Italian boy from the Bronx. He must realize that the hijacker now controls the entire plane; he controls the destinies of two hundred people. The handsome Italian boy smiles, and offers the co-pilot the position of Air Force general when they land.

He leans against an empty seat, closing his eyes and reliving momentarily the great exhilaration he felt upon breaking free of the ground, like an enormous balloon popping, as he escaped into thin air.

Perhaps he would land in Cuba. Perhaps the godless Communists would put him to death. They would bear down on him with tanks and flamethrowers, and he would be unable to move. His feet would be glued to the spot. He would weigh ten tons.

He had been a good boy. He didn’t use bad words and he didn’t laugh at dirty jokes. His only vice was sleepwalking.

He suddenly wonders why he didn’t bring his father’s old Luger pistol along with him. He could have used it on the hijacking; surely it was around the old home place somewhere?

He wouldn’t have been doing such an awful thing if he had become a priest. His mother would have been pleased; she believed in the Church. His little sisters and older brother would have been proud. Perhaps he wouldn’t have felt the need to drink so much.

The sweet, young Italian boy props his feet up in the cockpit. He’s sure the aged navigator is smiling at him, surely thinking the would-be priest might have been his own son. The captain is crying hysterically in the corner. The stewardess looks grim, but is stroking the Italian boy’s forehead, surely finding him enormously attractive. The co-pilot flies the plane, making exaggerated winks at the Italian hero. A better life awaits in Italy, the mother country, when they arrive. Money, fame, political power for the handsome Italian youth. Modeling jobs for the stewardess. It was so easy, the Italian boy thinks, and if they had refused to give up their silly airplane—silly to think of it now—he was going to commit suicide. The stewardess smiles as if she is reading his thoughts.

He had been a mouse while his father was alive; he had been worthless. But then his father died, and in this act of hijacking, this focusing of all his latent powers, he had taken charge of his life in the way that had been his father’s only virtue.

He had had difficulty walking; now he had regained his equilibrium.

His had been a futile rage; now it was released. He had become omnipotent, rising above all restrictions.

He had gambled with fate and won.

The handsome Italian boy from the Bronx gazes out of the window, down through the clouds, to his father stretched out naked and obese below. The old man groans and sputters in his sleep, and his useless sex organ seems to become increasingly wrinkled with each of his hesitant breaths. The Italian boy notices mountain lodges and recreation centers sprouting between the tough ridges of abdominal skin. He orders the plane’s baggage be dumped on the recumbent form, hoping to rattle the old man’s nerves.

The stewardess brings another tray of drinks as ordered. He downs them hastily.

The plane rips into the upper reaches of air, the Italian boy thinking how there is no turning back, ousted for good, the whole world down there, his father groaning beneath the weight of excreted baggage, and he, just a handsome Italian boy from the Bronx, free, free and on his way to Mother Italy.

But then he snaps out of his reverie, sure he will be caught. Some brave member of the crew, perhaps even the co-pilot, will daringly grab his wrists, forcing him to the ground, while the cunning stewardess disarms his vest of dynamite. Or perhaps he’ll land in Italy, only to be greeted by several divisions of the Italian army, their massive guns trained on him. In any case, it would be one more failure added to the many failures of his life. He would be transferred to a stateside hospital, put into a psychiatric unit, and when he got out he would have to try all over again.

He is amazed by the grayness of the plane’s inner walls. He runs from the cockpit and dashes back through the plane’s fuselage, but he finds no crew, no passengers, not even the cunning but beautiful stewardess. The odor of rotting flesh gags him. He looks out a window and sees the pale gray, outstretched arm of his father, simulating a wing. He can hear his father’s heartbeat, thundering behind fleshy walls where the plane engine should be.

Again he wakes from his sleepwalking, now realizing that his bomb has gone off while he dozed. Dark corpses sit rigidly in their seats. He recognizes a cluster of burnt forms as the captain and crew, another as a family grouping complete with two toddlers. He recognizes the dark form of the stewardess from her smile. Roughly three-fourths of the plane has been blown away. But still, he thinks, still he has succeeded. He holds out his transparent gray arms at shoulder height. He makes droning noises in his throat, staring forward, guiding his passengers into the new freedom of the deep blue skies.

OUT LATE IN THE PARK

Once again, Clarence Senior has let the ball get away from him. The other men gasp when it rolls out of the shadowed circle formed by our beloved trees and into the brilliant sunlight baking the sand paths where the beautiful young people stroll. Jacob, one of our oldest, scowls bitterly. I raise an eyebrow in warning—or I believe I do. Facial control has been more difficult these past few months. Often I’m not sure whether my thin line of mouth is smiling or twisted into some shape less agreeable.

As has been typical for him, Jacob ignores me. “He’ll spoil it!” he growls through a swallow of phlegm. “He’ll spoil it for all of us!”

I raise my hand to stop him, but too late because I can feel the stirrings of the angled things that dwell at the edges of the sun-lit path. It’s terrible, worrying that every spat of anger might cause your heart to seize, and then the whole of your body comes tumbling down and there’s no more light in you than a dark stone at the bottom of a pond. Finally Jacob recognizes my warning and stops, takes a deep, savored breath as if it’s to be his last one. Which it might be, of course. In this park of the world, suddenness is the business of the day.

Clarence Senior, as usual, appears to be somewhat lacking in orientation. He trots playfully after the volleyball. I envy the looseness of his stride, something my own arthritis denies me. But I am pleased that one of our own can still play with such reckless abandon.

“He’ll get hit by a car!” George cries nonsensically. “We’ll all get hit by cars!” This has been George’s signature warning since he first started coming to the park. I assume his family has some tragic history related to the automobile, but of course I do not inquire. Men of our age trust each other well enough not to ask. We all assume tragedy and imagine disaster. Perhaps this makes us less sympathetic—certainly it makes us impatient. And burying the curiosity of our youth has become a measure of the respect we have for one another.

Although, if truth be told, I would say we respect nothing more than the dark, and the half-remembered things that move there.

Now the others are yelling. Of course I have seen this phenomenon before—all of us are quick to panic. It is something that happens to the nerves, I suppose, as the nervous system constantly monitors to determine if the flesh is still alive. Men my age understand the process. There is nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night to discover that a favorite extremity has died.

“Get him back!” Joseph sobs. He is a weepy thing, old Joseph, more so than the rest of us, even though as a group we are a weepy bunch indeed. “Get him back!” Again, with that disturbing flail of movement-limited arms. Some sort of stroke, I believe. Strokes are as common among our kind as flies on newly harvested meat.

“Just stop it! Stop it!” I complain, unable to bear their old guy whining a second longer. “Can’t you just let him play? We have plenty of extra balls—grab a couple and toss them around! Nothing’s going to happen to him, or any one of us because of him!”

I do not believe any of this, of course, but it gets their minds off Clarence. He retrieves the ball from a beautiful young woman who has been watching us from the edge of one of those sunny paths. I stare at her for some time, even after Clarence Senior has jogged happily back into our little circle. The other men quickly close around him in case he’s been followed.

The young woman is unusual in that she has noticed us. We are not used to being noticed at all, especially by beautiful young women. I wonder if those of us with daughters—Jacob, Samuel, perhaps one or two others—feel the same confused anticipation when a young woman looks at them. I wonder if they suffer from the same temporal dislocation of desire the rest of us experience.

She looks quite familiar. But then all the young women look familiar to me. By the time a man reaches my age he has stockpiled the blueprints of a thousand young women in the caves of his memory, ready for somber perusal during the long, lonely hours before dawn.

The young woman’s eyes lock with mine and she slips in a quick smile. My heart speeds as a long stem of black insect leg darts from one corner of her mouth and scratches futilely at her chin before her dark red tongue can usher the leg back inside her mouth.

I look away as if with mere embarrassment, as if some part of her garment had slipped away and revealed more than might be decent. When I look back she is gone, but the ground where she stood appears blackened and torn.

* * *

Joseph injures himself again. His eyes are always filling with tears and then he can’t see more than a few inches in front of him. He runs into things and then he falls down hard. Clarence Senior is always trying to help by convincing him that he isn’t really hurt. “See, no blood!” Clarence Senior shouts with no small measure of delirium. He says this every time, even when there’s blood gushing from the wound. Everything is A-OK in Clarence Senior’s world, even though Clarence Junior hates him, even though he has the worst nightmares of us all.

“Throw me the ball! Me me me!” George cries, his belly moving independently of his leap. Benjamin, the retired carpenter—perhaps the best coordinated of us all—throws the ball and George drops it. No one laughs or complains—it has always been George’s job to drop the ball. He staggers back and forth as he attempts to pick it up, frustrated to tears because his knees will not bend properly. If someday he were to magically acquire competence there would be considerable tension generated in the group, for only by comparison do the rest of us remain competent.

Benjamin shuffles after the ball like some huge, shaggy toy run by remote control. No one knows very much about Benjamin—he started playing with us one day as if he’d always been here. He has never spoken. I get the impression that he simply has nothing to say and will not pretend. A far better way of being in the world, I think. The rest of us speak constantly, fueled more by anxiety than idea.

We toss the ball and drop the ball, we run around things called bases, worshipping at each one briefly before being urged on by the impatient cries of our companions. The bases are old schoolbooks, interestingly shaped stones, and stakes ripped from the hard hearts of trees and driven almost flush into the ground. Who among us would have the power to execute such a pounding? It has always been here, driven ages ago by some comic book hero or other. It would be nice to linger, but our fear is that to stop even briefly, to stop at all, would be to invite the fragments of black into our mouths, into our ears and eyes and anuses, until all motion is stopped forever.

So this tired old group of us, we play and we play and we play, pretending to have fun until, like toddlers run amuck, we collapse into the arms of our mothers at the end of the day.

But, of course, our mothers are not there at the end of the day. Most of us cannot even remember how our mothers died, or how they’ve otherwise left us. But we think about our mothers often, during these last, long days of play in the park, for we are still the melancholy boys we always were, late for dinner and crying over the day’s small, misplaced treasures.

Late in the afternoon Samuel arrives from his job by bright yellow taxi, his favorite mode of transportation. He is the only one of us to continue in a state of gainful employment. He sits down on the graffiti bench (“Peggy loves Frank, but what about God?” “Sing and play all day, but whatever you do don’t go past the path at night.”) for his daily cry, the rest of us gathering around him for our daily pretense of comfort. “They act like I’m stupid!” he complains. “Like I’m too old to learn anything new!”

We all pat his back and his knee, more fiercely now, agreeing vigorously although we really have no idea what we’re agreeing to. We have never been to Samuel’s work and most of us haven’t worked a regular job in years. Still, we know how it can be out there. Any man knows, past a certain age. The world is something new every day, something you’ve never seen before, something you feel hopeless to understand. The colors of the world shift their spectrum with each rising of the sun. The mouths of the world mutate the words of the world even as they are formed. “Damn bosses… damn wireless whatevers… damn computers…” We all nod our understanding. Damn whatevers, indeed.

Then there is Willy, standing in his corner of the field waiting for the ball to come to him. He would wait all day if we let him, and more often than not we do, for we enjoy observing his profound patience.

“It’s not patience,” Jacob declares. “He’s just an idiot.”

If there is truth in what Jacob says we do not want to know about it. Willy does not appear to suffer the fears that bother the rest of us. Willy has no need for hand-holding. Willy does not appear to need at all. Willy simply stands, and waits, watching for whatever comes next, a ball, or a butterfly, or fragments broken off the shadows and stealing across the lawns.

We try to prevent the ball from coming Willy’s way. He would not know what to do with it. He is a watcher, you see.

“He has about a thimbleful of brain,” is the way Jacob so delicately puts it. Jacob thinks it is shameful the way I let Willy groom himself: unshaven, hair long and stringy, greasy. Jacob has even brought shampoos and razors to the park from time to time, “To take care of poor Willy. Shameful the way we’ve let him go like that.” As if Willy were an unkempt yard or a dog in need of a trim.

But I always wave Jacob away. Willy is not exactly happy, but he is stable the way he is, and some things should not be tampered with.

Again I see the pretty young woman at the edge of our area, watching. I cannot keep my eyes off her. The beauty of young women is something I truly miss, being able to touch them, to admire them openly. Not that there is no beauty in older women, or that the feelings I’m expressing are primarily sexual. But so much is recalled when I see the newness in them, the untutored look as their eyes open up to the world.

A sudden breeze lifts her hair revealing a sheen of brittle membranes close to the skull. Small nodules like eggs nestle around her ears and above her forehead. Tiny shapes pulse and jerk in the sacs. As one begins to erupt into a flowering of dark, segmented parts, the breeze mercifully drops her hair back over the assemblage.

We are all supposed to be having fun here. Even though sometimes we try a little too hard, laugh a little too hard for comfort. But what are you going to do? Far better than the alternative. That is what everyone says. That is what all the old people say.

At five o’clock we line up and the designated adult checks the pockets of the others. We stand at lazy attention with our hands stretching our pockets inside out and sideways so they resemble a pair of large ears. Clarence Senior always requires some encouragement, Willy has to have his pockets turned inside out for him, and nine times out of ten George will be hiding something, so we have to watch him especially carefully to make sure he does not do anything that is going to get him into trouble. More often than not I am the designated adult, a fact that I often resent and can be quite bitter about. In those instances I always have Jacob check my pockets—I never keep anything in there besides some hard candy for the others.

By eight o’clock we are well into drowsy, although most of us will fight sleep with our last breath. We sit up on our bedding and talk about the day’s games and share memories of our mothers, now and then twisting our heads around to make sure that a particular piece of night remains respectfully in its place.

Jacob and I are always the last to fall asleep. Sometimes I think it is because we feel a certain paternal responsibility for the others. Sometimes I think it is because we think our alertness will protect us from the inevitable.

In the middle of the night they come for Willy. I am somewhat comforted that he shows no signs of surprise. Surely, this is what he has always been waiting for. Tonight they come as eight or nine squirrels and a large black bird with a broken neck. The bird bothers me most: its head flops and stretches painfully on the narrow strand of neck flesh as it still manages to grab a bit of Willy’s pants in its beak and pull with the squirrels to drag Willy’s body off into the night. Now and again one of the squirrels will let go and turn its head, smiling at me so broadly I can see that all its teeth are missing.

Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming. But most, I think, are punished.

In a few days they will come to take another of us. Rabbits, perhaps, or snakes, or shiny emerald-green beetles, or an old dog that so resembles one from our childhood we will be convinced it is the very same one. Soon only Jacob or I will be left.

But that is the worst kind of wish-fulfilment. How do I know I will be a survivor? At some things the imagination fails.

I know I should not whine about it. It is a natural process that happens to everyone. You can wait for it or you can play with it, you can roll your ball at it or you can run headlong into the cars that seem to be everywhere. But what you cannot do is stop it from coming.

Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable. Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come.

PICNIC

Each day of fair weather they gather along the edge of the park: to eat and talk, heat their sluggish bodies under the sun, watch animals creeping through the woods beyond, exclamations of pleasure with each new sighting, holding up the kids, making them look. “Kitty!” his youngest cries. At two, every animal is kitty. “Kitty!” patting the iron squirrel holding up one of the many barbecue grills the park provides. “Kitty!”

“When I was a kid we ate squirrels my daddy shot: two, three times a month. But he still thought they were beautiful, and never killed when we could afford better. I don’t know, maybe that made it okay.”

“Bob…” his wife warned, looking at the kids, but only Julie was listening, eyes big above her clutched hamburger.

“No, it’s true. It didn’t taste bad, a little strong. Dark meat, heavy with blood. An honest taste, I think.”

“I don’t think the kids…”

“I think about the kids all the time, these past few weeks. They should get out and see more animals, get to know them. Everything isn’t a kitty. Now when they see one it’s this big surprise—shouldn’t be like that. Animals are invisible to us—when they appear it’s this big magic trick. Then at night, their eyes shining in the dark, and in our dreams.”

“We take the kids to the zoo.”

“That’s not what I mean. Julie? That hamburger you’re eating was made in a slaughterhouse, honey.”

“Bob!”

“They’ve got this gun, and it shoots a steel bolt into the cow’s brain, and almost before it falls there’s a hook and a knife in it, oh, and sometimes they use a hammer to finish it, but not always. I don’t think the animal’s always dead.”

“Bob, that’s enough!” His wife had Julie up in her arms, and Julie was sobbing, and their little boy too. Their eldest, Richie, the sullen teenager, sat at another table, a look of entertained surprise on his face. Bob stared at the half-chewed hamburger that had dropped out of Julie’s little mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“I’m not saying she shouldn’t eat meat. I’m not saying any of us shouldn’t. I just don’t think we should be blind to the suffering is all, turning our heads all the time. And not just the suffering—we just don’t see them, we make them so goddamn invisible. We don’t want to be touched, we don’t want their eyes on us, we don’t want to look into their eyes.”

“Bob, you’re scaring them.” Not completely true, he thought, because although he couldn’t look at Richie right now, he could still hear him laughing over there, so hard his voice was cracking. “Could we just go home, please?”

He gazed at both of his youngest in her arms, crying. “I don’t want them to be scared,” he said softly. “I get scared. Each day I get scared. The doctor doesn’t know when, sweetheart. I see him twice a week and still he doesn’t know. Maybe I’m lucky—at least my when has a range. Three months, a year. I feel bad for you with no idea when your time’s going to be up. Like all those animals. They never know.”

She looked away, her crying sparking another round of tears in their children. Richie had stopped laughing, had sullenly turned his back.

“The main thing is… we look away. All of us. We won’t see. We pretend it doesn’t touch us, this messy thing. Our kids need to know about that, how life is this messy thing, but okay because that’s the way it is for all of us, we’re all in this messy thing. Don’t turn away. Look into our eyes.”

After a time the air cools and families leave the park. Few words are said in the car. In their fatigue they settle on takeout in front of the TV and an early bedtime.

In the park, small animals come out of the woods for abandoned scraps. They forage around the grill with no apparent recognition of the figure sculpted in metal. Other animals stay back in their lairs, alone, quietly licking at miscellaneous wounds.

DOODLES

“Her drawings know more about the world than she does.”

This thing his ex-wife used to say about their daughter eventually led him to take his seemingly compulsive, absent-minded doodles more seriously. He did them all the time: at work—on the papers due on his boss’s desk by the end of the afternoon, at dinner—on napkins, tablecloths, even credit card slips, even in his sleep, on the graying walls of his dreams. A nervous habit, or an addiction—he simply could not stop himself.

He had to have the pen firmly in his hand, and the pen had to be moving.

This habit underlined, circled, boxed, and generally ornamented his days. If he forced himself not to doodle, the days flowed on without form or direction.

“Her drawings are smart drawings.” He had no idea what this really meant, but he agreed completely.

His daughter had drawn pictures of houses mostly: huge, elaborate structures heavy with character. But however wonderful her depictions, she always seemed more careless in her execution than most children. Sometimes she didn’t even look down at the page. She just drew, sight unseen. She drew her world, and the houses that were in it, and the creatures who lived in those houses. This ceremony of drawing that she performed every day centered her, and seemed to make her happy.

But he scribbled and doodled, late into the night sometimes, and found no peace in it. He wondered if it was because of his age, or because of a long-standing pessimism about all forms of self-help. Whatever the reason, for him it was like worrying an infected wound. And yet he could not stop himself.

* * *

“Sometimes there’s magic in doing the same thing again and again.”

A series of vertical lines running up and down the page. Walls and borders that were not to be crossed. Some weeks he built these walls before and after everything he wrote: letters, reports, grocery lists. He’d write his name and construct the walls that were intended to hold it in, keep it from expanding so much that it became unrecognizable. Ego expansion could be a problem—it left one open to attack. A few individual walls scattered here and there emulated grass, or the spikes at the bottom of a pit to trap uninvited guests.

Sometimes it was a comfort to go over these vertical lines again and again to make them thicker. The act made his fortifications stronger.

Some days he filled the page with his walls, his borders, his spikes. After hours his wrist would begin to ache, but there was still relief in the repetition.

* * *

“You repeat the same old patterns—it’s as if you can’t help yourself.”

Some mornings he would get stuck on a pattern, find himself compelled to repeat it over and over and over again until he broke for lunch. Circles, triangles, squares, the same patterns made by the same muscular movements repeated endlessly. Then after lunch, the pattern broken, variety would suddenly be available to him again. And yet sometimes the pattern had been so worn in to the muscles of his arm, wrist, hand, fingers, that the old pattern would simply reassert itself (phantom circles appearing within a complex network of lines, for example), and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

* * *

“There are some things you just have to do, no matter how harmful. It’s as if you can’t help yourself.”

Daggers and other blades were a compulsion at times. As were primitive depictions of murder. They arrived at the most inopportune times: once, after his divorce, he was having a romantic dinner with a beautiful young woman, a young woman he someday wished to marry, when she suddenly stopped speaking, stopped smiling, and glared at him with a peculiar expression on her face. He looked down at his place setting then, discovering that he had taken the red ink pen from his vest pocket and used it to sketch the particularly grisly stabbing death of the young woman on his cream-colored linen napkin.

Some days it felt as if his doodles wanted him all to themselves.

* * *

“It made no sense. But it was compelling, irresistible, all the same.”

He couldn’t make heads or tails of some of his more unconscious scribblings. They resembled the webs of hallucinating spiders, he thought, or a cheaply made house after an explosion had leveled it. After years, however, he came to recognize these works as maps. All he had to do was find the starting point, and his current position relative to it.

* * *

“You feel if you do it often enough, the very structures of your brain will be altered.”

Hours of drawing lines as precisely as possible would sometimes be an aid to linear thinking. Too many nested circles brought a sensation of great fullness, and enormous headaches. Ten thousand sharp edges on a page might lead to a ripping and tearing, and then a brain hemorrhage would begin.

* * *

“The more I want not to feel these things, the more I feel them.”

Some days he would try not to draw certain things. The effort proved to be self-defeating, of course. The more he thought about the image, the stronger the compulsion to bring it to light, capture it in pencil on a napkin, pen on a flap of cereal box. Try not drawing a circle. Try not drawing a square. Try not drawing a small child trapped in a burning window, the window fragmented, blotted out by a furious, pen-wielding hand.

* * *

“My father used to say, ‘Find the one thing you do well, and do it often.’”

But this was not what his father had imagined, of that he was sure. If he could be paid for his doodles, of course, he would be quite the wealthy man. But who paid for obsession? Obsession was mostly a matter of self-gratification, a private thing, and powerful in that it belonged to the individual alone. He could take his doodles anywhere, whatever his “regular” job might be. There was power in that.

Drawings of strong, squarish hands that covered page after page after page. Sometimes without thinking he would draw these hands on a business report, and have to do the report all over again before an important presentation.

But no one ever found out. His bosses praised him for his neatness, his calm, his organizational abilities.

* * *

“You can live where you dream.”

The argument in his head, the ongoing argument with his ex-wife, continued as obsessively as his doodling.

Many of his doodles resembled floor plans of unknown structures rendered in a multitude of dimensions and perspectives unavailable to his normal, everyday senses.

They appeared to vibrate on the page—he imagined he could hear the music they made. In dreams, he did hear, and the music helped him fall asleep. Never mind that he had to be asleep already to be dreaming these songs—the songs led him off into deeper sleeping.

In daydreams he would speculate whether it was possible to visit such structures, such estranged, vibratory spaces. He had his doubts—what caused their vibrations would tear a normal, three-dimensional human body apart.

So why did his desire to visit such places still persist? Because he knew he would feel at home there, even if the peculiar geometries destroyed him. What was architecture but an endless and futile quest to recreate the “home” that existed only in the dream of your body, the dream of your cells? Doubly futile since the architecture can only create the home from within his body—and the client who must dwell there is immediately trapped within the architect’s own body. Primitive peoples had it best—they were their own architects. At least their mistakes in execution in attempting “home” were in service of their own dream, however distorted.

He started renting cheap apartments and trashed-out homes he could redo to his heart’s content, destroying if need be. Expensive furnishings were unnecessary—since the attempt at creating home was destined to failure anyway, cardboard and cheap lumber, even paper mache would do. It was the shape of the space that mattered, the way it fitted around his sleeping form. He made himself cocoons and nests and narrow coffins and sacks that hung from the uterine plaster walls. Yet home always remained out of reach, the terror of its vibrations singing across the darkness to him, tearing at his nerves.

* * *

“That drawing looks as if it hurts.”

Some days there were nothing but claws on the page—hooks and barbed triangles, jagged lines of lightning (God’s claws, he now realized). And even when they didn’t resolutely fill the page they were a major motif most days (especially in the late afternoon, when his muscles began to stiffen, and the air seemed heated). Sometimes they appeared to move in currents, to form patterns. At times they resembled graphics he’d seen representing electromagnetic currents, or the auras that supposedly radiated from the insane. He knew that visions in ancient times were sometimes described in terms of an eagle’s talons clawing through the scalp. So it wasn’t as if all these invisible razor claws were necessarily a terrible thing. He imagined they must somehow serve to also energize and inspire. On the other hand perhaps they were the source of migraines in those who relied on them too much.

But whatever the use, they filled the air—we breathed and drank of their arbitrary movements. Thank God they were invisible, he thought, else we would all be horrified in their presence.

* * *

“Sometimes it seems everything is falling apart.”

There were a number of scribblings, which might only be described as representations of “generalized corruption.” Lines that broke and ran dribbling down the page, patches of shadowing which bubbled and disintegrated, narrow scratchings chipped and faded away into a dead-skin paleness. It was a game, finding all the ways in which the doodles illustrated death.

Yet even though it might be a game, he thought these doodles were of particular importance. Corruption itself was a kind of ritual, a kind of obsession, which we ignored at our peril.

* * *

“That looks like a naked woman. Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”

Some of the doodles appeared vaguely pornographic. But a pornography of an elevated sort, as he could detect softnesses here which seemed to go far beyond that of normal flesh, certainly beyond that of any sort of flesh he had ever encountered: the softness of old women losing their hair, of young women in the fullness of life, of his own pale young son, and of his even paler daughter, of the pelts of animals, of silks, of swelling breads.

* * *

“You want to leave me, I can tell.”

His ex-wife accused him daily of wanting to escape her, until escape her he did. Occasionally a page filled with wings. This happened often during times of great stress. Sometimes he drew them all day, and on surfaces he would never think to scribble on, like walls and floors. Once his ex-wife discovered them drawn on their bedroom wall and he’d been a coward, blamed the doodles on one of the kids and was ashamed of himself for months afterward.

Later he realized he’d blamed both of their children. But that was impossible; that was crazy. What had he been thinking of?

It was strange that he never thought consciously of escaping, or felt consciously trapped, for that matter. He felt like a normal human being. But perhaps part of being a normal human being was to be trapped, unable to escape the confines of one’s own life and body.

* * *

“Sometimes you just talk and talk, but you really have nothing to say.”

One day his pen stopped writing, out of ink, then started again in fits and sputters. This disturbed him greatly, because although he imagined he could detect the patterns that the pressure of the pen nib had made, he could never be sure he had understood all of it.

And it was important to understand. He didn’t know why, but his life depended on it.

* * *

“Sometimes you say some pretty hurtful things.”

Sometimes the doodles appeared like mutilations of the pure white, expressionless page. They appeared to be angry, even though he didn’t think he was an angry man. They appeared to be hateful, even though he could think of no one he hated.

And sometimes they appeared as the worst sorts of obscenity: children being mutilated and destroyed, children burning to death.

* * *

“We’ve lived here so long. Maybe what you need is a change of scenery.”

Sometimes what began as a cityscape broke off into other directions that better expressed what the city had become for him. No matter how convoluted the network of lines of this urban representation became, he always seemed able to pick particular houses out of the complexity, important landmarks of his life there.

There was the house where he was born. There was the third-floor apartment in which he had first made love to the woman who would become first his wife, and then his ex-wife. There was the hospital where his daughter and son had been born.

There was the house on fire; the child within burning, her screams breaking up the lines he frantically drew and redrew, attempting repair, striving to make them permanent.

* * *

“Are you hearing me? Do you see what you’re doing to our marriage?”

Ears and eyes appeared frequently, most often together, evidence of a certain paranoia on his part. Everywhere he went, people were watching him, listening to him, and talking among themselves. They’d comment on the look of his face, its shifting expressions of sadness. They’d talk about how he cried, things he’d said when he’d had too much to drink.

Everywhere he went people knew he had lost a child.

* * *

“What’s that smell? Do you smell something?”

Misshapen noses were less frequent, but were more likely on hot, muggy days in August. Strong smells seemed to increase his need to doodle. Cooking smells, especially. Roasting meat, in particular.

Sometimes the smells so filled him it seemed as if he were all nose, and yet with no capacity to breathe.

* * *

“You’re always so nervous! What do you have to be nervous about?”

Overlays of squares always increased his anxiety. Like boxes, or cells. Or the scales of an artificial fish.

It was impossible to escape the box of one’s own nature. And in the end, when they boxed you, you couldn’t even imagine escaping.

* * *

“There are no secret messages here! What are you looking for?”

Sometimes scribbles resembled an exotic handwriting, and he would spend hours trying to decode them. The problems in his marriage had grown quite severe, but when he sought out the spiritualist in order to make contact with his dead daughter the rift between him and his wife became decidedly more pronounced.

One day he began examining every piece of handwriting that originated from or came into their house. He spent hours, in fact, studying his wife’s handwritten grocery lists. He’d become convinced that his daughter was trying to contact him in this manner, embedding her own childish scrawl within the handwriting of others.

He started saving all his own doodles and re-examined them, and found unmistakable proof that at times his dead daughter was guiding his hand. Many of the doodles had taken on her whimsical, sensitive nature.

He stopped going to work. He spent all day of every day doodling. His wife left him after one last appeal to reason. He was barely able to remember their conversation ten minutes after she’d slammed the front door.

* * *

“You talk in circles. You make me dizzy.”

He never knew quite what to make of spirals. Were they eyes, the insides of wombs, tornadoes as seen from outer space?

Their significance was certainly ambiguous, and even when he believed them to be something recognizable and concrete, they maintained a certain abstract quality above and beyond what he could interpret, a spiritual dimension.

He could remember a time when they resembled eyes, and these spiraled eyes were the most threatening thing he could draw. More recently they had become eyes again, but somehow these comforted him. He imagined the blue at their distant bottoms, drawing him into the depths of them, his daughter’s endless stare.

* * *

“Words, you keep using all these words. When are you going to do something?”

Mouths, he decided these were. They started out as eyes, and then grew teeth. People talked too much, when they should be listening. They talked about how things used to be, when they should be seeing how things really are now.

Eventually the memory of his daughter’s endless eyes grew teeth, and all the words in the world would not keep that vision away.

* * *

After his wife left him, there were no more voices to distract him from his doodling.

Sometimes they were faces turned inside out.

Or the internal organs of dream-selves and friends.

Sometimes they were the face your lover takes when she doesn’t believe you can see her.

Some might be the broken bodies of insects, or insects unknown to humankind: the flying brain zipper, the centipede of pain, the butterfly-roach of loss.

He created them at an ever-increasing frenzy, drawing them on the bathroom tiles and mirrors using lipsticks his wife had left behind, spray-painting them on the living room and kitchen ceilings, painting them with a broad brush on the outside walls of his house, using the leftover paint in his garage. Neighbors would gather and watch him, but out of anger or embarrassment they’d stopped trying to talk to him some time ago.

Once, after a week-long drunk, he’d used his own bodily fluids to smear the doodles across his clean white bed sheets.

* * *

He began to write a catalog of the ones he had neglected, or found impossible to save, hoping for some new understanding. He wrote captions at the bottoms of the originals, hoping his labels might crystallize and clarify:

Topographies of nowhere.

The worms of remembrance.

The absence of love.

* * *

In the masses of doodles he discovered pointillist portraits of children he’d never had, and that made him feel like a traitor to his daughter’s memory.

And here were the feathers from birds that were now extinct or that had never existed.

And here were mazes that would forever frustrate him because they had no solutions.

And here were the wriggling walls and strange vegetation that had grown up around him, completely isolating him from the outside world.

* * *

The fire had started in the bedroom. That’s what they had said the other time. It had been piled almost to the ceiling with “drawings,” as someone had called them, although most were no better than hen-scratchings, crudely repeated patterns like those a very young child might make. The drawings had been set on fire, but the rising heat had permitted a few to escape the open window. Several of these were unlike the others, were not crude at all, but were small, obsessive, precisely rendered portraits of a young girl’s face, dozens of them covering the page in a somewhat spiral pattern.

All the neighbors said he had been a nervous man, a smoker. They’d said that the other time as well.

STRANDS

He came to believe that there were knives far sharper than any made by human beings. Manufactured of materials we could not even imagine. And that there were vague, formless surgeons skilled at manipulating those knives, capable of separating nerve from tissue, nerve from nerve, and, deeper still, spreading apart the strands of thought, severing perception from conclusion, scattering the chains of continuity, turning all the moments of a life into short lengths of string, gathered into a box for casual selection and arrangement.

Dream: His brother, Michael, is late again. He keeps calling the apartment, but there is no answer. Suddenly Michael bursts through the door, his hair wild, his shirt unbuttoned—no, torn. Michael is grinning. Fooled you again! he cries. But Michael’s mouth does not move. It remains open and rigid like the bell of a horn. As if frozen in time.

Memory: The main staircase of his parents’ home had always been carpeted in plush, bright red, as far back as he could remember. On that particular day he had paid close attention to that carpet as he climbed the stairs. For some reason he had known how important it was to notice, and record, every detail of the twenty-year-old carpeting: how it pressed neatly into the bottom edge of each riser, flowed softly over the nosing, then stretched thinly across the tread, where the wear was greatest, where the blood-red of the fibers had worn and discolored to a dull rust. From all those steps: his and his brother’s, his drunken parents shuffling each other off to bed. The areas on the edge of the tread were also unevenly colored, from too little vacuuming or too frequent vacuuming with an ill machine. Where the carpet ended on each side the fibers were ragged, untrimmed. The oak edging looked sticky, and probably hadn’t been dusted or wiped in years. He wondered if his mother still had a cleaning lady come in, or if the drinks had become too costly for that.

The door to his brother’s old bedroom was cracked open. About two inches. Maybe three. Maybe he should measure it. The silliness of the thought bothered him, increasing his anxiety. In a rush to escape the next such thought, he pushed open the door.

The mural with Peter Rabbit and friends was still up on the wall. Their mother had never bothered to repaint. But it confused him for a moment, and even seeing Michael on the bed he wondered why his brother wasn’t getting up for school, if maybe he was sick, or pretending to be sick; and then he remembered that Michael was twenty-three, and neither of them had lived in their parents’ house in years.

Peter Rabbit was holding a bright red flower in his right paw. The dripping flower seemed to come closer, as if Peter were going to hand it to him. Maybe Michael was whispering to Peter, telling him what to do. He had a hard time focusing. On the bed, Michael’s head was covered with the melting red flower. Peter had been digging in the flower garden again. The rabbit had completely ruined Michael’s head with the digging and hadn’t even bothered to wash off the evidence: his fur was all spotted brown and red and gray. Mr. McGregor was going to know what had happened for sure.

But Mr. McGregor had already been here, he could see. For Michael was holding Mr. McGregor’s rifle.

And now: He was going to be late for his appointment again. On the bus an elderly woman thought she knew him. She called him “Joe” and told him all about her daughter, whom he used to date, and how she was doing—married, three kids in Chicago. He tried to remember if the story she was telling might be true.

“She was always a good dancer,” he said.

“Oh, the best! The very best! She won awards!”

“I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ginger Rogers,” he said.

“Oh, you were much too young to remember Ginger Rogers.” The old lady looked worried.

“I used to watch her dance and I’d think of Ann-Margret,” he said.

The old lady smiled. “She’s as beautiful as ever,” she said. “She hasn’t changed at all. A good marriage will do that for you. Are you married?”

He stared at her, trying to remember if he had ever been close to marriage, because he wanted to say yes, even though he knew it couldn’t be true. But after all these years, how could he not even have come close to marriage? Could he be that different from everyone else in the world? “No,” he finally said. “I’m afraid not.”

The old lady pursed her lips, patted his knee. “Well, you really should consider it, young man. It would do you a world of good.” And then she sat up straight and looked away from him, out the window at all the stores and people they were passing, as if she were through with him, as if she had immediately forgotten he’d ever existed.

For the rest of the bus ride he tried to imagine what he might have been like if his name had been Joe. He tried to imagine himself married to this old lady’s daughter, having this old woman as a mother-in-law. It all seemed perfectly plausible.

He closed his eyes and could see the daughter dancing, kicking her feet high up into the air, twirling, a bright red flower pinned to her breast.

The Therapist: “Sometimes it’s as if I’ve lost track,” he told the therapist, a woman who always wore dark glasses during their sessions. “As if the events in my life have become subtly disordered. It becomes too easy to believe that something that’s past, that’s over, hasn’t occurred yet, or maybe won’t even occur at all. My relationships don’t end—they just go on and on. The time frame seems too irrelevant. Michael tells me things every day. Tomorrow my mother will send me to school for the first time. Next week I’ll meet a woman I last dated over a year ago, but I’ll be meeting her for the first time.”

“We all want to know where we came from and where we’re going,” the therapist said.

“Maybe if you took something out, or manipulated a muscle or a bone or two,” he said. “Maybe then all these aimless… connections, these resonances… wouldn’t bother me so much.”

“We all want to know how long we have in this world,” the therapist said. “That makes you no different than the rest of us.”

“I think I may have already died,” he said. “Once or twice. Maybe more.”

Sometimes, if the conditions were right, he could feel the edges of the blades as they touched his thoughts. They entered cleanly most of the time, but occasionally there would be the slightest vibration, so that events might jar, one against the other, and the faces of the people in his memories would show their anxiety.

Dream: It has been a long kiss, a very long kiss. He thinks he may even have slept through parts of it, only to awaken again and continue his participation. The lips against his are bare, loose, almost impossibly mobile. They make him feel hard and unyielding by comparison, like metal or brick.

When he finally pulls away he sees it is Michael he has been kissing. But Michael’s lips are wider than he remembers them. Michael’s head lolls, his eyes still and fixed as a doll’s. Michael’s smile spreads loosely to both sides of his face, wide as a shark’s mouth. Michael’s smile flows to the edges of the sheets and drips off the sides of the bed.

Memory: Allison was walking down the sidewalk with the last of her packed suitcases. He imagined himself stopping her, using physical strength, or argument, or simple expressions of bereavement. He’d seen countless movies, read numerous books and short stories, and he could imagine various scenarios in which any of these techniques might or might not work. He tried to store up images of various lives he might have had with Allison, all for his future use. He imagined the faces of their children. He visualized the photographs in their albums. He experienced all her possible deaths.

All this before she got into her car, looked sadly out the window. “I’m sorry,” was what he thought she said, before she drove off for what was (maybe) the last time.

And now: He spent much of his weekend talking to the homeless, the derelicts, the bums (he didn’t know what he should be calling them). Whoever they were, they were good at acting. They could sound like his mother, his father, Michael, his lover, even his therapist—whoever they wanted to be.

“I’ve seen those blades you’re talking about,” one old man said. “They come mostly early in the evening, about the time the fireflies first come out. Sometimes you’ll see one outlined against the moon, or maybe a streetlight if the angle’s just right. They’re sharp and scary, oh, I know that. But they keep things from dying. They cut out the part where you know somebody died, or where you realized something was over—like it was on a tape or something. That way nothing ever dies, or ever ends. That ain’t so bad, is it?”

He thought, in fact, that’s horrible, but didn’t say anything.

“Leave the boy alone!” The old lady in the broken hat just seemed to climb out of the shadows around the base of the tree. “He don’t need to know about them blades!”

“You my wife or something?”

“I don’t know—I can’t rightly remember.”

“Well, I don’t remember neither, and until I do remember you just butt out, okay?”

“I need to prepare myself. Something’s going to happen,” he said to the old man and the old woman. “I’ve already figured out that things aren’t what they seem to be, they never are, and there seems to be no way to tell what they are.”

“There’s no such thing as preparation,” the old woman said. “I’m sorry, son.”

He wondered briefly if she could, indeed, be his mother, but it was too dark where she stood beneath the tree. “It’s being alone, you know? That’s what it’s all about, why it’s so bad, being alone,” he said to them.

But the blades had come down during their conversation, and severed the old man and old woman from the dark pool of shadows beneath the tree, so that they were in some other weekend of his life, involved in some other conversation.

The Therapist: “What are you most afraid of?” the therapist asked. Today he was lying on the table in the middle of the room and the therapist stood over him, most of her head in the shadows, only the heavy outline of her dark glasses showing. “That is always a good place to start.”

“I’m afraid of what is,” he replied. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Perhaps you simply can’t accept.” The therapist made rustling noises as she removed various objects from the drawers beneath the table.

“I simply can’t forget,” he said. “That’s a lot of it. What I remember, is. And that’s become too much, far too much, to bear. One thing becomes just as real, just as important, as every other thing. I don’t know what I should ignore anymore in order to keep on functioning, living. I don’t know what I should forget.”

“Pay attention to me now,” the therapist said, slipping on her gloves.

“It’s a lot less simple than everyone thinks,” he said. “A lot less simple than I was prepared to believe.”

“And if you let it happen to you? If you let your wishes drive you, and suddenly Michael is still alive and ready to talk to you every day?” The therapist placed her instruments up on the table. He could sense their hard, sharp edges.

He shuddered. “I don’t understand, but it would be horrible. Horrible.”

“So you’d actually feel far more comfortable if Michael truly was dead, if you never had to talk to him again, if you weren’t so compelled to remember him?” The therapist hovered closer.

“Oh yes, yes.” He found himself squirming, wanting to avoid her hands.

“But how can you justify such a betrayal?” the therapist asked coldly. Her lips glowed in the dim light.

“I don’t… don’t…”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked softly.

“Yes!”

“And werewolves, and vampires?” The therapist reached across him.

“Yes!”

“And demons and beasties and hidden things without names?” She stroked his hair, played with the lines creasing his forehead.

“Yes, yes!” He felt the heat in his head flowing out through his hair to warm the surrounding air.

The therapist was quick with the blade, sending all the separate bits of life swirling, flowers and rabbits and brothers and stairs and buses and suitcases and derelicts and Allison, tumbling into oblivion.

He used to wonder what it took to wield those blades, if the surgeons were gods or demons, or if mortals might aspire. He wondered if Christ or Buddha might have been such surgeons. Or Jack the Ripper.

Whatever the case, for the patients, the most important thing was to try to classify all the severed bits and pieces as accurately as possible, so as to avoid confusion. Some sort of order was desperately required.

Dream: Every Sunday he and his wife take their children to the cemetery, where they place flowers on the graves of his parents, and on the grave of his brother Michael. The children love the bright red flowers they carry. He makes sure they wrap the flowers in tissue, so that the red color does not rub off, or drip onto the children’s brand new clothes.

The cemetery does not bother him. He loves one woman; the children are happy and satisfied. He does not dream. He had parents and a brother at one time, but no more. He is content to live and work like everyone else he knows.

Memory: In a large empty room the surgeons whisper. Their invisible blades flash through the air, leaving no trace. He lies in the street and watches a truck smash into his father, tossing his father up onto the hood, turning his father’s head into a bright red flower to match his brother’s. A crowd gathers. His mother jumps into her grave. His brother pulls the red flower out of his face and becomes Peter Rabbit. All his children climb back into the womb and die.

And now: He holds Peter Rabbit in his arms. They dance around the room. Suddenly Mr. McGregor shoots Peter in the face. Peter’s lips turn into Michael’s loose-lipped, bright red smile. They kiss for a very long time. An enormous red flower grows in the rabbit’s face, fertilized by all of Michael’s memories lying dormant in the rabbit’s brain. He buries his face in the bright red flower, the rabbit’s flower, Michael’s ruined face. He takes as much of the sickly sweet smell into his lungs as he can.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, crying. “It’s beautiful,” he says, amazed. He knows that in at least one sense what he says is true; but in another, it is the worst lie of all.

The Therapist: “Is it better now, this life of yours? Does it feel good?” the therapist asks, running her lips down the side of his face, leaving kisses on his breastbone.

“No! It’s horrible!” he cries. “You have to stop it!”

“But you didn’t like the way things were. You hated your dreams, your memories of the past.” She rubs her lips around his navel.

“But now all the moments are the same! It’s all the same! There’s no past anymore. No memory, or dream. Michael dies now! The rabbit kisses me now! Their images devour me!”

“We all are dying. I’ve tried to tell you that,” the therapist whispers.

“It’s a horror, a horror!” he cries.

“No,” she says. “It’s your life: your thoughts, your soft, bleeding brain. You must learn to appreciate it.” She puts her cold lips on his ear. “I tried to tell you. You are the horror.”

NIGHT, THE ENDLESS SNOWFALL

The old man has lived a long time in the ancient cliff house. Not a cliff by any sea, although this man had been a sailor most of his life. The house is a thousand miles from any ocean. It is a cliff overlooking a desolate canyon—red, brown and white rock and sand as far as an eye might see. But the old man is not much for gazing out the window toward the land below. Instead he observes the skies. He sits looking out the window, and up, for hours at a time, his rocker leaned back and braced on a stone. Here, the old man watches, and waits.

Night will come, and he would greet it with sleep.

He has known for a long time this night would finally come, and feared it as all men and women fear such things. He does not know, except from forgotten dreaming, what it would be like, but he imagines it to be something like the ocean, that it will fill him, and he will never be the same again.

It is like waiting for a monster, waiting for a demon, and as the sun’s rays at last begin to dim the old man grows afraid, and goes to bolt the doors, to secure the windows, and to wedge cloth and mud into the cracks beneath the door and into the space between the chimney and the roof. All this to keep night out of his cliff house.

Slowly the windows begin to darken and the old man looks out his window, and down, but can see nothing of the barren canyon below, as that has been first to fill with night.

He feels the daylight begin to leave his face. And for a moment he sleeps, just a moment, and when he awakens it is as if he has come back from a long distance, where he had spoken some other language, and had another appearance.

The house is groaning, the window panes rattling with the night wind, for night itself is at them, night is beating at his windows, beating at his door, trying to lift off the roof in order to get into the old man’s house. The old man tries to fill his house with sleeping, but cannot, cannot fall asleep—except in bits and pieces—he has been insomniac many months, and does not know how to keep night at bay, except with sleep.

Then night whispers to the old man’s darkened closets and cupboards, and soon all his misfortunes come out to torment him. His children and grandchildren drift past him, all those left in ports whose names he cannot remember. The old man leans forward out of his rocker and tries to grasp them, but they break and drift apart in his fingers.

So late the hour, too late, the old man thinks, as once again his wife’s hair is in flames. She runs around the cliff house screaming silently, her mouth contorted, her arms like tree limbs warped in the lightning. The old man forces himself out of his rocker and stumbles after her, trying to catch her, trying to put out the flames, but too late the hour, his legs will not hold the racing of his heart, his ragged breath, and she dissolves into dark, into night.

A gray rope drops against his cheek, and then another, another. Then the snakes twine rapidly up and down his arms. The old man begins to scream, but spiders have dropped into his mouth, and he is biting them, they taste bitter, their spiny legs pricking and tearing his pale, thin lips. The old man screams even as he bites through them, eats them, and then the snakes and spiders are gone.

Night beats against the old man’s window, hungry to get in.

The light dims within the cliff house, the darkness closing in around the old man’s form. He runs and stumbles, trying to escape the enclosure being made. The darkness pulls around him, and the old man sees nothing but black, and deeper black, his feet losing their position, and he is falling, falling from a tremendous height.

The old man falls into his rocker and trembles as he gazes out the window.

Night beats against the old man’s window, angry to get in.

A silver hook, silver of moonlight, rises out of the floor and rakes the old man’s face. He lifts himself up out of the chair again and flees across the room. The hook chases him and tears his face just a bit at a time, tears strips and gouges and hunks out of his face, until it leaves him weeping in his rocking chair by the window again.

Night beats against the old man’s window, desperate to get in.

Then the old man smiles, weakly, for night has tired him. And night trembles against the old man’s window. Unknown to night the old man has fallen asleep, lulled to sleep by the sleeping breath of the dead ones once dear to him.

The old man gazes up and out of his window as the skeletons begin to drift down.

First the birds, the first pets he had as a child, their tiny skulls shining like brilliant, irregular snow flakes in moonlight. Then the mice, his first kittens, the dogs and rabbits, tumbling end over end, their bones glowing whitely from within, all their skulls smiling. His grandmother, Mr. O’Keefe—the baker who always gave him a cookie, Mrs. Mallory, Rev. Johannsen, aunts and uncles and cousins and all their livestock, their bones white as ivory, white as the sheets on his bed, white as his mother’s skin in his dreams. All falling, falling like the shells and skeletons of sea creatures through the dark water, seeking their final rest on the bottom.

His mother, his father, the brother who died early, the sister who died five years ago, they all join the ghostly fall, the ghostly traffic, the drifting down. Night howls its outrage and the old man smiles. He looks down toward the barren canyon and sees the skeletons rising in a smooth pile, filling every crack and cranny, every depression, and soon the endless snowfall spills out over the canyon’s rim, and a hill grows, a mountain of pure white snow before his window. Covering everything, covering his earliest thoughts. Night cries out in pain as the glowing white skeletons fill up the dark and push it away.

The world is taken apart, never to be reassembled. The old man feels himself drifting into sleep, his skin turning to white, turning to pure white bone.

In his cliff house the old man pretends his wife still sleeps here. She is in the bed, under the covers. He imagines her, dreams her, and her smiling skull illuminates the gloom in the room’s corners. He imagines he knows the address for each one of his children.

He rises and opens the door for night, and laughs at the diminishing dark.

His cliff house fills with an endless snowfall.

ARCHETYPE

The Family had been contemplating reality. I was not sure if Mother, too, had considered committing reality—she had the best of it, the Archetype drug having expanded her to where she had always believed she should be: at the center of things, awaiting supplication from each of us.

After all, it was hardly an inconvenience for her. We spent all our time sitting or standing or kneeling in her parlor, our ids so expanded we could hardly move. This is, of course, the most dramatic of all the effects of Archetype, this sense that some poorly understood aspect of one’s consciousness has suddenly engorged itself, has swollen so that it is much like a physical presence in your body, crowding out all other aspects of your consciousness and pushing out the walls of your flesh until you feel like a giant, so tall that you fear the ceiling and peering down at your feet you experience vertigo. Not that this expansion is literal, at least I don’t think it is, even though if you were to look at yourself in a mirror during this experience you would see this great and bloated thing, or so I have heard.

Mother hadn’t even known the Family planned to experiment with Archetype—Father had insisted that this be kept from her. She was the reason the Family decided to try the drug in the first place: her terrible mood swings had grown worse, her paranoia, and her increasing conviction that none of us cared for her anymore. I realize now this was indeed our fault—we had been taking her for granted for years. Her presence had always loomed so large in all of our lives that we no longer thought to comment, as if she were a steady backdrop of mountains or sea.

Once we all took the drug, however, she had us. Little did we know she was the mountains and the sea, the whole world in fact in a hundred-and-ten pound package.

Father was most quickly and easily absorbed into the stage piece she intended to make of the Family. But he had never been a very strong man. His eyes moved restlessly in his immense head, and now and then he was startled by how high his head was above the floor. Then he would look around at all of us, his Family, as if he did not know where we had come from, or how to keep us and protect us, or who we were.

FATHER: Don’t make so much noise. Don’t look that way. Can’t you see that she’s tired? She always works so hard. She works harder than anyone could imagine. Just look at her. Just look at her. She is the Mother. Without her there would be no home. Without her there would be no Family. Just look at her. Don’t talk so loud. She’s always very tired. She works too hard. But she has it. Men don’t have it, but she has it. She is the Mother. She makes us all feel like we’re going to live forever. She has it. She’s dark and mysterious and she knows how to keep us alive. She knows how to keep us fed. Just look at her. Just look at her.

Sister looked bored and aloof, as she has always looked bored and aloof. She stared out the window as if looking for another life. She reached down the immense distance to the hem of her dress and adjusted it, made it longer, made it shorter. She did this several times as we stood, knelt, lay in Mother’s parlor. Self-consciousness must have been an overpowering aspect of Sister’s personality since to make such movements is quite difficult when under the influence of Archetype. Most people must stand and gaze forward or at one another’s swollen selves if they are not to experience the side effect of the terrible vertigo. (Although this is not the worst of the side effects of the drug.)

SISTER: Why should we stand here? Why do we always stand here? We never leave this room. We never talk about anything interesting. We never do anything. Where’s the good food? We never have any good food. No one ever comes. There is never anything interesting to do.

FATHER: We never have sex.

Sister stared up at Father with her mouth open. With much effort she reached up a giant hand to close it.

SISTER: What do you mean? You always say things and I never know what you mean. You and Mother never have sex? Old people never have sex. Don’t tell me about your sex life. You and Mother have no sex life. I don’t want to know about your sex life.

Father opened his mouth as if to speak again, but with a cry of anguish he clamped his lips shut with the fingers of his own left hand, pinching the lips until they bled. But still his lips tried to move, they struggled like giant pink muscular worms under his wrestling fingertips, articulating saliva until it ran out of the corner of his idiot mouth. Finally he was able to nip the edge of one of his fingers, drawing dark red blood which the fingers rubbed at frantically, obviously unable to return to the mouth for succor.

Mother glanced up at him out of the corner of her eye and immediately grabbed the bleeding fingers and thrust them into her mouth where she sucked them noisily with eyes closed.

His mouth freed, Father still tried not to speak, his eyes panicked, his teeth attempting to clamp down on his rebellious lips, but he was unable to stop them.

FATHER: We never have sex. We never talk. We never go outside. We never kiss. We never hold. We never hold. We never hold. We never have sex.

He looked around wide-eyed as if addressing the entire Family with this speech.

Sister tried to move away from him, stared out the window, tried to move away from him, but could not, so she cried.

SISTER: You mean me! You mean us! We never have sex. We never have sex.

Brother tried to move closer to Father. He tried to raise his enormous hands. But his hands were too full of anger to be lifted above his waist. His enormous hands could only become enormous fists, which hung low below his waist at the ends of his long arms, swinging back and forth like great pendulums. His enormous hands would not lift and then his enormous feet would not move him closer to Father. He could only lean toward Father with anger.

BROTHER: Or me! Or me? We never have sex. We never have sex.

And Brother stared at Sister with his mouth open and Sister cried and Father continued to sweat giant gray snails of sweat that oozed slowly down his forehead as he tried to look somewhere, anywhere but at his Family.

And Mother sucked the blood slowly, greedily from his giant, wounded finger.

They stood there transfixed like this, my Family, floating on Archetype and full of swollen id now threatening to burst their skin and pull apart the joints and seams of their body as inside them they were made simple, their hungers simplified to basics, their minds simplified to central swollen images of need, pleasure, and pain.

Mother let the bleeding finger fall from her huge mouth, the finger now pale, limp, and bloodless, sucked on her lips to clean them of dried residue, and in a cracked voice, which gradually became more and more full-bodied, she spoke.

MOTHER: You thought you could fool me. You thought you could all fool me. Now see what happens. Now see what happens. The trouble you’ve made. Standing there, barely able to move. But maybe it was for the best. The best place for you is in my parlor. See what happens. You made me the house and the heart of the house. You made me the mountains and you made me the sea. You made me everything and you made me immortal. I am filled with the life of my Family and I hold it dear. What you have made me! There will be sex. There will always be sex. In the Family there are many openings into the body. There are many openings into the Family. There are many ways to be fed and you all will be fed. You will all have sex and you will be fed.

At that point the Mother began feeding me, and in my smallness her breast was enormous, and filled me with sickness and dread.

The Father tried to look down at me and vertigo almost made him fall. Brother looked at me and smiled, but then he too began to weave on his enormous legs. Sister took one look at me and scowled.

I could not see Mother’s face because of the size of her breast hanging over me. I could not see her mouth and it frightened me. Her teeth were so sharp!

For I am the Baby and in their way they all resent me. They think I get all the sex and I get all the food and in some ways I think they are right.

I do know they fed me too much Archetype for my size and now what is growing inside of me, pushing against the inner walls of my skin, may some day make me explode. I am filled with shadows, wishes, fears, and dreams.

But for now I feed from Mother’s breast and I grow larger inside as well as outside. I realize Archetype has gotten into her milk supply but my vocal chords are too clumsy for me to tell them this.

So I must starve or I must grow larger inside. My choice is obvious. Babies are too young to commit reality. Even the other members of the Family here have been unsuccessful at this—Mother has too much power over them and they cannot break away.

So I feed at her nipple and I try not to think of anything else. Mother coaxes the other members of the Family to her other nipple one by one, feeding them increasingly large doses of the Archetype in her milk. They go to her nipple willingly, even eagerly. I attempt to tell them that this is ill-advised, but my mouth is full. They turn their heads slightly and look at me as they feed, trying to smile at me without letting go of the nipple. Why?

Because I am the Baby. And like the rest of my Family, I am large.

THE HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL

Joseph did nothing but dream, until the world gave him the gift of eyes.

The eyes had been the easiest to catch: they’d simply rolled out of the darkness into his waiting sockets and they’d been unable to budge after that. Trapped, they’d opened and blinked, and filled his mind with frantic pictures of the world, at least the pictures the world wanted Joseph to see.

At first he hadn’t realized it had happened. Since dreams were all he’d ever known he’d assumed that the incident of catching the eyes had been a dream as well. Any future encounters with the many beasts of the world, he knew, would not come as easily.

With his new eyes Joseph gave the world back the same gift it had given him: pictures of the world. The eyes turned the abstractions of vibration and motion into one still picture. In his head Joseph could feel the world pausing for relief. Joseph sat—he could do nothing else as he had no legs—and the world sat with him, and together they were in peace.

But gradually new things began to appear on the world’s horizon, or at least things Joseph had never seen before. And his desire to bring these things closer became so great that eventually Joseph grew arms and legs. He spent his days chasing after the other things of the world, reaching out to them, with a disturbing desire to embrace them and pull them back down inside himself, but he knew that somehow those were the world’s desires and not his own. He was just another thing of this world. At night when he hid from the darkness this perception brought him many troubling dreams. He dreamed of the time before he had arms or legs, or the world’s gift of eyes, the time when he did nothing else but dream the world. In that long ago time he had never anticipated darkness to be a problem.

Chasing the other things of the world created in Joseph an appetite he had never imagined possible. He realized this new hunger was akin to that desire of his—the world’s desire—for embrace and reabsorption. Before, his appetite had been a small thing, a casual taking in of leaves, fluids, and miscellaneous edible debris. But now the world had created such an emptiness within him that the thought of filling it with whole, living things—things which moved and watched and yammered just as he did—was his constant obsession. He began to dream of filling himself with all the things of the world, until he was as large and complete as the world itself.

After years of chasing the other things of the world, Joseph came to know their habits very well. They breathed, much like himself. He had always thought this breathing to be significant, one way, perhaps, in which the world passed around the essence of itself. Further study led him to conclude that this breath was a kind of message, and that all things, himself included, were messengers.

Joseph spent his life hunting down these animal messengers, consuming them, wearing them, using whatever he could of their bodies. And each time he caught or killed one he would meditate, seeking the particular message he knew the animal must be carrying from the world for him. He would think on the message when he skinned or consumed the animal, when he sharpened the animal’s bones, and when he used the tools he made from these bones.

And so it was, as an old man running into the end of his life as if into a fireless cave, that Joseph first encountered the dragon.

The dragon himself lived in a cave at the center of the world. Joseph had never seen this cave; his dreams simply told him of its existence. This cave was full of the dragon’s breath, and thus was full of light and fire. And Joseph had come to realize that the end of his life would, indeed, be this cave.

Joseph’s many years of hunting down all the things of this world had given him an instinct. All he had to do to find an animal was to think about it. But he had never really thought about the dragon before, and so he had never stumbled across it. Even when he dreamed about the dragon he didn’t dream of the dragon itself but of its cave full of fire.

But now at the end of his life Joseph thought about all the animals he had ever encountered and the messages they had brought from the world. And by thinking about them all, in total, he allowed his feet eventually to lead him to the mouth of the dragon’s cave. Joseph thought about hunting the dragon down, killing it, eating it, and then worshipping it.

He dreamed a creature the size of an elephant, with a roc’s head and giant eagle’s feathers, front legs of a rhinoceros and furry, lion-like hindquarters below its scaly back. But when Joseph walked into the mouth of the cave he walked into the mouth of the dragon as well. He never got a chance to actually see the dragon; the eyes given to him by the world were useless for this purpose.

Joseph walked for a very long time inside the dragon, blind, and eventually, with no useful purpose for his arms and legs, they fell off as quickly as he had formed this thought.

Joseph dreamed within the dragon within his cave in the heart of the world, dreaming of all the animals, all the things he had been and would be. Joseph dreamed that he was the world. And Joseph the world dreamed of the eyes it would one day create, to give to that one piece of itself that required them.

SHOPLIFTER

An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an enormous lump under his coat.

Stop, thief! cries the store manager rushing up behind him and grabbing his elbow.

Remove your hand, the old man tells him, it’s only a large, malignant tumor I have.

The store manager opens the man’s coat and removes the refrigerator there, carrying it back into the store on his back.

An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an even larger lump under his coat.

Stop, thief! cries the store manager as he rams his head into the old man’s back.

Why, it’s only a committee of concerned citizens I have here, the old man says, nothing more.

The store manager opens the coat and pushes the down escalator back into his store.

An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an enormous black shadow almost hiding him.

Stop, thief! Will you never learn? cries the store manager as he leaps on the old man’s head.

It’s merely a cemetery, you funny little man, replies the old man.

Whereupon the store manager rips open the coat, revealing the hundreds of faces of his best customers, all staring out, sightless, their skin pale, lips cracked.

And their torn hands and arms pulling the store manager in…

BRAIN OF SHADOWS

While he was asleep someone played with a flashlight in his head.

The intruder was silent but betrayed his or her presence when sudden flashes illuminated the figures in the dream, making them cower and cover their eyes and revealing the landscape they walked in to be no more than paper, plaster, and cheap paint.

Have some courtesy, he mumbled in his sleep, and his dream folk nodded their agreement.

The intruder stumbled and accidentally flashed the light on himself to reveal a biblical figure in long white robes and a beard.

The next night the dream folk were all wearing dark glasses and the body of God lay broken and bleeding behind the sets.

ATTACHED

A mother takes needle and thread and attaches herself to her first born, a daughter.

A father weeps and shouts, What have you done to attach her so? How can you both live that way?

A daughter sews the first boy she finds to her left leg. Later she attaches an older, more attractive boy to her right thigh.

Eventually she has young men attached to her feet, head, shoulders, breast, buttocks, and groin.

I’m afraid it’s becoming quite difficult for us to walk, a mother comments in long-suffering resignation.

A father just weeps and wrings his hands over the foolishness of females.

A daughter attaches children with tighter and firmer stitches to all exposed parts of her body, until her own body is quite hidden by the bodies sewn to her.

Each child displays his or her own small needle and thread.

See, see what you have done! a father shouts at a mother. We’ve lost our daughter; she must be quite dead under there!

All the small children plead tearfully for their mother, once a daughter, even as they begin attaching food, feces, playthings, and other children to their own bodies with needles and thread.

Help, help, I’m quite suffocated! shouts a mother as she falls over backwards, pulling the mass of squirming, sewn-together bodies on top of her.

A father stoops over the crushed body of his wife, weeping and wringing his hands over the foolishness of females. He shuffles sadly away, absentmindedly scratching at the sewn-on corpse of his son, their second born, crushed so long ago between his great buttocks.

THE RIFLEMAN, THE CANCEROUS COW, AND THE SWEDISH MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, A Western

Lucas McCane, formerly known as The Rifleman, had put away his famous weapon with the enlarged firing ring, and moved to North Carolina so that his son Mark might grow up among deciduous trees and shrubbery.

“This will all be yours someday,” he told him. “This wooded area here, this lake I’ve recently dammed and drained for cropland (at great physical cost to myself, by the way), and there’s a nice little fast food franchise down there by the creek where members of your peer group eat hamburgers, shakes, and fries, and converse on various age-appropriate subject matters. It’s taken me most of my life, made me old before my time, not to mention quite impotent, but I was glad to do it for my eventual posterity, please don’t mention it.”

One day Mark and his father were walking through the wooded area, Lucas talking on in this manner, Mark listening, when they came upon a level clearing covered with a thin film of oil. “This bog has been here for millions of years, Mark, consisting of various animal and vegetative matter pressurized underground, then later exposed for our current viewing, but nevertheless, this too will all be yours when I go to meet that Great Ranch-hand in the sky,” Lucas went on and on.

Suddenly a large black cow with a cancer on his head stumbled out of the underbrush. And before Lucas could point out that that too would someday belong to his son, Mark spoke up for the first time in some while, saying, “Pa, what’s that?”

“That, son, is a large black cow with a cancer on his head. Notice how he eats large stumps and other useless vegetative matter around this here bog. A cow with a cancer on his head must be pretty clever to survive out here in the wilds of North Carolina.”

It suddenly became apparent to Lucas and his son that the cancerous cow was lapping up great swatches of the oil with an enormous, rubbery, gray and white tongue. And gradually revealed by these great swipes of the tongue was a smooth, hardwood floor. “No doubt created through the troddings of extinct land reptiles on the decomposing animal and vegetative matter, compressing these into this smooth dancefloor-like surface we see here before us,” Lucas speculated, “…though I have to admit this is somewhat unusual for North Carolina.”

During this speech the cow had completed his vacuuming, and a perfectly square, glistening orange hardwood plain, two hundred feet on a side, was revealed, bordered on all sides by rotting stumps and blackened underbrush. Lucas strode to the middle of this floor. “This, son…”

“…will someday all be mine,” Mark interjected.

Lucas painted an elaborate image of the mansion they would someday build using the floor as base. A wide portico all around, several entranceways, an immense expanse of glass, and several vistas of awe-inspiring aspect. Lucas counted some of these off on his fingertips: the curtain of gigantic pine, the plateau gauzed in grays and purples, the broad grassy slope flowered yellow, red, and blue, and… what was this?

Mark had run past the tall marble columns, the coved ceilings, the exotic tapestries of the home place, and was climbing the fan-like marble staircase of this last unexpected vista, The Swedish Memorial Hospital.

Lucas stared slack-jawed at the ruin. The Swedish Memorial Hospital was a five-level complex, each level built on the ruins of the former. Castle turrets meshed with steel framing and glass walls, stucco and wood. The several hundred yards of skylight had been shattered. Six brightly painted hot air balloons and two large dirigibles hung torn and abandoned from spires and eaves. Vines and weeds crept up between cracks and holes in the concrete. He could just make out the scarlet thread remnants of the banners. On the plain behind the hospital he could see the ashen wrecks of dozens of flying fortresses, once used to transport the wounded from all parts of the globe.

Mark was halfway up the stairs when Lucas snapped out of his reverie, panicked, and raced screaming after him.

But too late… the Rifleman could see already that he would fail. Already the young men in their red pageboy costumes were trumpeting at the top of the staircase. Already spiders, lizards, and snails were creeping out of the ruined masonry. Somewhere bands were playing, women dancing in their fine robes, great stallions pawing the pebbles atop the stone walls. Already The Pilot, that career intruder, was standing haughtily next to his gigantic saddled alligator, whistling, and cheering Mark on to the top of his stairs, into The Pilot’s waiting arms.

And already The Rifleman knew his son would soon leave North Carolina, would never till the family lands, own the cancerous cow, or build the family mansion of many vistas on the primeval hardwood floor.

The Rifleman, formerly known as Lucas McCane, collapsed at the Swedish Memorial Hospital staircase, and wept bitterly over this failure of his imagination.

JUNGLE J.D.

You can keep on mockin’, but I can’t stop rockin’…

Tony couldn’t believe his luck. Here he had himself a bad girl. Joy, the baddest girl he’d ever known, and not only was she with him, but she was with him in a stolen Chevy making it ninety miles an hour cross-country on Route 66, and how’s that for some kind of rock ’n’ roll legendary-type road trip? Halfway between Las Vegas, New Mexico and Santa Fe now, give or take a few tumbleweeds. The sky wide open for dreams. It was like some kind of goddamned movie! The gang was going to shit, if he ever saw the gang again. Maybe he’d send them a picture postcard, with one of them hotdog stands shaped just like a coney on it, send it to Carson’s Drugstore so they all could read it. Cool, man.

“Long as nobody got hurt.” That’s what his grandma woulda told him. Long as nobody got hurt—like that was the answer for everything. And maybe it was. But sometimes the answers run out, Grandma, and people, well you know people do get hurt. And deep down, Tony knew he much preferred it be the other guy what got hurt.

Tony turned his head once again to moon over Joy, and he was so excited, and it felt like maybe his head went a little too far, and he liked the feeling, so then it was like his head was spinning around like a record, but unevenly, so that every song played had a roughness to it, his head playing some angry song like Link Wray’s “Rumble” over and over again. He could still see Joy through his dizziness: sitting all pretty in her yellow Capri pants and pink sweater, wearing his black leather jacket—his—even though he’d only had it about a week he didn’t mind—she just looked too cool sitting there with her pink-framed shades, puffing on another Kool and moving her butt slow with the rock of the car, making that crisp vinyl snapping sound in that rollin’ rhythm like they were maybe doing it on his grandma’s bedsprings.

Course they hadn’t done it yet, even though she was so damned hot she was too cool, in charge like, but they would do it, Tony knew, he could tell by the way she kept her tongue in his mouth longer than any bad girl ever had before.

Tony had been in love four times in his life for sure, but this time it was the best, the very best, the coolest, the wildest. Lots better than when he was in love with plain Jane Atkins, and her daddy had to drive them places, and she didn’t like it that he smoked, said it made him taste bad, not that there was that much tasting going on, what with her old man hanging around all the time. And miles better than the Thompson twins—when they slapped you, well, you knew you’d been slapped.

“Goddamn!” Tony shouted out the window, then howled just like Wolfman Jack, just like Lon Chaney having an orgasm. He turned to Joy to catch her cool reaction and she smiled this thin, cool smile at him and blew a smoke ring. Goddamn, he wished he could blow smoke rings like Joy.

And that was about the time it happened.

The its in Tony’s life were always different, and always big. The last it was when he decided to blast out of New Jersey and head west, taking Joy with him and using whatever transportation he could find, having it somewhere in the back of his head that they would make it to California somehow and the Beach.

It was old man Perkins’s car he took, who’d just happened to have put a new tune on the vehicle, and was sitting there at the time drinking a brew with just the happiest look on his face. Tony had had to knock that smile off him when Perkins tried to stop him from taking the car. That was too bad, really it was, because Tony much preferred nobody getting hurt. That was his one rule, which was saying a lot, given how Tony felt about rules. But even that rule was a preference, because above all else Tony wasn’t going to be stopped. It was only natural, the law of the jungle and everything. Ungawa! A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. He wondered if he could wrap his mouth around Joy’s pink and slippery tongue and still maintain a steady ninety miles per. Hell, nothing ventured; nothing gained.

But right then Tony thought about his grandma, and that took a little bit of the fire out of him. Hell, she’d raised him and bailed him, and that had to count for something. Maybe at least she’d have a good funeral to attend someday, let her be the center of attention for once, everybody feeling sorry for this old lady who’d been saddled with this J.D. from hell when his own momma, her daughter, died on that sleazoid boyfriend’s motorcycle. Anybody could have been the daddy, and that meant no daddy at all, which was just fine with old Tone. Tony had left that sweet old grandmother of his all alone in their apartment. She was practically blind and she could hardly walk, so he knew it wasn’t a very nice thing to do. But what else could a fellow do? A guy just couldn’t be thinking about his grandmother all the time. It was like living with dead people.

Which he almost was, a couple of times, maybe three. He had a round scar the size of one of Joy’s smoke rings on his forehead from that last fight with the Seventh Street Slashers. He’d open his eyes sometimes while he and Joy were kissing and he’d catch her with her eyes open, staring at it. Bad girls kept their eyes open when they kissed—he’d concluded that a long time ago.

Tony kind of wondered sometimes if maybe that scar was one reason he and Joy hadn’t done it yet, her being grossed out or something, when he realized he was right in the middle of another big it because the goddamned car was rolling over and over and Joy had this funny look on her face—still cool—but her mouth was wide open but no sounds were coming out, just smoke ring after smoke ring.

It was then Tony realized what tune was playing on the radio. “Runaway,” by Del Shannon, one of his absolutest favorites, but he had a feeling he might miss the end of the song. Things were spinning pretty good now, and there were little green alien types, like huge frogs, clinging to the windshield even as the car turned over and over: little green men looking in on him and Joy.

* * *

Tony woke up hot and wet like he had his head stuck to Carson’s fry grill. Meat was popping and sizzling, smelly enough to make his mouth water.

He opened his eyes and salt sweat washed down from his forehead and everything went blurry. Then he remembered what had just happened and he tasted some of the stuff at the corners of his mouth expecting blood, but it was sweat like he thought, but a little heavier than he’d expected, almost like oil. He wiped the crap out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

Green surrounded him, bent down and hugged him, smothering him in tits and hair all green. He breathed it in and tried to lick it in and out of his mouth, unable to get enough. Then the green cleared a little and he could see more: the Chevy’s radiator steaming and hissing, lying on top of a dead hippo whose meat was roasting in the shape of that very same radiator. Roast hippo meat wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too early in the morning to be thinking about hippo burgers, so pretty soon his belly was spinning just like the car. Which there was no other sign of. But then he realized “Runaway” was still playing, although a much rougher version than he’d ever heard before, like they’d overlaid a new track with a lot of fuzz pedal in it. He looked up to find where the soundtrack for this dream was coming from: there was the radio, just the radio, all lit up but with no visible source of electrical power, sitting in the lower branches of a big palm tree. Now playing the opening to “Surf City.”

“Here we come,” Tony mumbled, “Sweet Buddy Holly.” Then he threw up.

* * *

Tony looked up into a sky full of green and hair. He could hear his grandmother crying in the distance. He could hear the preacher man speaking to a milling crowd he could damn well hear but could not see.

“He hath lived fast. He hath died young. He hath delivered unto us a good-lookin’ corpse.”

Tony opened his eyes wide. The preacher was looking down from heaven right at him, and he looked like an ape. He was an ape. Then there were other ape heads right up there beside the first one: a row of smiling, goof ball coconuts.

“Ah, jeez…”

One of the apes covered Tony’s face with a leathery palm and pushed him back against the ground. Then they were dragging him faster and faster through the jungle, his head bouncing off fallen trees, rocks, and hardened lion crap. Tony had visions of being nurtured and raised by these apes, learning their ape language, becoming skilled in their jungle ways, being part of a jungle gang that roamed and hunted and killed, that did pretty much whatever they pleased. Then they came to a sudden stop before a hillside, and headed back to the trees, leaving Tony there with his head spinning. An animal looking something like a cross between a dog and a very sick housecat stuck his head out of a hole in the embankment. Then there was his twin brother, and another, another still, until the hole was filled with about a dozen of those identical ugly animal heads. One of them squirmed out of the hole, came over to Tony, sniffed him, then raised his leg and pissed on him. Then he yipped to his brothers—they all came out and pissed on him, and then they snared his clothes with their teeth and commenced dragging him through the jungle at breakneck speed again.

That entire day Tony was passed in similar ways to the tiger clan, the elephant clan, even the goddamned wildebeest clan, but he wasn’t kept anywhere longer than a few sniffs and a lot of good peeing. By sunset he was bone-sore and stank to high heaven, and he’d pretty much given up on the idea of becoming intimate with any clever jungle ways.

That’s when his last potential adoptive jungle family—a ten-yard-wide black mass of no-nonsense army ants—deposited him face first in front of a small jungle dwelling—a jigsaw puzzle of branches, fronds, and mud. Tony shook the jungle debris off him and climbed unsteadily to his feet. A few broken sticks had been stuck to a door crudely fashioned from some salvaged crates. A small bald head appeared in a hole in the hut wall. “Vot iss this?” the head asked him.

Tony looked at the door again with sudden understanding. The handful of broken sticks formed a swastika.

* * *

Over the next several weeks Tony was schooled in the clever jungle ways of the expatriated Nazis. They weren’t such bad guys, really, although maybe just a bit intense. They liked injecting him with strange things or feeding him indescribable crap and seeing how he reacted. Mostly he reacted by throwing up.

After a while they let him inject the blacks they kept in a large pen in a nearby jungle clearing. That wasn’t too bad, kind of interesting really. The stuff he injected the blacks with must have been a lot stronger than the stuff the Nazis used on him because the blacks would scream for a long time after he injected them, roll their eyes and stick their swollen tongues out sometimes until they bit their tongues in two or choked, sometimes both. It was actually kind of funny, sometimes, if they jumped around rubbing their balls or crapping all over themselves, say, or they screamed over and over until it was like this loud, crazy song. Now and then he’d feel a little nervous about being alone in that pen with all those crazy, naked blacks, what with just the hypo to protect him, and what with them knowing what he’d been doing to their buddies. But the Nazis had armed guards just outside the fence carrying these huge tommy guns, and guard dogs with heads the size of watermelons. When the dogs crouched by the fence and growled, showing their long, sword-like teeth, even the bravest of the blacks moved to the center of the compound. Tony figured these dogs were some kind of special Nazi jungle breed—he’d never seen anything like them in any of the pet stores in New Jersey.

He never could figure why the Nazis were injecting the blacks with all that crap, but then he figured it wasn’t any of his business either. His grandma always told him, “People have their reasons.” That was her other bigtime saying. “Long as nobody got hurt.” Yeah. But blacks don’t count. Even grandma would’ve agreed with that. It was too bad really—Tony loved their music. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way it was. It was nature, and half of them living in the jungle like they did, the other half in some filth-hole of a city somewhere, they had to know that.

* * *

After a few months the Nazis must have given up on the blacks though—figurin’ they’d never change—and they started injecting stuff into Tony again. Or maybe it had more to do with the fact that most of the blacks they had penned up were dead by then, except for a couple of near-giants, Jo Jo and Kang, who had always been a pain to mess with.

Or maybe they were done with their animal tests, and now they were ready for the real thing. Ungawa.

Actually, Tony didn’t mind particularly. Life in the jungle had proved to be a lot less interesting than in the Tarzan movies. It was hot, it was steamy, and, other than poisoning the blacks or playing poker with the Nazis, there wasn’t much to do. He’d tried to swim the local river once, but what with the alligators, hippos, and eels it was a lot more crowded than your average Jersey pool, and almost as nasty.

He tried making friends with some of the local animals. “We’re of one blood,” he’d say as a sure-fire junglecratic opener. “I am a cub of the… the Nazi clan. And you?”

But they either ignored him, shit on him, or tried to eat him.

So he let the Nazis shoot him up with practically everything in their mad scientist pharmacy, as well with whatever they could find crawling around on the jungle floor that could be jammed into their giant Germanic steel Mixmaster.

And some of it wasn’t all that bad. After one particularly good jolt, Tony decided that the lead Nazi, a guy named Fritz, looked pretty good in leather. Tony’s leather jacket, in fact.

And, as they say only in the movies, that brought him to his senses.

“Joy! What have you done with my Joy?”

“Ya, ya. Der jungle be a sad place sometime. Iss not Fritz’s fault, however.”

Tony was staring right at Fritz when the Nazi’s head disappeared into a cloud of blood. The rest of the Nazi’s body stood upright a moment, long enough for the mist to form its first blood drops on Tony’s leather jacket, before it toppled forward, revealing the two giant blacks, Jo Jo and Kang, massive blood-stained stones clutched in each of their massive hands.

Tony’s bowels suddenly filled with wet, jungle heat. But he couldn’t move.

Jo Jo dropped his stones, which bounced unnoticed off his foot and a knee. He reached over and stripped the jacket off the Nazi’s back with a single offhand gesture. He brought the jacket up to his nose, sniffing loudly with nostrils that looked like bowling ball holes. “Hmmmm… white jungle princess,” he declared.

“Joy? You can find Joy?”

The giant Jo Jo slipped his arms into the jacket, apparently oblivious to the numerous splits he was creating throughout the leather. “We take you… her place.”

“Ju Ju!” Kang shouted excitedly, jumping up and down, feet thundering on the jungle floor.

Leave it to a black to get even his best friend’s name wrong, Tony thought, but he nodded and smiled anyway. After all, the guy was humongous.

Jo Jo slapped Kang across the face and the giant immediately stopped his gibbering. Then the two of them headed away from the Nazi compound with strides so long Tony choked on his spit trying to keep up.

Tony heard the drums starting up shortly after they lost sight of the Nazi huts. Kang started squalling “Ju Ju! Ju Ju!” again, and Jo Jo had to slap some calm into him yet again. Actually, Tony kind of liked the accompaniment. He thought it was kind of Bill Haley, and what better omen than that?

A few things happened along the way, but something always happened when you had to take a long jungle road trip. Jo Jo jumped into the river and rolled around with a croc for a while, but it was a little like watching some fat broad in a bad porno flick making it with the black stud, so Tony lost interest pretty quickly. Kang kept running away and Jo Jo kept dragging him back, until finally the lions got Kang, which was kind of a good thing since Jo Jo seemed to be getting pretty pissed off the way Kang kept mispronouncing his name.

The distant drums never let up, though, and Tony was getting pretty tired of that, and now that they were in the swamp country the mosquitoes were about the size of Fender guitars and just as mean. Things kept sliding over Tony’s shoes down in the mud, and more than a couple of times Jo Jo had to pull something off him, but Tony couldn’t see much detail down there in the swampy dark.

Then finally they were out, and they were in this sunny place, and there was a car radio up in every bright yellow and pink palm tree, and each radio was playing a different Beach Boys tune, “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Surfer Girl” all blending together into this crazy, hypnotic cacophonic medley that made Jo Jo gyrate and kick up the sand, and made Tony desperate to follow his every single move, which he could not possibly do, what with being a white trash punk from Jersey.

Then he saw Joy, still wearing those cool shades of hers and blowing smoke rings, in the teeniest leopard skin bikini he’d ever seen, sitting up on what was left of the stolen Chevy, which looked pretty swell up on blocks on the beach glistening.

But before he could say anything to her the giant black Jo Jo bounded over to her and gave her the longest, deepest, wettest soul kiss Tony could imagine outside a nightmare. And Joy sure wasn’t resisting any.

“Ah, jeez, Joy! You are a bad girl!” Tony shouted. And then he saw all the beautiful little brown-yellow babies with the curly hair playing around the front seat of the Chevy. “A bad, bad girl!” And Joy just winked, and blew this huge smoke ring, even with Jo Jo’s huge tongue in her mouth.

About that time these big planes roared overhead, bigger than anything Tony had ever seen outside a science fiction movie, and these men came zooming by with jets on their backs, just like the Rocketmen, and Joy and Jo Jo were waving at them, and their little brood of mixed bloods were jumping up and down with all this natural athletic ability they’d obviously inherited from their daddy.

“Ah, jeez, so bad!” Tony shouted, as the Nazi submarine came up out of the shallow waters. The hatch opened, and there were all the Nazi jungle clan, his clan, and they were fighting off the apes and lions and crocs trying to board the sub, with the Rocketmen coming up fast behind.

Tony didn’t have much choice. He dived into the ocean, spitting up saltwater as he swam toward the Nazis and their special jungle ways, and a past where he belonged.

CATS, DOGS, & OTHER CREATURES

CATS

Outside, in the cold air, the babies were crying again.

Esther knew they weren’t really babies. They were cats: tabbies and calicoes, short-hairs and long-hairs, Persians and Russians and Siamese. All of them crying like babies, just to be mean, their high-pitched cries rising steadily until they were babies in distress, babies in grave danger, babies going insane within a deadly dream. Such hateful cats.

Even though she knew better, Esther always let herself be fooled, always thought of them as the babies, because she wanted to be fooled. Her own babies were long gone now, married with babies of their own. Which she never saw, because their parents never visited. Because they’d hated their own mother for years, just like those selfish cats hated her.

Outside, in the cold air, the babies began to quarrel. Babies were always quarreling because there was never enough food, never enough love to go around. Esther thought that was a terrible thing, but it was the way of the world, and there was nothing she could do about it. But of course the babies never understood the worries of a mother.

Let us in, let us in! all the babies cried, but Esther was afraid. For she knew just how hateful babies could be, with their crying, and their quarreling, and their terrible hungers, and still more crying.

Outside, in the cold air, the babies began to scream. The wind rose, and looking out her window Esther could see the babies flying through the air, blown by the wind and blown by their own anger, which Esther knew to be without limit.

Open the window, open the window! all the babies cried, but Esther would not. For she understood the deceitfulness of babies, who cared only about filling their own mouths. The babies had taken from her all she had to give, and was it her fault she had had so little to give? She’d never been married, never had a man who stayed long enough to help out. She’d been thin and cheated and poor. She’d done what she could, the little that she could.

Then the babies were dropping softly through the broken glass, their bodies torn, tiny faces bleeding, and Esther ran around with towels and torn pieces of bed sheet to stop the wounds and soothe their cries, and even though their claws tore at her arms she never complained, never opened her mouth without a lullaby inside, and still it wasn’t enough.

DOGS

That summer the dogs gathered about him almost obsessively, as if afraid to let him out of their sight. There were the three he owned: the spaniel and the corgi and the retriever Ellen had left behind when she took the kids that day and went away. He’d always thought she loved that dog more than the kids, but he supposed he’d been wrong about that one aspect of their marriage. Certainly she hadn’t loved him more, but that wasn’t the reason he’d cheated on her. At least he was honest about it—that was part of his nature. Just as cheating had been part of his nature. He still believed he couldn’t have helped himself.

He supposed the retriever, Sam, was his now, even though he’d never liked the dog. Sam was old and fat and lazy, but he’d always believed that you never kicked out a dog just because you didn’t like him. You let him hang around until he died of natural causes.

Sometimes when he was out in the yard with the three dogs, picking up the kids’ toys—after all these months he was still finding toys everywhere he looked, sometimes telling them to put them away even though he knew good and well the kids weren’t there—other dogs from the neighborhood would join them, following him around with his own dogs. At least he thought they were from the neighborhood—he’d actually never seen these particular dogs before. Sometimes they’d follow him into the house. He’d never stop them. He didn’t care.

Occasionally the sheer number of dogs caused a disturbance among them—a dachshund would get too close to a boxer, a corgi would inadvertently step on a retriever’s paw—but a little fight had never bothered him much. He liked a little fight in a dog.

Over the months the dogs accumulated until he stopped counting their numbers. He simply knew he had more dogs than furniture, more dogs than words he wanted to share with anyone. He wasn’t sure when he had stopped getting up: a Doberman had ripped the calendar off the wall and eaten the pages—one centerfold pose at a time, Miss July, Miss August, the mighty Miss September. He’d laughed at that one, cheered the beast on, especially that evening when the dog shit some glossy nakedness out. The goddamned chihuahua had knocked the alarm clock off onto the floor, where it was quickly covered by a heaving mass of canine bodies. Not that he ever wanted to look at the time again, but he’d never cared much for hairless dogs.

“Hey, boys,” he whispered from the bed, making a half-dozen of them move off his back. “Hey, now,” he said, as he rolled over and a shepherd stretched out over his chest, pressing down so hard he could hardly breathe. There were snarls and snaps in answer, and vicious fights he could not see. “So what have you gone and done?” as the air filled with the stench of dead dog.

& OTHER CREATURES

The children played all afternoon on the wide lawn while their parents drank and played cards inside in the glass-walled room. One of the mothers worried that it might be too hot outside for the younger children, but the man who owned the house said it was fine because his children had always played in such heat with no ill effects. Her husband reassured her and poured another round of drinks. Then the couples traded stories about the resiliency of childhood and they all laughed and shook their heads, even the woman who had been worried.

Outside, the sun had become a great penny of fire. The older children advised the younger children to stare at the fire if they wanted to see the pretty pictures, and the younger children did as they were told even though it hurt.

At the edge of the wide lawn the other creatures gathered and watched.

Inside the glass-walled room the parents put on some music and began to dance. The young children on the lawn outside this room could no longer see through the glass, but they could hear the music and the jumble of noise that was their mommies and daddies laughing. The children moved toward the glass wall, lay down on the lawn and closed their eyes. The mother who had worried at first was glad her children weren’t in the room, because she wanted to forget them for a change, forget herself and have some fun.

Outside on the lawn the older children began hitting each other with bats. When one fell to his knees the others gathered around him, hitting him until the boy collapsed completely on the lawn and soft matter oozed into the grass. Some of the children continued to hit him with their bats because they liked the loud, soft sound his body made. The other creatures on the edge of the lawn continued to watch, but a few brave ones crept from cover to perch on the mowed portion of the lawn itself.

Inside the glass-walled room, the parents continued to laugh and dance, wondering why they’d never gotten together like this before. The mother who had worried wondered why she’d had so many children in the first place. She loved her children but they wanted so much, needed so much, that sometimes it seemed there must be dozens of them grasping, pushing, mouths open to be fed. It shamed her to be thinking like this. But sometimes the sheer numbers of children in the world filled her with terror.

Outside on the wide lawn the older children joined their bloody hands and raced down the long slope toward the wild edge below, leaving the younger children and the dead boy lying still on the hot grass. At the bottom of the slope the other creatures all entered the lawn and crept up the hill.

Inside the room the parents turned down the music and gathered at one wall of the glass. The couples held each other and smiled. Some of their children lay sleeping peacefully on the lawn, or rubbing their eyes and yawning as if impatient for sleep. The mother who had worried saw her youngest there, watching the sky.

The woman peered outside the glass down the slope of the lawn looking for her other two children, seeing nothing but a great cloud of insects in the hot summer air, and below them a gathering of eyes as the immensity of the world looked back at her.

HOW TO SURVIVE A FIRE AT THE GREENMARK

A NOTE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

The issuance of this guide is not meant to imply that St. Louis’ historic Greenmark Hotel is more prone to fire than any other hotel of comparable size and age. In fact, we believe the Greenmark’s safety record to be superior or equal to the finest international hotels. But all of us are subject to the whims of fate and the general shiftiness of the cosmos. And none of us is immune to the actions of madmen or hostile foreign governments. So it is simply out of a sense of responsibility for our fellow man (and you, too, ladies) that we provide this list of simple fire safety procedures. Here’s hoping that your stay at the historic Greenmark is a safe and pleasant one indeed!

1. STAY OFF THE PHONE

We may be trying to reach you. Don’t tie up the line. Have some consideration.

Odd, Jane thought, that she’d never before realized the value of pure and simple anger in today’s world. People acted as if something was wrong with you when you were angry, as if you wouldn’t even need to be angry if you just had your shit together.

Well, fuck that. Fuck them.

Nothing better than a pure and righteous anger to scour the mind of all its useless debris. Nothing better to focus yourself, to remind yourself just who the hell you were at this point in time on this particular mud ball careening through soulless space. A healthy bout of anger burned through you like a flash fire, reducing all those little shames and regrets to such a fine ash it was no trouble at all sweeping them out before the next asshole came into your life with a pocket full of fun money and a big-toothed grin.

She’d been seething all day. Combustion was inevitable, and she didn’t give a damn who got burned.

Jane gripped the receiver until her knuckles turned white. The peculiar thing was that even when she willed herself to relax, to let go, the muscles in her hand and arm refused, remaining locked and rigid, as if she had somehow misplaced the key that would release them. “You bastard,” she said. She knew she had been repeating herself. She just didn’t know for how long.

Calling me names isn’t helping things any. I’m going to hang up. I said I was sorry.

“You promised you’d be here. I took the day off and God knows I can’t afford it. I’m lying in this awful, stinking hotel because this is the place you chose. There was a goddamn used condom on the floor when I got here, Richard! Do you have any idea how this makes me feel? It makes me feel like a whore, you bastard!”

I really don’t think this is a fruitful conversation. I’m going to hang up now. Perhaps later when you calm down…

“Goddamn you! If you hang up I’m telling your wife!” The bastard didn’t say anything right away. Jane smiled but it wasn’t a smile she enjoyed. Something was wrong with her jaw. Smiling hurt her face.

And I’ll tell your husband.

“I really don’t think he’ll be listening. I don’t think he’s capable of listening, actually.”

What’s that supposed to mean?

“He’s dead, Richard. And aren’t you the forgetful one?”

What are you saying?

“Jesus, you’re a dense bastard! The gun in your glove compartment? Is it still there?” Despite herself, her smile spread. As her rigid facial muscles stretched and burned she almost screamed from the pain.

You crazy bitch!

She laughed out loud, and then she did scream. Flames had spread from the bed sheet to the black plastic phone, and now the receiver was too hot to hold. “I’ve got a little problem here. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll call you right back. You pick it up right away, you hear me? You don’t and you’re a dead man!” She slammed the phone down, then watched as it melted. The skin of her hand had blackened and was dotted by a dozen or more blisters like tiny pearls.

It was a hell of a thing to happen to her. But it actually made her feel better.

2. EXPLORE THE EXITS

Decide in advance how to make your escape. There is almost always more than one way out. Whatever you do, wear comfortable shoes suitable for wild, uncontrolled running.

Jane leapt to her feet and opened the door. There were no indications of smoke or fire damage. She padded halfway down the hall before she realized she was wearing only a bra and panties. She hesitated, listening. Oh, the hell with it. She followed the hall around the perimeter of the hotel, finding three staircases leading down. She went up to the elevator doors and put her blistered hand on the outside of one. It wasn’t particularly warm. On her way back to the room she passed an elderly couple who stared. “There appears to be a fire,” she said with a smile. “I suggest that you stay off the phone, douse yourselves with water, crawl into bed and hold each other as tightly as you can.” She took a few steps away then turned. “Sexual intercourse would be optional,” she added.

She went back to her room. One entire wall was enveloped in flames. She thought this was all Richard’s fault, but she wasn’t sure how. She walked calmly into the bathroom, soaked several large towels in the tub, went back to the flaming wall and spent five minutes beating the fire out. The flames disappeared with surprising ease, as if they had been sucked into the ugly wallpaper. (Red and green and black clusters of geometric shapes—from a distance they looked like bugs chewing on the wall. How could people fall asleep in such a room?)

3. CHECK THE WINDOWS

Do they open? How far is it to the ground? Note that you will probably not survive a leap from above the third floor. Do you see fire trucks outside? Are there bodies on the ground? Are other people jumping? Does rain look imminent? Beating on the window will most likely do no good.

The fire was at least partly her responsibility. Emotions kept pent up over long periods of time can reach dangerously high temperatures. She had read this in some popular magazine, the woman on its glossy cover large-breasted and nude except for a bright red scarf around her neck. Jane supposed the scarf represented the strangulation brought on by female sexuality. Or maybe the woman’s throat was on fire from all the things she could not bring herself to say.

But Richard’s responsibility was even graver. The bastard. The prick. He should have paid more attention to her. He should have been truthful. It wasn’t fair that all these innocent people might burn up in a fire while he was safe at home, free to continue cheating on his wife. Her face suddenly flushed with anger or with heat from the fire.

Jane walked around the room as she dialed the bastard on the phone by the closet. The cord became more and more entangled, but she could not stop herself from pacing. His line was busy. She dialed his number again and again, standing by the window, watching as flames shot out of one window, and then another, in the hotel wing across the courtyard. In the hazy distance other buildings appeared to be on fire. The ringing of telephones had risen to a deafening din. Obviously other women were going through the same things with their men. All over the city, men were being bastards. All over the city, women were turning into blackening, melting candles.

Jane? Is that you?

“You’re a dead man.”

My father called. I couldn’t get him off the phone.

“He’s probably a bastard, too. Is that where you learned how to treat women? From that bastard father of yours?”

Look, I know I screwed up. Let me make it up to you.

Veins of fire suddenly issued from one corner of the floor, flowed up the wallpaper, made jagged patterns like lightning across the ceiling over her head. Beautiful and deadly, as all things should be. “Come down to the hotel. We’ll see what we can work out.”

He didn’t speak right away. She gave him some time. She didn’t want to scare him off. She was a woman, after all, capable of great patience. I don’t think I want to do that.

“You’re not a little scared are you?”

Sounds like I may have reason to be, don’t you think?

“Just come down here. I just want to talk to you. You talk to me and everything’ll be okay—I’ll make it right. But if you don’t come down here in the next half hour you’re screwed. Royally. That good life of yours is over. And you know I can do it.”

But if there’s traffic…

“Call my cell phone from your car in fifteen minutes. Then I’ll know you’re coming.”

She held on to the phone after he hung up, watching in fascination as a narrow trail of blue flame followed the cord from the cradle, around the tangles, toward the handset. She dropped it when her hand began to burn. More blisters. She did not find them unattractive.

Behind her the closet ignited explosively. Without considering the consequences she went for her clothes. A wall of heat pushed her back, but she managed to get her slacks and top out. Her shoes were already on fire. She watched them burn: the colors were spectacular—red, yellow, cobalt blue.

4. IF YOU SEE A FIRE, REPORT IT TO THE HOTEL OPERATOR

We have operators on duty twenty-four hours a day to provide you with information and answer all your questions. Please note that room service is closed from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. If you should get our answering service please leave a complete and detailed message.

A sheet of flame spread steadily up the wallpaper behind the headboard. Jane stood and watched. Those little bugs were suddenly very unhappy, curling up and tumbling off the wall in all directions, their bug parts blazing. Of course she should have been making her escape, getting out of that room as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t help herself. Once the fire reached the flame-retardant ceiling it rolled back on itself, further complicating the patterns of flame. Gorgeous. Like a headboard of passionate dream. She wanted to stretch out on the bed and feel the heat, sleep while all the tension of the day burned away.

Something in her hand. She looked down. Her cell phone. She wasn’t even aware of getting it out of her purse. Of course. There was always the right thing to do, the thing that announced itself and judged you when you did not act. She dialed the hotel switchboard.

“I’d like to report a fire.”

Location?

“Four-oh-two-oh. My room. My bed. My goddamn life.”

Any idea how long? A man’s voice. She wondered what his name might be. He sounded like a Bob or a Bill, maybe a Tom. Certainly too sincere to be a Dick.

“Pretty much forever.”

Then you’d better get out.

“Oh, I will. You just watch me.”

5. FEEL THE DOOR WITH THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

Is it hot to the touch? Is it cold? Wet or dry? If you cannot relate to these words, how would you describe it? Perhaps everything’s normal and you can go back to bed. Would you like a wake-up call?

The door was warm, but that might be simply because her room was on fire. Did they ever think of that? She’d seen movies in which the hapless victim had opened the door against all advice and been blown backwards by the explosive force of the conflagration on the other side. A great word, “conflagration,” much more impressive than mere “fire,” but a much harder word to shout during a dire emergency.

Jane could feel the hairs on the back of her neck begin to curl and singe. She jerked the door open, ran out and slammed it behind her. Muzak continued to play in the quiet corridor, vaguely reminiscent of the melodies they played at buffets. She felt a little embarrassed about running down the hall in her bare feet. Somebody might think she was having an affair. Somebody might think she’d been stood up. Somebody might think she’d been a fool. So she walked, head high, posture proud.

6. CHECK THE HALL

Do you see any flames? Are there signs of smoke damage? If you cannot see because of the smoke, get down on your knees and crawl. If you encounter bodies or other human debris, please contact the management upon your arrival at the first floor.

Halfway down the corridor she noticed that some of the walls had become transparent. The only thing worse than a glass house is a glass hotel, she thought. This slowed her down when she should have been making for the stairs. But it was a peculiar thing—her theory was that somehow the intense heat had reduced the walls to a microscopic thinness, causing things to be all too clear. She could see people inside their rooms watching TV, dressing for dinner, making love. Sometimes they stared at the walls as if they could sense her presence, her gravity, but apparently they could not see her as she could see them.

She should warn these people, but she couldn’t very well knock on every door—she wouldn’t be able to save herself. Then she saw the rooms one by one fill with fire and there was no one left to warn. Their spirits floated through the walls and accumulated on the ceiling of the hall.

She fell to her knees and crawled, trying to stay as far away from their toxic spirits as possible. She refused to look at them any longer, even when she heard them weeping, even when their tears drizzled down from the storm clouds they had become. They probably thought she was some heartless bitch. But you can’t always control what other people think about you.

7. TAKE THE STAIRS

Sometimes in a fire people get turned around and head the wrong way. Don’t be one of those people! Let the handrail be your friend—we put it there just for you. Keep as far away from any panicked guests as possible—their chances of survival are slim. Don’t let them take you down with them.

The door to the nearest staircase was difficult to open, as if it hadn’t been used in some time, or as if heat had welded it. But it wasn’t hot to the touch. It was hard getting leverage in her bare feet, but finally, when she pulled on the doorknob while pushing her naked soles against the frame, the door popped open like a cork in a vintage wine bottle, sending her sprawling. She scrambled to her feet and made it through the door before it closed again.

The staircase had that unfinished look that emergency exits so often do: unpainted, the seams of the wallboard exposed, looking as if she had stepped back through time and the building was still under construction. The silence was what she really found disturbing, however. The only sound she could hear was the harsh labor of her own breath as she pounded down the stairs. She needed to work out more, she thought. She was woefully out of shape.

When Jane’s cell phone went off in the midst of all that quiet, she barely stopped herself from tumbling head-first down the stairs. She sat down on a step and fumbled the phone from her pocket, noticing that one of her feet was bleeding as she thumbed the phone on. “Yes?”

Okay, I’m almost there. I’m calling, just like you wanted.

Richard. She’d actually forgotten all about him. Amazing. She could barely keep the pleasure out of her voice. “That’s right. Good boy. How far are you away?”

No more than a couple of blocks, I guess. Say, what’s with all the smoke?

She caught her breath. “Smoke? You see it? My God, I was beginning to think I’d imagined…” She stopped herself.

What was that? Christ, is there a fire there?

“No, no. They’re throwing a big barbecue up on the upper deck. Texas style. Have you had lunch?”

I don’t feel much like eating, Jane. What do I do when I get there? Do you want me to come up to the room?

“Oh, you mean our room?”

Yeah, whatever. Is that where I’m supposed to go?

“Why, you sound a little angry, Richard.”

He didn’t answer right away. You’re the one in charge. What do you want me to do?

“That’s a good boy. Meet me down in the lobby. Like I said, ignore the smoke, no matter what else you see or hear. You got that, Richard?”

I got that.

“Good. See you in five.” Gleefully she switched off the phone.

8. DON’T PANIC

There’s really nothing to worry about. All members of our staff are trained professionals, ready to deal with any eventuality. We’re all consenting adults here. Remember that violence solves nothing.

It seemed imperative that Jane reach the lobby before Richard figured out what was going on. Before anyone else figured out what was going on. Where was everybody, were they sleeping? She hadn’t even heard a fire alarm go off, much less a sprinkler. Shitty hotel. People died in hotels like this, not even knowing what hit them. As far as she knew, the hotel staff already knew about the fire and had made their escape from the building without telling anyone. People were scum, especially people in the service industries. Didn’t they give a damn about the people they were supposed to be serving? No wonder customers got angry all the time. You just couldn’t get good service anymore.

Jane threw her head back and howled. The anger rose in great rings of dark cloud up the stairwell. The walls closed in to maximize the echo, becoming like another throat that surrounded her and gave amplification to every bad thing she’d been feeling for twenty-odd years.

9. MAKE YOUR WAY TO GROUND LEVEL

There you will find hotel staff eager to assist you. Please take advantage of our complementary beverage tray and cheese basket. Tell your friends. At the Greenmark we are prepared to deal with parties of any size.

Jane entered the lobby at a dead run. People stared at her, then went back to whatever it was they were doing. It occurred to Jane that they were dressed quite nicely for a fire. And impeccable behavior. No one was crying. No one looked even the least bit scared.

Obviously no one had told them about the smoke. No one had told them about the fire. Or perhaps they’d been told about it, but they had failed to listen. People were always failing to listen.

“You know, for a minute there I thought you’d set the place on fire.”

Jane turned and saw Richard standing there, the smug expression on his face, his take-charge stance.

“Oh, but there is a fire. Can’t you smell it, Richard?”

He was still looking at her with that confident expression when his sleeve burst into flames. This change in circumstance had barely registered in his face when the rest of him fell forward. The fire burned itself out as quickly as it had begun, leaving a dark, warped misery lying on the smoking rug.

Several in the crowd screamed. A woman standing beside Jane began to cry. Jane turned: she was young, pleasant-looking. She felt sorry for her. “Spontaneous combustion,” Jane whispered into her delicate ear. “It’s everywhere these days. Didn’t you see the spread last month in Cosmo?”

10. LET SOMEONE KNOW YOU’RE ALIVE

So many are tempted to continue their escape, stroll out of the building and start a new life under an assumed name. The management would like to disavow any knowledge of, or responsibility for, the actions of this radical minority.

The young woman stared as the lady walked through the lobby and out the front door in her bare feet. Everywhere the lady stepped, a scorched teardrop appeared in the rose-colored carpet.

MINIMALIST BIOGRAPHY

He and his wife led their small life. No great adventures or newspaper photos.

Neither did anything you might remember the next morning.

Tiny bodies, tinier heads—they disappeared in the glare of one bright day.

A dozen and more owned the house after. None recalled them or their time.

Then one morning cleaning we found handprints on ceilings, footprints across walls.

My wife angrily climbed the ladder with dripping mop, overflowing pail.

Kids? Elves? Way up here?

What is that red spot? Blood?

Peering closer she found a delicate, miniature painting: an alizarin rose.

Written beneath were flyspeck words:

“Tom loves Martha. She says hello.”

SOMETIMES I GET LOST

The woman in the photograph has no name. I have no story for what she is to me. I want to say she starts her day with “A,” first in the alphabet, and that she is first in my heart. “You’re just the best,” I say to her shimmering image, as if encouragement will grow eyes that see out of that paper portrait and soft lips that speak, identifying herself, available for more.

She may be alive or she may be dead. There is no difference inside my happy skull.

The day (morning? afternoon?) is cold. I reach out to wrap my children around me. I try to be careful, but some always fall away. I can hear them tumble, even with my eyes closed and hands clamped over my ears.

It is so sad to see an unfamiliar face in the mirror. I have fallen into someone else’s life, and now I must teach him how to cry.

In the distance there is the sound of buses pulling away for home. I can hear nothing with this fellow’s ears, except the stumble-bum rhythm of my own heart. It is so sad to see the backs of people’s heads. They are like portraits without features.

Inside my skull, people rearrange themselves. They may not realize how terrifying this game is.

This woman holding my hand: a very long time ago I stayed up all night building her a house full of dolls. I decorated each room to be like a room she might one day live in. Perhaps now I can crawl into one of those tiny rooms and stay. I will make myself very small: they will feel me against their faces or around their ankles and believe I am a soft breeze.

For years everything will be the same. I will have memorized the positions of all the furniture. No one will have thought to rearrange things. I will have a name for every voice I hear. Their names will be like music. Said together, the sound will make the walls shake.

Finally the girl’s hand arrives. I remember it being as delicate and tentative as a new bird learning flight. It is all that and more. The hand wraps itself around and takes me high in the air with its tender embrace. Careful not to break me, but this reunion is breaking me up inside, as wife, children, and grandchildren come tumbling out of my mouth.

The child watches me for a very long time, as if examining me for surprises. I cannot change the smile painted broadly across my face. Carefully she places me back inside rooms within rooms.

Sometimes I get lost, and it takes years for the memories to find me. Someday I will wake up big. I will wake up huge.

Until then, sweetheart, tell me your name. And if I still look confused, tell it to me again.

THE CHANGING ROOM

He wakes with the door behind him. It rattles, rattles again. He hears the eager key opposed by the reluctant lock. He hears the torn breath of the key’s owner, as if even this is too much effort. He hears a familiar language whose words he still cannot understand. He hears a music of distressed syllables, low vowels, painful consonants.

He risks a constricted, claustrophobic breath: these objects in front of him so close and yet somehow unreachable: the miniature table with the picture of the young girl: the bright red necklace arranged about the neck of her black and white image: the necklace moving one segment at a time down her throat: the click of insect legs on glass as the narrow red body disappears around the edge of the stained silver frame. A few inches away the square of soiled handkerchief, its aged stains graying into a spotted lizard hide. And on that cloth square, the ruins of the young girl’s comb, metal teeth broken and handle cracked, a swatch of blonde hair caught and held for decades, the whole of it collapsed like a wolf’s decaying grin. And beyond that grin, crumpled like a life regurgitated, lie the meager remains of her last letter, paper fingered again and again almost to transparency, the blue ink of her words floating above the shadows.

And, hanging around him, the clothes he wore that day, as if he were standing in the changing room of a large swimming pool, as if the objects on the table were the things from his pockets, laid there, away from the dampness that must eventually creep, that must eventually spread everywhere, and soften everything, and dissolve us all in its path.

The back wall of the room shimmers, as if metal or glass, but he knows it’s not metal nor glass, but he knows… nothing. And leaving the realm of factual carpentry, he understands that this is the corridor outside the changing room, leading to that grand public swimming pool. The passage glitters, reflecting the pool that lies beyond the doorway, around the short hall to the left, where the water extends as far as his mind will allow, as deep, where every word he speaks has an echo, where the other swimmers repeat his awkward speech, but will not show their faces.

But he will not go there. He is not ready to go there. He hasn’t done enough, even with all these rooms to show for what can and has been done, each one holding a moment he can climb into. He hasn’t gathered enough. There’s never enough time to gather everything he needs, and never enough space to hold it all. And what is there to do when every moment he’s collected demands focus, insists upon his attention? Sometimes all he can do is leave.

He turns around and grabs the handle. He runs through all his keys, trying each in succession. The door rattles, rattles again. The reluctant lock resists the eager key. He hears his breath begin to tear in the close space of the room. He rests his hand on the interior wall and is alarmed at how leathery it has become, how brittle, how yielding. He starts to pray in a familiar language whose words he cannot understand.

His repetitive plea becomes a music of distressed syllables and low vowels. The consonants are painful in the tender space of his mouth.

CHARLES

The night before Charles’s wedding, his mother took the long bus ride from her small house in the suburbs to the run-down apartment building downtown where he had been staying for many years. She had never visited him in this place, and although she missed him terribly she didn’t at all look forward to the meeting. Off and on during that day she had such spells of absentmindedness—misplacing her keys, forgetting why she had gone in to this or that room, walking out to the clothes line with her blouse all undone, finally losing the worn-out slip of paper with her son’s scribbled address—she eventually just had to sit down and have herself a good long cry. She really hadn’t thought she’d been sad, and wondered if sadness was really the right word for what she was feeling. Sometimes her body seemed to feel things she herself had no knowledge of.

Eventually she did find the piece of paper with the address—she’d put it in the canister with her teabags—and she managed to get herself dressed. It was one of the outfits she regularly wore to church, and it bolstered her. But even with these improvements in her condition she discovered that her hands weren’t working properly—they trembled so badly she dropped her fare by the bus driver and he had to pick it up for her. And maneuvering her feet down the narrow moving aisle proved difficult, her shoes feeling oversized and full of stones.

Her son’s building was shabby, but not as bad as she had expected. A sharp odor of urine in the lobby made her clasp a tissue over her nose and mouth. She was relieved to find that the odor did not follow her up the stairs. She stood outside her son’s door, sniffing self-consciously, then made herself stop. She rapped the door. It wasn’t a very loud knock, but it was the best she could manage.

He didn’t say anything when he first opened the door and looked down at her. He was wearing the kind of baggy shorts he’d always liked, except much bigger, of course, man-sized. And a T-shirt—it had always been hard to get him to wear anything but T-shirts. This one had some logo she did not recognize, whose jagged lines and garish colors made her uneasy. When she looked away from it she found herself following his long, sturdy legs down to the floor, to the huge, dirty gray, and almost disintegrated tennis shoes. She stopped there, staring, somewhat sickened by the look of the rotting canvas and rubber, and wondering if the tennis shoes were exaggerated, or if his feet were actually that big.

“Hi, Mom.” His voice had a phlegmy sound. She looked up into his expansive face, the tall forehead, the soft doughy cheeks and chin. The eyes buried inside that face appeared tiny, dark, and feverish. “I didn’t know you were coming.” His oversized head bobbed unsteadily on the thin neck when he talked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes tearing. “I should have come before.”

His eyes blinked rapidly before focusing. “Do you want to come in?”

“Oh. Of course, honey.” The honey was meant, and deliberate, and caused her pain.

He stood aside awkwardly to let her by. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands, like he didn’t know how to invite someone into his apartment—he didn’t know how it was done. So he raised them above his head and allowed them to hang and flutter there. Then, before she had a chance to step inside, he asked, “Are you coming to the wedding?”

She stared up at him, feeling very much a small woman. It seemed to her she had always been a small woman alongside her son, even when he was a little boy. She did not say anything for a time, but watched his face intently.

“I will be there,” she said finally, “because I think that’s the right thing for me to do. But you must not get married, Charles. You really mustn’t.”

He blinked and looked away, and she thought about how raw and sore his tiny eyes appeared. When he was small he’d get these terrible colds and eye infections, and it just seemed like they would never go away. “Mom, my name is Charlie. I want to be called Charlie now.”

“I apologize, Charlie. That’s a very nice name and I will call you that from now on. But Charlie, you just can’t get married. That’s something you must not do.”

“I’m old enough.”

“Yes, you are old enough, but that’s not the point.”

“She says she loves me, and I told her I love her, too. I promised. So did she.”

“Oh, Charlie, I’m so glad someone said that to you. Really, I am. But you can’t do something like this.”

“We have to, now. Everything’s all ready. There’s a party after, but you can’t come if you keep saying things like that.”

“I have to be honest with you, Charlie. I loved you when you were a little boy and I love you still. I have always loved you and I will always love you. You will always be my son. Forever. But you just can’t get married.”

“Why?” He said it looking around the room, looking everywhere but at her. She looked down at his feet wrapped in those terrible tennis shoes. He was rocking back and forth on those two huge feet, lifting one and then the other.

“You can’t marry, honey, because you passed away. You died when you were just six years old.”

He blinked his eyes a couple of times and then started rubbing them with the swollen mitts of his hands. Soon he was rubbing them so hard she was afraid he might hurt himself—a genuine, but ridiculous fear. She thought she knew now why his eyes were so raw, so red, so small. He let his hands flutter up above his head, stretched, and yawned deeply, with all his body, like someone awakening from a long and extraordinarily deep sleep, unable as yet to muster the power of speech. He stared at her, frowning. Finally she looked away, not knowing how to interpret the look in his eyes.

“We never talk about that,” he finally said. “It’s just too silly.”

“Charlie,” she said with a sad smile, “that’s my fault. At first, well, of course I wanted it that way—I wanted to pretend. The alternative was just unacceptable. But then when I couldn’t pretend anymore I still couldn’t talk to you about it. How could I? I suppose I thought if we didn’t talk about it, it would, well, take its own course, and that things would evolve as they were intended, in a more natural way, if natural means anything at all in your case. Charles, oh Charlie, do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

He looked vague, or bored, or perhaps he was trying to pretend he was bored. “You think I’m stupid.” His lips contorted in an ugly way. “A lot of people think I’m stupid. But I’m not.”

“No, of course you’re not, honey. It’s all my fault, this whole thing. I’m your mother—it was my obligation to help you… adjust to this in some way. I just thought that, I always assumed that, you did not know you were dead.”

He scratched his belly absently. He wasn’t skinny, he had a bit of a bulge there, and she wondered how that could be when, as far as she knew, Charles did not eat. And if he was eating now, she did not want to think about what he might be eating. “I dream sometimes I’m dead, I think. Or maybe I just remember it. And sometimes when I want to care about something, I can’t. It’s like some things I think about are just movies, and I’m not in the movie, I’m just watching it. Sometimes I lean on one side when I walk, and I think I’m going to fall over, but I don’t, and I always think about that, but I don’t want to. It makes me scared and mad.”

“When you were six years old we were having the downstairs re-carpeted. I was in the kitchen and you had wandered away from me.” Her face felt suddenly wet, but she didn’t try to wipe away her tears. “We had a conversation pit, they called them that back then. They were somewhat popular in the seventies. They had put the huge roll of carpet down on the edge of it and gone back to the truck for something or other. We never found out exactly what happened, but when we found you, you were at the bottom of the pit, the end of the carpet roll on top of you.”

All through his mother’s explanation Charlie felt around his head, his fingers finally settling into a particular spot three inches above his left ear. “I have this place here.”

“Yes, Charlie. That was one of the results of…”

“Couldn’t you have gotten it fixed? I don’t like it at all. My cap never fits right, and my hair grows funny.”

“Charlie, you were dead. There seemed no reason.”

“It’s not your head, Mom. You don’t have to comb your hair over and over again until it looks right.” His mouth suddenly seemed like this uncontrollable thing. He turned his head to the mirror just inside the apartment, and she watched as a sneer spread across his face in the glass. He turned back and frowned at her. “You should have watched me better. When Ellie and I have kids you better bet we’re going to watch them better than you did me.”

His mother trembled. “I made a mistake!” she cried. “And I have paid for it every day since then. You have been a constant reminder and a knife in my heart! But I never complained—I never even told you. I have only loved you.”

He backed up a few steps. It pained her to see. “You let me die,” he said, his hands held up between them.

“I’m your mother, Charlie, and I’ve always loved you. And I know it’s sad, it’s terribly terribly sad, but you just can’t have children. Just think of what they would be like. Something like that was never meant to be. My own grandchildren.”

“They’d be like me, Mom. Maybe they would look like me. What’s so bad about that?”

She gazed up at him, drying her eyes on the edge of her sleeve. “Oh, nothing, nothing, sweetheart. I’m sorry I got so upset.”

“Do you want some tea? Ellie likes it, so I have a lot of it. You can see my place. That’s what Ellie calls it—‘Charlie’s place.’”

“That would be very nice, Charlie. Thank you for inviting me.”

He held the door open for her as if he were a doorman at attention. She stepped inside carefully, watching her feet. Once inside, she sniffed. It was a bad habit. Her son had no smell, virtually none. He never had. But the mind plays tricks, and after he’d died she’d found herself attributing almost every unknown smell to him.

There were also no cooking smells, or smells of garbage, or unwashed clothing or unwashed body smells, the smells she generally associated with young men. There was a strong aromatic mix of soaps and disinfectants. Her son was no corpse. He was something else. He was his mother’s son, and no son of hers could be referred to as a corpse.

Charlie’s apartment was profoundly neat. The area appeared completely without clutter, the rug well-vacuumed, spoiled by not even a thread of lint, her son’s few personal items (if an empty vase, a stapler, and a battered dictionary could be termed “personal”) equally spaced on a single white plastic shelf mounted on the wall. There were a few toys—some cars, a plastic soldier, a yo-yo, scattered by the bed. While she was looking, he walked over and nudged them under the bed with his foot. “I don’t play with those,” he said. She gazed at the neatly made bed. “I have some cookies here, Mom. I used to like cookies. Ellie likes to have a cookie with her tea when she stays over. Would you like a cookie with your tea, Mom?”

“That would be nice.” She noticed his politeness, and noticed how his politeness pleased her. She went over to the bed, trying not to look at it too directly. On a small table beside the bed was a young woman’s photograph. She picked it up gingerly, as if it might go off. In her experience the most innocuous things sometimes had a tendency to go off, ruining everything. She stared at the image of the creature who chose to “stay over” with her dear, dead son. She didn’t like to think of these things, but how could she avoid it? The young woman in the photograph had a shy smile, and the saddest eyes she had ever seen. She put the picture down quickly.

“Here, Mom.” Charles walked awkwardly into the room with a cup of steaming tea on a small metal platter along with what appeared to be a spotless plastic ashtray with a single cookie resting inside. He went over to a large chest in front of the single window and set it down. “You can feel the wind when you sit in front of the window. I always like feeling the wind on my face. I don’t have any chairs. Do you want to sit on the floor?”

“That will be fine. Your floor is—very clean.” She sat down on the floor by one end of the chest and he sat down at the other. She started sipping her tea, which had a dry, dusty flavor, but she smiled and nodded at her dead son as she drank. The cookie was stale and hard, but at least the ashtray it sat in appeared quite sanitary.

Charles watched her as she consumed these things, occasionally peering out the open window, his eyes fixed and distant. Finally he said, “Mommy.” He stopped, closed his mouth and began again. “Mom, why aren’t I—” He closed his mouth again.

“Why aren’t you lying in some grave somewhere?” she prompted.

He nodded. “I want to know. Do you know?”

She was grateful for an excuse to put down that awful tea, even though her hand was shaking as she returned it to the platter. “I can’t tell you exactly,” she began, “because I don’t exactly know myself. We had the funeral, and it was very sad. I thought I would die, too, or that at least was what I deserved.” She paused then, looking for some reaction from him. As there was none, she continued. “For the next few days I stayed in bed while your father went to work. I knew he was suffering greatly, but I was in no condition to help him.

“At the end of a week, perhaps two—I really have no idea—I got up and made breakfast. Your father joined me at the table. No words were said. Then, after a few minutes, you walked in, much slower than normal, as if you had awakened from a hard sleep, and sat in your usual chair.” She stopped and looked at him. “Do you remember any of this?”

Without pause he replied, “I don’t remember. Was Dad surprised?”

“I thought he would have a heart attack.”

“Were you surprised, Mom?”

“No. No, I was not.”

“I think I knew you weren’t surprised.” She nodded. “Were you happy to see me?”

His mother did not know how to answer that question, and so she said other things she knew to be true. “For the first half hour or so your father cried and hugged you to him and told me how wonderful this was and what a joyful, joyful, thing it was that had happened to us that day, a true miracle. You, however, acted as if there was nothing unusual going on. You looked from one of us to the other, as if you hadn’t the faintest idea what we were talking about. Your father wanted to call your grandparents and all our friends and even neighbors who we didn’t know all that well.”

“Did they all come?”

“I wouldn’t let him call anyone. And just as I knew it would happen, over the second half hour or so, your father stared at you, and stared at you, until he became terrified of the sight of his own son, and he wanted to call the police and the doctors, but most of all he wanted to call our parish priest. But again, I would not let him. And though he said he could not bear it, he agreed to do what I wanted, and he did not make those calls.”

“What happened when our neighbors saw me?”

“The next day I got you up before dawn. I had packed some essential things, including a bag of your toys, even though you appeared uninterested, suddenly bored with everything you had had before. We left just before daybreak. I left your father a note, telling him the city I would be taking you to, to start a new life. He was welcome to come join us later, I said, but for the time being I didn’t trust him.”

“Did he come?”

“He did. After three months he got himself together, and one night there he was on our doorstep. But he was never the same, we were never the same, nothing was ever the same again. That’s not your fault, I want you to know that. That’s just the way it is sometimes. He couldn’t live with the change. And so he died.”

Charles didn’t ask how, as she had known he would not. Some things she understood instinctively, but there were so many things she did not understand at all. Charles stood quietly and took the tray with the cup and ashtray into the kitchen. She could hear water running, the sounds of vigorous scrubbing.

She looked at the trunk they’d been eating on. It was spacious and sturdy—she thought she recognized it as one they used to have at the house. Everything in the room was plainly displayed—there appeared to be no other containers than this. She pushed up the lid.

She recognized most of them—the few toys and books he’d owned when he died. And mixed in with these all the toys she had desperately given him after. All these toys for a child who would no longer play. But she thought about the toys shoved under the bed, and knew he had been playing, in secret perhaps, but playing just the same. She gently shut the lid, determined not to think of these toys again.

Charles returned and stood looking down at her. “I’m getting married tomorrow, Mommy. Are you going to be there?”

“Do you remember any of these things I have told you about?”

He was looking out the window again, distant, as if they were in two separate locations, but he said, “I remember riding my tricycle down a long sidewalk, except it was longer than just long. It never stopped. And I was thinking ‘I can’t ride a trike. Mommy says I’m too little.’ You said I couldn’t have one until I was at least five, remember? But there I was in my memory, riding the tricycle better than any boy ever rode a tricycle before, down that brand new sidewalk and by the trees and these great big houses, these huge houses that I’d never seen before. But that’s all I remember, Mom. Did I ever go to elementary school?”

“You went to elementary school and junior high and high school—you did all of that.”

“Did I have many friends?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Did I have girlfriends?”

“No, but you did lots of things—you watched television and you took the dog for walks—remember Corky, that spaniel I got you?—and we sat on the porch, and I played records for you, so many records—we had so much music in our life. And I told you so many things—I encouraged you. I told you how you would have a great career one day, and get married, and that you’d have many children of your own. You’d be a wonderful father. You’d make me a grandmother. I—we talked about all that. Tell me you remember at least some of that!”

He looked at her with what might have been a smile—it was hard to tell in that soft, doughy face of his in the failing light. “All I remember, Mom,” he said, “is riding that tricycle, and how good I was driving the tricycle, and how good it made me feel. That’s all I remember.”

She looked down at her hands. She’d been picking at her nails. It was a terrible habit—now her fingers were bleeding. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sad, Mom,” he said, but she didn’t think he really meant it, or knew how to mean it. “I’ll have kids. That means you’ll have grandkids. You wanted that, didn’t you? Isn’t that great?”

And she did smile. She said, “That’s great, honey. Sometimes we do get what we wish for,” and closed her eyes. And went to that place where she had not been in many, many years. And when she opened her eyes again, her lovely boy Charles was gone.

She sat alone in a dusty, dry box of a room with no furniture, with much of the window boarded, with trash on the floor and the remnants of numerous fires set for warmth or cooking or perhaps just for mischief. The door was off its hinges, lying in the corner, smeared with a variety of dark substances. She had never been in such a place in her lifetime, although she had heard of such places, seen them in movies and on television. One thing she did know about them was that a woman such as herself did not belong there.

On her slow journey down the stairs she passed a young woman with dark, sad, so terribly sad, eyes. They nodded but did not speak.

THE FIGURE IN MOTION

The majority of his days he had nothing useful to do. At one time he imagined that was what he’d always wanted. In fact, they had planned their mutual retirement around that simple idea. They would read books. They would go to movies. The staffs of the local parks and museums would know them by their first names. He’d had this vivid image of himself strolling the sidewalks arm-in-arm with the love of his life, making but the slightest, almost immeasurable, ripple of forward motion as they walked together through their remaining days. No one would notice the nearly invisible wake of their passage, but that’s what he thought they’d wanted. At some point all motion would stop, and even the memory of them would fade from the world forever. There was a simple dignity in the idea to which he was fully committed.

But then his wife was dying, a terrible disruption so unexpected at first but then gradually inevitable as her illness progressed. During her last few months on the planet he’d attempted to fill himself only with good memories of their life together, a cushion against the crushing loss to come, but he was quickly overpowered by events, and instead was forced to retain a series of images of her passing: her head bowed in burdensome fatigue, sitting shakily upright for a long stare out the window, her face at last too sad for tears, and then that final full day when she insisted on walking by herself across the field of powdered snow.

He’d watched her struggle across that brilliant emptiness, a lone figure changing shape, her shadow altering as sun and clouds moved, lines broken and ragged as she pushed forward into her future, her body so thin and her old dress so tattered she looked as if her skin were shedding while she prowled nervously through the whiteness of that late afternoon.

She left clear marks in the snow, gray holes descending into darkness and a wide scraping across the crystalline surface, making a pattern like angels’ wings, which gradually melted, filled and blended, until that world below his window was clean, untroubled, and unoccupied again.

It had surprised him that he wasn’t tempted to go help her. But that’s not what she wanted—this journey was completely hers to do.

And so through the long years of his retirement without her, it had been these images that had occupied his time. He did manage to read the newspaper and the occasional magazine, to skim volumes of non-fiction, to catch the odd movie, now and then to attend a lecture or museum exhibit, but the main focus of his final years had become memories of her decline, or—when he forced himself to think generously—her radical transformation.

Certainly it must have been some sort of fantastic rationalization that began to let him think of this collection of memories as art.

“I’m too late, aren’t I? I knew I would be—traffic was so bad, and I drive so poorly in bad traffic.” He knew he was saying too much, but he’d lost the ability to edit his speech some time ago.

“Sorry? Too late for what?” The young woman looked pretty, and amused. Young enough to be his daughter.

He imagined the heat in his face might be presenting itself as a blush. “The tour? The Postmodern Figure?”

“Well, yes. But they just started a tour for one of the local college art classes. You could follow right along. If you stay close I’m sure you could still hear. No one would care, really. I promise I won’t turn you in.”

He laughed, but only because he thought he was supposed to. He had no idea why some people thought such dialogs humorous—he just recognized that they did. He hurried along, his long winter coat flapping around his knees. He’d be too hot pretty soon, he knew, and then he’d have to decide whether to be uncomfortable wearing it, or awkward carrying it around. His wife had always had a good suggestion or two for such dilemmas, but he’d found that the further he traveled away from her, the tinier his ability to make a simple decision. It was a kind of perspective he’d never heard of, and could find no mention of in the volumes of art history he’d bought since her death.

“After the war the human figure was trivialized in modern art. It was made to appear insignificant, unreliable, and pitiable. Eventually it all but disappeared from the work of serious artists, as if they thought it beneath their notice, that it had nothing significant to say anymore. Art became dehumanized, less emblematic. As the prime emblem of our daily experience, the figure had to go.”

He wanted to protest, to argue with the young guide, but of course she was only doing her job, and, as far as he knew, was completely correct. But he still found it humbling to hear, and was it just his imagination or did some of these students shrink back a bit from her words, become smaller, a bit self-conscious? He himself became more aware of the size of these canvases, many times human size, so that they seemed architectural, part of the walls, which he now realized were of varying heights, many several stories high, making triangles with the sloped ceilings, which swooped down overhead at times, threatening the heads of the patrons with sharp corners and unfriendly windows. He thought those windows were the kinds of windows an angel might use, or some other holy and invisible creature, and considered this an alarmingly odd perception, although perhaps one not so surprising to have in an art museum.

It was at this point, or so he would conclude later, that he first became aware of the figures in the next room of the gallery, beginning to emerge from hiding, just their outlines peeking from the corridor, but when he turned and tried to take their measure, they were gone, and although he stood and waited, they did not reappear.

By the time he gave up looking for them the tour had moved on without him, and he had to hurry to catch up, feeling hot and uncomfortable as he did so, and wishing he had made the decision simply to carry his coat. He was always conscious of perspiring heavily inside his clothing, and, although he bathed regularly, worried about smelling.

“Eventually traces of the human figure began to appear in these huge, near-empty canvases. Perhaps not the figure itself, not at first, but the effects of its presence. It was coming out of hiding, it seems, but you might say it was being very cautious about the entire endeavor. The figure became tool and material, and eventually it became battleground.”

At the guide’s invitation the students spent some time with these images. Some nodded agreeably with what she had to say, and some had a skeptical air about them, but appeared careful to keep their own figures neutral, betraying no opinion. He dutifully traveled from painting to painting, and sometimes it felt like a journey of years. He had not heard of most of these artists’ names, but tried to memorize them so he could look them up later, find out what else they had done, read what they had to say for themselves.

Still, he felt an urge to leave the tour and seek out a Chagall, or a Soutine, one of the Jewish painters he liked so much, or even an expressionist like Robert Beauchamp, whose figures, with their nervousness and agitation, had become almost cartoonish in their attempts to recede and hide inside the paint. As for his own shy figures, he could still feel them lurking nearby, but thought it non-strategic to seek them out.

“There’s still some jokiness about the figure’s re-emergence, don’t you think? A kind of coyness that invites us in. I find that refreshing, don’t you? Art needn’t be so stuffy. It can look at itself with good humor.”

Perhaps he had no sense of humor when it came to art. Perhaps he was too serious about most things and that was his problem. His wife used to complain about his inappropriate joking, but she also understood that impulse of his came out of a belief that the world was a grim and serious place.

He felt a bit of palsy now in his right hand, and stared at it with eyes that did not focus well anymore. Between the two tendencies he was presented with an image of his hand with no clear lines, nothing firm to hold his flesh in. He felt his tears approaching, and stopped them by grabbing the hand firmly with its left partner, which held it decisively but tenderly in check.

He distracted himself from this localized drama by looking at the largest painting in the room. He didn’t recognize this part of the gallery and wasn’t aware of when the tour might have advanced here. At first he could see no figures in the painting, but then he found the one wavering line suggestive of a hesitant forward motion.

“For years the figure practically vanished from contemporary art.”

He continued to stare at the wavering line in the right third of the painting. He didn’t care for this kind of scraggly, wiggly art. He never had, except where someone like Beauchamp was concerned, who had this indefinable knack. For the most part, he could never find the emotion in this kind of work. But for some reason he felt this particular painting—in fact he found himself almost moved to tears. He saw more motion in that wavering line in the canvas than in his entire life, as it left its trace in the chaos, as it made its mark.

He looked at the artist’s name. Daniel Richter. A German. The name wasn’t completely unfamiliar, but it was still one that hadn’t been on his radar. As he walked among the other Richter paintings, most of them larger-than-life size, he was impressed by their colors, explosive and alive with blood and neon, living now, and not in some memory of days before, and as more and more of the figures began to appear, coagulating out of the aggressive paint, but still hiding, or attempting to hide, it struck him that so many of the figures weren’t much more than outlines, really, and inside those recognizably human outlines floated pools and bursts of color. But it wasn’t a portrayal of exterior resemblance on these canvases, but of a peculiar sort of interior, the interior a medical technician might see in an MRI, or the auras of variously colored heat observable by means of some sort of specialized surveillance equipment, or from the cold and inhuman sensory apparatus of a heat-seeking missile now rapidly advancing on its all-too-vulnerable human targets.

For now he did not sense the shy figures he had encountered earlier—perhaps they were wandering the other galleries, reluctant to enter this one, as if worried they might dissolve within the intense colors and the brilliant lights.

But he had no time for this kind of fantastical speculation in any case. He was too busy examining the figures trapped within these paintings, or if not “figures,” the evidence that figures had once been there, and now these were the prints their bodies had left behind upon impact with the world, or, looked at another way, their medical records, and the documentation of their trauma.

Of course no one had asked him what he was doing here in the art museum. No one had spoken to him at all. But he had been formulating an answer. He really had no idea where his wife had gone. All too quickly the traces of her outside their small home had been erased. He had no idea where to find her, so he was looking here, examining these paintings for clues. It made no sense, but he was convinced it was the right thing to do.

When he returned home that evening he fixed himself a sandwich and carried it into the living room, and sat with it on the palm of his hand and did not eat it. He could feel it drying out on his weary, outstretched palm, but he could not bring himself to take it into his mouth. Eventually he laid the uneaten sandwich onto a side table alongside several books his wife was never able to finish reading, and sat some more, gazing around the room, trying to find additional traces of where she had been, what she had touched.

He remembered she sometimes sat in this chair and knitted at odd times during the day and night. Sometimes he would awaken in the middle of the night and her side of the bed would be empty. He would come downstairs and discover her sitting here knitting squares, putting together blankets and sweaters and various indecipherable soft objects. She said she just couldn’t sleep anymore. She said she had simply lost track of things and now had to figure things out.

After she died he had tried to learn how to knit without any success. He simply could not see how to create patterns, then recognizable objects, out of piles of seemingly limitless string. Instead he had sat here gingerly cupping a ball of yarn in each hand, as if he were holding eggs, as if showing some sort of reverence for the act would bring him understanding. But it never had.

He picked up one of the books she had left behind: Beloved, by Toni Morrison. He found the ornate metal bookmark she had inserted a third of the way through the book, a bookmark he had never seen before, but one so special he felt it must have been his wife’s way of honoring this particular volume. He remembered that she had talked about this novel, how much she had loved it, how anxious she had been to get to the next page. But he was sorry that he did not remember anything more specific than that about the book itself.

He’d never read much fiction—fiction made him feel uncomfortable. He assumed the main characters were more or less masks of the author. Otherwise, how could the author make the story seem real? Fiction, he thought, must be a very strange sort of autobiography, portraying what the author wanted to happen, dreaded might happen, would happen if the author were of another sex, lived in a different country, had different personality traits, took a different path, job, spouse, etc. How did authors feel when their books were misread? What if people liked the character in your book better than who you were on such and such a particular day? He found such layering disturbing, and all too close to the way most people viewed their own lives.

But she’d loved the book and had wanted to finish it, and so, over the next few days, he finished it for her, reading it aloud despite the weaknesses in his speaking voice. He didn’t think he needed to read it aloud so that she might hear it. He’d never believed in such things. Wherever she was he didn’t think she was in any position to physically hear anything. He read it aloud so that the words might live in this home they’d shared all their married life.

Across the street from the art museum there was a park where people came to preach, to give speeches, to perform, or to express themselves in any way desired, as long as they didn’t ask for money or offend common decency. The city government prided itself on its openness and the privilege was well used. Every day there were crowds.

One afternoon he brought a folding table and a battered old suitcase into the park, and out of the suitcase he retrieved a variety of records, which he laid out on the table for display. All of these records had to do with his wife’s life, her long illness, and her death. At one end of the table there were photo albums from her childhood, letters to her parents from camp, a lock of hair from her first haircut. Next to these were laid out their wedding pictures and a variety of snapshots from their marriage: a trip out west, a day at the beach, a picnic in their own front yard when the car wouldn’t start. He and his wife appeared together in all of the shots, and when he examined them he became obsessed with trying to remember what friend, neighbor, or stranger had been pressed into service as photographer. For most of the photographs a clear identification of the person taking the picture was impossible, as any normal person might expect. He understood this. But still it troubled him. Had these record makers been purely accidental, or was it possible that some had hung around hoping to be recruited for just such a purpose? Certainly, if these people hadn’t been there, there might be no record that his long marriage to this wonderful woman had occurred at all.

At the other end of the table he stacked medical records and some pictures from her final years. He had been the photographer for these, and had taken so many portraits of her during this time that choosing a few representative photos had been a difficult task.

Specific facts having to do with her height and weight, the amount of space she occupied, her exact age to the minute at time of death, were prominently displayed. “This is the space and time she occupied,” he repeated again and again when reciting these figures.

There were relatively few visitors to his table that first day, but for those that did come he provided a lengthy narrative concerning his wife, their time together, and her relatively recent death. He was undeterred by the lack of questions—he enjoyed talking about her so much, and it had been such a long time since he’d had the opportunity to talk about her, that the public’s lack of interest wasn’t about to dissuade him. He returned to the park every day that week and delivered essentially the same presentation.

The following week he decided to add a new element to the performance, not only to make it more interesting for himself, but to draw some of the larger crowds available during warmer weather. Despite his lack of formal dance training, despite his singular ineptitude with anything involving coordinated movement, he positioned himself behind the table and began a series of sweeping, yet precise, gestures, which might have been untrained yoga, untrained martial arts, untrained dance, or the unintentional movements of someone afflicted with a nervous disease. During these movements he delivered the same talk he had the week before, except this time there were more questions from the audience.

He grasped, he moved, he took a large inhalation of air. He faltered, he limped, he ached, he winced. He tried to exemplify how it was to be in the world for the number of years he had walked upon this planet. He tried to show the truth of his body and the solitary nature of his existence, and, without using the exact words, just how much he missed her.

He meditated on his hands as they moved through the air. He tried to make the movements of his performance as natural as possible. He attempted to imitate the everyday movements he made as he went through a normal day: cooking, washing hands, taking medications, holding his face as he wept. He imagined his movements as invisible brush strokes. He imagined himself as Clifford Stills, as Jackson Pollock. He imagined himself as some anonymous figure struggling through the wind and driving rain of his very worst day.

He rarely looked at the figures of his audience as he made his performances. It required too much focus just to imitate everyday natural movements for him to give his audience much more than a passing glance. But every so often he became aware of a slight blurring of the edges of the crowd. Now and then he became aware of the forgotten figures coming out of hiding, their vague outlines filling with heat and color to become targets for his eyes.

His wife had used a dressmaker to make alterations in her careful purchases, so it wasn’t too much trouble to ask the woman to make several colored bodysuits fitted to his measurements. The only difficult part of the process was standing before her in T-shirt and shorts so that she could take these exacting measurements. Like a small boy he kept his eyes tightly shut until it was over.

The next week he appeared in the park in a variegated green and brown bodysuit. He thought he looked like a hole in the fabric of the world. He noticed that if he moved his body in certain ways, and at certain speeds, it was difficult for him to find the edge of himself. His sense of a personal outline faded in and out with his every movement, as if made from radio signals from an unreliable transmitter.

He attempted to harness unconscious habits into his performance: nose pickings, butt scratching, spitting. He was aware that some people were repulsed, and left at the first appearance of some unpleasant bit of personal business. Although it meant the loss of some verisimilitude, he quickly returned to a semblance of politeness.

The following week he added photo manipulation to his performance. He had taken some of those precious photographs of him and his wife together, copied them, and made crude alterations in the copies. In some of the images he had altered her, or scratched her out, leaving a shapeless white defect in her place. In others he had simply folded over the photo in order to essentially erase her from the image entirely. He discovered that the altered photographs made him look ridiculous. He became a mad eccentric holding hands with nothing, speaking to nothing, kissing the nothing that is not there. The outlines in the crowd wavered as their faces began to drain of all color.

As he moved inside his empty body suit he thought he was beginning to resemble them: the figures that were not there. Some days his arms moved so quickly he lost track and could not find them. If he closed his eyes even once he forgot he was even there.

Sometimes people would try to touch him and that was when a museum guard posted near the edge of the crowd warned them away. He had seen the guard there for days but had thought that the man was merely a part of the audience, perhaps out there on his lunch break and wondering why everyone was watching the man who was not there dancing behind a table full of garbage: water-stained photographs and papers so dirty and damaged no one could read them anymore. Of course this put additional weight on his verbal performance to convey exactly who his wife had been. But his voice was failing. Some days he could barely whisper. The crowd sometimes had to edge quite close in order to hear him. “Please do not touch the exhibit,” the guard would warn.

Sometimes he would notice the hands of certain audience members: opening and closing as if desperate to hold something. It occurred to him then that perhaps he should add things his wife had held to the table display: knitting needles, books, cooking implements. For didn’t the objects she had handled tell an important part of her story? He thought then of adding his own hands to the table display, or at least a casting or a photograph.

On some days if he kept at his performance long enough he became unaware of anything else. His figure became a tangle of moments, lines of force, electrical energy, exhalations, and perspirations. His very presence appeared to fracture the air.

Some days his body became a tired whisper in his ear, which he attempted to ignore. Some days he stood in the audience surrounded by vague figures and shadows of figures, an echo of imitated movements through time, and watched his own performance.

One day he arrived to find the exhibit closed. His table was there, but all his carefully collected documentation was missing. But then he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen those documents, and wondered if they might have vanished months ago.

“I’m afraid the exhibit is closed,” the guard said.

When he started to reply he realized the guard wasn’t talking to him, but to all the figures gathered behind him. They began to shuffle away, the outlines of their forms distorting and flowing across the landscape.

“What am I supposed to do now?” he asked. The guard did not answer. He began to dance, and could not find his arms, his legs, or his next wandering thought. But even then, his movement did not stop.

THE GLARE AND THE GLOW

James Thurber once said there are two kinds of light: the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures. I’ve always liked quotations. Whatever their content, they always seem apropos. If your audience doesn’t immediately grasp the connection, they’re inclined to think they just aren’t learned enough. I suppose they assume that if you’ve read enough to offer them some quotation, you must be smart enough to use it correctly.

I read a great deal. Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that I understand very little of what I read. I can be thoroughly involved in a novel and still not know what it’s all about. One of the differences between novels and real life is supposedly that the novel has a theme. I believe that’s another quotation, but for the life of me I can’t remember the source, or enough of the original context to quote it more precisely. Some people say there are no original ideas. I sometimes wonder if I don’t remember the source, does that make it an original thought? Following that line of reasoning, the people with the poorest memories must be geniuses.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of just starting to say something, but at the last second you become convinced it’s a quotation, and maybe you’re afraid you’ll make some embarrassing misquote, or maybe you’re afraid people will think you’re trying to pass off someone else’s thoughts as your own. So you say nothing. I think this may account for many awkward conversational silences. At least it does in my case. Some days I hardly say anything, so convinced I am that I understand nothing, and that every thought I have is stolen from someone else possessed of far better understanding than I.

About a month ago my wife and I brought a bad bunch of light bulbs into the house. I don’t mean that we acquired the bulbs as part of some joint purchasing decision—we just haven’t been able to pinpoint who bought this particular carton. Not that it matters that much—sometimes married couples just like to keep score. I’m sure that’s a quote; I’m sure I don’t remember who said it first.

We go through a lot of light bulbs in our house. It’s an old house utilizing a hodgepodge of wiring techniques, a regular electrical museum, which means surges and shorts, which seriously affect the lifespan of a bulb. What was it Dave Barry said about electricity? Something about how we believe it exists because the electric company sends us bills for it? We’ve tried the usual conservational measures—turning some of those light bulbs off, using fluorescent replacements—but we haven’t been all that successful at maintaining the changes. That’s probably more my fault than hers. I don’t think I have particularly lavish needs, but I do feel I deserve to walk around in as much light as possible, and not sit in the shadows worrying over what I might not see. “Let your light shine.” Oprah said that. And I love to read—we both do—a good reading light or two are essential in our house. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can stand fluorescents. Is that real light? I hardly think so—it’s like moon glow bouncing off a snow bank. Kind of pretty, but strange and useless.

So we tend to buy cheaper bulbs, and lots of them. I know that’s probably not the most economical thing to do. But the more expensive bulbs seem to burn out almost as quickly in our house as the cheap ones, so what’s the difference? We’ve developed this pattern of buying large quantities, burning through them fiercely, buying more to feed that bright, illuminating fire that both comforts and exhausts us. Shakespeare said “We burn daylight.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but it still manages to chill me.

I knew there was something different about these bulbs the second I opened the box. Something about their color, when they’re cold, no electricity applied. Now, I’m used to the cheaper bulbs looking a little different. Maybe it’s illusory and they’re all pretty much the same, but to my eye they do look cheaper, just lying there, their insides less frosty, and a kind of shadow already inside, resting, as if their potential for light must be less. I actually wondered if perhaps we’d been tricked into buying previously used, burnt-out bulbs.

Then when I pulled one out I was surprised, shocked I suppose, by its heaviness. The sensation made me somewhat sick to my stomach. My wife and I have a peaceful life—we do not expect such things. “Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise,” to quote Alice Walker.

As I turned the bulb the heaviness shifted inside it. I didn’t think it contained liquid—no sensation of sloshing. But perhaps something solid, yet fluid. Sand maybe, but it felt too heavy for that. Moving it gently side to side, as if I were rocking it, brought eggs and their hidden embryos to mind, which made me feel both rude and foolish. That would not be a perception I’d share with my wife, who has long thought me a bit too much on the crude side.

Of course, Thomas Jefferson called politeness “artificial good humor,” and that’s not exactly positive, is it? Nothing artificial about my humor. The world is a funny old place. If you don’t laugh about it, you cry.

We never had children, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I don’t know why we didn’t try the cures, or the alternatives. We never really talked about it. We left all that back in the shadows and just went on with our lives.

I put that first bulb down on the table and stared at it. Careful not to break it, but definitely wanting it out of my hands. With the metal base turned away from me, and no brand name or insignia visible, it did so look like an egg.

I went back to the carton of eight. I should have noticed before—the entire carton was heavy, remarkably so. But for the time being I left the rest of the bulbs where they were. I put the carton back down and pulled up a chair, examining the packaging. “Bulbs” was the only word on the carton, in big black letters. No brand, no manufacturer’s name or address, no instructions, no copyright, no trademark, no guarantee, not even a price. You couldn’t get much more generic than that.

Iris Murdoch said truth was like brown. “Truth is so generic,” she said. But did she mean that was a good thing or a bad thing? That’s the trouble with quotes. It sounds like she thought truth was really no big deal. But what else is there?

And I didn’t want to use those bulbs, but again, what else was there? Sometimes, to quote Eleanor Roosevelt, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” I had to use them, unless I wanted to walk around in darkness, which I’d had enough of in my lifetime already. I didn’t want to make a return trip to the store. I just don’t like the lighting. All those fluorescents. They make you rush your shopping. You’ll grab anything, buy anything, just to get out of there. They illuminate people’s irrationality more than anything else.

So I screwed one of these odd bulbs into an out-of-the-way, little-used lamp we keep in the front hall. Mostly its purpose is to illuminate the coat rack if one of us needs to go out at night. But neither of us goes out much. So what if one of us looked like we’d gotten dressed in the dark? Who would care?

I wasn’t too pleased about having the bulb in my hand for the time necessary to secure it in the socket. Besides the uncanny weight of it, the glass conveyed a dead-cold feel against my palm, and there was a hard-to-describe sensation just this side of dampness as I gripped and turned it, as if the bulb were sweating on its inside surface. And the weight inside seemed to more than shift, to respond to the movement being forced upon it with some sort of intelligence. I might have told my wife, “This is no dim bulb!” if I were but moderately clever.

I noticed right away that it had an almost lubricated feel as it glided into the turns of the socket. Usually you feel a kind of scraping resistance when you screw in a bulb—cheap metal against cheap metal. Usually it snags a bit—sometimes you have to back it out and start all over. But here I felt nothing at all. I come back to Eleanor Roosevelt for my wisdom: “When life is too easy for us, we must beware.” I was practically terrified.

But once I had the bulb firmly planted and flipped the switch I was amazed. What a light did bloom! It was almost pure white, whiter than a Halogen, but cooler. You could look directly at it without too much discomfort. And although I immediately saw the shadow inside, a shape that moved, I noticed that somewhat mysterious presence diminished the illumination not one bit. In fact, it appeared to manipulate the rays, and focus them, so that they spread at a speed you could actually perceive. You could see that light creep across the details of the room, at varying rates no doubt due to the different densities of detail encountered. So, gradually, shadows were eaten, and things were revealed, so that old scars in the woodwork suddenly became remembered, the residue of stains recalled, unevenness of tile, and dirt in areas I’d thought completely clean.

Even these flaws, once seen in such startling detail, became random incidents of beauty, and the truly beautiful things—a piece of tapestry, a strip of wallpaper, a crystalline vase, a dead cousin’s photograph—became almost overwhelming to view. I stumbled out of the front hall, tears in my eyes. I can’t say I was at all embarrassed by this. For “There’s a sacredness in tears,” to quote Washington Irving.

I know now I should have taken my time with the bulbs. My wife and I have never been ones to rush into things. We’re always so careful! But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I went around to the lights in the living room, the dining room, my study, and our bedroom, switching out those old dusty bulbs with the rather odd, somewhat weighted bulbs from that new generic carton.

As I screwed in each bulb, and turned it on, and left it on, it really was as if a fire had been lit. “Man is the only creature that dares to light a fire and live with it,” said one Henry Vandyke. The light flowed from each bulb, transforming our home, each separate stream seeking the companionship of the others, and morphing everything they touched into something beautiful and true. As these bulbs performed their magic I chased the light around our home, and I found an even braver brilliance where the edges of each separate stream met. And yes, I found myself dancing and singing to observe this, very much the idiot. “Every man plays the fool once in his life,” according to Mr. Congreve, and certainly this was my time, my time to shine, as it were. I felt as brilliant as those creatures, those embryos, inside the bulbs.

Because that’s what they were, weren’t they? I wouldn’t know what else to call them, these little creatures with their oversized heads and dangly arms, playing with this startling light as if it were their first and only plaything. I just so wanted to see their darling little faces!

So I kept easing closer to each flaming bulb, staring as long as I dared, even longer, examining their precious silhouettes, willing myself to see their delicate faces even through frosted glass. It actually seemed possible.

“John, what on earth are you doing?”

I stared at my wife. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “No,” I said. “That’s not quite all of it. The full quotation is ‘What on earth are you doing for heaven’s sake?’”

What was I seeing? She looked unhappy, but she always looked unhappy. But now I was seeing it in such refined detail: the disappointments, the displeasures, the wear and tear, the rub, the whispers, and the dying. And around her like a halo, like a cocoon: this house, much loved, and all that we’d put in it, and taken out, and so much of it accidental, without our choosing, just following habit, bad, lazy habit, just not thinking.

“You and your damn quotations! Couldn’t we just have a normal conversation now and then? Couldn’t you just tell me how you feel for once without dragging it out of the lips of someone famous, or dead? So tell me, I’m so unoriginal, who was that said ‘what on earth,’ and ‘what are you doing,’ and ‘for heaven’s sake,’ and all that, for heaven’s sake!”

“I don’t know,” I replied into the beautiful face of my disappointed, dying wife. “It’s anonymous. All the books call it ‘source unknown.’”

“Then as far as you know, it could be original with me, right? I’ve never asked you before, have I? What you were doing with our life? I just let things go.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God, it’s so bright in here! Where’s all this terrible light coming from?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s these new bulbs I bought,” I said, going to the lamp and shutting it off. “Don’t open your eyes yet, okay, honey? I’ve brought some really bad bulbs into the house. I wouldn’t want you to hurt your eyes! Let me just get them all shut off, and when they cool off, I’ll throw them away, smash them out in the garbage can, you know? So no one else can get their hands on these bad bulbs.”

I chattered on, making very little sense, walking from room to room and switching off those terrible bulbs, and every time I switched one off, I swear I could hear a little sigh, once the current was cut and my intentions were clear. And as I moved about that darkening house I could hear my wife weeping, not saying anything, just crying, and I wondered, just as I had seen those things in her, what, exactly, had she seen in me?

But ignorance is bliss, according to a thousand different authors, a hundred thousand fellow sufferers along the road. I kept this constant in mind as I wandered through the dark.

SLAPSTICK

That morning Terry had the familiar feeling that his face was all wrong, but even though he could feel that wrongness, he couldn’t find it in the mirror. His eyes were bright, his cheeks were rosy, his nose gleamed, his hair that color his wife called “beautiful.” He wasn’t sure beautiful was what he’d been striving for, or what was most appropriate, but no one had ever called anything about him beautiful before and he was reluctant to give it up. “Take those compliments and keep them in your pocket,” his mother used to say. Terry had large pockets, but usually nothing in them other than a pig’s bladder or a rubber chicken.

He knew he was in for a difficult day if he started it out with an unhappy thought. Wait. He leaned closer to the mirror. Of course. He’d gotten the mouth upside down. He’d painted his mouth as a big frown this morning rather than in his trademark delirious grin. Make sure they see you smiling, as his mother used to say.

He really should redo the entire look. Even though the application of the frown had probably been some random mistake it had no doubt affected the painting in of the other features, the eyes especially. But there was no time. He pulled out his kit and spread cream across the lower half of his face, much as if he were shaving. Then he wiped that half away, leaving great smears of white and red on the towel and a broad, flesh-colored hole in the middle, marred at the center by this wrinkled little pucker of lips and teeth, his naked mouth. He stopped and stared. It looked inept and pitiful, some frail insect you might expose from under a stone.

He reached for the white and spread it over the flesh-color, wanting to cover his nakedness as quickly as possible. He could hear his wife and kids arguing in the kitchen. Dwight had lately been giving them fits. He understood how, and pretty much why, his son hated everything—he had been the same way at that age. Nothing fit: clothes, shoes, skin, hair, the life that appeared to be lying in wait. But understanding didn’t make his son any easier to live with. He was always upsetting his much younger sister, but then there wasn’t much that didn’t upset Jane.

His wife’s voice sounded uncharacteristically strident, with a raw and hoarse edge. If he was very careful he wouldn’t even have to go into the kitchen—he could just give a shout that he was running late for work (which was true), and had to skip breakfast. No time for some irritable conversation. They never talked about much except the house and the kids anymore. Last weekend he’d discovered a green silk costume and makeup in one of her drawers. He’d thought that had been all settled. He’d never wanted her to go back to work—since before their marriage he’d imagined her at home, having long, pleasant days with the kids. Hours of genuine smiles and laughter.

He finished painting on his bright red—and huge—smile, then lined the inside of his fleshy lips with black. His pale pink tongue stood out in the dark hole of mouth, an exposed organ. He grinned widely in the mirror, bloody mouth stretching so far to each side he almost expected his head to fall open, something to reach out of that cavity of neck and ravage the room. He almost wished it would.

“Running late! See you tonight!” He paused briefly with his white-gloved, oversized hand on the doorknob, waiting. The argument had stopped in the kitchen, the house suddenly frozen in silence. He waited a second, let go of the doorknob, spread his arms out dramatically in supplicant posture and tilted his motley clown head back until he was staring at the ceiling, and shouted, “Good-bye, honey! Goodbye, Daddy!” He waited, one great eye cocked in the direction of the kitchen. Nothing. He pulled a crazily twisted ear horn out of one accessory pocket and jammed it into his right ear, tilting his body toward the kitchen in a gravity-defying lean.

“…’bye, Daddy…” came Jane’s little girl whisper.

Satisfied, he put the ear horn away and slung open the door, knob smashing through a previously existing hole in the plaster, rattling the walls and triggering the clock’s drunken cuckoo, the painted wooden bird dangling upside down on a spring from its door.

In order to get into his tiny yellow car Terry had to tuck his head in between his shoulders, crouch, stretch his right leg with oar-sized twenty-two shoe into the passenger’s side, then reach through the open passenger window with his Mickey Mouse hands and grab the side-mirror in order to pull the rest of him into the vehicle. His left knee typically banged the top of the door opening, and he typically uttered some G-rated curse. He then drove to work with his arms pushing out between his knees, hands spasming in pain, stiffly clutching the steering wheel.

Down the freeway under the rising sun his car joined the stream of commuters pouring from garages and tributary streets, scrambling like bugs over kitchen tile, nipping and shouldering like bumper cars, radios cranked to drown out both laughter and curses. Terry’s radio still broken, he forced his own music of mouth pops and whistles over a melodic bed of nonsensical raving.

He drove around the parking lot looking for any empty slot. For the eighty-fifth consecutive day unable to find one, he motored out of the lot, across the bright green grass, and straight into a lush bush, which concealed his little auto quite nicely. He staggered out of the branches and shook his orange wig free of insects.

Once in the expansive lobby of his office building he waited at the elevator doors. Overhead rumbled the departing troupes of the night shift. The thunder descended slowly, one floor at a time. Terry backed up, stared at his shoes as they nervously flapped the tile, beaver-like. He gazed up just before the numbers hit “1,” then backed up some more.

The middle elevator doors bulged out, then sprang open. A dozen or so clowns spilled onto the tile, many clutching their briefcases, papers bursting from cracks and holes in the cloth and leather. The contents of the side elevators joined them—the three streams colliding, tumbling, clowns in back somersaulting over those in front. Terry sighed and stepped forward but then more clowns—clowns by the dozens—came out of what appeared to be empty elevators, streams of them without pause. He waited after the last one apparently departed, then entered the middle one cautiously.

The flattened body of a clown lay face down in the middle of the floor. Terry turned around and tried to push the “Close” button quickly, but before he could two hobo clowns carrying a stretcher ran inside. They lifted the flattened clown onto the stretcher and ran out through the lobby, their mouths making loud, whiny siren noises. Terry made the trip up to the thirteenth floor staring at the mirrored interior smeared with gobbets of clown white, clown red.

Once in his cubicle he discovered that his evening counterpart had left pizza and salad debris over much of his desk. On the carpet under the desk were bits of underwear, bits of peeled skin. He used one broad gloved hand to rake all this garbage into the other gloved hand. He dumped everything into the trash including the stack of carefully numbered, illustrated, and mostly meaningless reports the Bozo had labored over the night before. If anyone asked he would deny any knowledge of their whereabouts. If he remembered he would leave an armed mousetrap in the pencil drawer as a present.

He wiped spittle off his monitor screen and turned the computer on. He pulled out his kit and using a small mirror he kept in a file drawer he painted lines of determination on his face. For good measure he added more red to lips and cheeks, thinking Indians, thinking war paint, thinking drugged-up urban street dancers. He began to feel giddy and a few chuckles escaped his lips before he’d even finished the paint job. His head swam in heated sensory overload; his nose pulsed with strange smells.

Terry grabbed his giant “World’s Greatest Employee!” mug with the company logo emblazoned on the side and got up for coffee. The office was starting to fill up again. Here and there clown heads popped up above cubicle walls, then fell out of sight as if smashed by an enormous invisible mallet. At the coffee station Terry examined his mug, then began drinking directly from the much more spacious carafe. The coffee scalded his mouth and he did a spit-take, spraying hot brown liquid onto Walter from accounting. Walter nodded and spat back half-heartedly, looking sad and bored. Terry poured more scalding coffee down his throat, laughing hysterically. Nervous twitters spread across the office like an orchestra warming up.

Strolling back to his corner cube Terry glanced into a neighboring space as a file drawer eased open and a diminutive clown in a billowy white jumper climbed out, his tiny pointed cap drooping to one side. “Morning, Bob,” Terry said.

“Too soon,” the small clown replied. “Night shift had a party.” He yawned, then burst into tears, pulling out some big red satin bloomers to blow his nose.

Terry turned away. He preferred his clowns with their tears painted on. “Steady, Bob. It’s only Monday.”

“You got that right!” a fat clown said, squeezing past and knocking the cubicle walls out of alignment. He had a target painted across his ample rear. Terry’s feet suddenly itched, but he managed not to act on the impulse. Here and there across the office he heard a quick, explosive guffaw and an anxious dancing of oversized clown shoes on plastic antistatic mats.

Back in his chair Terry was suddenly overwhelmed by a cloud of suffocating perfume. He rolled to the edge of one cubical wall and peered around. At that same moment Laura across the aisle, newly arrived, turned in her chair, her legs spread. He’d seen her only last week leaving late, her lips smeared down the side of her face as if her mouth had been ripped open with a knife. She did not look up, but a spring-loaded clown’s head with razor-sharp teeth popped out from between her legs on a scissoring extension arm and attempted to bite his face. Feeling that face go red beneath his makeup he retreated back to his desk. He’d once heard one of the office clowns say “She melts my face paint,” but hadn’t known what he’d meant, until now.

“Finish your reports yet?” she called mockingly behind him, and he grew frantic trying to remember if there had been a memo concerning some sort of promotion for her. Before he could reply she waved and said, “It’s like the boss always says—there’s always too much until you need just a little.”

Terry could not recall ever having heard their boss say that, and wondered if it might be some bit of boudoir talk inappropriately revealed. To be safe he started to laugh, and could not stop himself until he began to choke on his own absurdity.

From cubicles all over the office his fellow employees’ strained laughter echoed his, followed by the scattered struggle for breath, the cough, the nervous curse.

Some changes had been made since the previous week. A mime now managed the communications group. Whenever someone asked him a question about deadlines, he frowned and stared at an invisible wristwatch.

Terry could see into an office at the end of his aisle of cubes. It had been without an identifying sign ever since he started working here. From what he could tell it had a beautiful view of the distant mountains. Inside, a delicate white-faced clown wearing slippers shouted silently into a phone receiver.

Terry went down to the supply room to make some copies. Inside a very tall clown with a blue mouth was pressing another clown’s face violently against the copier glass. Copy after copy of the clown’s flattened facial features floated down, layering the floor. Terry picked one up. He was impressed that he could clearly see the broken pattern of veins in the eyeballs.

Every couple of hours he went into the bathroom to check his face. He stood in line with the others as they silently patched, reapplied makeup, intensified colors, redrew lines, practiced eyebrow raises, smiles, frowns. Some had a settled expression they simply reinforced. Others felt the need to twiddle, to change, so that their faces were never very predictable, or very neat. These employees made the others nervous, and seldom lasted.

Later he went to Carter’s cube looking for newer data. Carter was leaned back in his chair, staring so fixedly at the ceiling Terry was afraid the older clown was dead. But when he crept closer he heard the soft snores, saw the open eyes painted on the closed eyelids.

Lunch was a quick soup and sandwich at a diner that serviced clientele from the surrounding office buildings. There was plenty of seating but people were always stepping on each other’s shoes. When he came back to the office he could see clown after clown in the exterior windows, identical white-gloved hands pressing against the inside of the glass. On the grassy median between parking areas numerous clowns lay face up, staring at the sky, looking as if they had fallen from a great height.

After lunch he had a meeting on procedures. Twin clowns with giant bow ties stood at one end of the conference table, facing off with water-squirting sunflowers in their lapels. Finally the clown on the right grew tired of the back-and-forth, pulled out a slapstick, and proceeded to beat the other clown with it. No one intervened until chunks of painted skin and bright wig filled the air. Terry remained frozen in his chair, watching, thinking, it’s like peeling clown fruit.

He assembled reports all afternoon. When he couldn’t find the data he copied from the day before. Sometimes he added random graphics in bright primary colors. He had spent years mastering his templates—they were sure-fire, guaranteed-to-please. Sometimes he wanted to cry, they were so beautiful. By the end of the day he had hundreds of pages. They were his big blow off, his major guffaw, his extended joke. He simply could not stop the giggles they caused. He turned to look out the opening to his cubicle space, out the window, out to the sky beyond. He imagined floating there. He could not believe he sat in an office with no door or ceiling. He could not believe he had a boss who paid him for such things.

A dark shape blotted the sky. The cloud of perfume descended and filled him. Panic rose like gorge. “The boss wants to see you. Now,” she said.

Terry could not believe he was trotting eagerly down to see the CEO, his size twenty-twos making a merry slapping sound. He could not believe he was knocking on the man’s door, this company fixture who almost never left the building. He could not believe he was going in grinning, grinning so extensively he might have just had his throat cut ear to ear.

He could not believe he was saying “You wanted me,” and so very pleased by this statement.

The boss’s huge clown face, some four feet across, sat wedged behind the desk, although “sat” seemed to be a misstatement. It was propped up with crutches on either side of the chin so as not to crush the delicate little body beneath. The eyes were tiny and pressed into the face like a pair of bullet holes. The nose was long, slender, beautiful, and completely unsuited to this face. The mouth was wide and slit-like except for two rounded swellings of lip parted at the center, revealing great, blocky white teeth that gleamed like ice blocks. When the mouth opened further a tongue like a great pink pillow heaved in the yawning cavity. When his boss began to speak that mouth was the only thing in the room as far as Terry was concerned.

“How long?” the mouth asked.

“Em—pardon?”

“You have worked for me, how long?”

Terry felt dumb. He’d never thought of himself as working for this creature. In truth he worked for his family, to keep them fed, clothes on their backs, roofs over their heads, to keep them comfortable, and hopeful.

He thought all these things, but what he said was “Almost six years.”

The lips pursed, and their undersides adhered to the too-large teeth so securely it appeared they would tear when the head started to speak again. “You have completed so many reports, haven’t you? Thousands. You have contributed. So many hours.”

Terry didn’t know what to say. Was this an accomplishment? Was this a compliment? All he could do was grin, but he had no choice, did he? His clown face grinned for him. And the great clown head of his boss grinned back.

The commute home was always the worst. If you wanted a leisurely drive of sightseeing, you didn’t go out on the highway at rush hour. Clowns rolled out of every passing street in their bright funny cars, all of them heading, it seemed, in the same direction, but not everyone lived in the same direction, did they? He could never make sense of it. Clowns cursed and clowns collided, raising their fists and shouting “Bozo!” out their windows, all of them already home in their minds, with only this inconvenience of concrete, metal, and asphalt, this maddening delirium of transit, in their way.

“I believe I got a raise today,” he said with a slight hoarseness, raising his fork as if it signified his turn to speak. “They must be very pleased with my work. Delicious roast beef, by the way.”

His family said nothing, quietly staring. Little Jane appeared to have been crying. His wife leaned over to him, whispering harshly, “Terry, you should have changed for dinner, don’t you think?”

He turned his head to her, not sure exactly what she was trying to say. He looked over at Dwight, who looked back at him out of an angry and defiant mask of red and blue, the edges attached to his skin with safety pins. Then he turned to Jane, whose tears started up all over again. “What’s the matter, sweetie?” he asked. “You’re not scared of clowns, are you?”

He could feel the lower half of his face stretching. He could feel the skin around his mouth cracking. “It’s the smile, isn’t it?” he asked, and thought he might start crying himself. “It’s the smile that will kill you every time.”

STRANGENESS

Strangeness, n. In particle physics a quantum characteristic used to describe certain short-lived particles and their transformations when interacting with other particles.

Short-lived particles. Trish looked up from the dictionary at Martin. A half hour ago she’d had to tell him that his best friend from college had dropped dead from a heart attack the previous week. The man’s much younger wife had phoned with the news. She hadn’t provided many details—she’d said she had so many of these calls to make—she just thought Martin would like to know. “Like” seemed cruel in such a circumstance but what word should she use? Want? No, there had been no history. Absolutely none. The woman had skirted around the precise circumstance and Trish, guiltily, had just naturally assumed sex had been involved. A transformation having taken place when two short-lived particles interacted. The result being this alien state, this strangeness, the lights dimmed, no one left at home.

Martin appeared to be taking the news with equanimity. “He was never in the best of health,” he said softly, but would not look away from the television. It was one of those reality shows; Trish wasn’t sure which one. People yelled at each other quite a bit on those shows—more than she herself had ever experienced, although she knew this was probably normal behavior in some parts of the world. Then someone was voted out of the house, off the island, into the plastic box suspended from a crane, or whatever.

She waited to see if he had more to say, if he needed her comfort in any way. This man had been Martin’s best friend for many years. But Martin had barely reacted—it might as well have been some stranger on the news who died.

Strangeness had been coming into her life for years—now at last it had fully arrived, courtesy of Martin, her husband of twenty-six years. Did men undergo a change of life? Angie once said “The difference between men and women is that men go through a menopause every five years.” Angie was on her third marriage, this time to Harry, a small man who hid part-way behind her at all social occasions.

It was that sense of strangeness that had driven Trish to open a dictionary for the first time in probably ten years. Not even for Scrabble—if she had to look it up it probably wasn’t a word she’d feel comfortable using. The dictionary had been hard to find, pushed to the back of a bottom shelf in a corner of this basement rec room shared by Martin’s big old TV and assorted storage. Not much “rec” had occurred in this house for years, not since Molly had grown up and moved away to a series of eastern towns, none of whose names she could recall.

The top edge of the dictionary had been covered by a thick bed of dust, and curlicues of someone’s long hair—whose she could not imagine. She and Molly had always worn theirs short. Maybe it’s angel hair, she thought, chuckling, scrubbing off the book before daring to open it. But angel hair was a pasta—who would eat this? Of course there were poor people and people a world away whose lives she could not begin to imagine, but that was making her sad, so she derailed that train of thought.

She peeled the pages back carefully, looking for bugs. If she found any she knew she would just throw the dictionary across the room and then that would be the end of this little project.

Along the way to the ‘S’s she’d stopped now and then to look at a word—cynosure, destructionist, hydromancy, placebo, resistivity. The dictionary was like the estate list her mother had of what had been in her grandmother’s attic at the time of the reading of her will. So these are the things in grandmother’s attic, which we don’t use anymore, although once they had been important in our lives. These are things she had but which she doesn’t have anymore, her being dead, and which we don’t have, our having sold them. This is just a list of what used to be in that huge empty attic up there—this is all we have to remember them, and our grandmother, by.

That list had been no more substantial, really, than a list of the contents of her grandmother’s pantry might have been. And these are the things that she consumed along the way. This is just a list, mind you, for the pantry is now empty, our grandmother having eaten all these things over the course of her long lifetime, a time that has now ended and will not be, ever again.

On Martin’s television, young twenty-somethings lounged on inflated furniture in an indoor pool. She could tell by their body language that several different sorts of flirtations were occurring, seemingly at cross purposes. The volume was turned down so low she could make out a general pattern of tone, but no specific words. This had become Martin’s preferred mode of television watching: the volume turned down, brightness and contrast turned up. The lights in the television room were set to the lowest level of dim. The combination lent a yellowish pallor to his face, interrupted by lightning flashes of white. Simply watching his face she might have thought he was watching battlefield footage.

When Trish got into the ‘S’s, a letter that had never been her favorite, which she hated to use even in Scrabble, she remembered that this was a letter that had vaguely unsettled her even as a child, because it so resembled a snake.

Strange, adj. Foreign, the quality of being alien, not native.

She was somewhat surprised. Was that what the word really meant? She had expected some description of unease. Disquiet. Now that was a good word. Disquiet was the way she felt most of the time, in her house, in her life, in the marriage. Disquietude would be the noun. The place where she lived now.

Not native. That felt absolutely correct. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she had discovered she was not native to this place. The lands at the periphery of her vision, the island out the corner of the eye—that’s where she had come from.

The twenty-somethings were now in a bar somewhere. The camera work was jarring and aggressive, the colors bright, violent. Something about to happen, although she saw nothing evident on the screen. But she did not look away.

Once she’d arrived at the correct place, Trish had felt compelled to read the remainder of that dictionary page. It was like a rest stop on a long trip. Since you were already there, why not visit “the world’s largest prairie dog hole?”

Strange woman, apparently, was an archaic term for a prostitute. There were other meanings, of course. But did they all have some sort of sexual association buried in their etymologies? Weird sisters and harpies and sphinxes. Strangeness back to the beginnings of art and writing. Angie, who believed in astrology and evil spirits and the living Christ, and all manner of things Trish considered strange, said that it was men who made up the words and men who compiled the dictionaries, so it should be no wonder that women were associated with things strange and vaguely sinister.

She became aware of an insistent susurration in the room. She glanced over at Martin, whose breath whistled, as if he had fallen asleep with his eyes open. He fell asleep often these days: in front of his computer, sitting out on the porch. And this despite the fact that he was always in bed before she was. He used to complain about the resulting neck pain in the morning, although now he did not complain about anything, ever.

She did not think he was asleep. She could see his eyes flickering, his tongue darting between his lips. But he continued making that noise. As if he were having difficulty breathing. As if he were in pain.

Susurration. Like snakes gathered together to exchange the secrets of the world. Trish hadn’t realized that she even knew the word.

* * *

Martin sat motionless at the dinner table, his eyes two wet gray pebbles floating on yellowing jelly. Late afternoon spring sun afforded a relatively clear glimpse. He’d requested these earlier dinners, and eager to please him (did she imagine this would magically fix things?) she’d obliged. It hadn’t resulted in additional time together, however. He just had more time in the evenings to ruminate, to vegetate, to do exactly what, it now seemed, he did best: to stare unblinking at a life she wasn’t sure she understood anymore. They used to walk in the park, garden, sit in the sun, together, but not anymore. Martin was either too tired or too busy, but she honestly couldn’t figure out what he was being busy at.

His skin had a grayish, raw dough patina. The tiny cracks at the corners of his eyes appeared to have multiplied since the last time she’d noticed. She wasn’t sure, but his hair appeared to be visibly thinner. It was certainly grayer. There was also a puffiness about him, as if air was trapped in hidden pockets beneath the skin.

So people age. Headline news. She chided herself. If he wanted he could no doubt catalog a dozen similar changes in her face. But did he notice her enough to do so? He was still a handsome man—she needed to appreciate more what she had and not, as her grandmother used to say, “borrow trouble.”

“So,” she ventured. “You haven’t said anything about the ham.”

His eyes rolled towards her from somewhere behind his lids. “This isn’t ham.”

“Well, no. It’s what we always have. Turkey ham. It’s healthier.”

“It’s also pinker. Real ham doesn’t come this pink. I don’t believe so, at least. We haven’t had real ham in a very long time, I don’t believe.”

“If you want real ham, Martin, I’d be happy to fix you some real ham.”

“No, no. You said this is healthier.”

“Then what are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just saying that you asked me about the ham, but this isn’t ham. It’s turkey ham. But it’s perfectly fine for us to eat. It tastes just fine.”

A few years ago she would have been offended by the conversation. He was so hard to please. Now it seemed more likely that he was too easy to please, or that “pleased” hadn’t much meaning for him.

The remainder of their dinner conversation consisted of factual statements about the weather, the progress of the neighbor’s new patio, and a repeated recollection of Molly’s phone call from four days ago. She was pregnant, due in six or seven months. She lived across the country and they rarely saw her. They’d met her husband once, last Christmas. Martin had commented that the young man appeared to be stable, but that he needed a better haircut. She’d agreed. She’d actually said, “I agree,” even though she thought it was a ridiculous thing for him to say. It was the only comment he’d ever made about their son-in-law.

Later that evening Trish peered into the study where Martin was reading. She watched surreptitiously as he periodically turned the pages, tears tracing his cheeks with almost parallel trails. She left quickly so that he wouldn’t see her watching him.

Downstairs she cleaned the kitchen, although it was already spotless. She looked around for laundry to do. Towels were stacked neatly on shelves in the laundry room, sheets were in cabinets, and every bit of clothing except what they had on was tucked away cleaned and pressed in a drawer somewhere. Her rising anxiety was assuaged only when she took off all her clothes and slipped into a fresh clean robe, dropping the clothes into the washer and starting it. She would have just enough time to iron the small load before joining Martin in bed.

She went back upstairs. Martin was no longer in his study. She found him in their bedroom, lying in bed in his bright blue pajamas, sheet tucked tightly across his heart, staring at the ceiling. His lips moved slightly, constantly. She found the indecipherable whisper mildly irritating so she left.

* * *

“I’m just afraid there’s something really wrong with him that he needs to be treated for.”

Angie patted her arm with one hand and waved a cigarette sympathetically with the other. “Oh, I know, hon. You couldn’t drag my first husband into the doctor’s until the cancer ate his throat.” Then, when Trish started crying, “Oh… sorry.”

“He doesn’t want to tell me what’s bothering him. Half the time I’m not sure he even knows I’m there.”

Angie’s two-year-old—Trish couldn’t remember the little boy’s name—planted himself in front of her with his thumb in his mouth. Angie put the cigarette down and moved him like an errant piece of furniture. “Maybe he can’t help it,” she said. “There may be other forces involved.”

Trish looked up warily. “You mean another woman.” She almost said “A strange woman.”

“I mean the devil takes on a number of different roles in our lives. And when you’re wrestling with the devil, pretty much everyone else disappears, including your family. I know you may not believe that, but it’s what I believe.”

Harry was sitting at his own table, a small square of wood not much bigger than a dinner plate, in a corner against the wall by the sink. He’d turned his chair around to face them, but Angie’s wide shoulders hid most of his body. He’d been smiling since Trish arrived, his eyes floating as if he were listening to his own private, ecstatic tune.

“I don’t know what I believe. I don’t know that I know anything. I don’t know how people find each other in the first place, or how they stay together. What do you really see in another person? A few surface traits, the way they present themselves when they know you’re looking, and then those times they’re losing it, dropping the mask. And when things start going bad, those mask-dropping moments are what you focus on—you find yourself running around trying to catch them in the act, you’re just sneaking around looking for evidence that they’ve failed you—I swear, you’re collecting their worst moments, and you’re thinking that that’s what’s really true, that that’s all there is. To life, I mean. You can’t see what it adds up to other than a list of things, a list of words, objects purchased, things consumed. A long list of disappointments.”

She finished up wondering if she’d been spitting. Did she just lose her mind in front of Angie and that peculiar little Harry?

“Oh, honey, you’re just upset. You get all upset and then you get all complicated. None of us know. It’s in God’s hands, finally. There’s somebody for everybody, you just have to let God make the arrangements.”

“Angie, you’re on your third marriage.”

“And God had a hand in every one of them.”

Trish gazed at Harry, whose face split into an even wider smile. She felt warm, and wanted to leave, but didn’t know how to get out of there without being rude. The corners of Harry’s mouth began traveling in opposite directions then, until the line of mouth completely bisected his head. Harry leaned back and eased open his mouth. Trish got up and left before the top of his head had the opportunity to fall in.

* * *

When she got home she could hear Martin moving around upstairs. Low murmurs rising and falling. Snaky sounds. Reality TV. Which, she thought, must be the most despairing phrase in the current vocabulary of the world.

She couldn’t bring herself to go upstairs so she looked around downstairs for something to fill the time. She’d never had that problem as a child. Her mother used to say, “Trish makes up the world as she goes along.”

She sat on the couch in front of the fireplace. It wasn’t a real fireplace, actually, although there had probably been one, or several, in the house when it was first built. But the old chimney was at the other end of the house. This fireplace had a pretty, but plastic-looking, mantle and a painted optical illusion of a firebox with lavender gas flames.

She and Martin had redecorated this room multiple times over the years, each time to something prettier (according to the fashion of that year), and a step further away from reality, so that stepping in and out of this room was like traveling to a different… hallucination. Some day, she was sure, people would buy huge environmentally controlled boxes to live in, and video and 3D technologies would provide the decoration. Home and Virtual Living. The world outside the walls of your newly purchased skull could just go straight to hell. Why should you care?

Whisper whisper whisper. She also didn’t care if their house hated her new attitude or not. By this time it probably realized something was up, that it was quickly losing its grip on her. Some of these things—that side table, the small Victorian lamp—had been her grandmother’s, and some—that art deco desk chair, for example—her mother’s. The rest were things she and Martin had purchased at fancy department stores, garage sales, out of a catalog (from pictures which never exactly matched what was delivered). Today there seemed no solid reason for any of it to be here. Window dressing was the phrase her mother used to use.

People never stopped playing house. What was this place but her biggest dollhouse ever? People created their worlds within worlds driven by whim—so what substance could there be to any of it?

The walls of the room suddenly faded into a child’s wavering crayon lines, a lopsided oval of red crayon sun showing through the broken drawing. It smiled down at her crookedly.

Upstairs Martin continued to whisper. It might have been her name he was saying or it might not, but she decided to imagine it was. She staggered to her feet and made for the rough box that delineated where the staircase should be.

Stair steps shuffled beneath her feet like a random stack of narrow rectangular cards. The world didn’t clarify itself again until she opened their poorly drawn bedroom door.

Martin lay on his back in the bed, his chest rising and falling aggressively. A large something stood or crouched on the floor by his feet, wings spread into a crucifix, head the size of a buffalo’s with a huge black beak the sheen of metal, cow-like eyes bright with realization, and behind those eyes, blending into the long blonde hair that flowed down its feathered and scaled backside, a pair of flaming, multi-colored gills.

Judging from the size of the breasts Trish supposed her to be female, although visual cues seemed hardly reliable.

Martin whistled and bucked, in the throws of an oddly controlled seizure. Although Trish could see no trace of it, she felt something pass between Martin and the thing, this other she. She took something. He took something.

The whole process lasted less than a minute. Finished, the creature turned slowly toward Trish, and froze, only light moving across the eye. Trish felt as if she would completely dissolve in its greater presence.

Sweeping its wings, the creature moved again toward the window. Trish thought that such a large thing could not possibly pass through that size opening, when it faded into the air. A brief smell passed through her mouth and nose, scouring, then evaporated with a slightly salty aftertaste.

She sat down on the floor and remained there for some time, peering now and then at Martin who appeared to be breathing easily, resting peacefully. Eventually she crawled onto the bed beside him, staring at the ceiling, barely touching his side with her little finger, but touching him deliberately just the same.

She kept listening for the flap of wings, waiting for a change of smell or shadow. To her great disappointment, nothing came.

* * *

Trish walked through the downtown shopping district with a forced, determined step. She hadn’t brought her purse; she had no plans to buy. She did have a few dollars stuffed into her bra, because she did want to eat. She enjoyed eating these days—she was always hungry. Food becomes me, she thought, and smiled, the way she remembered Harry smiling.

Around her the narrow lines of the buildings swayed. Threads of various colors floated together briefly, becoming patches of sky and patches of store, power lines and sidewalks, streets, the momentary smear of cars moving with one or more occupants inside. Then the fabric warped and folded, hours passed, the sun tumbled through the sky like a half-eaten fruit tossed languidly into the trash, and there she was again, continuing on her merry way.

She bent down and picked up a thread—once part of a sidewalk, perhaps connected to a person’s leg or the side of a tree—gave it a yank, then she smiled as the world tightened and leaned over slightly, before returning more or less to form, rumpled like a worn out sweater.

When she was a little girl her grandmother had knitted her the most beautiful sweater. It had at least six colors knitted into a series of intricate, irregular patterns, as if from some sweater manufacturing machine gone wild, but Trish knew it came from her slightly addled grandmother and her imperfect way of knitting things. Trish had worn that sweater proudly every day until one day one of the threads had come loose, a strand of yarn some two or three inches long. The sweater now looked shabby. Not knowing what else to do, Trish had pulled on the thread, and pulled, until it became a long line of bright color, and, reluctant to ask her grandmother to fix it, Trish had kept pulling, and kept pulling, until after an hour or so the actual shape of the sweater was gone, as if it had never existed, and instead she had this pile of shapeless colored yarn.

“Mommy, who’s that strange woman?” she heard a child ask nearby.

Trish’s lips tasted sweet, then salty, and vaguely of sex. She smiled as the thread of the child’s voice stretched out into a long, dreary wail adrift with the rest of the dangling sky.

OFF THE MAP

“OK, Kids, we’re going to take this vacation off the map!” The Dad, relaxed and expansive behind the steering wheel, threw back his head and horse-laughed. Big Sis hated the laugh and hated the fact that the Dad pretended like this was something special, when he said the exact same thing on every vacation. Hated it almost as much as she hated being called Big Sis, almost as much as she hated her parents’ insistence that their children refer to them as “the Dad” and “the Mom.”

Beside her the twins Boyo and Gal Pal voiced their enthusiasm. “Bravo!” they cried in unison, Boyo waving his French beret and Gal Pal her tiny sombrero. This year Boyo was to be a resident of France and Gal Pal a citizen of Mexico. They’d overstuffed their dilapidated cardboard suitcases with the appropriate native clothing, reading materials, and snacks. After weeks of harassment Big Sis had finally decided on somewhere non-specific in the British Isles. At least they spoke English there, more or less.

The family station wagon cruised the back roads like an out-of-control boat. The Mom chattered to the Dad constantly about this or that seen, or passed recently, or coming up on the right. Big Sis clutched the padded arm rest until her elbow locked, and forced her eyes closed at the worst of it, when the Dad veered too close to tractor trailers, or swung too wide on curves, and the outside wheels spat gravel. “Shit shit shit…” she stuttered.

“Quelle horreur!” Boyo exclaimed, “Oolala, le potty mouth!”

“Oh, shut up!” She punched him in the shoulder. “That last part isn’t even French—it’s English with an accent!”

“Sere Bueno!”

“German and Spanish, you halfwit!”

“Pelé.”

“Brazilian soccer player.”

“Oh, Big Sis!” the Mom interrupted from the front seat. “Isn’t it all so much easier when you speak the language?”

Big Sis curled into the corner of the back seat to sulk. Boyo grinned wickedly, chanting bien, bien, bien.

It was always like this on vacation. Their family had no money in the best of times, certainly no money for trips abroad, although the Dad and the Mom had promised a trip to Europe for as long as Big Sis could remember. The very idea made her shudder. The whole world hated Americans. Maybe the Dad didn’t mind being beheaded—he was mostly head anyway, but why should the rest of the family suffer?

What they did instead was just like homework! Boyo and Gal Pal had been studying languages and customs for weeks, not that it had helped much in Boyo’s case.

She’d been lucky the Mom and the Dad had permitted her to choose Britain, which she knew all about, having studied about Queen Elizabeth I in school, and knowing pretty much everything about kings and queens, princes and princesses. There were dukes and earls as well, but she really didn’t understand that much about them, except there was a song, “Duke of Earl,” that the Dad had liked to sing to them when they were little.

They had been in the car for a very long time. On previous vacations her parents traded house-sitting chores for a place to stay, some out-of-the-way location where they could run their crazy vacation experiments without interference. They thought these deals were some big secret from the Kids, but Big Sis knew—the Mom and the Dad weren’t exactly secret agents. “Look at this empty house we’ve found!” the Dad would exclaim. “How could anyone forget they lived in such a wonderful home?” the Mom would ask, a stupid expression on her face.

But this summer they didn’t seem to know at all where they were going. Every few miles the Dad would pull off onto a side road, travel down it awhile, then stop near a house. The Kids had to stay in the car with the Mom while he got out, walked around the structure, looked in the windows, knocked on the door. Each time he would come back shaking his head at the Mom and they would drive around some more.

By dusk Big Sis was getting worried. She’d had nothing but biscuits (which tasted suspiciously like cookies) all day, with nothing to wash them down but unrefrigerated orange juice. Her throat was raw and scratchy, and when once again the Dad stopped the car, just after sunset, the sky an almost painful red, she wanted to yell at them both. Just what did they think they were doing? Both the twins had passed out from the heat in the car, and if they didn’t find the house soon she herself was going to be homicidal.

But this time the Dad came back smiling, shook the twins awake, and told them all it was time to unload.

* * *

“France is upstairs in the back, Mexico down here by the front door. England,” irritatingly, he bowed, “you have the large bedroom upstairs.” He paused, waving his bright flashlight around like a light saber. “Surprised?”

“Shocked.”

“You’re more than old enough now, I’d say.” And for the first time in months she smiled.

But something was missing. She looked around. Of course—there was no furniture. She stared at the Dad’s flashlight. She walked over to a light switch, flipped it on. Nothing. “There’s no power!”

“We’re fifty years into the future. Worldwide power outage. The direct result of a foolish use of our natural resources. I have an extra flashlight for you, by the way. It gets pretty dark in Britain after nightfall.”

She could have punched him, but she took the flashlight instead.

The next morning was full of the clamor of the French and Mexican wars. The Dad came thundering out of his bedroom wrapped in a bright red silk robe covered with sun-yellow flowers. He saw her staring at him. “Japanese Occupation,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

The Mom had packed her British kit for her, obviously not trusting her to do it properly. Beside the fairytale books, a costume jewelry tiara, and the Beatles CD Big Sis had thought to bring herself (but forgetting the CD player completely), the Mom had placed a woolen tartan scarf (great for summer!), a Fodor travel guide to the United Kingdom, and a shiny green teapot.

She had already checked the sinks—no running water. Gal Pal, usually quiet even during her hyper times, had said, “Maybe they don’t take baths in Yourup!” Big Sis called her stupid, which sent her running to the Mom.

The Mom and the Dad weren’t going to be much help, obviously. “You’re a British citizen now,” the Dad said. “What would any good subject of the Crown do in your situation? A good vacation stretches the mind—it teaches you how the rest of the world lives. You travel far enough out of your comfort zone, you journey far enough from home, and you just might find yourself.”

The Mom, grinning like an idiot, apparently agreed.

So Big Sis slapped on her tiara, picked up her teapot, and went looking for water.

* * *

The countryside around the house was mostly flat, covered in shiny, bronze-colored grass. She imagined the grass made a jangly sound against her tennis shoes, but knew it had to be a sound from somewhere else, maybe wind chimes, their sound carried by the wind.

She saw no signs of water, but the wavy ground reminded her of the ocean, so she kept looking for pools somewhere in the low ridges, hiding away clean and pure. Now and then she even thought she heard a fog horn, and once saw a distant bridge stretching between two square towers, but she thought it way too far to travel without help.

Some day, she would. She would travel as far as her heart’s desire.

Boyo strolled up beside her, resplendent in his gendarme’s uniform. “Et tu, Senorita?”

“No, Boyo. That’s Latin and Spanish.”

“But isn’t Latin, Spanish?”

“Sort of. Are you here to protect me, Gendarme?”

“Wie bitte?”

“Never mind, you’re speaking German again. Können Sie mir helfen?”

“Was möchten Sie?”

“Could you tell me why you hate us?”

“But you’re British. We only hate the British when they act like Americans.”

“And how do the Americans act?”

“Why, they act like they’re the Dad.”

“But I’m not the Dad. We all can’t be the Dad.”

The creek had risen out of the grass and was flowing toward the ocean now. Big Sis filled her teapot with its clear, liquid gold. Suddenly her tiara fell forward and somersaulted into the fast-moving water. She started crying—now she could never be a princess.

By the time Big Sis and Boyo returned to the house it was nearing nightfall, and Big Sis was afraid of another night alone in the dark. She knew she would have her family around her, but she also knew that once she closed her eyes she would be alone in the dark again.

She was surprised and delighted that the Dad and the Mom had built a great bonfire out in the front of the house. Gal Pal was strumming her guitar, singing sad Spanish songs of death and unrequited love. “De la sierra morena.”

The family sat around and toasted marshmallows. They watched as something bright shot across the sky. The Mom said, “You know, it might just be a meteor. A shooting star.”

The Dad said, “No, it was just a plane from some airport nearby.”

Boyo said, “Isn’t it great that all the peoples of the world share the same sky?”

The Dad said, “No, that isn’t exactly true.”

Gal Pal, who had offered nothing to this gathering but song, asked the Dad, “Why do you like spoiling things all the time?”

The Dad replied, “Well, we all die alone, even those of us in families.”

A dark child wandered out of the night and sat down by the fire. She wrapped her arms tightly around her knees and looked around.

The Dad said, “Careful! She’s a bomb!”

Boyo said, “She’s got a short fuse.”

Big Sis said, “Wait a minute.”

The Mom said, “Oh Jesus Christ a bomb!”

Big Sis said, “Please, wait a minute.”

The Dad said, “We gotta take care of that bomb!”

Boyo said, “Watch out!”

Gal Pal said, “Sound the alarm!”

The Dad said, “A bomb!”

Big Sis said, “Please…”

The Dad laughed and said, “Let’s all do this again next year!”

The Mom said, “Best vacation ever!”

Big Sis closed her eyes, wishing they’d never left home, and waited for the inevitable explosion.

UNKNOWN

Not for the first time he decides to go nameless. Moves to a city where they don’t know him. Tells no one of his new whereabouts. Chooses a new name using identification documents he’s paid a fortune for, then avoids using that expensive new name as much as possible.

“And your name?” they might ask at a bus stop or in the park.

“You can just call me Buddy,” he replies. Most do so without blinking an eye.

Then he spends months trying to erase both the new name and the old name from his consciousness.

The process is not particularly difficult for him. He doesn’t open his mail—drops it into the trash without a glance. He fills out only those forms he cannot avoid, looking away when he scribbles a bit of graffiti that may or may not be his signature. He answers to “Buddy,” but for him “Buddy” is no more identifying than “Hey, you.”

He deals with neither banks nor doctors. He isn’t naive enough to think that he’s achieved total anonymity—no doubt his persona has been digitized in a number of different ways. But he doesn’t think much about it. He does not avoid photographs, but always makes sure he is part of a group, which as far as he is concerned is far more anonymous than never having been photographed at all. Similarly, he rejects the life of the hermit, and wraps himself in crowds. He tries to make himself as frequently seen as lampposts and trees.

You would expect such a man to avoid diaries as if they were forbidden tomes of black lore, but he keeps his religiously, using it to report concise, non-judgmental observations, the only reporting suitable, he thinks, for an anonymous observer:

Two dogs were run over in the street today. A car avoided the first animal, then plowed into the second. At the same moment the car behind ran over the first dog. The men climbed from their cars and swore at each other. A nearby child was hysterical. No one went to the child, who cried for thirty-six minutes, fifteen seconds. Most would think such lengthy hysteria impossible, but an accurate watch cannot be denied. Eventually a female police officer came and led the child away.

The temperature was forty-five degrees at 8 a.m., climbing to seventy-six degrees at noon. At 142 Lincoln Street a dark man in a white t-shirt and green pants sat on the front step and watched the sky. At intervals varying between fifteen seconds and three minutes forty-two seconds the man wiped tears from his eyes. He said nothing when the old woman in the blue dress split her grocery bag. A can of peas rolled under a parked white Oldsmobile. She did not see it and left it behind after she’d gathered the spilled groceries. At 5 p.m. the man stood up slowly and went inside. His shoulders and knees appeared to struggle with gravity. A man in a brown suit passed him going out the door, walking very fast.

There are eight green bottles and a dead cat in the alley across the street. A man enters the alley and counts them every day. He looks at the cat and tries to determine if it has been moved. A newspaper lies beside the cat but he does not reach down and cover the cat with it. He prefers to remain nameless.

The nameless man wanders down the street with a water bottle in his hand. At every third corner he stops and takes three swallows. At some point in the past he has fainted from dehydration and is determined to avoid such incidents in the future. He continues down the street until he finds a crowd to join. For the rest of the day he moves from crowd to crowd, holding the water bottle, drinking his swallows but trying not to be too obvious about it, trying not to be seen. Both unknown and unknowable, he is a part of the grand movement of the world, he thinks, and there are others who need the moisture far more than he.

At the end of the day the man strips off his shirt and stares at himself in the mirror. He drips what’s left of the water over his head. It is a kind of baptism, he thinks, but will not pursue the idea. He imagines the remaining dust of the day dissolving from him, freeing him from this time and place.

In the morning the traffic noise begins early, at precisely 5.15 a.m. The man without a name dresses in clean gray slacks and a light blue shirt. He puts a newspaper he will not read under his arm and walks out onto the hot concrete. He strolls at a steady pace down the sidewalk with no destination in mind. The man from the day before is again sitting out on the front step crying, silently but unmistakably to those willing to notice. The man with no name walks past the crying man, pretending not to notice.

The man who will not be named slips into a mass of people on their way to work. Their movements and intentions toward movement make an intricate pattern of gravity and emotional force the nameless man has come to understand and predict. He moves with them as if within a migratory herd of long duration as they pound the pavements, casting off one member after another at bus stops and subway entrances. He is aware of the unhealing carcinoma under one dark man’s ear, a young woman’s blackened eye, the bleeding forearm of an elderly Jew where the skin has been scrubbed raw. The man without a name smells the stink of fear that leaks from pores swaddled in clothing bought with a great deal of money and very little taste. The nameless man tastes the horror in the mouths of those who cannot speak it, yet speaks none of it himself.

He walks and walks with no destination in mind, with no name and its burden of past association to stop him.

“Bob!” The voice breaks through the back of his head. “Bob, is that you?”

The man who has no name turns and looks at the woman who has stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, her hands thrown up to her face as if in joy or grief.

“I thought I’d never see you again!” she cries, and runs toward him, throwing her arms around him. He flinches, but allows her to do what she feels she must do. The woman suddenly removes her arms and steps back. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

The nameless man does not think in terms of right or wrong and so says nothing.

“You act like you don’t even know me.”

The man without a name recognizes the fatigue in the woman’s eyes, which had been there every time he saw her. “Mary,” he says, knowing that isn’t the name of her secret heart—it is only the name she shares with others—but she has never shared her secret name with him so Mary is all he can use.

“Bob, you’ve been gone for months—is that all you have to say to me?”

He looks at her, wondering what he can possibly say to her, thinking he’d have to be a genius in order to know the right thing to say. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you,” he finally begins, telling her the truth. “Believe me, I would give anything not to hurt you. We could have been married—I know that’s what you wanted. Maybe I wanted it, too. Maybe I still want it. We could be married and I believe we would have had a successful marriage by the usual standards. No huge betrayals, no precipitous decline in affection, certainly none of the arguing that continues at a low burn for years before finally erupting into something more than painful and possibly dangerous. We would have had children and I’m sure we would have raised those children well.”

Somehow he thinks saying those things will in some small degree be comforting. But he has always been stupid in relationships, and he is being stupid now.

“Then why did you leave?” She is screaming at him. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her screaming before. “You just threw it all away! There’s something wrong with you!”

“I’m not going to say that you’re incorrect about that.” He looks down, unable to look directly into those angry eyes. “But if we had married, whom would you have married? In our relatively short time together, how much did you really learn about me? How much would you have known after three years? Five years? How much do I even understand myself? I would try to be honest with you, but am I going to tell you things I think will make you dislike me?”

“So how is that different from any other relationship?”

“I don’t think it is. I don’t know. Is my ‘self’ anything more than a random accumulation of brain cells? These things that are me, are they anything more than accidental?”

“Bob…”

“You call me that name, but does it identify me any more precisely than any other? It’s a label my parents gave me, and the government finds convenient, like a label on a file so that you can find it among all the other files. But you can put anything you want into that file, can’t you? If I married you I would have been Bob with wife and kids and a house at a specific address in an all too specific neighborhood, working at any of a number of possible occupations, with benefits. I would have been well adjusted. I would have been happy. But I’m not at all sure it would have been right.”

She stares at him for a long time. When she leaves without saying anything more, he feels embarrassed, but relieved.

The nameless man returns to his hotel room and sits in an overstuffed chair the texture of battered skin. He has moved this chair to face the window so that he might have a fresh breeze on his face. He replays his conversation with Mary. He feels genuinely sorry that he has hurt her but he is anxious about something much more important right now: what if she tells others where to find him?

What if she finds some way to get in touch with his parents?

He has never seriously considered the possibility before. Once she asked to meet his parents and he told her he hadn’t spoken to them in years. Which was perfectly true. When she asked him about what had happened he told her it was too painful for him to talk about, but that someday they would. The first part of that statement had been basically true but even then he’d known he wouldn’t be around long enough for the second part. He’s already made a few too many mistakes with her, giving her his real first name and inadvertently revealing the state where he had been born (and where his parents, as far as he knows, still live). Those two items shouldn’t be enough to track down his history but who knew how many other slips he might have made? That’s what happened when you got close to someone. Perhaps she had just enough information, and perhaps she was angry enough, to contact his parents.

He tries to imagine the resulting conversation, the trading of stories, the bonding of these people who cannot fathom his odd behavior. Contemplating it makes him ill. He thinks about them visiting one another, trading pictures, hiring professional assistance. He knows he will need to leave this place sooner than planned, but perhaps there is still a way to buy himself more time.

He grabs the disposable cell phone he acquired when he first moved into this city and dials her cell number.

“Yes?”

“Mary, this is… Robert. Bob.”

“I thought you were done with me.” She’s been crying. She’s resentful. He hears cars, street sounds. She’s obviously outside. He thinks he can detect panting, footsteps. She’s walking somewhere. He thinks he’s in terrible jeopardy here.

“I’m so sorry,” he says to her, pleading. “Obviously I’m not a well-adjusted person. And you’ve been wonderful to me.”

“I don’t… don’t deserve this,” she says and a sob escapes. “Wait. Wait,” she says. “I’m crossing… wait.”

A loud car horn. A muffled impact. A rattle, a rattle, distorted voices. The phone goes dead.

He stares at his own phone, drops it onto the bed. Where was he? What was he thinking? He feels light-headed, nauseated. He leans over, stretches out on the bed. Certainly she’s all right. A near miss. She just dropped the phone.

Suddenly desperate for fresh air, he stumbles from the bed to the window, prying it open with trembling fingers. He sticks his head out into the air of the alley, clutching the sides of the frame, sure that he will fall.

The nameless man looks down and sees the creature feeding off the garbage pile below. Some sort of goat or dog—hard to tell, it is so emaciated, probably ill. Large patches of its coat have fallen out. Something odd about its head. A horn, so it is a goat. But only one. And that one distorted, broken, oozing narrow rivulets of pus. It turns its head around and smiles up at him with broken teeth, a piece of a rat wedged in its mouth.

A true unicorn, he thinks, not knowing why, but knowing it is so. That’s what they really look like. And now he knows Mary must certainly be dead. A vagrant wanders past the unicorn, neither apparently noticing the other. Mary is dead and he is at last forgotten, for now he knows his parents are dead, too. Because he is seeing unicorns the way they really are, raw and unglamorized. At last unknown, he has descended into the worlds of myth, of things unnamed and misnamed, of things unseen and things misunderstood. The grand consolation prize, he thinks, for anonymity.

* * *

When the unknown man goes out that evening it is only after reconsidering the events of the day until a certain sanity has been achieved. The delusion he had experienced was the direct result of the shock of Mary’s accident, or presumed accident. Presumed death. He could make some calls and find out for sure, but he knows he will not.

An author whose fantasy novels he has been reading for years is giving a signing at a bookstore nearby. The author is there in support of his recent autobiography, which the nameless man has read. He has his copy with him, tucked under his arm. He has a number of questions about the book, most having to do with its authenticity. He isn’t sure if he will risk asking them.

A drunk wanders out of a bar onto the sidewalk in front of him. The scruffy fat man turns, his sneer all the more disturbing because it is on a bull’s head sitting lop-sided on his shoulders.

Minotaur, the unknown man thinks, throwing up his arms in alarm. The book skids across the sidewalk and rests against the minotaur’s left foot.

The minotaur stares at the book dumbly, as if it is a category of object he has never seen before. He bends awkwardly, the weight of the great head threatening to pull him over. He clutches the book between his two palms, fingers too short to be of much use—and pulls it up to eye level, where he sniffs it, then licks it. Finally he shoves it into his mouth, apparently tasting it as his eyes roll around and copious amounts of saliva drip onto the sidewalk.

The minotaur stares at the nameless man again, slack lips drooping into an avalanching frown. With an explosion of wind and saliva the minotaur spits the book back at him. It slams into the nameless man’s chest, and he hugs himself so it won’t get away from him again. He examines his catch: the pages and cover are damp, but readable. When he raises his head the minotaur is gone.

As the nameless man continues to the bookstore he wipes the cover and pages against his shirt until satisfied he can do no more. The book appears to have swollen to twice its original thickness.

A few doors down from the bookstore he pauses in front of a shop specializing in exotic fish and supplies, where a giant aquarium fills the front window. Disobeying the posted sign he taps the glass in an attempt to attract some fish. Almost instantly a cluster of fetus-like creatures swarms out from behind flowering vegetation, propelled by large, powerful tails. They gather in front of him, staring with partially formed eyes. Their chest cavities are filled by some sort of complex, inefficient breathing organ. Their mouths open and close in painful-looking spasms as they struggle for air. Mermaids, he thinks, poor, pitiful mermaids. Unable to witness this for long, the unknown man turns away from the colony and heads into the bookstore.

The nameless man is surprised to see that no long lines wait for the fantasy writer’s signature. In fact, other than a large man who might be the writer’s bodyguard (or younger lover?), and a few bookstore-clerk-looking types, the nameless man is the only person in the store. Suddenly anxious to finish his business, he walks up to the small table and plants the bundle of rustling pages in front of the startled writer.

The writer opens the book gingerly and examines a few pages. “You know, I used to love reading in the bath,” he says, as if that explains everything. He looks up and displays a vaguely bored smile. “Do you just want a signature, or would you like it personalized?”

“How personal could it be? I just met you. You don’t even know my name.”

The large man steps forward, but an impatient gesture from the writer stops him. He takes a step or two back, but the nameless man can tell he is ready for trouble.

The fantasy writer laughs out loud. “Good point.” Then he stops, looking slightly awkward, as if he’s left his script in his other jacket. “Do you even want a signature?”

“Actually, I don’t care for signatures very much. I do have a question or two, if you don’t mind.”

“I’ll answer what I can.”

“This book…” The nameless man touches the sloppy bundle on the table. It makes a soft rattle. “It purports to be your autobiography. Yet it reads just like one of your novels. It has suspense, rising and falling action, complications appearing just at the right points in the narrative. Real life isn’t all that neat.”

“I suppose you would have preferred that I fill it with descriptions of television shows watched, fast foods eaten, frequent trips to the bathroom, and long naps after too much drink?”

“Not really. I just don’t understand how I’m supposed to believe that any of this is true.”

The fantasy writer looks at him, considering. Finally he sighs and says, “I suppose we each have to answer that for ourselves. Writers are there to give experience shape, and that includes their autobiographies. The moment you write something down, you’re changing it.”

“The moment you name it,” the nameless man says.

“Pardon me?”

“The moment you name something you change what it was, what it was becoming. It was a living, evolving thing, and then you killed it by naming it.”

The fantasy writer laughs, then looks at his bodyguard. “Listen to this guy!” Then, turning around he says, “So maybe I shouldn’t have put my name on this book. If I hadn’t put my name on it, people might find it more believable?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But at least they’d be reading it without preconceptions. It might have more of a chance to be… magical.”

“So, do you write?”

The unknown man feels unaccountably anxious, reluctant to reply. Then he says, “A little. A diary, of sorts.”

The fantasy writer turns the warped book around and offers the unknown man a pen. “Then you sign it. Personalized, please.” He laughs. “Say, ‘To my good friend.’ It’s a lie, but perfect strangers ask me to put that down all the time.”

Without hesitation the nameless man takes the pen, writes ‘To my only friend,’ and signs the complete name he was given at birth.

The fantasy writer turns the book around and puzzles over the scribbled handwriting. “Hey, I can’t even read this!” he says, but the unknown man is already going through the door.

Outside it has grown dark, and all over this part of town lights are going on, individually and in groups, with a peculiar kind of rhythm that fascinates the unknown man, who actually begins to smile until his own light explodes inside him, and he feels himself pitching forward, a skyscraper containing thousands of souls in the last throes of demolition.

When he wakes up there are people leaning over him: a woman, the bodyguard, a man in uniform (postman? policeman?), and the fantasy writer, who is scribbling madly in a small bright red notebook. The unknown man wonders if he is about to become a fictional character.

And floating above the heads of these people are the angels: tiny rat-like creatures with oily, burnt leather wings, long square teeth and loopy grins. Several are blind—all have something wrong with their eyes. Now and then they bump into each other, and then punish themselves with their long fingernails, which they scrape against their cheeks over and over making frayed patches of blood.

“Your name,” the officer says. “What’s your name, sir?”

The nameless man speaks, saying his name over and over again. But he can tell by their faces they do not understand.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

Now, this place has no mirrors. They were all removed before I came. Rowley, who seems perfectly normal except for his worship of the letter “T,” says it’s because of the glass—potential sharp edges and all of that—which makes perfect sense, of course. The fact that I didn’t think of that right away, that the danger wasn’t immediately apparent, could be symptomatic to a professional’s eyes I suppose.

In any case, I suspect that it’s more than an issue of shards of glass and the damage they might do to hands or a face. Sometimes I imagine what it must have been like for these people, the only friends I have left in the world, when they had mirrors to contend with. To be on your way to a dinner party at the Queen of the May’s tree house, anxious to discuss the rise of unsweetened misery with her grand counselor the unzippered fly, and then to have to confront this image of an old man in a hospital gown, his butt hanging out, hair much whiter than he remembers, and the expression on his face so frail and weepy—well, it would be quite a come down in the world I think, quite a trip down to the abandoned shore.

So why encourage the upset? Banish the mirrors. Rowley tells me that the first step, however, was to remove the smaller mirrors but to cover the larger ones with thick layers of cardboard and tape. What a scene that must have been! To see these great panels with their reflections draped—and to wonder—and you just know they all did—what secrets were being hidden from them.

The one in charge (Is it another doctor? I have no idea.) would have done well to have asked Rowley, or the General, Stuttering Will, any of them. Ask a madman. The faces of the past are everywhere, rising out of the shadows, shining in the windows, curled into the folds of stained pajamas. Ready to cling and travel with you like airborne seeds or balls of cat’s fur.

And still there are worse things than memory. There is regret, and failed anticipations. There are those faces as well, the lives you have turned your back on.

The General marshals his troops. The chairs with their sturdy legs perform admirably—no resistance there. But the lamp and the seat cushion refuse to cooperate at every opportunity, not even waiting for the General to turn his back. He reaches out a hand to steady them into place, but the hand is shaky. It’s the new medication but I’m not sure if the General realizes this. He thinks he’s getting too old for this, but he’s really only thirty-six.

I have heard that at one time the General had quite a responsible job. Vice president of paper clips and coat hangers or some such. Then at some point he could not do it anymore. He missed his place, lost his bookmark. Forgot his lines. It’s almost surprising, the number of men in here simply because they forgot their lines and couldn’t do their jobs anymore. I think that is part of what happened to me, but maybe not all of it.

The ballerina crashes into the TV whilst performing her pirouette. The others complain, but I help her up. “I left my slippers on my other feet,” she tells me, and dances off toward the sunroom.

On television a man in a nervous black suit delivers a lecture on job interview techniques. In their battered chairs my fellow audience members hang on his every word, but do not take notes. Some combinations of medicines play havoc with a person’s handwriting. They may make it more difficult to read. It has been three months since I last opened a newspaper, and my fourteen letters home remain unwritten.

“Who better to sing the song of the tragic tractor?” John whispers into the ear I reserve for secrets.

Ants perform an intricate maneuver across the wallpaper by my left shoulder. One line of their travels duplicates the slogan of a popular cold medication.

Sitting in the darkest corner of a too-bright room, Bob says goodbye all day long.

And by the door to the lunchroom/visiting room, one of the male nurses attempts to wave me over. A young actress from an old television series peers like a scared bird from beneath his left arm. From the way the male nurse stands, I do believe he wants to have sex with her.

Upon further examination I realize this is my daughter come to visit, and I understand I must separate her from the nurse’s bad intentions as quickly as possible.

I hurry over, ignoring the protests of separated Siamese twins—one black and one white—who sit on the floor each day, commenting on the invisible skin that connects them, that is forever being trampled upon by oblivious passers-by. When I reach the young woman, my daughter, she walks me into the lunchroom for our visit. I hug her awkwardly, and what I get back from her is more than mere awkwardness. I sense her fear that if I hug her too completely she will be compelled to remain here forever.

“Dad, you don’t belong here. I want you to come home.”

I look around knowing what she means, but not quite able to parse that meaning. This is my home—this is where I live. And the idea that fragile human beings, so ill at ease in their own bodies, could actually “belong” anywhere is quite beyond me.

“This is home,” I say simply, careful not to reveal any of the many complications. Normal people never want to hear about the many complications. It scares them, or worse, makes them angry.

She bites back a tear, re-enacting a scene I have witnessed in many movies and television shows. I wonder which one she has copied this particular instance from.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Dad.” She’s come to me without patience, which I must admit makes me a bit apprehensive.

“I think my doctors would disagree.”

“You’re here voluntarily, Dad. Your doctor told me. He says you can leave anytime you want. So why don’t you leave?”

This is unexpected, and I feel the smile I’ve maintained since first seeing her falling away. For just a moment I get a glimpse of how I must seem to her, this aging man, her father, who has given up and chosen the institution to hide out the rest of his days.

The windows begin to cry, and the floors sigh with the weight of the invisible. “Don’t take my bag of sleep,” I say to her, thinking there may be nothing I can do to convince her of my aberration. I turn to watch the windows weep.

“Do you know what the weather is like outside, Dad?”

“It’s raining, my love. I’m not crazy.”

“Then come home, or whatever you want to call the place. Come with me.”

The roof is on fire above me. I can smell the children’s burning flesh. Soon there will be no more roof, and I will stare straight up to Neptune.

I look at her. She is crying. I can remember the little girl she had been and I feel terrible. “I can’t decide who to be,” I say, beginning to cry myself.

“Just be yourself, Dad.” Her anger is obviously genuine—it’s worn into her face. I am grateful to recognize that.

Somewhere, in another hall, Shirley is waiting for the Insect King. She is dressed in white, with three folds of newspaper over her head. I know this because this is what she does every day. She has married and divorced the Insect King many times. Theirs is a troubled relationship.

“Dad, why aren’t there more visitors?”

I don’t know how to explain this to her. “We get visitors,” I tell her. “Every Saturday afternoon…” But I can’t go on. Bob and Shirley, the General, the Ballerina, they’ve all wandered into the lunchroom. They sit down, they get up, they wander around the room. Cold like a hand rubs at my arm.

“She wouldn’t want you to be like this…” my daughter is saying, has been saying. I wasn’t listening.

“What did you say, honey?”

She looks at me oddly. “Mom. I was saying that Mom wouldn’t have wanted you to act like this after she died. She would have wanted you to keep it together.”

The cold in my arm settles deeper, and despite myself I look up, toward the window.

And there I am, pacing back and forth, gesturing angrily. I move my head in front of my daughter’s face, afraid that she might see. But she can’t see, of course.

And as I turn my head I see myself again, a gentler, more contented me, standing behind my daughter and getting ready to caress her with his hands. And somehow this one is even worse than the other one.

“Get away from her!” I scream, and before I know it the male nurse is behind me, dragging me away. My friends protest the aggressiveness of this solution, even the Siamese twins. My daughter cries like a little girl, inconsolable, and that is the worst of this.

In my room, the light bulb speaks disparagingly of the night. Dust beneath my bed dances to the sad songs the walls would sing if only they had mouths.

I gaze out of my one face and a hundred faces of me stare back, all angry for my failure of ambition and terrible lack of care. If I am not careful I know they will be the death of me.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” I whisper quietly. “I don’t know how to be.”

And the faces come, and come again, to make one vast and unforgiving stare.

A VISIT HOME

The house is not as I’ve remembered it all these years. The style is more modern, the living room more spacious. There is no real wood—it is all imitation grain. My mother and father seem older, grayer than any human beings I have ever met.

I have brought three college friends to see this town I grew up in, this place where my dreams came from. My friends appear startled by the lush greenness of the vegetation, the humidity, the bright sunlight through blue skies striated by wispy cloud. I know they won’t want to stay long.

I realize it is the same lot, the same location as the house I spent my childhood in, but there is a new house here. What have my parents done? Torn the original down and rebuilt according to some hopeful plan for rejuvenation? But I am afraid to ask them what has happened. I am afraid of what they might tell me.

I spend my nights roaming the halls of this new house, stepping quietly so as not to awaken my three friends, somehow knowing that my parents won’t be aroused no matter what I do. I examine several pieces of furniture each night: my father’s new, barrel-shaped liquor cabinet with the carved eagle on its front, the new refrigerator with the automatic ice-maker, the matching pieces of the never-used guest room, the ornate rugs, the new pictures on the walls—photographs of people I don’t recognize.

Occasionally I find something belonging to the old house; a piece of bathroom tile, a door stop, an old worn footstool, and once an entire yellow-papered wall that materialized in the hallway without warning. When I blink it is gone.

THE MULTIPLES OF SORROW

Malcolm had gone from London to Paris after the end of the First World War. His few remaining friends in England speculated it must have been a desperate move to escape some unhappiness. What they had not grasped was that desperation required a certain emotional investment Malcolm had not budgeted for during his remaining years on the planet. He had no intention of feeling desperation or any other strong emotion. He could see no point. If he was going to waste his time, there were activities far more interesting for his thoughtless consumption.

If anything, he’d left for aesthetic reasons. Not because Paris during that time promised so much in terms of freedom, beauty, art—he had no illusions of access to such things—but because London promised so little. Despite the post-war appearance of palatial department stores and great business houses, jobs were few and the divide between rich and poor intraversible. He’d grown tired of the slums of the east end and the architecture of ruin and rust, surfaces silky with a moist dust of unknown content, unidentifiable insects disassembling on the edges of vision. Worse than the bombs dropped by the German Zeppelins had been this devastating fusillade of failed commerce.

Of course the aesthetic background of Paris was no richer, only different: a stacked mess of darkened brick, spider-veined by wet, depthless streets where broken beggars stumbled and died. Upon reaching Paris he was possessed of few funds and he had no considered plan for their replenishment. Now and then he would work a menial restaurant job for the privilege of some laughable underpayment and the dubious benefit of glimpsing such luminaries as Picasso and Ford Madox Ford. He lived in the worst possible places, attic rooms where he could not walk upright, the ceilings decorated with the long, looping signatures of marching insects. If he grew tired of the wriggling creatures falling into his small store of food he’d burn a bit of sulphur to drive them into the next room, separated from his by the thinnest possible layer of paper and board.

“Monstre!” boomed the voice on the other side of his flimsy door, followed by a rain of fists on wood that shook the room. “Meurtrier!”

But instead of hiding like a child he rolled out of his bed and jerked open the door. “Oui!”

The large bearded man hunched in the doorway, his head lowered as he peered inside. Malcolm noticed several gray insects crawling in and out of his hair, thin black legs slipping on the oily strands.

“Degaré?” Malcolm asked, recognizing him as a man he sometimes washed dishes with in the restaurants.

“Mon Dieu! Malcolm!” He suddenly grinned. “I have bread, if you have the wine to wash it down!”

For a time they had an arrangement, but nights when Degaré had too much to drink Malcolm would always leave.

Malcolm sold some of his clothing and most of his other belongings for rent, with a few sou left over for bread and margarine, wine, cheese, some potatoes, a little coffee. The price of food had increased so drastically the past few years, bread almost three times, an egg at least five, he’d been reduced to the occasional theft and killing pigeons in the park. This was always an awkward task—having no skill with a slingshot he had to bludgeon the birds with a stick or a decaying shoe and sneak them into his apartment under his coat where he would fry and rapidly eat them. On those nights it was Degaré who left, in disgust.

He supposed he was starving himself, but frankly found the prospect more interesting than frightening. Starvation and poverty served as acute catalysts for breaking down the usual sensory boundaries. He saw things more deeply than he had in years. He only wished this new vision were of a finer resolution.

“Animal!” Degaré would cry, whenever he saw Malcolm with a pigeon on a plate, referring to both. Malcolm thought that at least it was a clean plate, but did not present this detail in his defense. He simply took a larger bite.

Perhaps this exchange was what initially triggered the idea. Man’s dual nature: the spirit and the beast. It was a lot to chew on. It took Malcolm some months developing a theory, refining his understanding of his own impulses.

He spent most of his days in bed to preserve his strength, preferring to go out at night when Degaré was sleeping and the details of the city’s decay were somewhat wrapped in romantic shadow. He accepted that decay but did not want to be constantly exposed to it. The daylight made the city’s deterioration abundantly clear. There was no excuse for surprise, of course. A building material hadn’t been invented that would last forever— most fell far short of the mark. If all the wealth in France were focused on the single purpose of maintaining Paris in pristine condition there still would not be sufficient funds. No nation had the resources necessary to maintain a major city in such a manner. Buildings do fall apart, eventually, and it seemed to Malcolm that most of the major cities—London, Paris, New York—were failing at approximately the same time.

He felt the inevitability of the decline most obviously during late afternoon strolls through insistent rain. The Paris sky boiled down into a spoiled soup. He clamped his mouth to keep out any taste of the foul French precipitation. All around him the brick walls melted, sliding into the streets. It happened too slowly for most of its denizens to notice but Malcolm had grown acutely sensitive to the world’s steady transformation into mud. Certainly human beings were little more than that—animated mud, however they might dress themselves up. Their condition stunned them. Everywhere he looked he could see Parisians staring at him, or staring off into space. Consumption ravaged their tired flesh. They smiled at one with a smear of blood. They stared out of illness, out of insanity, out of death.

It was hardly surprising their city was maintained so poorly.

Degaré did his wanderings during the day. Sometimes they would pass each other on the disastrous stairs leading to the attic room they now shared. Malcolm’s roommate occasionally growled at him, little more. He did not know what Degaré did during the day, although he suspected criminal activity was involved, as the man returned every evening with his enormous carcass swollen even further with hidden cheeses and breads under his coat, as well as wrapped packages whose contents obviously surprised Degaré when he ripped them open.

One evening Malcolm found a few drops of blood on one of the bread loaves. Their eyes found each other, Degaré’s swollen and angry. “Do you wish to make une réflexion, Monsieur?”

In answer Malcolm stared and began eating the bloodied area.

Sometimes after an extended period in bed Malcolm felt very much the philosopher. What better place to construct his theories? His father might have said this was no way to make one’s way in the world, to which he might reply that neither the way nor the world was very clear. One invention of meaning was as near the truth as any other as far as Malcolm was concerned. There was no sense having a heart attack over such questions, which his father, indeed, had.

Lying in bed he had the opportunity and the will to review and reflect upon his life, something which even the wealthy could not always afford. It gradually came clear to him that a single human being could not have possibly felt and done all the things he had felt and done in such a relatively short time. One being could not possibly contain such conflicts of feeling. He was a man of some education and yet he had eaten bread soiled with a stranger’s blood. And the repugnant Degaré? Sometimes his roommate recited French love poetry in his sleep, with very few mistakes. Such conflicts of spirituality and bestiality! The usual explanations for such contradictions made less sense the longer Malcolm remained in bed. He himself hated the ugliness and falseness of the world, and yet loved the heightened sensibility his hatred brought him. He had absolutely no hope or optimism for his own future, and yet it was a future he looked forward to with great anticipation.

The true mystery was why more did not go mad when forced to endure these conditions. Malcolm concluded there must be a surfeit of souls in heaven (or whatever one chose to call that astral realm) and a shortage of flesh in the mundane world to serve as their vessels. Even when madness was not the immediate result, to live with such internal warfare had to lead inevitably to the vilest sort of illnesses.

In one sense these were merely the idle speculations of a man with no other pressing chores. But Malcolm was taken aback to discover that these ideas triggered emotions he had not experienced in years. Of course he had no one reputable to bear witness to these recent enlightenments. He had no real acquaintances, actually, other than the disreputable Degaré. And so it was that one late evening while engaged in one of their increasingly rare shared dishwashing jobs, the kitchen explosive with heat and argument, a porridge of loose food underfoot, he pulled the giant Frenchmen out into the alley and told him all that he had surmised on the subject.

To Malcolm’s somewhat uncomfortable surprise Degaré actually appeared interested, nodding and sucking in his cheeks, periodically staring at Malcolm with a sympathetic look on his face. Finally, when Malcolm was not yet finished but too exhausted to go on, Degaré turned to him with a dripping ladle raised like a wand and spoke. “I may know just the man who can help you with this problem. He’s a German. He comes to Paris from time to time for various studies, experiments, and God knows what. He dresses very finely, oriental robes, silk scarves, even when he is renting the poorest of hovels to preserve his privacy. You might think he was simply some sharp-tongued dandy, but he is educated, a writer, or so I’ve been told—he certainly weaves magic with his words—who knows deeply the issues of mind and spirit.”

“What is his name?”

“Oh! He has so many! When I first met him he was Meyer, but I have heard others call him Dagobert, and Ruben-Juda. He is quite fluid, let us say, in his allegiances. He joins associations only to tear them down it would seem. I can never tell if the man is serious! But that is simply a symptom of his brilliance, I think.”

“You would seem to know him well.”

“Un peu. I have done the occasional odd job. I have acquired a particular ingredient he has desired, now and then. What can I say? The man talks, I listen, I have learned a bit of his situation. Perhaps he can help you. He is known among certain, say, circles impopulaire for—hmmm—le processus de arrachage?”

“I don’t understand.”

“How do you say? An extraction process?”

“Is that dentistry you’re referring to?”

Degaré laughed. “Non! Ne dentiste! Surely there cannot be a physical process for such a thing. It is philosophical, spiritual. No danger, or so I am told. How could there be? You can have my spirit, Monsieur, I give it gladly, if you will only feed my belly, and other things.”

Malcolm shuddered at what he thought the Frenchman might be suggesting. “Where do I find this magician?”

“Why, only a short stroll to the east, I think you know it? The Rue D’âmes Vidées? I will give you the precise address, for, say, a bit of innocuous cheese?”

* * *

As Degaré had promised, the Rue D’âmes Vidées was a short stump of a lane a few minutes stumble toward the river. Malcolm had not been familiar with this particular segment of pavement, although he was aware of other parts of this street from the conversations of others. It had once been one of the longest streets in Paris, a north-south slash through the city’s heart, but over the centuries it had been broken up, blocked by one project or other, canals or public buildings, or occasionally when some housing development was extended across its surface like a dam across a stream. Streets required advocates if they were to remain intact, but this street had none. Now its longest segments were only a few blocks—Rue Abattue D’enfant was one of the siblings, he believed, as well as the Rue des Veuves Aveugles, and the petite route des fenêtres chuchotantes—and here and there, at least according to rumor, a section would be completely enclosed on all four sides, becoming a cour, a courtyard, or forgotten completely on the other side of windowless walls.

Malcolm could not escape the perception of mytaphore, metaphor, in the history of this road and his theory regarding developments in the human personality. Isolated, diverted, and segmented all came to mind when he contemplated the nature of the human spirit.

The door to No. 56 Rue D’âmes Vidées, if that sunken slab of wood could be called such, was dragged open with surprising ease by a handsome man in a fine robe. Malcolm felt immediate intimidation—there was a piercing, electric quality to the man’s eyes as they gazed, unblinking.

“Excusez-moi, Monsieur. I was told, I believe, there is a, arrachage?” He knew he must sound like a fool, but how do you ask about such things?

The man on the other side of the door said nothing, those eyes examining Malcolm up and down with unsettling calm. He made a little wrinkle with his mouth and stepped out of the way.

They moved through the darkness before settling into a sour-smelling room, lit only by a blazing fire. Even though Malcolm was accustomed to working in the hottest of Parisian kitchens, he found the heat in this room almost too much to bear but his host appeared unperturbed, his high forehead dry, unwrinkled. But not undamaged. Closer up, the man’s face appeared scraped, flaking, as if there might be layers of skin missing. “Tell me your story, if you would,” he said.

“Do you mean my theories? Or would you like some sort of introduction?”

The man said nothing for a time, then replied, “Tell me what you would tell me.”

Malcolm worried over this, then asked, “How shall I address you?”

“You may call me Professeur. I think I would like that. At least that will suffice for now.”

Given the professeur’s lack of precise direction, Malcolm had no idea how to begin. Seeking to avoid an extended and laborious back-and-forth, he started with his somewhat disorganized and impulsive decision to move to Paris, his struggles in the city to feed and shelter himself, his relationship with Degaré, finally culminating with the reason he had knocked on the man’s door: his bed-facilitated speculations regarding the problem of the human personality and its inherent conflicts.

Along the way Malcolm became progressively more aware of the increase of light in the room. He supposed it his eyes’ natural ability to acclimate to the ambient gloom, but the fire did appear brighter, fuller, more intense. With the heightened illumination came an abundance of raw detail: the shelves collapsing under the weight of oversized jars and mysterious machinery, the frightening cracks in the ancient beams high overhead, the litter of decaying documents and scrolls in the corners, the small piles of half-eaten food, the constant fall of cinnamony dust, the scattering of indecipherable taxidermy, the stain mark that ran along the walls at an identical height, a sign of some past flood survived. And with that increase in visual detail came a corresponding heightening of olfactory sensation, a blend of acrid and acidic aromas that tickled the nose, then burned. The state of the room seemed dramatically at odds with the elegance of the man who lived here, even if it was for only some short stay. Was this perhaps some Germanic trial of the spirit? Malcolm’s eyes began to weep involuntarily, and soon the entirety of him appeared to be leaking.

Perhaps these various elements led to a distortion in his senses, because Malcolm became convinced the professeur had been amused by his narration, the man’s finely sculpted features gradually warping under the pressure of an ill-fitting grin. However it was not an impression he felt comfortable commenting upon. Ne réflexion.

Finally the professeur spoke, an unmistakable smile dancing across his lips. “We will require several vessels for your various aspects, suitable bodies to contain the release of spiritual energy. Not too many as it is possible to spread the sauce too thin, as it were.”

“Vessels?”

“They need not be informed volunteers. Tell them I will feed them, pay them, whatever. I will recruit a few, but if one might acquire at least one, as assurance?”

“I do not wish to hurt anyone.”

“How might you hurt them? Paris is full of aimless foreigners now. Czechs, Poles, Asians, uncountable young Brits such as yourself. You yourself say that one meaning is as good as any other. We live in a time in which the world is full of wandering spirits. How do you know you will not be providing them with a better meaning? You might do them a favor! Bring whoever you may find here tomorrow. A similar time.”

* * *

It would be no exaggeration to say Malcolm felt qualms, although they were not of the moral kind, since he did not believe in that sort of thing. He did believe, however, in survival of the fittest, and the imperative of doing what was required by the environment you were in, which all seemed to add up to a rough sort of justice, and this particular activity, this collecting of vessels, seemed somehow less than just. Of course he did not relate all of this to Degaré, but Degaré was, indeed, his confessor, and so he did manage to cover the bare outlines of the problem.

“Merde.” Degaré spat into the restaurant’s dishwater. “I would give you myself if I could, for the price we discussed, but pardonnez moi, I find I am not yet prepared for such a major life change.” He thought for a moment, rubbing soapsuds through his greasy locks. “Have you thought of Zajic?”

“The kitchen slops man? The Czech?”

“The very one. He broke up with another girlfriend. He mopes all day, he cries. Get him out of here, I say, before I kill him.”

Malcolm found Zajic sitting out in the alley behind the kitchen, weeping. He crouched beside him and commiserated. It was not an entirely false commiseration—he had a few memories of his own, but he had lost his belief in romance long before he had lost his belief in religion. Neither was of any practical use to him.

He offered Zajic some food. The Czech smiled, his hard, slabbed, clay-like face splitting in unused directions. Malcolm offered him a job, and was suddenly swallowed by the slop man’s unwelcome embrace.

In the same gloomy chamber Malcolm lay on a low bed made up of straw and planks and the thinnest of blankets. Zajic lay on a similar arrangement beside him, nearly unconscious from heavy drink. Malcolm had drunk a small amount of wine but wanted to be relatively clear-headed for this procedure, this extraction.

But he was being constantly distracted by a commotion behind the door in a generally left direction, behind his line of sight. He hadn’t noticed a door there before, but he could hear it creaking, opening now and then, shutting with a soft bang, and the people behind it, murmuring drunkenly, possibly weeping.

“Pay no attention to them.” Meyer, the professeur, was suddenly above him, and unless Malcolm misapprehended, gazing down at them as if they were babies in their cribs. “They will come in later during the process. We start with one, we expand to two, as many vessels as are needed. The mathematics are inexact—I will know only after we have begun.”

“But they seem distressed.”

“Distressed? Oh, non, I assure you. They are simply anxious to be a part of this great expérimentent. We are surrounded by a surfeit of life force—surely you can feel it? Yours, our volunteers’, the spirits of all the soldiers who died in the war? So much to channel, to redirect, to sort! I must ask you to simply relax. I have something more for you to drink. It will go well with your wine.”

The taste was strong and bitter, but the bitterness went away immediately, replaced by an overpowering sweetness. The professor smiled broadly and danced around the room, his arms above his head, loose and waving, rubbery. But then he was back close again, a moldering book in his hands, whispering, but Malcolm could not hear him. The anxious people behind the door were too loud.

The professor caressed Malcolm’s side, and his fingertip came away bloody, and there was a knife in his hand, dripping. Malcolm watched as the professor used the knife to carve shreds out of the book, then stuffed those shreds into the wound in Zajic’s side. He had a moment’s anticipation of a different, simpler life to come, fewer complications and conflicts, an avoidance of misunderstandings. And then the professor strolled over to him, grinning widely, his hands full of those shreds, those fragments of ancient narratives, and then the professor’s hands went inside Malcolm, where they stayed, and became busy as insects.

* * *

He had been in Paris for decades, it seemed. He could not recall the year he had arrived from Prague, or the look of Prague in even the most general of detail. He could not recall why he had ever left, but he was sure it could not be desperation. It could not be desperation.

There would be no point. Worlds were coming to an end and there was no point. The cities were all failing at the same time. Had no one else noticed this? Could he be the only one?

Some days he would wander the lanes, searching the short streets, the forgotten streets, for nothing. The Rue Abattue D’enfant, the Rue des Veuves Aveugles, the Rue D’âmes Vidées. Some days he would walk to the river, and watch there. He could not remember the river’s name, but thought it might be the Seine, the Thames, the Vltava.

Some nights he climbed the shaking steps to his attic room. But Degaré now lived there. He said he had always lived there. “Monstre!” the burly Frenchmen shouted. “Meurtrier! Can you not leave me alone? You do not live here!”

Some nights he slept where he could. Some nights he wandered without sleeping.

Was he starving? Did it matter?

Everywhere he went people stared. They did not stare just at him—they stared at everything.

He himself stared, he was always staring. He did not want to miss any vanishing detail. In this at least they were brothers and sisters.

There was much he had forgotten, and yet there was much he still knew. Every idea in him had its own voice, every stray thought its own head. In him there were multitudes. He thought perhaps that particular idea might be from the Bible, but he did not know for sure.

He might be sad, he thought. He very well might be. But he could not be sure. He waited for all these other voices to tell him.

FISH

He calls himself Fish because he swims at the bottom of the pond. Most everybody he knows glides so easy above, like life wasn’t even a second thought, even the ones who live hard, who fill their insides with sewage, they’re still high in the sky as far as Fish is concerned.

He don’t mind. Sometimes it’s safer swimming at the bottom. He can look up at their faces and see they’re looking at each other, hating on each other, but not seeing him at all.

“Get outta there, Fish!” That’s his brother Paul. But Fish just found somebody’s ring in the Trench, and he has hopes for more. Paul keeps his distance from the Trench, he has no belly for it, the Trench where they dump the bodies before they burn them. Bodies lay there two, three days so they smell like nothing ever smelled before, mommies and daddies and kiddies waiting to be burned by the burning crews, always short-handed, it being such a foul job. Fish has seen the burning, and he thinks it’s pretty, the way the flames go blue in places, like they caught a soul—souls burn blue. Houses of people, blocks of people, cities of people are dying every day—pretty soon, Fish thinks, the whole world will burn blue.

But Fish finally gives it up, crawls out and rolls around in the dirt to get the stink off, then crabs after Paul, low to the ground where Fish feels safe, the ring hid in his pants pocket. Paul says it’s time to eat, and Fish was born hungry.

Along the way they stay out of trouble even though trouble passes the time. Trouble always means you eat late.

Some slime-head has his tongue down the mouth of a little girl, but they pass him by like he was scenery, even though it makes Fish’s teeth ache.

Some bald woman sits in water and screams, pinching skin until she’s black-spotted, scratching herself until the skin runs.

A clean-up crew chatters about nothing while they beat an old man with electric fans and toasters, slinging any machine with a cord into the wrinkled face, snapping ribs, pounding dead arms and legs. Paul pushes Fish’s head away so he don’t see.

A so pretty lady lies on a sofa in the middle of the street. She’s been harvested, her parts replaced with rotten potatoes and corn. Fish gets away from Paul and swims right up to her. He don’t get upset—he just looks a long while trying to figure out what he sees.

Most of the houses are burning, those dead families a cloud of smell that creeps across the sky. But the sunset is still something beautiful, like Paul says it’s been since the beginning of time.

When they get home Mama has the food hot and waiting. But Fish swims in slow, careful of a kick and a stomp, a belt across the ear.

“Paul, get your brother up off the floor,” Mama says, and it’s like the daylight finally come, and Fish sees himself in the bright new kitchen, and there’s a great green tree out the window, and the voices of little kids playing outside.

“He was talking crazy again, Ma,” Paul sings like a crow, “and jumping out of his wheelchair, rolling around on the ground. It was embarrassing! I wish you’d let me tie him in if I have to take him out!”

“We’re not tying your brother to a chair like he was some kind of animal! Not like they do in those places. We’re his family, and it’s an honor for you to mind him. Some day you’ll understand that, I pray when it’s not too late.”

Mama cries as she and Paul help Fish back up into his chair, and Paul says he’s sorry, and everybody’s sad. Except for Fish, and Mama’s new boyfriend, standing in the door.

Fish jerks his head around, and remembers, laughing loud because they live in such a nice place, with sunshine and linoleum and good smells and no Trench outside waiting for them to make a mistake.

And then Fish looks at Mama’s new boyfriend again: the smoke in his face, the blue fire in his eyes, and remembers, and remembers there are things in the pond that swim even lower than Fish.

MERRY-GO-ROUND

The elevator is the dullest of the conveyances humankind has devised. Each year I tell the young doctors, the ones who come here eager to learn the art of psychiatry, that we should model this device after the merry-go-round. The elevator takes you from a spot on one floor, to the same relative spot on the next. The distance left and right to the end of the corridors is the same from floor to floor. The machine provides no stimulation. Moving vertically, it provides only a minimal illusion of progress.

But a similar device based on the merry-go-round: there, at least, would be a kind of stimulation. There would be different spatial relationships to experience at each floor, and the return trip back up to your room would be different from the descending trip. The overall experience would be a small, but therapeutic, one. I would think that in a top-ranked psychiatric hospital, such as this one, that would be an important consideration.

Each year the brighter ones in the new class of doctors feel obliged to answer my proposal. Their counters are always the same. Their knowledge of economics and spatial relationships, after an afternoon spent formulating the answer, will lead them to the conclusion: “That kind of arrangement would take up far more of a building’s space than the standard vertical elevator. It would require an entire vertical slice of the building, at a depth equal to that of the elevator. And you would have to build a second elevator opening for every floor with the exception of the top and bottom floors. And that space could have been used for more rooms, offices, so you’d lose all that rental income as well.”

Their knowledge of physics, after an afternoon spent drawing diagrams, will lead them to the conclusion: “A device like that would require much more time to travel from floor to floor than the standard vertical elevator. The passenger booth would be traveling along the circumference of a large circle in order to reach various vertical debarkation points. So of course they’d be traveling a much longer distance than they would using an ordinary vertical conveyance. And the speed would probably have to be somewhat slower, to compensate for the physical effects brought about because of centrifugal force.”

Good, well-thought-out answers. And each year I reply, “So? So who cares if it is slower, and less economical?” And thereby teach the doctors a lesson in humanity, if they care to let one in.

Each morning we have patient care conferences: the young doctors, Dr. James Zachary—head of the program—and me. The young doctors periodically question Dr. Zachary about why he allows a patient to come along on these confidential conferences. And that, of course, is another part of the education, and why this is one of the greatest teaching hospitals of psychiatric medicine in the world.

The conferences are informal; they normally take place out in front of the hospital, on the sidewalk, as we visit the various bakeries, drug stores, news stands, and coffee shops that share the neighborhood. The establishment on the corner always has fifteen scalding cups of coffee waiting for us at precisely eight-fifteen.

The conferences, as Dr. Zachary conducts them, are always more theoretical and Socratic than specific-case oriented. He makes the new doctors think, stretch themselves, and question their preconceived notions about psychiatric diagnosis.

“The Newman girl. Fifteen years old. If you’ll remember, she has a history of difficulties with her parents, problems relating to peers, serious altercations with authority figures of all stripes: teachers, social workers, the police.”

“She’s schizophrenic.” There is always one very eager student the first week.

The young man begins to elaborate but I interrupt. I’m impassioned on the subject, perhaps too much so for my own good. I realize I risk a little more every day I stay here. “No, she’s not. That’s nonsense.” I turn to face the young man, who holds his coffee cup unsteadily, still not used to this sanctioned interruption by a patient. “Any talented psychiatrist can make a claim of schizophrenia in any person you care to name, and prove it adequately to his colleagues. Remember the meaning of the word, doctor: ‘as if split.’ You must not forget the ‘as if’ part. It is too easy; schizophrenia is a natural state of the mind. Pull something else out of your textbook, doctor.”

The young doctors quietly shift their attention to Dr. Zachary for the final word on the subject. He smiles that famous smile of his—a slight tensing of the lips that might be construed as illness in another man—and says, “Mr. Lippmann has a point, as usual. I suggest you think about what he has said.” And, again this year, the new doctors subtly change their attitudes toward me, because the great Dr. Zachary has certified my thoughts as worthy of contemplation.

We have this same interchange concerning the diagnosis of schizophrenia sometime during the first week every year. There is always a patient on the ward to use as an example, schizophrenic symptoms always being in good supply. I know that Dr. Zachary agrees with me on the subject, although he will never admit to it outright. That isn’t his strategy.

I originally came to the hospital because of another patient of Dr. Zachary’s. Forty years ago, Dr. Zachary was just beginning his rise to fame. His patient, Roger Ellison, was a friend of a friend. I seem to recall that my friend was distantly related to Roger in some way, but my memory of that bit of conversation may be an imagined one, although I would never use that word “imagined” in describing it to Dr. Zachary.

The three of us lived in a small hotel down by the waterfront. My friend and I were roommates. Roger lived on an upper floor. He would drop down and visit us occasionally, but I never knew him well. He was mainly interested in talking to my roommate, my friend.

Roger was a very sick individual; I would no doubt agree with any diagnosis the young doctors cared to make concerning him. The specific symptoms are irrelevant; as human beings, most of us have some knowledge as to what it truly means when a human mind is in serious trouble, regardless of the jargon brought to bear by those who are trained and paid to do so. Roger possessed a superior talent for making himself unhappy. That unhappiness took many forms, but it was remarkably stubborn in its ability to circumvent the most careful safeguards. Nothing brought joy or even satisfaction to his existence.

The night Roger poisoned himself my friend was away for the weekend. He pulled himself through my doorway—I’d left it open because of the heat—and called to me from the living room floor. I’d been in the kitchen preparing iced tea. By the time I got to him, his limbs were nearly paralyzed. He had an envelope in his hand—a will, I later discovered. He insisted I “take care of things.” He made me promise I wouldn’t turn the envelope over to the police. I’d never seen anyone die before. It was powerful, irresistible. This person whom I’d met, talked to briefly, yet scarcely known, had died on my living room floor. I could not refuse whatever he asked.

Later I found Dr. Zachary’s card in his wallet. The next day I called his office and made an appointment; I thought he could help me locate the family. I left a note for my roommate, my friend, telling him what had happened and where I was going to be. I’m sure I did. I haven’t seen him since.

Dr. Zachary’s office was smaller then, but just as quiet, as reverential, as it is now. I told him of the will. I handed it to him. He examined it. That was the first time I was to see his famous smile.

“And Roger left this with you,” Dr. Zachary began, “whom he hardly knew.”

“I was there when he died, the only one around. He died on my living room floor. It was a—profound is the word, I suppose—a profound experience.”

“I see. A profound experience.” He paused, looking at the will as if he were reading it, but I didn’t think he was, in fact, reading it. He had already read it several times. “I had not seen Roger in several weeks; he had broken numerous appointments. I assumed he had decided to give up on therapy.” He turned and gazed at me with what I thought might be mock-seriousness, but which probably wasn’t from him. “Therapy can be quite demanding, and a client will feel progress isn’t being made. But I assure you there is usually some progress, however invisible it might be to the client. Sometimes it takes years before you realize how much progress you have, in fact, made.”

His use of the second person pronoun bothered me. It sounded like a sales pitch. “Roger appeared to be a pretty disturbed individual,” I said.

“Oh? And what makes you say that?”

I hadn’t expected the question; I’d thought it was obvious. “He was terribly unhappy. At least, he acted unhappy, and agitated all the time, nervous.”

“Hmmm. Yes, Roger was unhappy. And yourself? Are you happy?”

“I—well, yes, I’m happy. Reasonably content.”

“Reasonably content. I see.” He glanced down at the will. “It says here that Roger wanted to leave most of his belongings to his mother and father. And yet, I know that his mother and father have been dead for years. How do you explain that?”

Dr. Zachary was frightening me. I suddenly realized that I might be in a very dangerous situation. “I don’t know. Roger was pretty disturbed.”

“Disturbed, you say? And yet you also say you hardly knew him.”

“Well, yes. But it didn’t take an expert to see…” Dr. Zachary smiled, and I halted my sentence.

“This will is typewritten,” he stated simply.

“Yes, it is.”

“Roger’s signature is also typewritten.” He smiled again. “Roger never signed this.”

“Well, talk to my roommate. He and Roger were related somehow. He’ll probably know more about it; he knew Roger well. They talked a great deal.”

“Yes,” he said, getting up. “I’m sure they did.” The interview was over.

Dr. Zachary informed me that they needed me to be available for further questioning, that matters of estate were quite serious affairs. He asked me if I would stay over as their guest while the authorities completed their investigation. I said yes.

I have never been able to say why I let them keep me that first night. Dr. Zachary brings the issue up from time to time in the morning conferences. “Just why do you suppose Mr. Lippmann allowed us to keep him that first night forty years ago?” he asks the group of young doctors. “No one forced him. The legal criteria had not been met.” But of course the legal criteria were met soon thereafter. Dr. Zachary has a talent for collecting all the required signatures. “So why did Mr. Lippmann acquiesce?”

No one has ever given a satisfactory answer. Some students propose theories and other students shoot them down. They cannot imagine themselves doing the same. Why would any mentally competent person do such a thing? I certainly have no answer, and perhaps that ignorance is what keeps me here. That mystery. To contain mysteries is a dangerous thing. There are those who will lock you up for that alone.

I’ve never been informed as to the final disposition of Roger Ellison’s belongings. Perhaps my former roommate and friend has them. Or had them; it has been forty years, after all. Or the authorities may have donated them to the poor.

Or perhaps Dr. Zachary has had them in his possession all this time. Perhaps there was something in Roger’s room he needed, was afraid to have revealed, or required for his research. Perhaps my old roommate had a hand in this as well.

All these theories are, of course, paranoid, whether true or not. So are best left unvoiced. They, too, can result in one’s confinement.

Over the years I have had my supporters among the new class of doctors. They usually come forward around the fifth or sixth week. “It’s hard to believe that a man of Mr. Lippmann’s insight, warmth, and intelligence has a serious mental problem, particularly one that would require such a lengthy hospitalization. He’s much better adjusted than most of us would be in his situation, Dr. Zachary.”

That came early this morning, from a short, bespectacled, blond youth. He had struck me from the first as an unusually sensitive type. Some of the students nodded slightly, as if they had been waiting for someone to express that opinion. Others focused their attention immediately on Dr. Zachary.

It is odd how every year this one issue is construed by the students, and worried over, as a direct challenge to Zachary’s theories and methods. Even if it were so, he never seems to take it as a serious rebuff.

“Does intelligence make one immune to mental illness? Does penetrating insight? Does warmth? Think on this proposition: some might say that those qualities actually make imbalance a more likely occurrence.”

I find myself siding with Dr. Zachary, even when it’s my own condition we are discussing. Without stating his propositions as his own, he proposes quite clearly. And it is hard to believe that what he proposes could be wrong.

At the end of the conference he turned, and smiled his smile my way. “You’re a difficult case, Lippmann. We’ll discover the nature of your illness yet. Even if it requires another forty years.”

As the patient care conference breaks up I head back to my room on the tenth floor, riding the elevator that should have been a merry-go-round. It is visitation day. There are children in the halls, wives, husbands, relatives. But it is the children who are most noticeable, racing into open elevators and pushing buttons at random, squealing as the elevator that should have been a merry-go-round makes its many unnecessary stops.

By the time we reach the fifth floor my breathing is ragged. By the time we reach the tenth the tears are leaking out of my eyes. As I struggle to open my door with the worn-out key the sobs fill my throat and spill out over my palsied hands. Embarrassed, I push the door open jerkily, ushering my sobs inside.

You would think Roger Ellison would have had some relatives with small children. They form my only pool of potential visitors, and yet none of them has ever come. But I feel sure they must have been informed of my existence, by the police if not by Dr. Zachary himself.

Ellison’s death had a profound effect on me. I was stirred by such compassion for this crawling, pitiful suicide. I could not have refused a last request.

Dr. Zachary must have been quite upset at losing a patient.

I cry for a very long time in the darkening room, terrified that someone might overhear me. When the doorknob rattles and the lock clicks I am not surprised to see Dr. Zachary standing in my entranceway.

“Why are you so unhappy, Mr. Lippmann?”

“What’s there to be happy about, Dr. Zachary? I have no family, no friends.”

“I am your friend, Mr. Lippmann. Even if I’m your only one.”

I turn and gaze at him, suddenly feeling sorry, for him, for Dr. Zachary. “I know, Dr. Zachary. And I am your only friend.”

“You’re depressed, Mr. Lippmann. You have delusions of grandeur.”

“I am unhappy, Dr. Zachary. Wouldn’t you be?”

“You could have left a long time ago, at the first, when it all started.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.” But he has already left. I can hear him walking down the corridor. To the elevator.

Which should have been … a Ferris wheel. A Ferris wheel. Not a merry-go-round. Is that why he has kept me here all these years? A glitch in my thoughts. A misfired neuron. A palsy that made me say “merry-go-round” when all the time I was envisioning a Ferris wheel. One foul piece demonstrating that the entire mind was souring. So here is Dr. Zachary’s secret evidence of my insanity.

When patient care conferences begin in the morning I will have the answers to all of Dr. Zachary’s elliptical questions. The other students will be quite impressed. At last we have concrete verification of Lippmann’s illness. Now a course of treatment can begin.

THE GREEN DOG

How strange it is to stare into the mirror and find that the one staring back at you is not at all whom you expected.

Sometimes I think that toward the end of my life I will become an old green dog.

Not that the dog would ever understand he was green. Like most dogs, he had a difficult time distinguishing among yellow and orange and green, or even red, not to mention the difficulty a dog has finding a reasonable mirror. A dog will find its mirror in his master’s eyes, we hear—but all too often what he finds there is small and miserable.

* * *

The dog didn’t remember that, as a boy in high school, it had known a girl whose peroxide-bleached hair had turned this same shade of green in the swimming pool. The girl’s hair had eventually gone back to auburn, but this was the dog’s natural color.

Canine greenness being a rarity, the dog was regarded with delight and distaste, wariness and incredulity. Other animals didn’t pay much attention to his color, for he smelled like a dog, made dog sounds, marked his territory like a dog, fought like a dog over scraps of food and places in the sun. But people noticed. A few took his pigmentation as an excuse to throw things at him, some of which hurt, some of which he caught in his mouth and determined to be edible. A few others tried to entice him closer, and once in a while the prospect of having his ears scratched outweighed both his street-wise caution and his dislike of being inspected. Most, though, kept their distance, thinking him an aberration of nature or their own minds, or his color a symptom of some dreaded and contagious disease.

This dog was lucky enough to have neither master nor mirror. If he’d had a mirror, and if mirrors made any sense to dogs, he’d have more or less expected to see an older man going to fat and gray, going to invisibility as his eyes faded and his voice grew weaker, and even though he had gained weight steadily through his middle years, he’d have seemed less substantial, as expansive as a cloud and no more significant in the great span of eternity. Then had come that too warm, too humid morning when he woke up as a dog.

The green dog howled then, in that mournful way of dogs and men. Some would say it was a sadness without much legitimacy, since no tragedy had occurred, no painful injury. It was the sadness of the human being living his human life. It was the sadness of the shape-changer.

The dog was lucky in another way: he wasn’t plagued by a man’s ambition. His flanks and belly were crusted with scars, including the vague crease from a human appendectomy. He’d sacrificed a testicle in a losing battle with a garbage truck. And now he was content to roll around on his back with his diminished genitals in the air, inordinately proud of what others considered a warped and sorry bit of punctuation. The man still in him identified it as a semi-colon. Used to join two main clauses, and between coordinate elements containing commas, to indicate a subtle variation of voice; the semi-colon was by far the man’s favorite punctuation mark. The fact that the man had a favorite punctuation mark spoke volumes about who he had become.

* * *

Sometimes the green dog saw the man it had been out in the street, or wading through the tall grass staring at his feet, as if having lost something very important, as if having lost his mind to the green dog. The man was lost, or puzzled, and these were things the green dog understood because it had often been lost or puzzled. How the green dog could still see the man it used to be did not puzzle it, because this was a man and the green dog was a dog who had left the concerns of a man behind.

The green dog sensed it should probably stay away from the man, but it could not. It was drawn to the man by forces as basic and compelling as its need to eat and get rid of what it had eaten, both as pleasurable as they were necessary. So one night it showed up at the man’s back door after the day went dark, and sang the universal sadness that even the man could understand. The man brought a bowl of something to the back door and laid it down for the green dog to eat, and the green dog ate what was in the bowl without bothering to smell it first, because it trusted the man it used to be.

And so the green dog came to feed each night at the house of the man it had been when it moved upright through the world. Although the food the man served was edible, something was not quite right about it. Sometimes the man cooked the food with the paper still wrapped around it; the dog ate the burned paper, too, which tasted quite good. Sometimes the man didn’t cook the food at all, which was fine with the green dog, even though it somehow knew this wasn’t so fine as far as the man was concerned.

* * *

Finally one night the dog came for supper and the man came to the back door without a bowl in his hand. The man opened the screen door and held it as the green dog readily trotted inside. “Here,” the man said, gesturing around the kitchen. For a moment the dog was confused, thinking it must be daylight again and this a garbage heap—it had that very smell, that very appearance. The dog looked up at the man. “Don’t look so stupid!” the man shouted. “Help yourself!” And after a brief, sad and nervous time, the dog did what the man said.

The man himself ate very little in the days that followed. Sometimes he would sit down on the floor with the dog and put a plate no cleaner than the dog’s bowl on the floor in front of him. Sometimes he would stick his fingers into the food, bring them into his mouth and suck on them loudly. The dog was hungry even though all it really wanted to do was watch the man.

But most of the time the man did not eat. Most of the time the man stared at the food, and spoke words at the food, but did not eat the food. Out of respect the dog held back from its own food as long as it could, but eventually of course it ate because it had the honesty of a dog, which compels it to eat when it is hungry, to rest when it is tired, to bark and to howl and to make any noise possible with its particular vocal chords when it feels whatever it is destined to feel. And to ignore what it sees in the mirror.

The man, on the other hand, had lied so long to himself and to others he could no longer tell if he was tired or hungry or in some sad and lonely state with the best part of him residing in this ugly green dog of the solitary testicle.

* * *

Eventually the man fell ill. The green dog had been expecting this, because even a dog understands that everything must eat in order to live, just as it must breathe and drink and move through the world with others of its kind. These are things that even a green dog knows.

The man who was the green dog before there even was a green dog became so ill he slept most of the time, and when he could get up he managed only to sit without moving in the large brown chair. The green dog didn’t like the large brown chair because it faced a mirror. A snippet of leftover man-thought flitted through the dog-consciousness: mirrors pretended to show everything, but in fact showed very little.

How strange to think another thing’s thoughts, thoughts it had no hope of understanding.

Even though the man himself seemed to have no liking for mirrors he sat watching the man in the mirror for days at a time. Eventually he did not return to his bed at all but sat in the brown chair day after day, watching the man in the mirror carefully, as if waiting for something sad or awful to happen.

When the awful thing happened, the green dog howled. Then it went into the kitchen to relieve itself and look for more food.

* * *

How strange to wake up as someone else then wake up as someone else again.

The man in the brown chair who had become a green dog had no strength left for walking or lifting or even eating, but he did have strength enough to recognize the man in the mirror for what he was: dust and reflection, lost skin cells and idle fantasy molded by shadow, a compendium of every person he’d had any stray urge to be.

And as the man in the brown chair declined, becoming less like a man and more like a piece of badly worn furniture, he came to understand that the man in the mirror was far more than he had ever been. He came to understand that he had given the man in the mirror the best he had dreamed and hoped for, and consequently the man in the mirror—although completely imaginary and not much heavier than a dying breath—was far more alive than the man in his sagging saddle of furniture, in fact was far more alive than this man had been at the best of times.

This is not to say that the man was overcome with any kind of sadness or regret. He had led what he considered an interesting life. He’d had a family who cared what happened to him and he’d had a career better than some. And a wife who had loved him so much that each day it was yet another surprise for this man who had grown up without the expectation of love.

The fact that the man in the mirror was so much more was undeniable, and unchangeable. The man could accept this because he felt he had no choice in the matter. Certainly none of us could ever be as fully realized, as complete, as our imaginary selves. And now at the end of his life he could think of nothing better to do than to gaze at his better self as first breath, then imagination, left his body.

* * *

The man in the mirror felt only the vaguest connection with the old man slumped over in his ratty brown chair. He gazed at the dead man much as he might have looked at a somber photograph, one he had seen perhaps too many times.

In fact, the only interesting thing to happen in this particular view was when an ancient green dog occasionally wandered over to the dead man to lick his fingers and howl. For some reason, this vaguely amused the man in the mirror but he suppressed his chuckles, not wanting to startle the dog from the room. Eventually his patience was rewarded and the dog stared through the mirror into the mirror man’s eyes. Which froze the dog in terror. Which made the man in the mirror smile.

But even without the green dog and the dead man in his sorry chair, there were still things the man in the mirror could do to entertain himself. He might follow the trail of a ray of light as it made its way from that other world of more limited possibilities, through the silvered glass and into the unlimited realm he called home. He might stay with that ray for a time as it distorted against the furniture of his world and made itself into colors as fragile as the last thoughts before sleep. He might step in front of that light and grin as it distorted his carefully formed image, turning it into water and cloud and dark. He might paint the sky of his world with the fragments of his own brittle image.

He might step through the silvered glass and take the place of a dead man.

* * *

How strange, thought the man in the mirror, to see the man you were and feel nothing but embarrassment and shame.

Without breathing, the man from the mirror watched the man he might have been sleep, feeling curiously empty, even of humor. He attempted a grin but could not maintain it in the coarser atmosphere of this more mundane world. In frustration he kicked at the dead man’s leg, which swung swiftly away from the blow. The man from the mirror was surprised by the quickness of the dog, only just hearing its growl before it clamped its jaws around the mirror man’s own leg. The mirror man felt no pain, of course, or irritation. He observed the dog with vague interest until it released his leg and slunk into its corner by the old brown chair and its dead master, watching the mirror man with fear and anger. The mirror man did not fear the dog but still decided he would not strike his dead counterpart again.

How strange to see yourself yet not see yourself at all, the man from the mirror thought, watching the version of himself, which ironically was far more real than himself, collapse into decay inside the ancient brown chair. The mirror man could not bring himself to feel sorry for the man he’d actually been, because that man had already felt far too sorry for himself. The man from the mirror understood all too well that life was in large part image and reflection: you create an image of yourself out of light, dust, and air, and you send that image out into the world while you sit home alone in your rotting brown chair counting flies. If because of that image you achieve some sort of success or someone loves you, then it’s all for the good. If the image fails, it’s all just dust and light anyway, so what do you have to complain about? Real people whined endlessly—in the abstract realms of the imagination you could hear their distant voices scraping at the gates, so much so that the dwellers in dream could hardly hear themselves sing sometimes.

The mirror man looked down. The green dog was at his feet, gazing up with eyes veined in yellow and red. Shoo, the mirror man said to the dog. Go away.

The green dog urinated on the mirror man’s imaginary leg.

All right! the mirror man shouted. He loved things! He loved his wife, he loved his children, his grandchildren, the mirror man said, gazing over at the putrefying corpse, though he was a bit soft and dreamy at times. It would have been better for his children if he’d been firmer

The mirror man felt the familiar warm liquid running down his oh-so-perfectly imagined leg, wetting the stiff, unwrinkled socks, staining the shiny-with-never-a-polish shoes. He glared down at the grinning, grinning green of the dog. Okay! He loved and was loved. He believed life was hard enough that no one has the right to make things more difficult for anyone else. He loved the beginning of the day when the spreading light awakened the light and color of everything it touched. He loved the end of the day and the smell the fading light and heat left behind. Sometimes he had trouble with the in-between times, mind you…

The green dog growled and the mirror man stepped back. But he tried, that’s the important thing, he did his best, he made an effort. He loved making things, even if it was just another space with a light bulb hanging over it, and then he loved telling what people might do in this space, he loved clubhouses, libraries, and family rooms, he loved telling stories, he loved just having something to do, he tried to invent new occasions to celebrate with his offspring and theirs, he loved inventing holidays, he loved turning everything into play, he loved seeing, and smelling, and dreaming of everything, including all the things he would never be. He loved making the effort. He loved trying.

The mirror man sank into himself then, spent and, much to his surprise, saddened by the longest speech he’d ever made in a life at least as long as that of the dead man in the brown chair.

The green dog devoured him with one last long and lingering look, then departed the house he’d raised children and grandchildren in, mourned a wife and dreamed his less-than-practical dreams in, looking for what lay outside, and what lay beyond.

A DREAM OF THE DEAD

The dead dream all night the life we have this morning. They love the way we, who know so little of sleep, try to drive it from our bodies with the day’s first yawn.

Almost as much as they love the bright yellow of egg on plates they used to own.

Almost as much as they love the sadness of cupboards, and the years tucked inside so carelessly, with no thought of meaning, or the eventual shape of it all, lying in the dust disarrayed.

They watch us from the rough boles of forgotten trees, the ones left unnoticed between the buildings and on the edges of town, sharing the space with termites and fairies, and the carved-in promises, to names whose faces are now beyond the reach of even imagination, whose pronunciation is the arcane prayer we make as our eyes close, too soon, at the end of the day.

But compared to the dead we are a quiet breed. We hold onto longings for decades without speaking their facts. We’ll strangle our children before speaking our minds. The dead recognize our problems with the truth, for they have seen us tremble so many times in the wake of their passing.

How often have we seen that color, that pale color unlike any other, astray in the last moments of sunset, a thread of it tracing the slant of the spring rain, and just a touch around the eyes of the child we love past reason? It’s the color of a dead mother’s heart, but we cannot bring ourselves to say so.

And this absence that swells the lungs with shadow, this despair that cannot be whispered or even shouted away, it is this spirit now which animates our days.

The dead understand these things and more. The dead know the music of diminishment and the deceit that bolsters joy. The dead wrap themselves in garments of exhaustion so they might pass unnoticed from night into light. The dead are the rags and the mud, the lamp and the lungs, the stab and the limp and the vulture’s singing mouth of the world. The dead yawn even as we yawn but their throats are yellowed and poisoned by the souring energy of the world. The flowers they hold in their glowing hands have been stolen from the poor, blossoms turning to ash as the dead glide wearily through the world. Their eyes are bald of lashes, turning to glass and scabs as they spread like felons through the world, committing their crimes against crab and dove, child and falcon as they saturate every promising landscape of the world.

For every quiet snowfall is a cold comfort pulled over the dead. Every wayward smile is food for their whispers, every shaded ravine a quarry for the hiss, the whistle, the endless complaint, and whine of the dead. Every butterfly swollen with dusk plays the priest for their hollow pleadings. Every shy and unknowing gesture becomes an invitation for their helmeted kiss.

For this is the truth of it, the tribulation, and the detour: the armies of the dead have made a carnival of our small disasters. Within their hidden elevators they descend the grave height from reason into those secret places where even the best of us aspire to fool.

I tell you we’d be better off killing them, if we only had the method, if we only had the time.

SATURDAY

You know you have misgivings but you cannot articulate them. Your mind is a flaming bird alighted on a sinking boat. Some days you can feel neither hands nor feet and it is your eyes and tongue desperately grabbing. This is what happens when the world finally changes, when it shakes off its hide, and everything invisible slides from its pores. You can barely catch your breath and you are so afraid if you breathe too deeply you will take in something living and then what will you do? You might attempt to blow it out of your lungs or vomit it out of your stomach but you know the aggressive desperation of the invisible, its need to hang on, so how might you expel it without it dragging some essential part of yourself along?

These are the cautionary thoughts of those living at the end of the world. These are the tales we tell ourselves as the lights begin to dim and the cold creeps down from the mountains. These are the preparations one must make when everything unseen, unheard, and once thought merely imagined finally make themselves completely known, descend from their attics, crawl out of their caves, smash their windows, transcend their closeted realms.

All week you have felt deceptively clean, your skin scrubbed, your collars ironed, your socks fresh from their packaging, your rotting breath disguised by some cancer-causing sweetener. All week you have smiled and nodded and showed your appreciation. All week you have attended to your chores. But now at the end you can hear the whispers issuing from your cells. Here at the end you can see the face of all that was turned away from you. There at the end you can smell and taste the decay in your own spinal cord.

Here is the place you have lived in most of your life, these walls this carpeting these horizontals these verticals your pants your shirt your cocoon your packaging. Here is where you huddle against the winds that scrape away everything. Here is the one warm spot derived from your own body heat. This is your pinpoint on the map of the universe.

Your bed writhes with recovered memory until you can no longer stand it. Rising up on impaled feet you stagger across floorboards oozing the debris of lifetimes, every forgotten toy and lost dime, fevered notes to self and all, the infinite divisions of trash and discarded skin, every misplaced acquisition vibrating now with the power of wasted energies.

In the rooms of your apartment, furniture floats through a porridge of dust and air before bursting into tired old flames. The photographs recording your life revolve into tunnels and doors as old lovers and family and friends whose dissolving flesh irritates your fingertips pass from the warehouses of desire into this small booth of regret where you have lived more years than you can remember. Here the phone rings day and night and either you ignore the summons or pick up the receiver on a thousand miles of empty air. Hello Hello your syllables break without releasing sound. The letters of your attempt make scratches in the jellied air, which fall to the floor where their segmented legs carry them away into the mysteries of the baseboard.

So this is what it’s come to: dead hours waiting for an exterminator at the end of time, your furniture gone to fire and everywhere you step is a worry of vermin. This is everything your parents warned you about with their very lives. You wander your empty rooms railing and shouting speeches in some language even you do not understand. You beat on the sealed door of your life until, tired of your whining and complaining, it releases you to lobbies and corridors where your fellow inmates howl at the bars. Down flight after flight the stairs fold up behind you, the rooms close to nothing and the halls telescope one inside the next until the moment you step outside, everything that once protected you is a sloppy stack of cards in a trash-pasted lane.

Despite the inexorable forces which threaten to pull you into rags and sticks, you take a moment for this glorious sun, this exquisite warmth you’ve never spared much time for, even though, finally, when memory and passion and your last hope for the attention of another human being fades away, it is this distant holy fire you will miss the most, and the unpresuming embrace it makes of everything you’re still able to see. All around you the air boils and brightly colored threads rise and fall through the texture of it as if attempting a repair. Here and in the distance the arbitrary plantings of grass and shrub, iron and concrete forms launch themselves into sky where they blast apart beneath the gaze of final perceptions. The crusty hardscape of the world withers under the countless, minute cracks of your awakening, becoming fine as powder then blowing away on the winds that raze generations.

All that is left is everything that came before you, before all that you knew and all that they knew. All that is left is the rock and the fire and the loamy decay, the powder of stone and the powder of knowledge. All that is left is the space between there and the there you will never reach. All that is left is the space owned by the invisible.

Now, at the end of your week in the world you have nothing left but the invisible to love you. You have nothing left but the sigh of the empty and this unknown world’s forgotten gaze. You have nothing left but the desperation under the tongue and the eagerness in the palm. You have nothing left but what you have no voice for, however wide you open your mouth and work the exhausted muscles of your throat.

For at last you have arrived at nothing, understand that nothing binds these threads of flesh together, that nothing holds nerve to bone or gives direction to your vanishing blood. Yours is a religion and a politics of nothing, and you find you have nothing left to say.

APHASIC WORLD SYNDROME

The cats had climbed onto the outside of the house again. Alex stopped to count them—he didn’t understand how he could know this, but he believed their numbers were a more precise indication of his condition than any of the multitude of tests his doctors had performed. He stopped at 127, too depressed to continue. They made an exact accounting difficult anyway—they were in constant movement, digging their claws into the weathered planks with each step, sending slivers and chunks of house raining down onto the lawn below. When they howled—usually singly or in pairs, but occasionally gathering together for a chorus of group complaint—they irritated his own fragile ductwork, so that he was forced to conduct his daily chores in tears.

He made his way down the runway to mail the prayers he had gathered into his arms: sad, orphaned prayers he had sung during spare moments, now ready to sail into other households where they would torture the sleeping inhabitants with paper cuts. Sadness turned to anger quickly in this day and age, so who was he to tell his prayers their indiscriminate violence was wrong? At least he would soon have them safely out of the house.

At the end of the runway waited the eager birdhouse. He rolled up each prayer tightly and stuffed it into the tiny round hole, increasingly excited as the displaced birds flew out and peeked into his ears. There the yellow candles burned, filling his head with smoke.

Once all his prayers were safely inside the bird house, Alex raised the small white flag of surrender so that the mail carrier would know he had been thoroughly defeated, and his prayers were ready to be picked up and sent on to their eventual assassinations.

All the cats had come down from the house and now gathered at the base of the birdhouse, waiting to capitalize on any avian mistakes. The howling winds on their grand bicycles regaled him with tails of mice and men.

It suddenly occurred to him that in all his doctors’ speeches not once had aphasia been mentioned as a possible symptom of his favorite, sweet disease. But he was on a diet in any case and had no time for demise.

Besides, he had never been good with words. Chopping each one down had been such hard work he’d finally switched his giant screaming baby to coal.

But what if the problem wasn’t his? Perhaps it was the world itself that had captured illness, and instead of constantly speaking the wrong word (for the world is largely mute, no matter how much you flatter it), the glory of its aphasia was that it kept bringing forth out of its nervous womb the wrong object, the incorrect animal, the mistaken human being desperate with amnesia.

But Alex was certainly no mathematician or rogue milkman of the dreamlands. He was hovel born, his mother a cello falling down a forgotten staircase, his father an unemployed cigarette embalmer.

He was no vacuum cleaner to refinish the world—he could hardly polish his own toes.

But something had to be done. The cats had stretched out his tongue and were now playing it with their tiny bows, making a music so apologetic he might cry himself awake.

DECEMBER

The snow accumulated slowly over several weeks. No more than an inch fell in any one evening, but the best efforts of those in charge were ineffective at removing the snow the following day. The best efforts of a brilliant and uncompromising December sun were equally useless. Each night while the city slept the snow drifted down, almost imperceptibly, like a slow fall of white dust, the powder of a dream shoved against the saw blade of consciousness. And it was so cold, despite that bright sun, that the powder stayed, collected, and grew to a phenomenal depth of numbing whiteness.

Once they realized what was happening to their city, the people became alarmed, of course. Those who remained in charge were chastised for faulty preparation. Plans and strategies were devised and adopted. Promises were made. Programs were implemented. And still the slow snow accumulated. With no end in sight.

As those who pretended still to be in charge talked and studied, shouted and divided, the people of that city—singly, then collectively—eventually accepted both the cold and the depth of this December snow. Businesses closed as employees stopped showing up for work. Downed power and phone lines went unrepaired. Families gathered around and smashed their TVs. People whispered to each other in the dark at their dinner tables. Parents made up new and startling tales to reveal to their children at bedtime.

It was during this time that those who used to be in charge—out wandering the empty streets with shovels in their hands—began discovering the bodies.

The bodies were cold and well preserved. Further investigation demonstrated that they had been dead for a very long time. The bodies were those of men and women, parents and grandparents, but outnumbering all of these by a vast quantity were the bodies of the children. Thousands of children, faces immobilized, thoughts frozen in mid-formulation. Stuck behind trees, cradled in frosted bushes, stacked along the streets like earth-filled sacks damming a flood. No attempt had been made to hide their bodies. Their small still forms lay scattered like indecision.

Those who hoped one day to be in charge again searched their records carefully: none of the families of these parents and grandparents, none of the mothers and fathers of these countless sweet-faced dead children had reported them missing.

All out of procedures, those who were again in charge (if only of a few thousand unreported dead) refrigerated the bodies until the issue could be studied further.

During the next month the temperature rose almost imperceptibly, a degree or so each day. The snow melted. The people of the city gradually grew less inclined to sleep and dream.

In the high offices of those again comfortably in charge, the officials waited for the phone calls of alarmed citizens seeking their loved ones. No phone calls ever came.

Life in the city returned to normal. Businesses reopened. Voices rose above a whisper.

And all over the city they were again being murdered: the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands. Those in charge never found any bodies, and, even if they had, they would have discovered no wounds.

THE MASK CHILD

A Play for Puppets

The Puppets: Tall, thin, stylized: think Japanese Noh, think Greek tragedy. The tallest of these figures is THE MASK CHILD. Either use two versions for child and adult or construct a puppet that grows. Through the progress of the play the Mask Child wears a bewildering succession of masks over the puppet head. The masks he wears as a child are much larger than the ones he wears as an adult, with the exception of the Baby Mask which is small-featured, delicate. A few of these masks are described in the text—have fun with the rest. His drapery (clothing) suggests that the body hidden beneath is “different.” It consists of uneven stripes with odd corners, lines that do not meet, clashing colors. The PARENTS behave as one unit, a chorus. In fact, one puppet will do: two heads and two torsos, draped in complementary clothing, joined at the hip. The NARRATOR has a long face and beard. He wears a robe similar to that which a judge might wear. The BOYS is a chorus of adolescent boys—see their introduction into the play for more description. The GIRLS is a similar chorus of adolescent girls. The TUTOR has long hair, dark robes, and a wizard’s pointed cap.

The Setting: Consistent with the classical Japanese Noh/Greek tragic feel.

Performance Note: Play around as you wish with the delivery, but most of these lines were meant to be half-chanted, half-sung.

NARRATOR: It is a strange thing, responsibility. It is that thing we all demand but few would acknowledge owing. We all know we have certain duties, but few of us truly understand the ramifications of those duties. We all know that our fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers before them, have behaved in ill-considered ways—in fact, at certain times in our lives we glory in their inadequacies, which lead us to believe that we are so much more.

And being so much more, do we pick up the blame they discarded? Do we take it upon ourselves to cure the past and make amends?

Of course not. We may be many things, but we are not responsible.

The events told here happened a long time ago. The parties involved are all dead, as far as I can determine. Certainly it is our right to say such things could not happen in our neighborhood, in our city, in our country.

We have evolved. We are a better race, now.

The bad old times have passed. Huzzah for our brave new age!

I have been a judge for nearly forty years, and am now approaching retirement. This case was before my time. But I could tell you stories. You wouldn’t want to hear them, but they are available if you ever feel the need. Such stories do not go away.

The parents were older. Just how old has gone undocumented. Some have set their age as early sixties, perhaps feeling this would make their story more unsettling, or because it might provide some explanation for what occurred. But some events defy explanation, despite our need for it.

What we do know is that they had waited all of their lives for a child to be born. This child. In fact, they had given up hope, and had adjusted their futures accordingly: their twilight years would be spent in horticulture, and on plane trips to distant cities with other childless couples of their age.

Then pregnancy came like a toe stub in the middle of the night and their child, this child, was born.

But something was terribly wrong with this particular child, her child, his child, this strange little twisted and discolored bit of flesh. Nothing they could have imagined. In fact, if the couple had taken in a movie and this apparition had traversed the screen, they would have gotten up and left.

I must confess that no records have survived describing the specific nature of the child’s deformity, if indeed there ever were such records. All we have are descriptions of other people’s reactions to the child—most importantly, the parents’. In any case, early on the child developed his own solution for his singular facade.

[Lights up on the PARENTS, moving slowly side to side, rocking.]

PARENTS (almost a song): What to do when to do it, how does it happen when you hope and dream, the surprise that comes unasked for, the joke of it, the terrible joke of it, these questions of duty, of life so unexpected, these questions they ask of you, all of them asking so much, so much, and much too soon.

[THE MASK CHILD totters in, draped to the neck. We can see nothing about his body, but he appears to move more like an insect or arachnid than any human child (or is this simply a child’s normal awkwardness magnified?). He wears a small Baby Face mask, perfectly formed, doll-like, but empty of character.]

THE MASK CHILD: Mother, Father, see? Can you see, can you not see? I’m a real boy now. A real boy. [The PARENTS ignore him, so intent are they on their rocking, their swaying. They drift back and forth across the stage—he follows them closely, essentially chasing them.]

PARENTS (chanted/sung softly and monotonously underneath THE MASK CHILD’S speech): What to say, what to do, our duty, just a boy, he cannot understand, cannot know, how people are, how people really are, what to say, what they’ll do, what to do, what to say, just a boy, how could he, how could he know, our duty, our life, our life, what must be, what must be done.

THE MASK CHILD: A boy, a real boy, like the other boys, like so many others. Now we can toss the ball, now you can teach me about bikes, like so many others, Mother, Father, we can go to movies together, we can go to plays, we can, we can, I am so alike, I can be so liked.

[He finally crashes into them. They reel—he stares up at them.]

PARENTS: You cannot know, you cannot understand, how there is no play in this, how there is so much duty, so much to be done, and no one to tell you, no one who understands, what must be done.

THE MASK CHILD: To play, to sing, to dance, to walk outside in sun and snow, hand in hand like so many others, a boy like so many others, in the morning, with the sun on my face, with the sun.

PARENTS (more loudly): We never knew there could be, what’s the duty? We did not understand, the shapes, the package, how a life might arrive, so many, so many, how could it be, in the night, when no one is listening, where no one can hear, in the night, dear child, in the night.

THE MASK CHILD (scrambling back, shouting): But in the sun, so many others, tossing the ball, Father! A real boy, Mother! So real, in the sun, on my face, my face, Mother! In the sun, in the sun.

[Fade out, fade in on the NARRATOR]

NARRATOR: I see it every day. We all make the mistake. We forget what they are. We forget their humanity. The children are so cute, we say. They are so adorable. Like a doll, we say. Just like a monkey. But of course the children are not dolls or monkeys. And they sometimes understand far more than we could ever imagine.

The problem, I would submit, is that our imaginations are so very poor, there are so many things we cannot imagine: how they think, what they feel, the many shapes a life can take, the varied forms still with the power to think, the passion to feel, the imagination to dream such sights and sounds you would be astounded, you would weep from the sheer surprise of it all.

Very little is documented of his adolescent years. But even with our poor imaginations we know. We can see.

[Fade out on the NARRATOR, fade in on a group of adolescent BOYS—all similarly constructed except for their hair colors. As they move about the stage two points beneath their drapery beat rhythmically against the cloth. The motion is somewhat reminiscent of grasshoppers. It becomes clear that these represent knees as their legs are constantly pumping—these boys are all knees and elbows, and their movements about the stage make this kind of awkward, synchronized adolescent dance. In fact these puppets might be constructed ganged two and three together to facilitate control and emphasize this odd, awkward sort of chorus line effect. During their game THE MASK CHILD appears on stage, older now, but still very much out of place. He wears a huge mask, brightly painted, African in style, suggesting some sort of warrior.]

BOYS (repeating chorus): This is the game we love, every night and every day, we play, this is the life, all the boys say, this is the game, this is the life! This is the time, we say, this is our time, we play, all the day is ours, we rave, this is the game, this is the life!

THE MASK CHILD: This is the life, oh yes, this really is the life. And I can play. I have the legs, and I have the head for it. See? My big and beautiful face with all its paint and terror? This is the play, this is the life. I can say it, I can say it so well!

BOYS (still moving constantly, surrounding him aggressively): This is our life, we say, this is our game, these are our heads and these are our knees, out of our way, we say, it’s not your time, we say, out of our way, out of our way!

[The BOYS dance around THE MASK CHILD, who twirls and leaps at their center. THE MASK CHILD’s movements become frantic, and he crashes his great warrior’s mask into the BOYS as they close in on him.]

THE MASK CHILD: Let me out, I say! I have a life, I pray! Let me out let me out, I have a life!

[Suddenly, his back to us, THE MASK CHILD’s mask comes off and falls to the stage. We cannot see his face. All action stops. The general lighting dims, the tall shadow of THE MASK CHILD is thrown across the backdrop. The BOYS shrink slowly away into the shadows. After a pause a single BOY comes back on stage, gives THE MASK CHILD back his mask and leaves.]

THE MASK CHILD (softly): Let me out, let me out, I have a life.

[Fade out on THE MASK CHILD. Fade in on the NARRATOR.]

NARRATOR: It is an unfortunate fact of life that our poor faces can only begin to reflect the light that fills and gives color to the heart. For what is a face but a few scattered knobs of flesh, the odd opening and some strategically placed teeth? A random toss-up of features out of that swirling genetic cesspool that your parents and their parents before them created out of the sweat and leak of their ancient passions.

Is this any better than a mask? In fact I think it is far less. At least when we create a mask for ourselves there is some thought put into it, even if those thoughts were derived second-hand from the originality of others.

But take it from an old judge, ladies and gentlemen—be careful what mask you decide to put on, because that is your life.

[Lights up on THE MASK CHILD, sitting alone in the middle of the stage. At first, his head appears covered by a huge (several times his body size), stony-faced mask with rough, forbidding features. In fact, his head is covered by a series of masks, one inside the other like nested dolls. These masks come off one at a time throughout the scene that follows, ending with the final mask: plain and white with large eyeholes. The masks should be of a variety of designs and materials, showing a wide range of emotions and effects. THE MASK CHILD also grows much taller during this scene, so by the time the last mask is removed it appears as if he has grown into young manhood right before our eyes. The correct musical accompaniment would be important here (a lot of discordant violins, for example).]

THE MASK CHILD: I had to write this essay for school, “The Nicest Person I Ever Met.” A lot of the kids wrote about their parents. Maybe a few more than that wrote about their grandparents. Every kid’s grandparents are nice. They have grandmothers who bake them these miniature cakes with their names on them, and grandfathers who take them fishing and teach them about the different kinds of trees. My grandparents have never seen me, as far as I know. Certainly I have never seen them. But I hear they are very nice, just like other kids’ grandparents.

I’m sure my parents are very nice too. Most kids’ parents are nice, if you believe what the kids say. Nice is like another word for mother, another word for father. It’s like you can’t separate the two. They’re nice because they’re your parents. They’re nice because they gave birth to you, which is a very nice thing. They didn’t have to give birth to you, you know.

My parents and I don’t talk very much, but I’m quite sure they’re nice, just like real kids’ parents.

But the nicest person I ever met was an old lady who lives at the end of our street, there where the pavement ends and the trees and the fields begin. I’ve heard some of the other kids in the neighborhood say she is a witch, just like in the fairytale books, and that she does awful things to people—kids especially—in those woods, at night, in the dark, when everyone else is at home in bed thinking they are safe.

Once they looked at me when they were telling that story and I knew exactly what they were thinking. They were thinking that was what happened to me. That old witch lady happened to me.

Of course I didn’t tell them I had already met that lady and talked to her a number of times. I used to walk down our street but I always walked toward the woods because there weren’t any people in that direction. And that’s how I met her. She was sitting up on her porch and she said to me, “Nice mask!” I don’t remember what mask I was wearing that day but I guess that doesn’t matter.

I went up to her porch then and she gave me a little piece of cake and I went up to her porch again every day after that. But the nicest thing she did for me was that every day she asked me this same question.

She asked me, “What do you do with your day?”

She didn’t ask me how was or how is your day. Or what I did the day before. She asked me what did I do with my day. That was the nice thing.

[Pause. The GIRLS begin drifting into the stage area. They have small heads and large dresses, which they occasionally twirl. They resemble flowers. They move quietly around the stage in a kind of slow-motion dance during the following speech.]

So what do I do with my day? I had to think about it. School takes a large bite out of my week, of course. I sit in classes for hours, mostly aware of how hot and itchy my face is under the mask. I get terrible rashes, and sometimes I’m afraid things are getting worse under there, in the damp and heat, in the dark where no one but I can see. The itching feels like skin disintegrating, my face slowly dissolving so that someday there won’t be a face at all, and I will have nothing left to support my mask and then where will I be?

Sometimes I am aware that the other children stare at me during class. Most are so used to my presence and the five different masks I wear to school that they pay little attention to me, but there are always a few who wait for the tiniest slip of the mask, like voyeurs waiting for the smallest revelation of flesh.

Occasionally I am aware of the subjects the teacher discusses, and try to remember them generally so that I can read up on them when I am at home in my room alone.

After school I walk the long way home and look for animals I have never seen before. Sometimes I find one, but most of the time not.

And of course I work on new masks every day. If I could, I would have a different one for each day of the year. I feel lucky that I have as many as I do.

I make up lists of things I would do if I only had the courage. Such as give each of my classmates their own mask and encourage them to wear them for a day.

I don’t always wear a mask in my own room. In my own room the room becomes a mask and I am the small face that lives and plays inside.

When I leave my room—for dinner, for play, for my chores—I wear a plain white mask with large eyeholes. That mask has no expression. My parents could stare at it all day long without knowing what I am thinking.

[THE MASK CHILD stands up, wearing the white mask with the large eyeholes. He is quite tall now, rock-star thin and angular. The GIRLS slowly gather around him, swaying back and forth.]

GIRLS (chorus): See him? You cannot really see him. But I bet he’s so. You know he has to be so. You know he must be so.

THE MASK CHILD: Real boy. You know I’m just a. Real boy. Just like all the. Others. This is the game, this is the play, this is the life.

GIRLS: Real boy! You know he’s such a real. Boy. Not like all these. Others. This is the game, this is the play, this is the life.

[THE MASK CHILD has raised himself to his full height. He towers over the GIRLS, and looks threatening, colored stage lights reflecting off his white mask: bright reds, blues. His clothing billows, wraps itself around the GIRLS, and turns red.]

THE MASK CHILD (louder): Real boy! Now you tell me that I’m a. Real boy! Where were you when I. Needed you. Needed someone to. Talk to. Where were you! Don’t you know that this is no game. Don’t you know that this is no life. This is the. Darkness. This is the. Nightmare. This is the dream, this is the terror, this is the death that hides under the mask.

[The GIRLS disappear completely under THE MASK CHILD’s voluminous red clothing. Fade out. After a pause, fade in the NARRATOR.]

NARRATOR: Details are sketchy, as they so often are with the embarrassing things that happen in a life. Certainly the parents were embarrassed—we have no record of what THE MASK CHILD felt about this event. None of the girls was seriously injured, but the boy’s parents were told their son could no longer attend the school.

They tried other schools, but word of such behavior has a tendency to spread. Not content to leave him to his own, troublesome, imaginings, they hired a tutor for their child.

This was perhaps the most successful relationship in THE MASK CHILD’s life, lasting into his twenties, until the tutor’s death.

[Lights up on the TUTOR and THE MASK CHILD in an academic setting.]

TUTOR: What are the numbers, child? What do they add up to, child? No matter the face you show, your numbers are lovely. Your numbers are always beautiful. What are the sums they show? Tell me, child. All you have to do is say. Them. All you have to do is close. Your eyes. And say the lovely numbers. You see with your eyes closed. All the pretty numbers.

THE MASK CHILD (growing throughout the following, and wearing a succession of progressively more mature masks): But what good are the. Numbers? I cannot even begin. To count the laughter. I cannot number. All their stares.

[He stands up and begins following the TUTOR around the stage. It seems a bit threatening, but we can’t be sure.]

TUTOR: Just listen and try. The counting. Just begin with one and two and go on until they calm. You. There is nothing wrong. With numbers. They are not here. To harm you. Just count all their lovely. Permutations. Let them add you away. From sadness. Just try to count all the lovely numbers. I promise you’ll be glad if you just try.

THE MASK CHILD (begins speaking counter to and underneath the TUTOR’s speech, eventually drowning out the TUTOR and shutting him up): I cannot count the times they stared. I cannot subtract all their. Shouting. These numbers do me. No good. This mathematics just creates more. Pain. Could you stop it with all these. Numbers? Could you calculate somewhere else? I get so tired of all your. Excuses. You cannot understand their. Calculations. You cannot figure all my pain!

TUTOR: Child, you are not the first to stumble in his calculations. You are not the first who has felt this. Pain. Calm down and look at your. Numbers. Please count them. Slowly. It is all we have to keep ourselves. Sane.

THE MASK CHILD (swaying, dancing as the TUTOR fades away): So it’s one and three, and four who loves seven and more. My ten and my twenty have been lost in all the subtractions that count themselves lucky to be out the door. So please leave all your digits at home. My heart is no longer good at figuring. My poor brain can no longer do the math. What you see is all subtracted. What you see is in a negative state. Just leave me with my solitary. Number. Just leave me with my one.

[THE MASK CHILD settles onto a bench in the middle of the stage, his head down. The lights change to day, to night, to day again. The BOYS and GIRLS appear on stage, all wearing masks. They form one CHORUS, their speech alternating and overlapping with that of THE MASK CHILD. You have a lot of flexibility as to how many times to repeat the speeches until the next one begins. The idea is to create waves of conversation, song, sound. Find the mix that sounds the best.]

THE MASK CHILD (Toward the end of this speech the CHORUS’ first speech begins. Again, throughout this scene overlap these speeches until it seems appropriate to begin the next one): Real boy. I go to sleep and I’m. A real boy. With dreams just like all the. Others. Playing games just as if I. Belong there. Singing songs just as if I can. Feel them.

CHORUS: Time to work now. No time for all these games. When we were children we played games. Now we have jobs and all these duties. And no time for all these games.

THE MASK CHILD: What is this? Why do all of you wear masks? I can see you in your masks. Are you mocking me? Is that why all of you wear your masks? I look at you and I see so many masks.

CHORUS: We have jobs now! There is no time to be so. Foolish. There is no time to be so. Different. You should be so. Happy! That now we all are wearing masks. We’re your brothers and sisters in our masks!

THE MASK CHILD: That’s not at all what I ever. Wanted! The mask was just what I. Needed. And not what I ever wanted. You all look so foolish in your masks. Now the whole world’s wearing masks.

CHORUS: Isn’t it time you finally. Grew up? Isn’t it time we all were. Grown up? It’s so much easier wearing masks. We all look better wearing masks.

THE MASK CHILD (lying down on the bench, growing sleepy. The CHORUS begins to fade into the shadows): It’s nothing I ever. Wanted. I just needed someone. To talk to. Now the whole world’s wearing masks. I can’t see their hearts for all these masks.

CHORUS (softly, in the shadows): Can’t you see we’re wearing masks? Growing up demands a mask.

[The NARRATOR drifts quietly on stage as the chorus departs.]

NARRATOR: As I said before, we have evolved. We are a better race now. Grown-up, civilized folk are so much more accepting than they used to be. We have learned to value the person behind the mask, far more than the mask itself.

Did I tell you we have learned? Oh, certainly, certainly we have. Life would be almost intolerable if we hadn’t.

THE MASK CHILD disappeared some time after the TUTOR’s death. Some say he passed away from exposure. Others say he simply blended in with every other mask. They say his parents went looking for him. They say his parents never found him.

[Fade out the NARRATOR. The PARENTS come back on stage. They find THE MASK CHILD sleeping on the bench.]

PARENTS: Just look at him! Didn’t we say he would not understand? Just a boy, he cannot understand. How could he know how people are? How could he know what must be done?

[They go to THE MASK CHILD and begin tampering with his mask.]

He always wanted to be. A real boy. How could he know what must be done?

[They remove the mask and toss it away. There is no head underneath it.]

In the night, when no one is listening, where no one can hear.

[They begin removing his clothing/drape. Again there is nothing underneath.]

PARENTS: In the night, dear child, in the night. We always wanted. A real boy.

[They toss the drape completely aside. There is no MASK CHILD. Fade to black.]

SHUFFLE

A Fiction in 54 Cards

Read The Rules of the Game. You don’t have to follow them, but you should at least know what they are. And everybody should learn How to Play.

The Rules of the Game

1) Lives are understood to be finite, but we’re always surprised when they end. Stories are discrete and self-contained and we look forward to the appropriate finale. Pick ten cards. Or pick twelve. This is your story. Accept the order of your deal or determine for yourself what comes first, what comes last, in this narrative of John.

2) We seek balance in our lives. Sometimes we achieve it, sometimes not. But at least in our fiction we can tamper with the scales. Pick three cards from each of the four suits to tell John’s tale.

3) Or perhaps you don’t want the responsibility of the story; you want to surrender to the lack of control you know you don’t have any way. So for you we’ve numbered the cards, 1-54, to make it easier for you to reach some kind of order. We’ve tried to oblige you, tried to find some arrangement that at least makes some sense to us. Pure illusion, of course, for out of the collection and recollection of moments we’ve learned that you can conclude anything about a life. But, still, we’re willing to humor you this conceit of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

4) You will notice that each card bears a different design, as if assembled from dozens of different decks. This is because uniformity is some comforting illusion, and not a natural order at all. We’ve provided numbers and names for suits, but honor if you will the differences in each moment. It will make your game last.

The Cards

1. philosophies

A strange thing, John thought, that we appear to live our lives in a line, moment by moment, and yet our memory of its significance is all a shuffle, key moments taken from here and there, and not necessarily chronologically. Hard to say what card might find its way to the top—it might well be a matter of chance or temporary circumstance. Only a few people seemed to have the ability to order the deck the way they wanted. You could not change the actual cards themselves, the specific events; but to change how you felt about them? Perhaps all that was required was another shuffle, a new deal.

2. dreams

Before John’s uncle lost his life, he lost the names of things. His car became a comb, his bed a guitar. “I have to get into my guitar now,” he would say. “I am suddenly very tired.” The next morning he might tell anyone who would listen, “I had an interesting sing last night. Many windows happened. Where is my flowerbed? I miss it so much!” And then he would cry. His children were upset when he lost their names and referred to them as cups and spoons and rabbits. His daughter wanted to know if her father still loved her if he did not know her name. John worried the same would happen to him. Perhaps that was why John told her, “He tells me he loves you all the time, it’s just that as he nears the end of his life everything reminds him of you.”

3. behaviors

It had become terribly important to John that he track down every lover and friend from his past. It was not simply a matter of tying up loose ends, but of establishing those ends in the first place. “Do you remember who I am?” he might begin a conversation, and wait anxiously for the answer. The comings and goings of people through one another’s lives, possibilities taken and opportunities denied—these were the things that obsessed him. If memory could not be verified and anchored, how could he be sure he’d lived the life he’d thought he had?

4. philosophies

John read that one theory of the brain was that a single memory might be stored in multiple parts, much like a hologram. So parts of a brain could be reshuffled without destroying the integrity of that memory. Every card in the deck might vary slightly from every other card, while still containing the essentials of every other card. The variations might be extremely slight—differences in lighting, tone, or mood, but essential for all that. All together, the deck represented all the complex feelings and attitudes attached to a particular memory. But if you somehow managed to draw one card at a time, you could feel positive or hopeful or angry or depressed about a particular memory. Perhaps good mental health was simply knowing how to draw and play the best card.

5. events

When John was eleven years old, a far less auspicious age than ten, he was beaten up almost daily by a slightly older boy named Frankie Williams. It was the last great encounter of his life with personal violence, and although his exasperated mother called it “fighting,” there was no fight to it. It was a beating, pure and simple, ending only when sufficient blood had greased Frankie’s fist.

It was the blood that Frankie wanted to see, the only potion capable of releasing him from the violence he endured at home, and John unaccountably realized this almost immediately, and so allowed this to happen, even looked forward to it, because it was the strongest, most fantastic thing he could imagine, becoming, in fact, the most imaginative thing he was ever to do with his physical self.

6. events

Adolescence was pain, the first hint that disappointment lay beyond the brilliant fields of childhood. When he reached his teen years John developed an odd walk. The doctors didn’t know why—they suspected it was “emotional.” All he knew was that suddenly his body did not care for gravity, and the surfaces of the world seemed to demand some gait or stance other than his own. Even the furniture went wrong—beds and chairs seemed made for different spines. It was such a disappointment. He had come so close to normalcy only to see it slip away.

He eventually recovered from this condition, developing a kind of amnesia, the knowledge of his ailment briefly recovered here and there when the world went bad.

7. dreams

When he was twenty years old John stopped dating for more than three years. The precipitant was the last in a string of breakups, this with a young woman who said she could not stand that he could not tell her exactly why he loved her so much. “I just do,” he said. After the breakup he was driving his car down a darkened lane, glanced away for a second, then back again, to see the rear end of a truck suddenly filling his windshield. He jerked the wheel to the left, narrowly avoiding a terrible and no-doubt fatal collision. But part of him had continued straight on through the truck and out the other side. It was a mental accident, a psychic crash, and he felt sure it would happen again and again the rest of his life.

8. philosophies

Odd how in any life one event might come to the top and color and transform all others: an unexpected death, a windfall, a chance meeting, an injury, a song sung with a particular kind of feeling. Accident and happenstance, but once it occurred you could never look at the total accumulation of your life in exactly the same way again.

9. events

After a night of bar hopping and late-night driving through anonymous housing developments, John parked on a side street to walk and puke and clear his head. After an hour of this he discovered he could not find his car. He wandered the dark streets searching, but after a time he became more fascinated by the subtle differences among the houses in the development, how each family created its individual look. A different porch light fixture, a differently colored door, lawn furniture in front of one, bright curtains in a window. “We’re all the same here, but different,” they seemed to declare. He never found his car, opting to take the bus home instead. He never returned to retrieve it.

10. dreams

A woman John was dating disappeared one night never to be seen again. Her family and friends were frantic—he helped with the search. Now and again he would return to where she had last been seen—a gray street with glass- and steel-fronted shops. Like an operating theater. A mail carrier, said to have been the last to see her, stated she had stood in front of an empty display window for an unusually long time. When John came here he thought of surgery, that she had been surgically removed.

11. philosophies

He supposed the conventional wisdom was that one’s birth was the first event of a lifetime, the beginning of the story. But now John wasn’t so sure. What about the courtship, the circumstances of his parents’ first meeting, their attitudes and expectations? There was also the fact that he had not learned the details of his own birth—the blood, fractures, extended trauma—until he was in his thirties. So did that trauma affect him more before or after he learned the facts of it? There was also his conviction that, for some, birth marked the beginning of possibility, but for others, it marked the end.

12. dreams

A man in a crisp white suit followed John as he made his way from his house to the grocery store. On his way back he noticed the man in the white suit again, waiting on a bench, then following him again. John picked up the pace, and so did the man. John began to run, the man began to run. John dropped several apples out of his bag. The man picked them up and began eating them. John tripped over a curb and went sprawling, the man did several somersaults and a cartwheel. John picked himself up. The man bowed, smiled, and went on his way.

“Why?” John called.

But the man had become interested in someone else. John followed the man following this someone else. He had no idea what he was doing, but it filled the rest of his day.

13. events

The quality of John’s work had fallen off sharply in recent months. “I may have to let you go,” his boss told him.

“I’ll do better. I can do this,” John declared.

“No third chances,” the boss said.

“Of course not,” John replied. “I wouldn’t expect it.”

John stared at the papers on his desk. They made no sense to him. Why was he doing this? He got up and left the office, walked down the street, watched birds flying overhead. He watched people walking, some of them laughing, some of them holding hands. Why can’t I get paid for doing this? he asked.

He stayed away for two days. Of course they fired him. He checked the want ads every day, finally answering one.

The ad was for his old job. His interview went very well. His former boss said he thought John had initiative, not like that last fellow.

John got his old job back. He had a lot to do—the fellow who had formerly held this position had gotten woefully behind.

14. philosophies

It always amazed John, the power and influence of popular song. The aesthetic qualities of the tunes were seemingly irrelevant—even the stupidest composition might remain in your ear and force the rhythm for the day. Many songs seemed to acquire an added life in commercials and movies, often years after their initial release. Despite a certain tendency toward anarchy, he secretly hoped the government kept a close eye on these composers of our daily soundtracks. A musician with a dark motivation could conceivably do harm, guiding the unaware listener through a spectrum of emotional changes in a relatively short period of time. For his part, he would make himself more aware of his semi-conscious foot tappings and hummings, and put a stop to them now.

15. dreams

When John separated from people he often wrote them a brief letter a week, until they moved or he grew tired of the occasional response. The fact that he lied in his letters may have been a factor. His lies consisted of narrations of events he was afraid might happen or hoped might turn out a different way.

Billie,

My mother is dead. I’m not sure how, but I’ll manage to get through this. Love, John.

An ungenerous observer might have said he secretly hated his mother as he killed her off frequently, in a variety of ways.

Jack,

The house burned down, and with it all my accumulations. More later, John.

16. behaviors

John had long believed that if you wanted to get a feel for the consciousness of a place, the air of ideas, hopes, fears and traumas that gathered there, you need only read a few months’ worth of its daily newspaper, especially the small stories, the crimes, the domestic incidents. “Wife kills husband and dog” “Local funeral home defaced” “Methodist minister and three women missing.” A newspaper was like the diary of a city, the city revealing itself almost unawares. For a time he tried rewriting his own life in terms of local news headlines: “Man breaks up with wife, again” “Man changes jobs for the sixth time in a year” “Man prowls grocery store aisles seeking company.” The attempt quickly grew depressing. He felt like a criminal reading the newspaper for word of his own crimes, following the trail that must inevitably lead to his incarceration.

17. behaviors

John once spent a slow weekend taking close-up photographs of the things of his life, then the following weekend distant shots of his house, his neighborhood, a long shot of his town from the hill on the outskirts. He papered the walls of his bedroom with the photos and felt no compulsion to leave that room for more than the few moments required to raid the refrigerator. Eventually he tore the photographs down, sold the house, and moved to a new town where he again began accumulating photographs.

18. behaviors

Like many people, John supposed, he did not have a particularly discriminating sense of smell. Aromas blended like the ingredients of a porridge, so that he could not distinguish a lover from a dead dog, sugar from decay. This seemed a terrible disadvantage. He’d had a dream in college he was about to kiss his girlfriend—had thought her perfume to be unusually strong that evening—when he found himself kissing her dead lips, crying not in deep emotion but from the smell. The odor of fear, the secret smells of the body, the smell of the air before some great disturbance, all having meaning if you simply knew how to parse them.

Sometimes in his anxiety he would smell his own body seeking signs of illness, but it appeared to smell no better or no worse than any other.

Sometimes the air grew stale from the perfume of too many people, desperately trying too many things, seeking to put together a bouquet, succeeding only in stinking.

19. philosophies

John was always surprised at how difficult it was to know his own mind about things. But how could he, when each part of him, each object in his everyday life, had its own point of view? What the stomach wants is not always what the intellect wants, and truly, the left hand does not always tell the right hand what it is doing. The eyes might dream of blues and yet it is reds and pinks that the fingertips crave. Your life story was a completely different narration depending on which piece of you was listened to. The healthy ones, he thought, were those who quickly achieved some sort of coordinated consensus. The unhealthy ones were constantly at war with themselves, and unable to choose a restaurant for dinner. The brain might be Catholic, the feet agnostic, the fingers Republican, and the ears Democrat. And, perhaps, that was the way it was supposed to be—listen to your voices, for they contain the world.

20. behaviors

It came to John how randomly, and all-too-infrequently, silences occurred in his life. When he made himself too busy with the striving of the now, others’ silences seemed like that awkwardness that happens when the tape runs out or the conversation dries up. But now and again when he remembered that it pays to listen to oneself, he heard himself breathing in the silence, and the unsteady emotion that was that breathing, and the anticipation of new beginnings, and the anxiety that there would be no new beginnings, ever again.

During one such silence he realized he loved the woman who became his wife. During another he decided to change careers. All at random, all unplanned. Some days he waits for the silence, and yet another opportunity to breathe.

21. behaviors

John had discovered One Hundred Twenty-five ways of hiding himself from others. Thirty-eight of these involved various ways of holding his nose. If he felt he had to say something critical to someone he adjusted his glasses. If he had to ask for something he scratched either his left or right eyebrow, depending on how badly he wanted it. If he said hello to someone he had to manage, somehow, to touch one eye. If he had to say goodbye it was both eyes, accompanied by a little dance of the feet. If someone he knew died he’d scratch away at a certain point on his neck all day until it was torn and bloodied. If he lost his hands, he realized, he would be quite unable to venture out in the world. Sometimes when he didn’t know what to do he simply closed his eyes. People could not tell, but there were tears beneath the lids. Sometimes a woman would hold both his hands, and he would close his eyes, and blink, blink again, open his eyes and blush. He liked it most when they grabbed his hands by surprise, when he least expected it. It was a thrill like no other, an ecstasy he could barely tolerate.

22. philosophies

John had long resented the influence the news had on day-to-day life. His father had had the right idea—he never watched it on television, but listened to it on the radio, or read newspapers. Of course, if it was something that had gone on for days, and everybody talked about it, he might check in with it a few minutes one night just to see what was going on. That’s how the old man knew about World War II.

John knew all too well how learning the daily news could ruin a day or week, a lifetime, change the way you looked at the world and how you saw yourself in it, what you strived to be. Better to let the decline of civilization happen without you, better to let destruction occur without warning, better to let unhappiness be a surprise and not what happens to everybody, every day.

23. dreams

People lie about the strangest things. What they did last evening, the importance of their jobs, even what they had for lunch that day. So much of their own memory, in fact, has been filled with self-manufactured moments.

It is not because I want to deceive people, John thought, having caught himself in the fourth deception of the day, but because this isn’t the life I wish to live.

In the long night before his next day he lunges recklessly in pursuit of the events that will define him: things that never happened, but should have.

24. behaviors

John wondered when food had become such a toy, a miniature landscape for dolls, a diorama concerning the landscapes of other countries. Meals at the best restaurants felt more like museum exhibits. Anyone who could afford a lunch might travel to a place where he was guaranteed misunderstanding. A fork, a knife, a spoon was a ticket out of the head and into a dream.

If he could have afforded it every day, he might have eaten the world. As it was he had a taste enough to staunch a craving through sleep and into another day.

25. philosophies

John went through long periods unable to speak to anyone but his wife and son and a few co-workers. This was not unfriendliness. It was simply his way of reducing the burden of complications in the world. He had discovered other people to be infinitely distracting. They walked around in their clouds of moments, wearing their lives on their sleeves, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they were happy, if they had some tragic secret or unfulfilled dream, if they made their families feel good about themselves, or if they were a drag on the progress of western civilization.

And if he got too close or stared too long, he risked having their moments mingle with his own, and the messiness, the tears and the regrets and the recriminations, would be much too much to bear.

26. philosophies

You think it’s going to be perfect. Both of you do. You laugh at the same things, appreciate the same movies, agree on the same two or three political issues you’re aware of. For the first time in your lives, everything fits.

That time of close fitting is woefully short, John thinks, but most things are. We are not made to fit, for any length of time, but those brief moments are precious to us. They give us good mileage.

John always loved his wife, even when things seemed to have been bad for years: for a moment taken there, an hour here, scattered minutes pulled out of time and held close when the lights dim.

27. events

John’s wife had had one affair that he knew of. He understood that it had been going on for some time, but he never let that knowledge reach him. Finally one evening he drank enough to drive down to her office. He saw nothing, yet knew everything.

He didn’t even know she owned the kinds of underwear she gathered together, cursing. He didn’t know she drank, and the smell of whisky on her was almost too much to bear. Her boss was unflappable, offering up a sheepish grin while pumping his arms daring John’s no-doubt feeble attack.

John did not attack, of course, and he and his wife never spoke of it again, not even when a month after the event she was quietly fired. The embarrassment made her bitter.

John’s own shame became a worm that spread itself through nerve and muscle until he could barely speak of anything, or move his arms above his shoulders, or recognize more than the most basic of colors other than the hues illustrating that one defeating moment.

28. events

One of the things John remembers most about parenting is weekend trips to the emergency room. Illnesses and mishaps occurred almost invariably on weekends, and there quickly grew an atmosphere of desperation about it. His son panicked so he and his wife panicked as well.

He saw his neighbors visit the emergency room with their young daughter regularly for months.

Then one day they returned without her. The couple was quiet and had few friends in the area, so he never found out what really happened during those crucial moments of their last trip. Eventually they had another child: dark-haired, beautiful, and they never let her out of their sight.

29. events

Every year or so there would be reports of a rabid dog on the edge of town. No one could specify the location or witnesses. A friend of a friend (for enemies keep their peace). Children were said to have been killed. No surprise there, John thought—children are always said to have been killed.

During these periods the whole town complains of a lack of sleep. Mothers and fathers scream over small tardies. Out on the lawns the dogs slink behind bushes and will not come out.

“This is the year of the monster,” is the oft-repeated whisper. “There is nothing we can do. It’s the worst we can imagine.”

There are always new babies the next spring as the town provides more food for its fear.

30.

CHAOS CARD

You just never know. Random horror can occur at any time. One bad day and your life is changed forever. A brake goes out, a cable slips, an air bubble travels to the brain. Instant and irrevocable adventure happens. Disaster happens. Death happens. Weather is everywhere. The weather of high winds. The weather of torrential rain. The weather of a shower of bullets from scattered drive-bys. The virus secret in the heart. The resentment secret in a triggerman’s brain. It does not matter how good or bad the deal, how just or unjust, whether you say your prayers or deny the meaning in everything. It will come.

If you could only accept that, you might plan your life accordingly.

31. events

All the moments collected, remembered, photographed, written down, passed from family member to family member still couldn’t explain the death of his child. All these happy faces and games completed, movies watched and parties attended, say nothing, nothing, about why the child decides one day to erase it all, to make sure no more moments come, except those of his parents’ grief, sorrow, and baffled wonder. Moment by moment John peruses the few photographs of his son’s life, each made all the more precious because of their scarcity: limited editions.

Small numbers of anything, he had discovered, will break the heart. Ask any grieving father in the final afternoons of his life.

32. events

The best moment of his life was the moment his son was born. It was more of a miracle than he could have imagined—one minute it is he and his wife, and the next minute they are a family of three. Almost immediately the baby showed signs of a distinct personality and all John could think was where did this child come from? It was as if fairies had spirited the child into their lives.

For every one of his son’s birthdays John tried to relive that miraculous moment. One of the worst aspects of his son’s death was the sense that he had been robbed of that special moment.

But as John grew older, he wondered if at the moment of his own death he would at last be able to recreate the miracle once again.

33. events

Beginning a year after his son’s death he saw a therapist for nine or ten months. This man was quiet and thoughtfully sad, and John thought to ask him what had ever happened to him to make him this way, but it would have meant crossing too many boundaries to do so.

Instead he went week after week and counted memories with the man: 1) the birth photograph, 2) the boy lying before the birthday record player, wagging a socked foot through the air in time with tunes too old for him, 3) the boy standing on his father’s feet as they danced as if some dream of princess and instructor.

John was thankful for the brevity of these appointments, reassured that there would be no time to reach the end of his pitifully small count.

34. dreams

The world was always in motion. This wasn’t easy to recognize, as one’s own unsteadiness tended to cancel out the roll and wave of the world. But John knew that if you were quiet enough, and held yourself steady, and tried to think of nothing, it made itself obvious to you: the up and down of streets and ground, how the houses moved in and out of focus, the hesitant outlines of other people’s faces, the way colors wandered out of lines.

Choosing one single moment to remain steady was an impossibility. You could not hold the world. At best, you might resist the dizziness resulting from all this shaking.

But these are things perhaps only the dead lie still enough to know.

35. events

John did not date for two years after his wife died. She’d been taken in a car accident, and John felt he no longer had enough pieces to play with. Then, gradually, he built up enough confidence to at least speak to one of the women at work, to share a confidence or two, to offer help, to trade phone numbers. On their first date she spent the entire evening talking about people he did not know and their various adventures with cars, pets, and home repairs. On their second date she wanted to have sex immediately, then acted as if they had been dating for years. He concluded from this experience that the norm now was a streamlined and truncated courtship—people lived their lives with too many missing cards. He would not date again for almost a year.

36. behaviors

After she was gone John let things go. Dirty dishes gathered in the sink, half-eaten food waited on the table, garbage stood in the corner, all murmuring their condolences.

It was an attempt, he realized, to stay in the moment: if he kept the remnants of their last meal on the table perhaps the next—the cleaning her out of his life—might not occur.

But the flies came and the stench, for stalled time eventually rots, and cannot be kept.

37. dreams

After John’s wife died he often found himself looking at very young women. Other people might find this perverse but he himself did not think it was. He supposed it did not embarrass him because he and his wife had never had a daughter.

In any case, he wasn’t sure if there was anything sexual in his interest. His appeared to be more of an aesthetic concern. There was a freshness in them, a lack of cynicism, or so he thought. He was self-aware enough to know this was an idealistic view, but no matter. It made him feel better just to see all these beautiful young women about in the world.

38. behaviors

For two years after his wife died John was but sporadically employed, taking odd jobs for odd money. Stocking shelves, inventory, yard work, but in the spring it was painting, which he enjoyed. So time consuming to make it right, but he always felt the world had been renewed with a reservoir of completely fresh moments.

Despite his advancing years he was always the new guy on these jobs. And, after an initial display of deference, his co-workers must have decided he knew nothing, and treated him like a kid.

That was how he wanted it. If he could still take advice from a 20-year-old the world might still be a well of possibility.

39. events

John had managed to avoid crime most of his life, until he was forty, when a series of break-ins left him without a TV or stereo. He replaced them immediately, left the new boxes out in his trash, a signal to the thief that he was ripe for the picking again.

This relationship lasted off and on for over a year, with the usual swings of attention and inattention, disappointment and anticipation that pester most relationships. Not a lover exactly, but John’s own private Santa Claus, a treat always left out to please and bring an unexpected chuckle.

40. dreams

When looking through old photo albums he’d accumulated during his lifetime, John was annoyed by how many photographs displayed people he did not recognize, places he was sure he’d never been, or even images that appeared to make no sense whatsoever. He knew it was possible to take an unrecognizable photograph—his photography skills had always been less than average—but what would possess him to display such photographs? Obviously they had had some meaning for him at some time, but that meaning was long gone.

Which was the most distressing thing, he supposed. How meaning could just slip away, seemingly at random, almost as fast as you might acquire it.

Perhaps his dead wife had taken the photos. But why hadn’t he noticed them before? He hadn’t been paying attention. He had lost his memory of these photos. Little by little he had lost meaning. He had lost his wife.

41. philosophies

He’d discovered that when life grew dull he could experiment with being his opposite. A teetotaller, he became a heavy drinker. Quiet around women, he became the ultimate charmer. Passive and reticent, he became forceful and brave. He might maintain the transformation only for a few days, sometimes only for a few hours. But each time he managed to retain at least a ghost of the person he’d pretended to be. For certainly these were all people he could have been, given the right circumstances. Chance could make you dull and fearful, or interested and competent. He believed we should have more control than that over our personalities, but so often we did not. Luck of the draw. Sometimes late at night he could hear the faint sound of the world shuffling, reshuffling, riffling the deck.

42. behaviors

John had a sister who would forever define the best and worst of the female sex for him. A year younger, she had always been more mature. When they were teenagers she let him watch her get dressed so that “He would know the order that a woman’s clothes went on.” It was another year before he fully understood what she had been talking about.

They drew apart in their middle years. He never forgave her for taking up smoking. She drank too much, dressed immodestly. The last time he saw her was after his wife died and following the end of her third marriage, and it shocked him how much she looked like their mother.

It was then he knew he could never marry again.

43. philosophies

Only recently had John realized that people did not fully appreciate the importance of individual moments. A stumble over a stone, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman, and your life was changed forever. And what is that glint in the passing automobile’s bumper—the reflection of your long dead son, his heart stopped by a fall, now singing into the last sharp reflection of the day?

44. behaviors

Most of his adult life John had worked in an office. Originally it had been the best he could get right out of college with a good education but no special skills. In the years that followed it was the thing he knew, and when a company had to plug someone into a position his was the plug that fit.

Primarily he moved papers around, office to office, company to client, company to government, and back again. He now has very few memories of that period of his work life.

For paper destroys time. That can be wonderful in a novel, but not so wonderful when you’re trying to recall, and store away, the best part of your day.

45. behaviors

There were very few things John felt ashamed of. But all of them had to do with women. Things he’d done when he was much younger, of course. They’d tease him on and then they’d try to turn him off.

No one knew himself less than a young man in his early twenties. Unable to see past his own need. So many shameful incidents, so many explosions of bad behavior: he’d take them back if he could. He spent many a late night worrying over the sins of a younger self.

If his son had lived, he would have told him. He would have replayed every ill-behaved moment. And his boy, he would have had to listen.

46. events

John saw the man three times in as many months. A hard face, collar pulled up as high as it would go. Oily eyes. He never knew such eyes were possible, as if the tear ducts issued a yellow oil that glazed the eyes. The first time he saw him the man was watching some small boys play ball at the edge of the park, examining every move as if he were a major league scout. The second time John had brushed against him as he came out of the hardware store. Metallic things jangled under the coat—John checked his body for injury—he could have sworn he felt his skin tear. The third time the man had appeared on a distant corner, bent to pet a cat, and snapped its neck with a blur of motion. John had run to the corner but there was no sign of the man or the cat.

He searched the papers for months for news of missing children and found nothing. He always believed it was the wrong papers, or the wrong time.

47. dreams

John was hardly suicidal, but sometimes in the dentist’s chair he imagined himself succumbing to some medication mishap and discovered he didn’t feel badly about that. He felt such vulnerability leaning back with his mouth open, metal instruments protruding like utensils from a serving bowl. Halfway to death already, or so it seemed: the only thing between him and death now an allergy or a sensitivity or some accidental lethal combination. That’s what death frequently was, anyway, an accidentally lethal combination of moments. You could worry about it all your life or you could accept it, even welcome this universe of accidental possibility.

In fact, he was frequently so relaxed in the dentist’s chair he slept through the most uncomfortable procedures. The best moment was when he first closed his eyes, waiting for the drill.

48. dreams

They try so hard to be heard, John thinks: the ghosts, the ones who have passed from day to night to when and wherever. They need what we all need: contact, a body that will listen. But at least they know true contact is impossible. We still cling to our illusions.

Sometimes looking at the world is like gazing through an oil-smeared lens: their passage dirties the glass, preventing him from seeing anything with absolute clarity.

But that is their mission—that is all they have left since their lives went away. To obscure. To cloud. To hinder our view of the next day.

49. philosophies

He’d reached the age when the body chooses to rebel. Arms had shortened themselves, and hands could not hold anything reliably except another hand.

More difficult still was the unusual shape his ears had taken, and the wart he noticed on the side of his nose one day, apparently which appeared overnight.

He supposed it might be a reaction to the longevity of modern man. The body knows it was never meant to last past forty, and does its damnedest to convince the mind.

One moment he is racing to catch the train, a movie, or a plane. The next moment he dodders like a film slipping its sprockets to display the same image again and again: an old man with a surprised look, shouting at his feet to move.

50. dreams

We drown in a sea of the dead, he thinks. Everywhere are the things they have made, touched, hated, loved. The oils from their bodies, the stench of their humanity, the electric charge of their passions, linger—he is sure of it—long after their physical bodies are gone. In the heavy air that chokes the world their vanished lives move.

We cannot avoid them. They brush against us, rub their lost memories into our flesh so often they become a part of us we cannot scrub, medicate, or cut out.

It is impossible, sometimes, to think, because the noise of what they had and what they miss fills our heads.

It is impossible to breathe without breathing them in.

The world, he thinks, is made not so much of atoms and electrons as of moments.

51. dreams

If he let himself be open to it John knew the world to be a work of art. The textures of it, the infinite shadings of color, the shapes that resonated in the oldest part of the brain. To move through the world was to live inside a work of art, down to the individual brushstrokes and pixels. Moments of time were merely dabs of color, spontaneous decisions, which altered the entire portrait.

All one had to do was pick up the brush and add one’s own little bit. A simple line or color fill would do, but so few made the effort.

52. behaviors

At least once a month John would travel to an isolated rocky beach, to sit, to stand, to observe the world as one alone just as he imagined other humans to have done from the beginning of their times.

Over the years he never saw another person there. It wasn’t the friendliest sort of beach—no place to wade, no comfortable sand to lay a beach towel on. It was a place of sharp edges and hard surfaces, a reminder of the smallness of our bodies, the delicacy of our flesh. But for him there was a comfort in knowing he could have been anyone in time here, standing alone on the rocks, the massive presence of the world ready to tilt and crush him at any moment. Here he grieved endings, thankful that at least for the moment he could breathe the ocean air, feel the chill breeze against his too-exposed skin, and stand.

53.

JOKER

But in every deck there is at least one Joker, the card that’s the spoiler or the treat, depending on the game. Someone calls with a job offer or a profession of love, someone else delivers the news that what you care for most is gone and irretrievable. You try to keep this moment at the bottom of the deck, as far from you as possible, but still it shows up when you least expect it. Then again, what if it’s good news, and only your fear prevents you from holding it? There is no easy answer. There is only the anxiety, which could just as easily turn into elation or devastation.

Thoughts like these had kept John out of the game for years. But eventually there had to come a time when the winning and the losing mattered very little anymore. He just had to play the game. He just had to play.

54. philosophies

There comes a time when there are more years behind you than ahead of you. There comes a time when it’s the last day on the job, the final European vacation, the last woman you’ll have in your bed. There comes a time when the caregiver becomes the one cared for. There comes a time when a twenty-year guarantee on the house’s new roof has no more meaning. There comes a time when the math seems irrelevant. There comes a time when you wonder if you have, in fact, reached that time, or if you’re just feeling old, like your father, and his father before him.

TWELVE MINUTES OF DARKNESS

1.

Since only darkness inspired him, he was always waiting for the light to burn out. Although he might switch the light off by hand (and most evenings this is what he did), there was something special about spontaneous, accidental darkness, and to encourage its visitations he would shake the lamp for a few minutes each day so as to weaken its filament. Once enveloped in such darkness, however it might have been achieved, he would scrawl across the pages his stories of lost children, maddened fathers, and vengeful women, ignoring lines and sometimes even the edge of the page, so that after a few years the outer stretches of his desk were tangled and layered with the missing phrases and ends of lines and stories he had written long into his middle age, then long into his old age. So many such bits and pieces had been irretrievably lost that he never had enough for a complete submission to whatever pulp journal might be popular at the time, but that did not matter to him. What mattered was the very act of writing through the dark, and in this, his last minute of living, he thought about the journey of it, mounting a carriage in the middle of the night, an umbrella poised above his head to keep off the inky drops, the driver quiet and sullen, the smoky horse blind and swollen, the great narrow carriage wheels turning toward the end of his story.

2.

Every night in her dreams the moon fell. Some nights it descended slow as a kiss, but on others it plummeted rapid as failure. She could not decide which was the worse nightmare. She could not bear the absence of even this vague light, and once when her soon to be ex-husband refused to pay the utilities she spent a night huddled before the fireplace like some earlier sort of human, pondering the required ritual to insure the sun’s eventual emergence from the black cave of night. Tonight she woke from the dream screaming, for in this new variation her father had swallowed the moon whole, then turned and looked at her with that old smile of complete control. She counted one by one the minutes of darkness, waiting for the moon to appear from behind the clouds. Finally the minute arrived when she realized the moon had left her forever, had fallen into the ocean or into the midst of men who had torn it to pieces, each desiring the whole of it, so she painted her face silver then, and sat in an upstairs window, and turned her head gradually as her dreams went through phases.

3.

Insomniacs both hate and love the night, he thought, waiting for that minute when the darkness would begin to fray, the torn edges of it scraping across the brightly colored roofs of the town, the smoke of its passage turning into bright morning fog, the great breadth and bulk of it dwindling into black, rotted threads as it made its frantic escape back into the caves and sleeping heads from whence it came. Finally the minute did come, and he could almost hear the raw edges of the grass and trees screaming from the abrupt departure of darkness, and his eyes began to water from the stench of the corpses rising from their beds all over town, brushing their teeth, grabbing that last cup of coffee before climbing into their cars for work.

4.

For just a minute the coming night had taken on the dark purple of a bruise, and she wondered what it would be like if all darkness were to remain this color, the color of her cheeks the minute before she left him, the color, that first minute, of the baby she had borne without him. Each day after he beat her she would go out and try to find some member of his family, some mutual friend she could show this darkness to. They would nod, and smile, and offer her tea, gazing at her as if admiring some remarkable sunset.

5.

During that minute when he misjudged the curve of the road, just before he slammed into the damp wall of night, he recalled as a child how he had set out open jars on the lawn in order to capture the darkness. He’d supposed the dark was so heavy that he would have plenty of time to screw the lids on before it could slither out and escape. Each morning before dawn he would slide out of bed and run downstairs only to be disappointed by the bright transparency of the cool glass containers. He considered lining the insides of the jars with double-sided tape or glue to at least give the darkness pause, but such measures felt somehow unnatural to him. Finally one morning something dark and viscous and frighteningly opaque had settled into one of his traps and did not stir when he twisted on the lid. He kept it upstairs under his bed for years, through fire and floods, his parents’ deaths and his first bouts with a black depression. Now as his car exploded from the force of dark he wondered whatever had happened to it.

6.

The dark we begin with ends, but the ending dark goes on forever. As the baby fought its way out of her that’s the lesson she would have wanted to teach it, if she hadn’t been in so much pain, if there hadn’t been just this one initial minute of its birth, and there were suddenly so many things she wanted to tell it. We all think life is going to be different from the way it turns out, she would have said, if the meanings of things hadn’t become so blurred for her. How would she explain both the pleasure and the terror in the anticipation of each new day? Household chores will become almost a religion. There will be days when the fact that one thing follows another will comfort you. When the baby was free and held up to her, at first she could only see the initial night reflected in its eyes, the black shadow cast by the duty she owed this helpless creature. Sometimes the time becomes a sooty blur, all the inefficient hours and wasted days accumulating so that you start wondering what happened to it all. Sometimes even the minutes seem sad and filled with a dark anxiety. And yet still, the baby smiled at her. Just try to keep busy, sweetheart.

7.

The minute after she left him, he did not believe the house had ever been darker. Shadows were stiller, and therefore more intense. Even seconds later, dust and cobwebs seemed more evident, as if the house had been without tenant for months. She had taken with her all their son’s clothes and toys, leaving only one small mateless brown sock on the polished oak of the second floor landing, and a plastic wheel from some lopsided car which would now and forever run in circles. He knew his son would not mind, for to a child a small dark circle can be forever. Only an adult sees the breaks, the terrible possibilities in even one misspent minute. The refrigerator hummed to itself and the air conditioner chattered. He opened the refrigerator door but found nothing inside but a light. The light turned the linoleum a mournful shade of yellow. He went from cabinet to cabinet, finding only shadows and dust, searched the attic and closets for pictures, mementoes, stray scents of their life together. He found nothing. The terrible minute arrived when he realized she was never there in the first place, his son a figment, his life a brief tale and badly told. His abandoned house was in fact his own shabby head, where no one ever enters, no one ever leaves.

8.

She built a huge machine for manufacturing night. Her father was greatly displeased. “All that money I gave you for college, is this what it’s come to?” She shrugged helplessly, a gesture that always infuriated him. She’d always wanted to be a mad scientist, but the role models were all male. She had a girlfriend once who’d owned a butterfly net—that was the closest she had to a mentor. The girlfriend used to run down the street with the net, chasing bugs, leaves, bits of trash, anything airborne, hairpins and curlers falling out of the back of her head like paratroopers jumping out of a plane. So bugs and bits of trash went into the basic design of her machine, curlers and hairpins and her father’s painful frowns. When she turned on her machine one jet-black nugget representing a pure minute of unadulterated night dropped out of the chute and landed at her feet. Her machine never worked again. She puts the nugget under her pillow now, on evenings when her thoughts are too light for sleep, needing its density to bring her back down to earth.

9.

Every night the house breathed, and he listened for his son’s breathing in the house. His son was scared of the dark house. His son was scared of the dark house breathing. And sometimes late at night when the house breathed its fullest, he too wondered where it all might lead. Every night he counted the breaths from his resting son, timing inhalations and exhalations, estimating volume displacements, listening for rattles, for organs damaged or organs suffering a secret weakness. The son did not know of his father’s countings, for the son was far too busy tracking the thunderous breathing of the house. One and two and breathe. Three and four. Five and six. Finally the night came when the father kept on counting, counting a full dark minute, but there was no answering breath from the small form of his son. Nor from the quiet house itself, satisfied at last, and stealing away with all the air.

10.

It was her ignorance that made her what she was. Strangers she did not know directed everything she did. She was always imagining what they must think of her. Everywhere there were people with secrets—it had always been so—they knew things she did not, and they refused to tell her. She did not understand, and yet she loved what she did not understand. There were strangers she was meant to meet and love. There were strangers she kept missing, although she tried her best to be everywhere. People died and because she did not understand death she was afraid they must hate her. When she accidentally stepped on a bug she feared reprisals from its family. When friends went on vacations she thought that, instead of their announced destinations, they traveled to secret places known to everyone but her. When she tried to remember her childhood a dark place appeared in the middle of her head and spread. Minutes passed slowly inside this dark place. A woman in a red dress lived here, with long knives for fingernails. When she asked what time it was, the woman took her hand and pointed with one of the long nails at the watch that had been attached to her wrist all this time. But the watch face bore only a single, black digit. Removing the watch from her arm she discovered a hole in her skin leading down to the dark clockworks inside.

11.

Finally came that minute of true darkness when he realized that there was authentic evil in the world, something beyond the ordinary occurrence of bad things. Famine, murder, genocide were as elemental as gravity. The man down the street set fire to his son for the insurance money. The mother on the next block had drowned her own baby in the bathtub. Five minutes’ drive brought him to the park where a gang of young men raped a young coed. Under the bright lights at the corner, next to the modern convenience store, an old man was stabbed thirty-seven times. He had a powerful urge to label such things accident. It was a much more manageable label than divine mystery. He could not comprehend his own goodness, so how might he understand his own evil? Suddenly he experienced the urge to kill; he didn’t care who the victim might be. He wondered how it might feel. He wondered if it might make him feel better. He thought he might be capable of killing a young child if he could think of that child as a doll and if he knew that no one would ever find out. He stared for a minute into the dark mirror, and found there the beast.

12.

The man and the woman rested in their basement laboratory, volumes of data stacked to the ceiling: measurements of evening, experiments in night, anecdotal narratives concerning adventures in darkness. One man trapped it, she said. One woman mocked it, he said. One man breathed and ate it. One woman made it her lover. The darkness crouched and wrapped its arms around them. The darkness kissed them with cool lips and a probing, livid tongue. It’s elemental! she cried. It’s alive, he cooed. The darkness wormed its way down their throats and into hearts, lungs, bowels. But their lives seemed no different. Put water into more water, you still have water, they cried, and felt the darkness fill their bellies. The darkness crept through their thoughts, and there was no noticeable change.

AN ENDING

There is nothing more he can say. Perhaps he’s told too much already. His daughter used to complain he had an answer for everything, and now he knows she felt bad about saying that for some time, and now he answers to no one, no matter how much they ask. But there is nothing more he can say about that.

Now that he cannot speak, his thoughts are loose in time. No matter how much she asks, he thinks, as if she could ask, as if she were not gone. Just like him, unable to bear witness to the world. Just like him. So does this mean he, too, is dead?

Of course not. Of course not. Not so long as the neurons fire, illuminating the brain, filling the sky with light. Broadcasting the voices.

The songs they sing are measured in broken air and shattered bone. The power of them lies in the stray wind in the high mountains felt and heard by no one. When they cry the earth cries, and the earth cries often. The darkness that is their subject knows no bounds real or imaginary, rubbing at us all.

But she was correct just the same. Once upon a time he did think he had the answers for everything. Now he understands how little he knew. But he cannot tell her.

And if he could speak, what might he say? What would he talk to her about? What message would he bring to the dead to show he understood even a bit of their plight?

He might say no. He might say yes. He might yadda yadda yadda.

He might say there is a new flower growing in the window box. A yellow tulip, his wife’s favorite. He might tell his wife he still loves her. He might tell her that he loved her and he loves her and he always will. What better thing might a person say?

The strangest thing about his immobility, he thinks, is how much he moves inside it. His chest rises and falls, ever so slightly, not much more palpable than his thoughts, but still discernable. Sweat traces his face like the fingertips of blind angels. Fluids and gasses move deep inside him, down in the hidden chambers of the self.

And his eyes move, even though he is rarely aware of it. He sees, but what he sees could be the dream he’s having, he has no way of telling. He has no way of telling anyone. His eyes might even be cameras, replacements for the eyes he used to have. Click and click again. Can they do such things? They can do so many things he does not understand. He does not understand.

And the world moves, changes and spins because of something he has done. He is done. The world changes colors and brings forth strange and wonderful creatures who dance and lick and scream, and he knows he is the cause, but he does not know how.

In the other bed his wife stares at him. She may have died but he cannot be sure. Sometimes he thinks a look can last longer than a life. She has stared at him so intently for a very long time. She does not miss a thing. He understands that for a very long time she stared at him with a love beyond anything he had ever experienced before, beyond anything he might imagine, but he suspects the intention of that gray-eyed gaze has changed over the time of their imprisonment to become of another kind of focus and intensity, but he was never quite sure what words might best describe this new state. In his more fanciful speculations, in fact, he imagined that his wife invented a brand new emotion: one that goes beyond love, one that factors the despair of knowing, the knowledge that comes from living with death so close at hand.

He prefers to look not into those hazy gray eyes but at her hairline, at that place where the hair parts above the middle of her forehead, where the combined scents of shampoo and brain heat so often gather, where she smells clean and vital, where her smell is like a taste of the entire of her, where he would live forever if he could.

The phone rings again, a physical tearing of the sour air in the bedroom. His daughter’s answering machine picks it up. A loud click followed by another loud click, as if something is snapping. As if the bones of this sorry animal, this answering animal, are breaking, and soon it will answer no more, its sad carcass draped over the nightstand.

Once upon a time it did answer, and so efficiently recorded the details of their daughter’s death, which he would not believe at first, because she only went out for some milk, she promised them both (although neither of them could answer) that she’d be right back, and who could die in such a way, on such a small errand?

The voice on the machine had been so crisp, so professionally sympathetic as it delivered the terrible news, who could not believe it?

Now the male voice on the machine asks, “Are you there? Pick up. Pick up. Are you there?” with an urgency that surprises him. Some boyfriend he does not know about? Was that where she was really going when she left here? Did she tell him about her parents, so that maybe he’ll think to call the police and send them to her house?

There’s always a chance. He used to tell her, from the time she was a little girl, there’s always a chance, sweetheart.

“Are you there?” Even if he could answer, he does not know what he could say.

His daughter left on her little errand eight days ago. He knows because of the calendar on the wall just above his daughter’s desk. He can barely see it, tucked around the corner there, but it is still clear enough. Kittens above the black, dated squares. He cursed her sweet name for her arrogance, so convinced with her nursing degree that she could take care of them both. No nursing home, no nursing home, Dad. Damn her carelessness. And her driving has always lacked caution, no matter how much he tries to teach her. She thought she knew. She thought she knew. Her father’s daughter, she took after him.

No one knows he is here. And no one knows her mother is here. Now the eighth day is passing, slipping like ooze from broken hydraulics, dripping off the edge of the table and out of sight.

And damn her for being dead. She’s broken his heart. And now nothing can be right. There is nothing he can say. Even when there is so much to say.

His wife’s arm hangs limp off the side of the bed. She’s been strapped down, but in that last seizure the cloth tears, the arm flopping free, then limp. He’d wanted to be closer then, but all that moved were his desperate tears.

Eight days and some strong smells have faded, some gradually making their presence known. The smell the body makes as fluids give way. The smell of the orange on the sunny table. The stench as the body dies incrementally. The reek of time, wasted and misused, the days thrown away. The foulness of regret, accumulated until the very end.

His wife was always fussy about matters of toiletry. She had no more odor than a glossy magazine ad. She cared for no variety of incense or perfume, and found even cooking odors somehow rude. She could not be said even to smell fresh. She was cured. She was sealed. She was statuary. Her nose was an anchor for her eyes and nothing more.

Illness, as he would have told her had she just asked, brings indignity. He was the first to fall, robbed of speech and mobility by a blood clot, and he greatly admired the way she put aside her prejudices in order to take care of him. Even changing him when the aide was off duty. She didn’t complain, not even involuntarily. She simply did what needed to be done for someone she loved. Could he have done the same for her? He wasn’t so sure. At least not with such care, such equanimity.

She’d been bent over him, rearranging his pillow, making it so that it fit perfectly beneath his ears, and he was feeling absurdly grateful, because a crease in the case had been torturing him for hours. Then he detected an ever so faint aroma of urine, and he stared at her in surprise as her expression changed, as if some startling idea suddenly entered her consciousness, and almost immediately he knew it was a stroke—she’d been assaulted by the fairies, and she fell away from him and he couldn’t even shout his outrage at the terrible thing. The anger leaked out of him a bit at a time over the following hours, weeks, and months.

What is left of the woman he loved in the nearby bed he cannot know. There is so much he cannot know.

* * *

He does not know when the ringing in his ears first began. It seems a recent event but he cannot be sure. He suspects it’s the song the brain sings when it dies but of course there is no way for him to know if this is true. Sometimes it is loud and sometimes it is quite soft. Sometimes it is all he can do not to weep when he hears it.

One of the things his wife and he enjoyed most was listening to music together. Now those days are gone, he thinks, or are they? Perhaps even now they are listening to the same tune.

Suddenly there is quiet as if a door has been closed. This is the way. This is the way. When the view becomes unbearable, then shut the door.

He closes his eyes against her death and a loud voice grows, singing from somewhere far below him. It is his own voice he hears, even though his lips do not move.

* * *

He has heard, of course, that as the brain dies neurons fire indiscriminately, and what the mind perceives in such circumstances is not to be trusted, is fanciful in its last, desperate attempts to complete a train of notions, and all that is witnessed under these conditions is a product of an electrified imagination.

So what, he thinks. When you are reduced to brain, and the various senses that are accessories to the brain, what more could there be, and certainly, what could be more important than that first trip into insubstantiality where only the imagination can report back, strapped to a shuddering, unhesitant engine of unreason?

So he isn’t alarmed to see the great goat stroll through the door, like some new owner surveying the premises purchased for a hard price. The goat gazes at him only briefly, a polite but dismissive look at an eager would-be lover found wanting.

Instead the goat lingers at his wife’s side and he is suddenly overcome not only by a bare, numbing grief for her but also by the very reek of her, suddenly more powerful than ever before, like a focused sample of every undrained outhouse and waste pool, every foul abattoir avoided by so-called decent, civilized people. He is terrified, tries to turn away and when he knows the attempt useless, closes his eyes tight as his love for her.

But the goat’s huge laughter tears his eyelids open and he has to look at the thing, prancing and dancing over his wife’s disastrous bed, now her grave. The goat rises on its hind legs and pounds the ceiling with its split hooves, shaking down plaster and lath, wiring and insulation batts, jangling pipes and a steady and gorgeous fall of fine white powder, continuing long after the goat has settled back onto its haunches, long snout pushed heavenward, eyes closed in pleasure over the bath it is receiving.

He surprises himself thinking how oddly beautiful it all seems, the abstract patterns of debris framing the now snow-white animal fur, the blissful yard-long smile spread around the goat’s huge head.

Then quickly the goat mounts his dead wife’s bed, licks the disaster of her with its long red tongue, and lowers itself, and lowers itself, until it can begin its thrusts effectively, a great back and forth of ripping and damage as it enters his wife’s sad remnants of flesh, forcing a terrible gasping of air out of her mouth in a hideous parody of orgasm.

After the great goat has done whatever it can, it rises and walks off the bed, dragging remnants of the woman he loved most of his life still stuck to fur, to belly, to genitalia, most of it disintegrating as the goat strides to the door and out, her skin and hair shattering against the floor like bits of frozen twig and leaf.

* * *

A darkness begins to seep from scattered corners of the bedroom. It breaks into wings and the things that wear wings, insects and disasters spat out and eager to escape. Their flight soon fills the room, until he can see nothing else. When their edges fly too close he can feel his skin tearing, but not enough, sweet lord, to bring him release.

In the middle of the world a huge wind begins to turn. In the distance his life shimmers like a beautiful, barely noticed thing, and as he watches the dark shapes rush to surround it: the almost loves and the never agains, their narrow heads brightly plumed with the naive prayers of children.

So he has his release, his ending, his final day. And he’s ashamed to say he’s grateful not to have suffered what his wife had to suffer. He’s grateful to have had some peace at the end, deserved or not it matters little. He’s grateful.

What more is there to say at the end, even when he can say nothing? He said all he knew to say a long time ago. Some things can only be said in the language of angels.

* * *

Dad? Dad, are you awake? Did you sleep well? Time to get up now. Time for dinner.

He is awake, his eyes wide open, but only now beginning to see. He is so absurdly grateful he begins to weep. No ending here after all. He wasn’t ready, he wasn’t ready. And somehow the angels knew.

So kind of his daughter to wake him. She’s always been a good daughter, a wonderful daughter in fact, and he is grateful. So many fathers have not been as fortunate.

So many fathers have children who leave them, children who stay away even when they are home, children who pretend they have no fathers or mothers, children who have this other life, waiting for their fathers to die.

Dinner, Daddy. Don’t let it get cold.

He gazes around the bedroom and again it amazes him how clean she keeps it, how everything seems in its perfect place, how it had no perfect place until she put it there. The bed he lies on so carefully made, barely disturbed even as he eases from between its crisp white sheets. His wife’s bed, equally well made and laden with roses to honor her memory. When did she die? He’s not quite sure, because her passing was so peaceful—their daughter has taken such good care of them both he knows she passed with a minimum of fuss and pain.

He had so many fears about this time—how foolish it had been to worry and obsess about what must come to us all. How much better to ease into it without struggle, to see it as simply another stage, no better or worse than any other, just another adventure at the end of your days.

Daddy, please. I don’t want you to starve.

Eating always made him feel better, so why not do what made you feel better? Store enough up to last you through the lean times, was the way his father had always put it. The world had a way of eating at you, so what better way to survive than to have more of you against the world’s angry appetite.

“Smells good, sweetheart. Smells wonderful!” He almost laughs, because he’s so surprised to hear the sound of his own voice. It seems forever since he’s heard the sound of his own voice. But of course it was only this morning, or perhaps last night, certainly no further away than yesterday afternoon. He and his daughter speak every day, after all: long, serious talks about politics and morals and her many dreams. She’s always had so much ambition. She takes after him. She takes after him.

Even to the point of sounding like him: his voice, her voice, indistinguishable.

He’s just had so many bad dreams of late in which he wasn’t able to speak to her, he wasn’t allowed to speak to her, and he’d been so hungry for conversation. He is so hungry.

Dad, I’m not telling you again! Dinner!

He’s always been late for dinner. He’ll get so busy sometimes, there is always so much to do, and a person of ambition can go on and on without replenishment sometimes, building on what he has already done, using the same words, the same thoughts again and again, reusing the dreams he’s dreamed a thousand times before.

That line of thinking is making him vaguely uncomfortable. Better to get on to dinner, otherwise he might hurt her feelings. Nothing wrong here. Nothing is wrong.

She’s kept the kitchen as spotless as the rest of the house. Gleaming countertops, crystalline glass, shiny silver of the utensils. The finest linen. But where’s the food? He doesn’t see any food.

Not that he needs to eat, however hungry he may feel. He’s gotten so fat of late, he could lie in bed a year or more and live off all that he contains.

Better not to think of that. Better to keep a positive attitude. He has so many bad dreams. He has so many awful things in his head.

“Sweetheart,” he says. “Sweetheart. I don’t see the food.”

Look down, Daddy, she says from the other side of the wall.

He looks down at his plate but there is nothing. There is nothing to eat. “There’s nothing here, sweetheart.”

Don’t be so helpless, Daddy. Make yourself a meal. Make yourself a meal.

He can feel the sheets gathered around his head. He can hear his wife’s body torn asunder and carried out of the world. He can smell the reek and decay of everything he has ever loved. He tries to cover his ears against the screams of this world but he cannot move. He cannot move.

Make yourself a meal, her voice says with finality.

He gazes down at his ponderous belly and fumbles at all the utensils suddenly spilling off the edge of the table: all the sharp edges, all the knives of the world.

The telephone rings. The answering machine picks it up. “Are you there?” the male voice asks. “Pick up. Pick up.”

“I’m not here!” he says. “I’m not here!”

Make yourself a meal, she says, and, grabbing the sharpest knife, he does.

Publishing History

1. “Onion Song” appears here for the first time.

2. “The Sadness,” Star*Line, Nov/Dec 2009

3. “The Messenger,” Weird Tales, Fall 1981, Vol. 48, No. 3

4. “The Hijacker,” Eldritch Tales 8, 1982

5. “Out Late In the Park,” GATHERING THE BONES, Jack Dann, Ramsey Campbell, and Dennis Etchison editors, 2003

6. “Picnic” appears here for the first time.

7. “Doodles,” Noctulpa 7:Sinistre, 1993 (reprinted in Ellen Datlow's Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror)

8. “Strands,” Noctulpa 4, 1990

9. “Night: the Endless Snowfall,” Eldritch Tales #12, 1986

10. “Archetype,” NonStop Magazine 2, Winter 1995

11. “The Hunter Home from the Hill,” 2001 (India), July 1991

12. “Shoplifter,” Kayak 60, 1982

13. “Brain of Shadows,” Psychos '92

14. “Attached,” Kayak 60, 1982

15. “The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital,” Pig Iron 11, The New Surrealists issue, 1983

16. “Jungle J.D.,” It Came From the Drive-in, ed. Norman Partridge

17. “Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures,” Talebones 21, Spring 2001

18. “How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark,” The Spook, July 2002

19. “Minimalist Biography” appears here for the first time.

20. “Sometimes I Get Lost,” Electric Velocipede 11, 2006

21. “The Changing Room” appears here for the first time.

22. “Charles,” Black Static 12, 2009

23. “The Figure in Motion,” Postscripts, 22/23 - The Company He Keeps

24. “The Glare and the Glow,” Interzone 227, 2010

25. “Slapstick,” Bare Bone 11, 2009

26. “Strangeness,” Sybil's Garage 4, 2007

27. “Off the Map,” Albedo One #35, 2008

28. “Unknown,” Black Static 2, 2007

29. “Saturday Afternoon,” Brutarian 33, 2001

30. “A Visit Home,” The Tiger Garden, ed. Nicholas Royle

31. “The Multiples of Sorrow,” Cinnabar's Gnosis Ex Occidente Press

32. “Fish,” Horror D’oeuvres (online), 2006

33. “Merry-Go-Round,” New Pathways 14, 1989

34. “The Green Dog,” Null Immortalis: Nemonymous 10

35. “A Dream of the Dead,” Album Zutique #1, ed. Jeff Vandermeer

36. “Saturday” appears here for the first time.

37. “Aphasic World Syndrome,” Pindeldyboz (online), November 15, 2007

38. “December,” HORRORS! 365 SCARY STORIES, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, Robert E. Weinberg  eds, 1998

39. “The Mask Child” (a play for puppets) originally appeared on the multimedia CD Imagination Box, Melanie & Steve Tem, Lone Wolf Publications, 2001

40. “Shuffle” originally appeared as a virtual card deck on the multimedia CD Imagination Box, Melanie & Steve Tem, Lone Wolf Publications, 2001

41. “12 Minutes of Darkness,” a chapbook, Chris Drumm Books, 1991

42. “An Ending,” A Walk on the Darkside, John Pelan editor, 2004

Praise for Steve Rasnic Tem

“Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.”

Joe R. Lansdale

“Tem’s stories are written with an enviable precision of language and the hallucinatory candour of the true visionary, but with all the signature notes of a keen and compassionate intelligence at work. Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic, and spanning thirty years of the author's career, Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I've read in the last year.”

Peter Tennant

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Copyright

Onion Songs

by Steve Rasnic Tem

Published by Chômu Press, MMXIII

Onion Songs copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2013

The right of Steve Rasnic Tem to be identified as Author of this

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published in March 2013 by Chômu Press.

by arrangement with the author.

All rights reserved by the author.

First Kindle Edition

This book is a work of fiction. If your life resembles these stories we would be quite puzzled but interested to meet you.

Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press

Cover image by Jessica Fortner

E-mail: info@chomupress.com

Internet: chomupress.com

Content

Steve Rasnic Tem
ONION SONGS

ONION SONG

THE SADNESS

THE MESSENGER

THE HIJACKER

OUT LATE IN THE PARK

PICNIC

DOODLES

STRANDS

NIGHT, THE ENDLESS SNOWFALL

ARCHETYPE

THE HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL

SHOPLIFTER

BRAIN OF SHADOWS

ATTACHED

THE RIFLEMAN, THE CANCEROUS COW, AND THE SWEDISH MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, A Western

JUNGLE J.D.

CATS, DOGS, & OTHER CREATURES

HOW TO SURVIVE A FIRE AT THE GREENMARK

MINIMALIST BIOGRAPHY

SOMETIMES I GET LOST

THE CHANGING ROOM

CHARLES

THE FIGURE IN MOTION

THE GLARE AND THE GLOW

SLAPSTICK

STRANGENESS

OFF THE MAP

UNKNOWN

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

A VISIT HOME

THE MULTIPLES OF SORROW

FISH

MERRY-GO-ROUND

THE GREEN DOG

A DREAM OF THE DEAD

SATURDAY

APHASIC WORLD SYNDROME

DECEMBER

THE MASK CHILD

SHUFFLE

TWELVE MINUTES OF DARKNESS

AN ENDING

Publishing History

Praise for Steve Rasnic Tem

Also from Chômu Press:

Copyright