THE LUCKY BUDDHA

The Lucky Buddha is neither fortuitous nor spiritual, as the name would suggest. It is just a restaurant, and not a very nice one. Although it’s not a not nice one either. It is newly opened, at least—an oasis of cheap green tea and pickled ginger in a sea of dying Subways and froyo. Like the suburb that surrounds its strip mall, the decor demures into its own corners, whispering its class aspirations to no one in particular. It is where the townsfolk of East Waterloo can come for lunchtime gossip, the smell of bamboo chopsticks lingering on their fingers like a naughty vacation. It’s where sushi goes to die and where General Tso marches as if still at war.

Because the restaurant is named Lucky Buddha, the manager placed me in the front window. He purchased me from the internet, and I was dropped off at the restaurant in a cardboard box. I came with a receipt that read HAPPY BUDDHA STATUE – LUCKY AND PROSPEROUS – FENG SHUI FOR HOME OR BUSSINESS – NONTOXIC PAINT. 6.5” x 8” 0.6 lbs. ALL SALES FINAL. Under my happy, fat bottom are the words MADE IN TAIWAN.

Bob, the manager, is a forty-something-year-old bag of sweat and ego who directs everyone to call him “Uncle Bob.” Uncle Bob claims to be Italian, which he says is the reason for his excellent taste. He explains that excellent taste is what led him to a vacation in Tokyo with his ex-wife fifteen years ago. When she finally left him last year, he realized he never stopped looking for Magical Asia, so he quit his job managing a Wendy’s and applied to manage Lucky Buddha. He got the job, one of two applicants, and considered it a huge promotion, a win for both him and his uncultured hometown. Finally something sophisticated, run by someone cosmopolitan. Plus, it was a big fuck you to Janie, who loves California rolls but will be too proud to come.

A week after I’m propped in the window, business is PROSPEROUS, as promised. It’s still mostly takeout with Celso on the line and Ricky on the sushi rolls. They each salute me when they arrive—an inside joke. They clock in and clock out, eat lunch together behind the restaurant—rice and cigarettes. They like to add an egg or make a quick fried rice with ham from the grocery store across the strip. Bob won’t let them cook much else for themselves. He would measure the soy sauce in pipettes if he could read millimeters. I can tell he feels a little jealous when they salute me. I’m not sure if it’s because he wants to be saluted, too, or if it’s because he can’t understand when they speak in Spanish.

How do I see all this, feel all this, if I’m stuck facing out the window? How can I hear, with my bulbous, plastic ears, Celso muttering “chinga tu madre,” as Bob steps over him during a spicy mayo spill? Why is my consciousness split and roaming? To be honest, I’m not sure. I’m not sure how I know anything, or what knowing even means. I’m just a little plastic Buddha. I’m not a real god. I’m not a real anything, but I know every time someone touches me, grazes me with their thumb or looks at me for a couple extra blinks, it leaves a little bit of them behind. A taste of memory, a lick of personality. Maybe, without a real mind I cannot meditate, so I absorb everyone else’s thoughts instead. They recycle and are reborn, a pit stop before dissipating back into the universe. Amituofo, Amitabha Buddha, infinite light, if you will.

 

A month later, Bob decides it’s time to expand the dine-in business, so he hires Lucy Lin-Carmichael. She’s a high schooler looking to save up money for college. The only Asian girl in town, she gets the job easily. Her application interview takes five minutes. Bob asks her two questions: “Are you eighteen?” and “Do you want Direct Deposit?” She says no and yes, then seeing the look on Bob’s face, switches the order of her answers. She starts the next day.

“This place is more cultural,” Bob tells Lucy at her training. Then with a tilt of his head, adds, “You’d get it.” She doesn’t seem to, nor want to, but Bob smiles and nods anyway. He tells her to come every evening at four, to start by wiping down the tables. He hands Lucy a waiter pad and motions her toward the counter, where he shows her how to use the touchscreen register, then pulls her by the elbow to the soup station.

“You know this stuff—egg drop, miso, and beef broth. Standard. But we’re not running a soup kitchen here, so no free refills. Someone will ask you. Tell them no and get them to upgrade for two dollars.” He’s still holding on to Lucy’s elbow, so she pushes her waiter pad into her back pocket, deftly maneuvering out of Bob’s grasp in a way he doesn’t notice.

“Sorry, what are the different soups again?” Lucy asks.

Bob points to each pot as if chastising a dog. He’s irritated at having to repeat himself, even though he mixes up the soups himself three times a week.

“Eggdrop. Miso. Beef broth.”

“Oh, is that why they have different color tape on the lids?”

Bob’s irritation turns to pride. Someone has noticed his ingenious system. He pats Lucy on the back and her torso quakes.

“I knew you would be smart,” Bob says, his hand lingering on Lucy’s shoulder. “Asians really are sharper, aren’t they? And hard workers, too, especially the women—just like Mexicans, am I right?” He laughs and throws a thumb toward the kitchen, where Ricky and Celso are prepping. A pause in chopping is barely audible, then the rhythm returns to a staccato. Lucy shifts her shoulder free with a weak chuckle. Bob runs through her opening and closing routine and passes Lucy her apron. Training concluded.

“Pat the little Buddha as you leave. It’s good luck!”

Lucy smiles instinctively, a habit she realizes will serve her well in the industry.

That’s when she touches me for the first time. I smiled at her during the interview, but she didn’t notice. After all, I am always smiling. She brushes a thumb along my earlobe, gently, hesitantly (I am rarely sanitized), then she’s gone, waiter pad in her pocket and apron wadded in her fist.

It’s such a gentle caress. Most people palm me like a doorknob or chip at my peeling gold paint with their fingernails. Lucy’s touch is not like that. It reminds me of when I was packed away at the factory in Changhua, Taiwan, enveloped in a dark box amongst layers and layers of tissue paper. It feels almost like home, if I ever had one. That must be how she touches everything: the flimsy napkins, the sticky soy sauce bottles, even the fake, dead-eyed orchids at the checkout counter. All will be blessed during her time at Lucky Buddha. A touch like that is so rare in this town.

And it lingers. Lucy’s worries and dreams flow into the empty chambers of my head and body, pushing everything else out. She’s excited to make money, but worried. Worried about Bob’s heavy hand. Worried about whether she’ll do a good job. Whether she’ll get good tips, and whether she’ll be able to keep on top of her homework and college applications. Then, beneath all the worry, genuine care. She’s ready to make people happy with a secret soup refill. She’s ready to save up enough cash to support herself, to get out of this town and its suffocating strip malls. To find a place to breathe.

I am not a real Buddha, not a real anything, really, but I felt at that moment, with Lucy’s finger on my ear and her thoughts in my mind, perhaps I do have a mind. Perhaps I really am a being, maybe even a lucky one. Perhaps I, too, can think—and not think—my way to nirvana.

 

So that’s our team, at least for a while. Me and Lucy, Celso and Ricky, and Bob. The days start to have a rhythm, even if they never rhyme. Bob pets me on the head, saying, “Let’s see how lucky you make me, little buddy.” Then he laughs and sees if anyone notices his joke this time. It makes me feel greasy for hours, his touch penetrating my existence, filling my plastic soul with his desperation and arrogance. Then there’s Lucy, with her gentle touch and quiet eyes that seem to open, layer by layer, when she looks at you, like a lotus coming into bloom. Her quiet voice is a prayer, even as she reads the specials. Sometimes she reads them out to me, just to me, to practice.

On her meager “lunch” breaks (taken around four thirty before service starts), Lucy talks to me. It started as phrases at first, like “hello, little guy!” or even the occasional line from a stale fortune cookie. Then she really started talking. Musings about her family, mutterings about Bob, mild complaints about the kids at school, and how she can’t seem to relate to anyone. Perhaps she’s really talking to herself, but I listen intently. Lucy speaks softly, as if afraid to be heard, or afraid Uncle Bob will take it as a chance to conquer the conversation. Other times, she doesn’t say anything at all, just speaks to me through her mind, our psychic connection filling the silence. I can never really answer her, but I sense she understands me.

From our chats, I learn that Lucy’s father is white and that she has a cousin on that side named Kaylee. Kaylee has red curls and works at Hardee Joe’s, a diner-themed diner across the plaza. Through the window, Lucy can see Kaylee greeting guests and pulling menus out of her uniform—a yellow gingham dress with a frilled white apron. Sometimes they’ll wave to each other, a quick spasm before rushing back to work. I learn that Lucy had tried to apply for a job at Hardee Joe’s, but was told she “wasn’t what they were looking for,” so Kaylee suggested the Lucky Buddha instead. She told Lucy they would have to hire her there. And she was right. She was exactly what Bob was looking for.

He was lucky to have her too. It had taken Lucy about twenty minutes to memorize Lucky Buddha’s menu. Kung Pao Chicken. Spring Rolls. California Rolls. Dumplings: veggie or pork. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Some of the items even reminded her, like a caricature, of the dishes she had eaten with her mom in Taiwan, back when she used to request summer visits after the divorce. But then her mother remarried, and so did her father, and Lucy started spending fewer summers in Taiwan and more summers riding in the back of Kaylee’s different boyfriends’ different cars. The Kyles. The Joeys. The Jacobs. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

 

Lucy’s here an hour early, and she’s irritated. As usual, she stops by my window for a lucky pat, but this time she picks me up. She holds me in her hands, passing me between her hot fingers. I hope the rhythm calms her down.

Before work, Kaylee convinced Lucy to come along in another one of her boyfriend’s cars—this time a truck—to ride around with her gaggle of modelesque nicotine addicts. She said something about Lucy always hiding herself away, slugging away at her homework or always working, so Lucy relented. It was a Saturday, and she had nothing against flavored cigarillos blowing in her face. But Kaylee’s boyfriend Jojo brought along a foreign exchange student from Taichung, who he’d been leading around school and town, showing off like a new pet he could feed Sour Patch Kids and Bud.

“Konichiwa!” Jojo announced. “Here’s Avery. You two should talk foreign together.” Avery smiled politely, mostly because of limited English, and clearly had no idea what was going on. Lucy tried to start up a conversation, using her broken Mandarin, but it was too tiresome, and they both eventually fell into grateful silence, sliding into each other as Jojo swerved with his hand on Kaylee’s thigh. Lucy then asked to be dropped off, saying she had work and ended up here an hour early for her shift.

Her emotions bleed into me as she shuffles me around. She wants to get out of East Waterloo. Maybe she can move to Beijing, live with her mom and new husband, the one who calls her “your mixed kid” and talks about her as if she doesn’t understand Chinese. It would be better than staying here with her “white privilege doesn’t exist” father and his “boys love something exotic” girlfriend Leann. Or maybe she could get into a college somewhere, a city. But would they even accept her? What could she write in her application essay? Who was she anyway? Maybe all she knew of her Asian self was pieced together through The Joy Luck Club and the international aisle. She would come off as a whiny, clueless wannabe, like her Taiwan cousins said she was. A confused mongrel that didn’t belong anywhere. Half-and-half and somehow never whole. Never quite enough of anything but different.

She places me back in the window.

“Wherever I go, it’ll be better than this, right?” she asks, and I wish I could answer her. Truth is, I don’t know the answer. I’m just a plastic Buddha, molded in the shape of something that was once real, or at least believed to be real, thousands of years ago. I’m MADE IN TAIWAN, and like Lucy, my only memories of the motherland are fuzzy: the steel walls of a manufacturing plant, the wrinkle-fingered woman who painted my frozen smile from cheek to cheek, her mind drifting to the bento box she would have for lunch. Then I awoke here, at Lucky Buddha, where I came back to consciousness with the touch of hungry American fingers. Now I speak the language they speak and hear the thoughts they think, even as they sicken and confuse me. It’s like a missed step on the stairs, over and over. But still, it’s the only consciousness I have. I’m as Asian as you are, Lucy. I guess I’m as not-Asian as you are too.

 

Celso and Ricky make lunch for Lucy, their usual fried rice with rotating ingredients. They can cook with extra rice today, since Uncle Bob’s at his usual spot, the Subway next door. His frugal eyes are focused on a Meatball Marinara Footlong, not whether his employees are sneaking sixty-five cents worth of food.

Lucy loves the fried rice, so Celso and Ricky make her a bowl every time. Celso amps up the restaurant’s recipe, while Ricky whips up the Peruvian chaufa his mother used to make. Lucy usually eats at the server’s station. They would ask Lucy to join them out back, but they’re worried about the secondhand smoke from their cigarettes, which they desperately need. Lucy doesn’t mind. She likes the alone time.

Since it’s not really lunch and more of a pre-shift dinner, Lucy starts bringing iced coffees for Celso and Ricky. She’s only there in the evenings after school, but Celso and Ricky are there all day, even during the slow, takeout-only lunch hours. She feels it’s the least she can do.

One day, Lucy brings spam and eggs for the fried rice. Then another day, she brings canned corn. Green peppers. Even Hot Cheetos from the school vending machine. It quickly becomes a game of “Will It Fried Rice?” and somehow, Celso and Ricky produce a delicious meal every time. They start to compete against each other, asking Lucy to rank their rices.

The same day that the Subway closes for inspection, Lucy comes in with pineapple and shrimp. Bob, pouting at an empty table, makes a face as Celso whips the ingredients around in the wok. He looks so pathetic they give him a bowl anyway.

Bob actually likes it and adds the dish to the menu.

Some days are like this. Something reverberates, like a Tibetan prayer bell, and it all makes sense, or at least moves like it does, and I can feel it all from my window. Tomorrow, Bob will sneer something about immigration papers to Ricky. He’ll go back to Subway, reopened with a slightly lower sanitation grade. Tomorrow, an elderly customer will tell Lucy “this is pretty clean for an ethnic place,” then complain about using chopsticks.

But today, everyone enjoys pineapple and shrimp fried rice: Bob in his pouty corner, Celso and Ricky with their cigarettes, and Lucy at her server’s station. Rating: 11/10.

 

Guests sometimes inquire if Lucy is Chinese, Japanese, or somehow related to the owner. She tells them that the owner is Global Food Experience, Inc., but that no, she is not related to any of the staff. They compliment her English (her native language). She smiles and nods politely. They tip okay, except when they don’t. She still smiles and nods politely. They always love the food and look Lucy pointedly in the eyes when they say, “So glad there’s finally something authentic in town!” And in spite of herself, Lucy nods and tells them, “Well, the manager is Italian,” then buses away their dishes before they can react, smiling and nodding all the while.

Uncle Bob does consider himself to be a cosmopolitan contribution to the town. His latest cultural enhancement to the restaurant is the East Waterloo Roll: cream cheese, imitation crab, and avocado, battered and deep-fried. He has Lucy draw up a flier for it—a sketch using green, pink, and orange highlighters—which he sticks on a placard right next to me. What makes the roll representative of East Waterloo is the little paw print of wasabi stamped on to every plate. The local high school mascot is the Tigers. That’s where Lucy goes, where her cousin Kaylee went until she dropped out, and where Uncle Bob went before he was anyone’s uncle anything. Sometimes, when Lucy sees the sign, she laughs, in a way that sounds like a cough. I laugh along with her.

 

Like the Lucky Buddha, Lucy herself is not fortuitous, nor is she spiritual, something that perplexes her father’s girlfriend Leann and her Bible study group. Leann believes Christ and sullen youths make a wonderful pairing, as divine as yum yum sauce on Teriyaki Chicken, and that Lucy is being stubborn. If only she had raised Lucy, she could have saved her from a life of heathenism. When Leann runs the Bible study, she holds the meeting at Lucky Buddha, so she doesn’t have to tip. She even hands out flyers: COME MEET JESUS AT THE LUCKY BUDDHA.

Lucy will say, “It’s not that I hate Leann . . .” but I do. I hate Leann and her Bible group. I hate how her face is too tan for her neck. I hate how she tells Lucy she’s so skinny—and how her little Chinese momma must be skinny, too, right? I hate her stupid food blog that no one reads, that’s 85 percent mayonnaise anyway. How everything she cooks makes Lucy feel ill. I hate how, when she gets drunk, she starts talking about Lucy’s mother, about how she honeypotted her father for a green card and an anchor baby. How she used her exotic body to get what she wanted, pulling a good American man, her blameless Timothy, from the path of Jesus our Lord and Savior.

 

Unlike the Lucky Buddha, which belongs perfectly in East Waterloo, Lucy knows she doesn’t. Sometimes she feels more like Avery, the foreign exchange student from Taichung. Not because they share a last name, and Taiwanese descent, but because from the second Avery arrived, his countdown to leave began. Avery was there for an exchange, and Lucy feels the same (except that her exchange has lasted a lifetime). Ever since she can remember, East Waterloo has been where her house is, where her father is, but has never felt like home. Ever since she can remember understanding what college is, she knew she would go away for it.

And now she’s just waiting, hoping to hear back from UC Berkeley, or that small liberal arts college on the East Coast, highly ranked, with full funding in grants, and an Asian student population of 15.6 percent. Lucy reads the stats on her phone, which Uncle Bob reads over her shoulder. Uncle Bob is not good with personal space.

“Never heard of it. You should go to State,” Bob says. Then, patting his glossy forehead with a kitchen towel, “If you can get in, of course. I almost went, but my ex-wife—Janie—she made a fuss. Didn’t want me falling for an out-of-state city girl.” He hands Lucy the dish towel, and she holds it away with two fingers. “Speaking of which, prep the cocktail glasses for the Old-Fashioned Geisha. It’s on the specials tonight. Fancy. Real bourbon and everything.”

Lucy nods, smiles, and does as she’s told. For now, she still needs East Waterloo. Still needs Lucky Buddha and Uncle Bob’s sweat-stained envelopes of cash. She will need these paychecks, these tips, for college, so she won’t have to come back. So she’ll never need us again. Or at least so she hopes. She won’t find out until April. For now, she clutches her warm, fake wasabi-stained salary, and imagines the feel of an acceptance letter: cool to the touch, thick, paper-permanent.

 

It’s a Wednesday, and Lucy’s prepping for her shift when an article pops up on her phone. She reads it, and I read it through her. I can feel her spine tense, her breath captive in her chest. They’re calling it the Asian Spa Shooting. Two dead, suspect at large. The phrase “hate crime” is dropped, but meekly, more of a suggestion. As she reads, something happens, something new. I’m not just in Lucy’s mind. I’m in the minds that Lucy enters too.

I’m there and it’s a Tuesday. Yesterday. I’m at work lighting a candle. Sandalwood and vanilla, one of my favorites. I’ve bought new shades for the lamps, and they cast a therapeutic amber around the massage parlor, the kind with a special room in the back. People don’t like my work. They call it names, associate it with the streets and with the dark, as if hours have morality. They call it sinful and debased, but I take care of people, give them a moment of peace. How is that different from any other service? How is that different from working at a laundromat? A restaurant? It wasn’t what I wanted when I left home, but a job’s a job, so I do it well.

A boy comes into my shop. He is young, and for a moment, even adorable. His eyes are hazel, and I see them before I see the gun. It doesn’t register, it feels like a joke, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen a white boy with a gun. Once, it was at the Apple store, hanging from a hip holster like forbidden fruit. I don’t have time to fear because I’m already dead. He’s so young, I could be his mother. Who is his mother? I smell sandalwood and vanilla, until I don’t.

Now I’m across the room, and I do have time to fear. I’m younger now, one of the newest hires. Just a girl, really. I don’t know what happens in the back room and I don’t ask. I spend most of the workday at the desk, where I manage check-ins and the playlist. I miss my family terribly, but the money I send is making a difference. I’m changing the song, looking down when he comes in. I choose Tibetan prayer bells: the sound of careful, human touch.

A bullet is not a touch. It’s a twitch of the fingers, a snap, then something happens on your behalf. It’s a demand, directed at those in the dirt, those beneath you. A demand for your life. I hear the first bullet. I feel the second. It’s not the pain that’s shocking, but the force.

It doesn’t kill me instantly, so I have the privilege of terror. I look up and my coworker has a gaping, shredded hole where her cheek used to be, and I think, irrationally, urgently, oh, but she has such beautiful skin, she takes such good care of it, and that’s why she gives the best facials. I watch her fall, and panic starts to click. Then he turns to me and click, click, click, except it’s three blasts, and I’m on the floor. From here, the gun looks like a toy, like its barrel should shoot bubbles. It does not. Click-blast, once again. Such nice skin. Tibetan prayer bells in a long, vibrating chime, a sonic balm, to help stretch consciousness from this realm to the next. Hazel eyes meet mine. Warm yellow lamps. My thoughts splinter into light.

Now I am not afraid. I am righteous. I am rage. I am vindication. I’ve conquered temptation from the oriental whores. Executed my lust. These foreign Jezebels in pools of righteous blood. Their Babylon eyes can no longer trick me, cause me to stray. They’re with the Devil now, and I am with God. I can hear Him beneath the bells of the heathen song from the heathen world, so far east the angels cannot reach. I can hear him beneath the righteous beating of my heart in my ears.

Now I’m free from temptation. Now I’m free from judgment. Now I’m in America. Now I’m dead, and I used to have such nice skin. Now I’m wondering, should I have chosen another song? Now I’m wondering, how do they see me, when I give them what they want? When I serve them miso soup? How do they see me through the barrel of their hate, their suspicion, the warm gauze of otherness covering their eyes? How many Asian girls does it take to save a good, Christian boy? How many sex sacrifices to save a wayward soul? How long until we all forget, because they didn’t really matter anyway?

Lucy shoves her phone back into her pocket. She rubs at her face. She’s late on her prep. No one at work will mention the article, and she will not talk to her parents about it, or Kaylee either. They won’t ask anyway. They might scroll past it, or they won’t see it. It happened in a different city, in a different region. It has nothing to do with them at all.

 

In between tables, Lucy plunges her hands into the giant bag of fortune cookies by the register. Her applications have been submitted, and with each plunge Lucy’s face stitches together, pleading, “Let this be a lucky one.” When she pulls out a cookie, she crushes it whole in her hand, leaving the plaster-like dough in its wrapper. She slides the fortune out like a tongue, fingers it gently while the restaurant buzzes. If it’s bad news, she frowns and throws the whole thing away. If it’s a good fortune, or vague enough, she nods, smiles, and eats the cookie, dumping the sharp edges down her throat, before making a round of water runs.

 

Dear Lucy Lin-Carmichael,

Congratulations! We are ecstatic to inform you that you have been accepted to Anderson Gill College. The admissions committee was impressed by your academic achievements and application materials. Your financial aid package and official letter of acceptance were mailed today. Please call us if you have not received this package by April 11.

Our congratulations once again. We look forward to fostering your unique talents.

Sincerely,
Chastity Zhang
Dean of Admissions

 

Uncle Bob does not like the new server, but he doesn’t have a choice because this kid is his actual nephew. I don’t much care for him, either, but I like how he bothers Uncle Bob. His name is Xander, and he is a musician. He brings his saxophone to work—late—and serenades a table if there’s a birthday. He is always asking if there is a birthday. Uncle Bob tells him the saxophone doesn’t fit the restaurant’s aesthetic, but Nephew Xander brushes him off with a, “Dude—everyone loves the sax.”

Lucy has done her best to train Xander, but while Lucy picked things up quickly, Xander prefers to just make things up, including menu items. Ricky even had to come up with an impromptu “red chicken” to serve. Xander doesn’t care. According to him, it’s all MSG anyway, and will rot everyone’s brains. In fact, Xander never seems to eat, instead popping white pills with technicolor energy drinks. Xander clearly doesn’t want the job as much as Uncle Bob doesn’t want him to have the job, but based on the unrequested saxophone performances, Xander’s musical gigs are probably in short demand.

And Lucy, as you know, is leaving. The response was sent immediately, an enthusiastic yes, before she even told her father. Even before she told us at the restaurant, we knew. Her smile told us she’d be gone by summer. So Bob needs a replacement.

Of course, Lucy doesn’t seem to mind that Xander can’t remember that the red tops are regular soy sauce and the green tops are low sodium, or that he never refills the table water. She is often in a daze these last couple months. Ever since she was accepted, she has carried her letter around everywhere, pulling it out of her apron to read it again and again, whispering to it like a monk with a mantra. It’s her first-choice school. Her tuition isn’t fully covered, but enough. She already put in her two week’s notice, but Uncle Bob convinced her to stay through June.

“The textbooks will be expensive,” he had said, and Lucy agreed.

 

Xander’s mind is chaos. It’s not my favorite mind to inhabit, but he flings his psyche at anything and anyone in his path. He’s creative, sure, but he’s inherited Bob’s arrogance, which he can pull off as confidence since his hair isn’t thinning. Sometimes, when Xander looks at me, straight at me and into my eyes, he’s not even thinking about me, and that puts me in a weird space where I’m not sure if I even exist, forget on a metaphysical level, but on an atomic level—on a plastic and paint level. It stresses me out.

Xander stresses everyone out. Bob wonders if he’s tripping at work, on another plane of existence, but he’s actually most bearable when he’s blazed. Otherwise he can be erratic, prone to long sentences that lose their muffins in the sock. Sorry, I mean train of thought.

I don’t dislike Xander, but I don’t blame anyone who does. Xander takes for granted that he can be obnoxious and people will call it personality. He takes for granted that he can show up late, that he can talk over women at his community college, that somehow he always ends up with a job, his mini-fridge waiting for him in his parents’ basement.

Shakyamuni Buddha left a life of luxury to meditate under the bodhi tree. Xander’s the kind of person who brings jewels to the temple, embedded in his skin, clanging on his arms in heavy bracelets, while proclaiming what a pleasure it is to eat nothing but rice, water, and ayahuasca. That’s not a very good metaphor, but it’s a very Xander metaphor.

Since he can’t fire him, Bob mostly avoids him. Celso and Ricky pretend they don’t understand him. He’ll bother someone who “comprende English” instead. Customers ask if there’s anyone else who can serve them. Lucy, of course, is the most patient, and she’s the one who gets the largest dose of Xander. Even when Lucy’s drowning in orders or when she’s trying to train him, Xander will tell Lucy to slow down and chill out, that it’s all whatever, babe. She smiles, but because she knows she’s out of here soon.

 

Lucy leaves the Lucky Buddha today. Before that, she takes a Sharpie and labels the pot lids. She hugs Ricky and Celso, and gives Xander a pound. When she gives Uncle Bob her apron, he shakes her hand, a little too hard, and for a little too long.

“We’ll miss you, girl,” he tells her. “Don’t hesitate to come back if school doesn’t work out. And don’t forget to clock out. I’m not paying for your textbooks.”

She laughs and taps the register for the last time.

As she walks out the door, she touches my ear. She rubs it like a worry stone that has outlived its crisis. I rest in her touch.

Then she’s gone.

 

Xander, hungover from something, picks a fight with Celso and Ricky. This is after he’s been forcing himself into their cigarette breaks—smoking weed instead. He’s been going on about some crazy job he did in Panama, one that sounds either made-up, illegal, or a bit of both. Today, he says something about ICE, because Ricky asks him to please put the soup lids back on their pots, properly. This eventually leads to a lot of shouting, which eventually leads to a pot of soup on the floor. When Uncle Bob asks Xander to wipe it up, he says that’s not part of his seven twenty-five an hour. Celso and Ricky can’t believe Xander’s being paid seven twenty-five—two dollars more than they are. Then, because Xander won’t, and Bob won’t, and service starts in half an hour, Celso and Ricky mop up the soup.

Tomorrow, they’ll be gone. I see it in their eyes as they leave, saluting me for the last time. They’re starting their own business. They’ve been planning it for months and were waiting for the opportune moment to leave. Xander helped expedite that.

It’s going to be a food truck, a fried rice joint, which they’ll drive out to the nearest city. Ricky will add arroz chaufa de mariscos, pollo, and camarones to the menu. Celso will name the pineapple and shrimp fried rice “The Lucy.” Their truck’s specialty: bring them anything, and they’ll “fried rice it.” It will be a social media phenomenon. Thanks to Bob, they’ll know exactly what not to do in managing a restaurant. Thanks to Xander, they’ll have a good idea of who not to hire. The Chaufa Truck, and Ricky and Celso, will do just fine.

Uncle Bob, shorthanded with service starting in ten minutes, picks up a spatula and curses.

 

What Leann wants to hear are the lunch specials, but what Xander wants to talk about is his stint with Hare Krishna. He also wants to show her his pentacle tattoo, a proud relic from his heavy metal days, before he rekindled his love of ska. This was all in response to her Bible study, which he says she can’t hold at Lucky Buddha anymore.

Leann does not want to hear this. She’s a chef for Christ’s sake (a food blogger) and a respected local writer (an unknown food blogger). She wants to speak with the manager, but Bob is out today, desperately trying to find a new set of cooks. Xander tells her he is the manager, which they both know is untrue, and then tells her to take her Karen-ass elsewhere.

The next day, there is a damning Google review. Anonymous. One star. Terrible service! New waiter was Rude and Misogynistic. Angry emoji. Angry emoji. Angry emoji. Food is Disgusting. The Lucky Buddha has gone downhill!!!! Plus, they charge for green tea refills and are stingy on ginger dressing. Won’t be coming back . . . and just so everyone knows . . . Satanic!!

 

The Lucky Buddha is just doing takeout for a while.

 

Now that Lucy’s left, I sleep most of the day, only roused from my slumber when a toddler snatches me from my platform. The mothers tell them I’m dirty, then put me back, wiping the dust on their denimed butt cheeks. Without Lucy, I am tired. I am tired of Uncle Bob’s relentless talking, his inability to talk without painting himself as Person Number One. I am tired of the smells, of vinegared rice and pink sauces where the eggs have split. I am tired of the New Age music that Xander belts along to, the words mixed and tangled like seaweed salad. I am so tired it makes me sleep, and I dream of when Lucy was still here, when she would touch my bald head so softly. Or sometimes, I dream of the factory in Taiwan: the smell of plastic fresh on my skin, the heat of the furnaces, and flimsy packing material like pillows in my shipping box. I slept often then as well, between the murmur of machines and the shouts of foremen. I even dream of a former life, maybe as petroleum in the earth’s crust, as a water buffalo, or as an all-knowing deity, meditating under a bodhi tree.

 

Lucy comes back.

When I see her, I feel like I can breathe again, even though I don’t have lungs and have never breathed before. She sees me and smiles, but she doesn’t stop to say hello. I don’t care, just being near her is enough. It’s Lucy! And she’s back, at least for a bit.

Bob is surprised to see her again, and she says her flight isn’t until tomorrow. She knows she’s already said goodbye, but there’s something else she has to do. He asks if she’s sure she doesn’t want to take a gap year—it’s not too late! He pretends he’s joking, but he’s not. Things are better, but they’re not quite there.

“How’s it going?” Lucy asks.

“Not great, but not bad.” Part of the improvement came when Bob banished Xander to the back of house. He needed someone to cook anyway and figured Xander could handle the simple stir-fry and pre-made sauces. Surprisingly, the straightforward menu balances Xander’s chaos. He’s got an okay palate too. His Satan tattoos even look pretty cool against the flames. He misses the saxophone solos, but seems to find solace in the sounds of the kitchen.

“I’m interviewing some new servers,” Bob continues. “Another high schooler named Kimberly. She’s only sixteen but says she knows how to make bubble tea. You know her? She’s always wearing those cutesy anime shirts.”

“No, I don’t think so. But bubble tea will be good for business.”

“At least the kids will stop bugging us for it.”

Lucy hands Bob a gift bag.

“I’ve brought you something. I saw it online and thought of you. And this place.”

Bob shoves his hand into the bag and out comes a new buddha statue. He’s bigger, and he’s resin poured. He’s also bright gold with giant black sunglasses. Unlike me, he’s not sitting in meditation, but lying on his side with one leg propped up. His hand is in a hang ten.

It’s love at first sight for Bob. Xander, who has emerged from the kitchen, says it’s sick. He grabs it out of Bob’s hands and kisses New Buddha’s bald, shiny head.

“I thought this would make a good going-away present.”

“Thanks, Lucy.” Bob yanks the statue back from Xander’s grasp. “It’s perfect. You want the old one? He hasn’t been so lucky lately.”

Lucy picks me up before he’s finished asking. She says goodbye and slips out, while Bob yells something at Xander about his greasy fingerprints.

Lucy holds me firmly, but in her usual, gentle way, and in Lucy’s hands, I’m overcome with a sense of belonging, just as I know New Buddha will belong with Bob, with the new chapter of the restaurant, hopefully more funky than fetish. I know Lucy will belong somewhere too.

“Hey, little buddy,” she says, and I know she came back for me. The gift was just an excuse. As she holds me close to her heart, my consciousness begins to fade. My mind dissolves, and I welcome it. Something is falling into place in the universe, and I no longer need to be here to see it.

I hope I will not be back to this cycle of birth and rebirth. Of passing thoughts and feelings. Of the illusion of the self. I hope I leave samsara behind with the restaurant and with East Waterloo. Lucy is my nirvana, and I am not afraid. I do not have time to fear anyway. I smell vanilla and sandalwood, soy sauce, and the ink of American dollars. I hear Tibetan bells and the hum of a Saturday shift in flow. I hear a gunshot, but it cannot touch me.

I am lucky and fortuitous.

 

bruhh welcome to lucky buddha feat. yours truly the luckiest buddha in east waterloo. reach enlightenment with our killer lunch specials with free soup. we’ve got my man xander on the grill with the spiciest kung pow chicken you’ve ever tasted msg free & extra saucy. it’ll make you say ommmmm . . . my god. we’ve got my girl kimberly aka kimbo aka the bodhisattva of boba. she’s got melon, she’s got taro, she’s got all the flavors, babe. now a round of applause for the man behind it all, uncle bob himself. he’s the eightfold path, he’s got the four noble truths—one of which is fuck his ex-wife janie, cause we make a mean california roll. as you can tell from my full physique, the food is divine. tasty, tasty karma. we’re making good money, good food, and good vibes. it’s peace and love forever at lucky buddha, babes. take a fortune cookie on the way out, give me a rub, and don’t forget to tip. shaka shaka.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE FAIRY SWAP

We found the fairy after a three-day thunderstorm.

We were rock hunting at the time. During the summer construction workers had scooped out one of the trails that wound up the ridge behind our house. Dad complained endlessly about the pulled-up trees, but the yellow Cat diggers did shake a lot of pretty things loose from the dirt: clay-smeared chunks of amethyst and rocks with black garnet chips and sheets of mica as big as your head. Once my sister Sadie found a fist-sized golden lump that was called pyrite. Whenever I stared at it glittering on our dresser, I wished more than anything that it was mine.

At first we both thought the fairy was a clump of muck broken off the carved-out mountainside by the wind and rain. I was the one who found it, as I poked a stick into the mud under one of the crouching diggers and hit something that didn’t give. Sadie was the one who noticed the yellow eyes. Sometimes the lids would slide over them, as gray and crusty as rock, but no other part of it moved. A sticky blackness oozed down the side of its head.

I was bigger than Sadie, but she was older, so she was the one who took off her red rain slicker and grabbed the thing through the cloth. Up in her stick arms, it was about as big as a good-sized cat. A gray foot hung out of the coat, each little toenail yellow and hooked. Without knowing why, I started to cry.

“Shut up, Omie,” Sadie said. “It’s okay, but just shut up.”

She carried it all the way back down through the steep wet woods to our house. Twice I thought I heard something behind us, just a touch different from the rhythm of the dripping trees. But as Sadie often pointed out, I was always noticing things that turned out to be nothing.

Back home we put the fairy in Ghost’s crate, in the soft spider- webby hollow of her empty bed. Ghost had been a Great Pyrenees Dad was sure would keep coyotes away from our chickens and would watch over me and Sadie when he was gone. Only she’d snarled and snapped at the chickens and trembled in the corner of the crate whenever we approached her with a bone. She’d crashed through the screen door one day and when it became clear she wasn’t coming back, Dad moved her crate down to the basement. He had not gone down there since.

“Do you think it will get out?” I asked.

The fairy hadn’t moved since Sadie set it down. The ratty edges of the bed seemed to creep up around it, like sand sucking down a stone.

 

Dad was at a gig that night, so we were able to make as many trips to the basement as we wanted. We pushed bits of our dinner sandwiches through the bars, my peanut butter and banana and Sadie’s dry turkey, along with some old dog food and a carton of blueberries, because who knew for sure what fairies ate. We edged around the crate with a flashlight, examining what parts of it we could see. It had no hair. The shadowy lack between its legs made us suspect it was a girl.

We were no strangers to fairies and their various races. In fact, we were probably as close as any two girls could be to experts. In the stories Dad told to tourists at the Folk Art Center on Friday nights, the root people—as yellow and hairy and creased as old carrots—lived in tunnels beneath the mountains and hunted chipmunks with arrows the size of hairpins. In Mom’s gold-gilded English books, the fairies were shy and dainty, but would steal babies or pretty ladies and swap them for a Changeling, a mean-tempered fairy version of the person, if they had a mind to. I imagined we might count as an exotic pet to them, like a peacock or a tiger.

We weren’t sure what sort of fairy we had. Not a particularly exciting one, anyway.

We tossed around a few names, like Moonlight, Fern Gully, and Mountain Dew (which I thought was the most beautiful pairing of words there ever was). Nothing seemed to fit, though, so we just sat there on the concrete with the damp seeping through our jeans, watching its outline waver in the dark until it almost seemed to shimmer.

That night I climbed into the top bunk with Sadie, dragging Fat Jamie, my favorite Cabbage Patch doll, up with me. My bed was level with the window and the patter on the porch outside our room sounded like footsteps, soft soled and creeping. Sadie whined and dug her elbow into my belly, but not very hard.

“I think we should tell Dad about the fairy,” I said. Dad knew all about strange things in the mountains: big cats that walked on their hind legs and glowing will-o’-wisps that lured hunters into swamps.

“No way. What about Peter?”

Peter had been a tiny shut-eyed squirrel we’d found at the base of a pine. We’d dreamed of raising him to ride on our shoulders like a parrot, and Dad promised we could keep him. Only we’d come home from school to find that he’d taken Peter to the Nature Center in Asheville, without even letting us say goodbye.

“Fairies are different than squirrels.”

“We’re not telling him. I saved your life, remember?”

This was true: Sadie had saved my life back when the fairy Changeling wrecked the car we were all in. When I was little I used to think she owned my life: a yellow flicker she kept in a jar, like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan. Either way, it meant I had to do whatever she said.

“I guess we could just keep it to play with, then.” I imagined the fairy and me walking hand in hand through a glittery green wood, flowers crowning our heads.

Sadie drew a sharp breath and rolled over. Her eyes were an inch from mine, black and sparking.

“I bet it could bring Mom back.” Her voice was low and hungry. “I bet we could make it.”

I looked away, like I always did when she got that hard, sparkly look. The rain from the window cast funny shadows on the opposite wall, slithering down like worms.

 

Mom had been taken by the fairies two years ago, when I was six and Sadie was nine. She was just the kind of human they wanted for themselves: dainty and beautiful, more like a girl than a mother.

I couldn’t remember her well, but Sadie could. Sometimes when we were in bed at night, she’d start talking out of the blue: Mom this and Mom that, the words tumbling down from the top bunk and piling all higgledy-piggledy around my head. Even though I never cared much for stories I couldn’t see myself in, I always let her talk.

Mom and Dad met in college and it was Love at First Sight, according to Sadie. He had been playing fiddle at the Friday night contra dance; she had been dancing with other girls from her Advanced Folk Dance class. She could leap higher and spin faster than any of them, and Dad kept noticing her floating up and down in the crowd, a ball of bouncing light.

Afterward, she complimented his fiddling and he complimented her dancing, and they went for a walk. Dad was majoring in Appalachian Studies; Mom was an English Major with a double minor in Sustainable Agriculture and Dance. Dad had traveled all over the state begging old folks in their trailers or dusky retirement homes to tell him stories and knew hundreds by heart at only nineteen years old; Mom could quote whole pages of Shakespeare and Tennyson, so beautifully that it almost made you hurt. They were amazed by each other.

Then Mom fell pregnant with Sadie. Her grandparents had a summer house in the mountains, and because they loved Mom, they gave it to her. When Dad was away at gigs, Mom and Sadie would do all sorts of things together: make cake out of the puckery persimmons growing in the woods, catch grasshoppers and pull open their rainbow wings, drag Dad’s old-fashioned record player out on the porch and dance through the long grass. After I came along, Mom strapped me to her back and kept dancing. Sometimes I wished I could remember what it felt like to be leaping and spinning along with her, hidden under the silky sweep of her hair.

There was just one memory of Mom I could see clearly, all on my own. She and Dad were sitting on the porch with their gasoline-smelling whiskey drinks after supper, swatting the no-see-ums out of their eyes. Dad had told me broccoli would make me invisible, which had the desired result of me eating the stuff like it was Cheetos. He exclaimed in fear at the unseen footsteps thundering along the porch, the ghostly hand ruffling his beard, as Mom laughed so hard that she hunched over in her chair, yipping like a coyote. That was still the Mom I saw in my head whenever Sadie talked about her: mouth gaped and drooling, unable to catch her breath.

Although I knew it wasn’t true about the broccoli, I still couldn’t help examining myself every time I ate it, as if I’d be able to see the grain of the table through my fading bones.

 

The Changeling showed up suddenly, Sadie remembered. The fairies had snuck it into Mom’s side of the bed during the deepest part of the night. The evening before Mom had been cuddled up in the top bunk as usual, soothing us to sleep with her sing-song English Major stories, and the next day she—or rather, the thing that looked like her—wouldn’t get out of bed. When Sadie went to tug its hand, it snatched it away and called her a mean name. Its eyes were black except for a bit of blue left around the rim. A strange smell, like snake musk, crept out from the blankets. When it finally stood up to go to the bathroom it walked like it was just learning how, banging into corners and hissing through its yellow teeth.

The Changeling stopped brushing its long hair, greasy clumps hanging over its face. One day it got into such a scary fight with Dad that it took a butcher knife and stabbed the kitchen table, not even stopping when the blade slipped on the hard wood and cut its palm. Dad asked why it was doing that and it screamed, “Because you fucking made me.” (I hadn’t wanted to believe that part, but the gouges were still there, each as long and crooked as a claw mark.)

The last day Sadie saw the Changeling—that we both saw it— was when Dad was away and it was just the three of us at home. The Changeling had gotten out of bed early and put on a pretty dress, looking almost as sweet and happy as our mother had. It told us we were driving down to Sweet Dreams, our favorite ice cream shop in the city, and that we could get whatever we wanted. Sadie and I had been giggling in the backseat as we slid into each other around the curves in the road, when all of a sudden the car leapt and crunched and we were all sucked down into something black and wet.

That’s when Sadie saved my life. She’d climbed out of the car window, but when I tried to go after her, the Changeling grabbed me by the back of my overalls and wouldn’t let go. So Sadie scratched its arms until it did.

The car wreck was what made Sadie certain Mom had been swapped for a Changeling. Fairies didn’t think like humans did. They had devilish sides, drinking dewdrops from acorns one moment and dragging sobbing babies out of their cribs the next. Probably that was why the Changeling had wrecked the car: it had just felt like it.

The Changeling went away after that and we never saw it again. The only good thing about it all was that it meant Mom was still out there somewhere, wherever the fairies lived: in a glittering cave, or some tucked-away grove dripping with flowers. Probably she was dancing and reciting Shakespeare, all dolled up in gauzy skirts and leafy crowns. Probably, the fairies loved her as much as they were able.

 

“How can we make the fairy bring Mom back?” I asked Sadie, still watching the wormy shadows. “We can’t even talk to it.”

She squirmed around onto her back, sucking at her teeth.

“We need to show the other fairies we’ve got one of them.”

I wanted to leave a note that explained the nuances of the situation, but Sadie pointed out that this type of fairy probably couldn’t read. After all, our fairy seemed about as dumb as the rock it resembled. Dad didn’t let us have brain-rotting cell phones and we didn’t have a printer anyway, so taking a picture was out. It was Sadie who thought up cutting off a piece of it—its pinky toe or its shrivelly ear, whatever was easiest to clip with gardening shears—to set out in the woods. “It’s the only way to show them we mean business, so don’t you start whining,” she warned when my mouth began to jump. Sadie would do the actual cutting since she had to do everything, anyway.

For a while after the Changeling went away, I had been sure the fairies would come for Sadie next. She was just like Mom with her honey skin and flossy hair, a perfect target. I used to stand up on my bed and look over her every morning before she woke, certain I’d find something different: a wild rotten smell, a dark gleam under her white eyelashes.

But I hadn’t needed to worry. Sadie never acted sadder or more devilish than usual. There was something about her the fairies just didn’t want.

“So they’ll give us Mom and we’ll give them our fairy.”

Sadie huffed. “They’ll know what we mean. That’s how fairies think, in swaps.”

I looked out the window, down at our dripping porch, at the dark droopy couch Sadie liked to sit on when I was bugging her too much. I tried to picture Mom there instead, her mouth a drooling hole.

 

In the morning, I half hoped to find the fairy had vanished; surely that was the sort of thing fairies could do. But it was still curled up on the dog bed, blinking its yellow eyes at us.

I wanted breakfast before we did anything gross to it, so Sadie fried me an egg and paced around while I ate, staring out the windows. “Look,” she said. Even though it was still February, the grass was scattered with dewy red flowers, like the ground had been pricked all over with a needle.

Sadie refused to make me any more eggs because I was too fat anyway, so I followed her back down to the basement. She handed me a softball bat and a butterfly net and told me to stand behind her (when I whined and hesitated, she had to remind me again that she saved my life).

She crawled into the crate, garden clippers in one hand. Her spine curled up against her T-shirt like a lizard’s. Then she took a good, hard look over the fairy and pulled its ear away from its skull. It looked so much like a spongy lichen that I was sure she could just pluck it off.

But as soon as the clippers clacked the fairy started screaming. It was like the yap of foxes and Mom’s coyote-laugh and the screech of broken-necked chickens all at once.

“Shut up,” shouted Sadie. “Shut UP!”

She flung back the hand that held the shears and hit it on the side of its round head, so hard that when she drew her fist back it was trembling. It just kept on screaming. Being the baby I was, I started to scream too.

Sadie had only managed to cut off the lobe of the ear, which was sitting in a mess of blackish blood and squashed blueberries. She fumbled around for it and grabbed me by the arm and we both scrambled back up the stairs. We could still hear the fairy screaming after we slammed the basement door.

“It made me do it,” she said, staring at her swollen knuckles.

It took a while for me to calm down. I was sure that the muffled screaming was coming from a hundred different places: Dad’s empty bedroom, the carved-out ridge, from deep under the long, dead grass. Finally, Sadie pushed Fat Jamie into my arms and said she’d let me pick out the dish we’d put the ear in, if I’d just quit bawling.

I chose a china saucer rimmed in faded violets. Ringed by the flowers, the earlobe looked like a bit of spat-up mushroom.

Because I was still blubbering and in no shape for a potentially dangerous mission, Sadie told me to wait inside—lock the door behind her, just in case—while she went up to the construction site to set out the plate. The fairies were sure to find it there.

I pressed my nose against the window as she marched off into the rhododendrons at the edge of the yard, her white hair and red rain slicker bright among their dull curled leaves. The fairy was quieting down below me, and I thought about what I’d do if she didn’t come back. Eat all the eggs I wanted, for one thing. Not cut off any ears. Have my life all to myself. But none of those things seemed worth being alone for.

 

When a knock came on the door I had a notion I’d find a whole crowd of yellow-eyed fairies on the porch. Or even Mom, back from fairyland, still red-faced and howling. But it was just Sadie. When I asked her if she saw any fairies, she said no. Probably we should give them a couple hours to find the plate.

But we couldn’t go back to check that day, because that afternoon Dad banged into the house with his fiddle case. He said hello and kissed us both on our heads, like we were normal girls and not ones who had put a fairy in the basement and its ear up on the mountainside.

The older we got, the less Dad came home. Sometimes I got startled if I opened the bathroom door in the morning to find him shaving his beard hairs off into the sink. It was how I might feel if a raccoon broke in: pleasantly surprised but knowing it didn’t really belong.

All he said to us was to be sure to take baths that night, because the Aunts were coming tomorrow.

The Aunts came to see us every other Sunday. This was never much fun, because they didn’t like Dad. They didn’t like that he’d named me and Sadie after murdered girls from Doc Watson songs, they didn’t like that he made a living as a fiddler and storyteller, and most of all, they didn’t like that our house was his and not theirs.

The Aunts were Mom’s sisters. They both lived two hours away, in big square houses with square-headed husbands. Aunt Evie had two thick-necked sons who were off at college. Aunt Katelyn didn’t have children but had been talking for ages about how God had called her to adopt a baby from a starving place. She would make us look at the online ads for the sad orphans, our possible cousins, touching their cheeks through the phone screen with a sighing wet-eyed look.

Every time the Aunts visited they acted like the house was theirs, walking from room to room, clicking their tongues at the Virginia creeper curling against the windows, the dusty piles of ladybugs crawling over each other in the corners. Sadie said none of that stuff had been there before Mom was taken, but I couldn’t imagine living in a house without ladybugs.

“Good Lord, it smells like a cave in here, Alex.” Aunt Evie flared her powdery nose. “Do you have mold?”

Dad didn’t answer right away—like me, he was probably wondering how Aunt Evie knew what a cave smelled like. She was right, though: there was a new smell in the house, something dark and mossy.

“Maybe a bit in the basement,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of rain this month.”

Aunt Evie snorted. Then we all had to sit around our knife-clawed table and talk. Dad told them he was interviewing for a substitute teacher job at the district high school (this was not true; Dad hated the public school system). Sadie said she had gotten all As on her last report card (also not true; she’d failed her English oral report because she’d tried to do it on Flowers in the Attic). I’d gotten two Snickers for the price of one from the cafeteria vending machine last week (this was true, but only because I was still too riled by the fairy business to think of a good lie).

There were some things we never told them, of course. They didn’t know that me and Sadie looked after ourselves when Dad had a gig. They didn’t know I’d had a bubbly rash on my chest for most of the winter that had gotten worse when Sadie drenched it with peroxide. And they didn’t know that when the weather was warm we skipped school to pick blackberries; that for supper we’d eat a pailful each, drowned in sugar, and leave red fingerprints on the walls for days.

“I talked to Meg the other day,” Aunt Katelyn said, once the question-asking was over. “She misses you girls so much and told me to give you both a big hug.”

She delivered the hugs with that wet-eyed look. The Changeling was in some place in Arizona. Sometimes Aunt Katelyn told us what it was doing out there—taking yoga classes and talking with other crazy people, mostly—but none of us much cared.

“I brought you girls a little something.” Aunt Katelyn was forever bringing us little somethings. This time it was a Breyer Horse for me (never mind that I was scared of horses) and a strappy dress for Sadie, the same silky blue as her eyes.

“My, aren’t you lucky girls,” Aunt Evie remarked disapprovingly. “Now go put those things away so we can chat.”

What she didn’t know was that we could easily hear the chat from our bedroom. It was always the same: Meg’s treatment bills were draining Mama and Daddy’s retirement; when was the last time Omie had a haircut because she was looking mangy; was Sadie eating enough, because she was awfully thin.

Dad usually laughed and mumbled during the chat. This time, he was dead quiet.

In their clipped cheery voices, the Aunts said that Wildwood Homes, the same people who were going to build houses up on the ridge, had made an offer on the house and property. The title was in Meg’s name, of course, but the Aunts wanted to be respectful, talk it over with Dad. They’d give him some of the money, as long as he promised to use it properly, put it into college funds. The girls could stay with Katelyn for a time, give him a chance to get things in order.

Dad didn’t say anything for a good while. One of the Aunts was jigging her heel against the floor. Tap-tap-tap.

Then, so soft we could barely hear him: “Over my dead fucking body.” It was a bad word and the Aunts gasped, but there was a limpness to the way he said it. In my head, bare-headed vultures swooped down on his corpse, picking at a string of flesh.

Before anyone could say anything else, Aunt Evie started coughing. She coughed and coughed and coughed. We peered through the crack in our door; Aunt Katelyn was trying to help her stand up. But she kept coughing and something pink splattered on the floor in long ropes. For a second I thought her insides were coming out, until I realized it was just the pasta salad she’d brought us all for lunch.

“You do something about that mold,” she rasped. “Or I’m calling CPS, don’t think I won’t.”

“Evie,” said Aunt Katelyn.

“You need to leave.” Dad followed them to the door and watched until they drove away.

Then he went to the kitchen window and wrenched it open. Paint flakes fluttered up and the creeper coils spilled inside. He went to all the other windows and opened them, even stomping into our bedroom like he didn’t even see us there. Then he went and lay down on the couch with his arm over his eyes.

If anything, the mossy smell was stronger with the opened windows. I imagined it spreading up into the squiggly crevices of my brain, green and furred.

Dad came into our room and told us a story that night. He usually only told stories when he felt bad about something (after the Changeling first went away, we got one every night for weeks).

Tonight’s was a particularly good one. Two girls named Omie and Sadie found a magic ring in a tree hollow. They took turns trying it on. The ring made Omie sprout snowy wings and fly between the mountain peaks. Then it made Sadie talk to animals and they both got invited to the Deer King’s Winter Ball. Dad did all the animals’ different voices and swooped around our bedroom, peering down at treetops the size of broccoli heads.

“Is our house really getting sold?” I asked Sadie, after he shuffled off to his own room (I knew better than to ask Dad, who tended to answer questions with sighs or, if he had the wind for it, more stories).

“It’s Mom’s house.” Her voice was low and hungry again. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to hold onto the picture of the two girls from the story: glowing with magic, lighter than air.

 

Dad hung around for three days, so we couldn’t check the ear plate or feed the fairy. He slept on the couch during the day, shivering and twitching beside the open window. When I tried to wake him up to make supper he just blinked his cruddy eyes at me. “I was dreaming,” he said, but wouldn’t say what about. At night he kept us up with his coughing and pacing. He went from the living room to the kitchen and back in long, slow circles. A few times we heard his feet stop right by the basement door, but he never went down.

 

Then he was gone again, leaving behind a note for Sadie that Burlington Old Time Music Festival was on and that there was lasagna in the freezer. The first thing we did was hike up the ridge to look for our plate. Behind Sadie, I dragged my heels into the wet leaves, dreading what I was sure to see: a white ear, dainty and curled as a seashell, or maybe a long strand of hair attached to a bloody tag of skin.

But there was nothing there. We looked all around, kicking over rocks and clumps of leaves—even climbed up into the empty cab of the Cat digger and rustled through the water-wrinkled underwear magazines someone had left on its floor—but the plate was gone. I speculated that the fairies may have just wanted to keep it for their fairy parties, since it was so pretty. Sadie told me to shut up.

The house looked different when we walked out of the woods. It took me a minute to figure out why. Had the rhododendrons always been leaning so close to the windows? Had those weird red flowers always been poking up through the cracks in the porch? But then I saw it: a violet-rimmed plate, waiting right in front of the door. There was nothing on it, but my insides still shriveled.

Sadie wasn’t scared at all. She just looked at it and laughed. She laughed so hard that she started to cry, dribbling snot all over the painted flowers.

 

I felt all mossy-headed after we found the plate, but Sadie was excited. She leapt and spun around the house like a much littler girl, her white hair tangling around her. She pranced down the basement steps and laughed at the blood-crusted fairy and dashed back up. She jumped on the couch, in the greasy hollow Dad had left, and the creeper vines bounced like they were excited too. She twirled over to me and squished my cheeks between her cold hands.

“We’re getting Mom back, dummy.” Her eyes had that sparking look. “Why aren’t you happy? I order you to be happy!”

I let her spin me around and laughed too. It was easier just to do what she said.

 

Sadie wanted to take the fairy up the mountain and swap it for Mom right away, but I was too tired to hike all the way back up there. So we decided to wait until morning.

After Sadie started to snore, I went down to the basement alone, Fat Jamie’s best silk dress balled under my arm. The wood steps were slimy under my bare feet and I had a notion that I was walking over faces, mushy and sucking. I grappled in the dark and pulled the lightbulb chain. The fairy was slumped against the side of the crate, its head black and crusty. I wondered if it missed the other fairies. I wondered if it had helped take Mom, years ago. If it had ever thought of letting her go.

I opened the crate. Its eyes turned toward me but didn’t move. I reached out and ran a hand down one of its legs. I thought it might feel cold and rough, but its skin was hotter than mine.

It didn’t do anything as I pulled each of its thin arms through the dress sleeves, tied the ribbon at its throat. I wondered if Mom had a hard time dressing me when I was a baby, if she’d struggled to stuff my limp arms through the sleeves, or worried that my fingers would snap when they snagged in the gaps of the lace.

I usually talked to my dolls when I dressed them up—told them I’d make them beautiful, that they’d feel much better now that they had something decent to wear—but all the things I wanted to say to the fairy dried up in my throat. After I was done, I rocked back on my heels and we stared at each other for a good while.

It looked like a wet rock someone had stuffed into a cheap princess outfit. I took the dress off again, not sure why I’d expected to see anything different.

 

When morning came, we both got dressed in the dark. Sadie put on her new blue dress from Aunt Katelyn. She told me to wear my red Christmas jumper and pinched me, hard, when I said I wanted jeans: “Do you want Mom to see you looking all raggedy?” Then she combed out my hair, tugging the snarls until my eyes stung.

In the basement, Sadie fastened the fairy’s wrists and ankles with some rubber bands she found in the junk drawer, even though it was limper and duller than ever. She picked it up like a baby, its yellow eyes turned into her bony chest. Then she carried it up the stairs and out into the pale, shivery light. Her hair ran down the blue dress like creek froth.

“You look like a butthole in that dress,” I told her. She ignored me. It was a lie: she looked so grown-up and beautiful, I hardly knew it was her.

Mist snaked out of the rhododendrons and into the grass. Sadie told me to pick some of the red flowers to give to Mom. When I yanked them up the roots hung on, sprinkling dirt all down my jumper.

Sadie climbed the ridge like a deer, slipping around the briars and tree trunks. I stumbled and panted, trying to keep up. Part of me—the same silly part that used to think she kept my life in a jar—was sure that if I let her out of my sight, I wouldn’t see her again.

The mist was still thick when we got to the construction site, the crumbling red walls and ditches veiled and silvery. Sadie set the fairy down. She grabbed me by the hand and dragged me up next to her.

“Okay,” she said, breathing deep. “Okay.”

The fog stirred around, but nothing else happened. The fairy lay curled on its side, eyes closed except for a yellow sliver. My heart quieted a little and my head started wandering toward breakfast, to our kitchen and Fat Jamie and the buzzing ladybugs, a million miles from here.

Then, I saw it.

It didn’t appear out of nowhere or float out of the trees, just walked out of the mist and stood there. It was like our fairy, the muddled color of dirt and rocks and naked trees. Another walked up beside it, bowlegged and staring.

Sadie’s hand was jolting in mine. The mossy feeling spread from my brain down into the well of my belly, because I knew Mom was going to come out of the mist next—like Sadie but older, taller, stranger—and that she’d walk up and take the flowers from me, maybe give me a big hug, and I’d have to just stand there and soak up whatever cold, musky magic she brought back with her.

We shivered together for a long time, watching. But nothing else came. There were just the two fairies, standing there with their toes squishing into the red clay. One lifted a hand and scratched its lumpy gray butt cheek.

“Where is she?” Sadie’s voice was high and thin. “Where is she?”

She started screaming things I couldn’t make out. The fairies jumped and the bare trees rattled but she just kept on screaming, pulling at her hair until shimmery white clumps tangled in her fingers. I tried to stop her and she pushed me so hard I fell in the mud. She kicked our fairy, again and again. It rolled over and its head lolled up at the white sky.

Sadie crumpled and dropped to the ground, clay smearing over her wet cheeks. The other fairies started to come forward, knobby hands reaching for the still gray form at her feet.

“No.” I scrambled up and stamped, like I was trying to scare a dog. I scooped up our fairy and turned my back to the others so they couldn’t see how its eyes had stopped moving.

I told Sadie let’s go and reached for her hand. Curled inside the dirty folds of her dress, she looked tiny: a little kid hiding under the covers. I thought it might be hard to pull her down through the woods while carrying the fairy, but they both felt like nothing.

When we got back to the house, I glanced over my shoulder. Something was crouched at the edge of the yard, glaring yellow-eyed through the raspy grass. I knew it couldn’t do much more than that.

In the basement, I sat Sadie down on the concrete and put the fairy in the crate.

“It’s okay,” I said, petting her torn-up hair. We both looked through the bars. The crisscrossed shadows seemed to cut the fairy into pieces.

MEN OF ZEN

Congratulations on your new role.

Whether you have just joined the Company or been with us for some time, we are confident you will find the Company a dynamic and rewarding place in which to work, and we look forward to a successful association.

Welcome, says our new Employee Handbook. Not two years after Todd and I launch Zensor 1.0, the Company is experiencing a period of fast growth. Our corporate advisor, Michael Allen, informs us we should hire a bunch of new people, then take a week of vacation in order to enter Q3 with the strongest synergy yet. Since we’re hiring total strangers now, having run out of shared connections, we had to pay our lawyer to write an Employee Handbook about the “perks, amenities, and other miscellaneous joys of being an employee of the Company,” but it turns out anyway to just be stuff employees can and can’t do legally. “Not that people are going to defect.” Our lawyer always looks at me when she says this. “Not that you should expect defection. You just want to cover your bases, is all.”

Well, I fully agree with her. I love to cover my bases.

I expressed the desire to adjust the legalese of the Employee Handbook toward a friendlier tone, but according to our lawyer, “there are legal implications for doing that.” Now, Todd and I are writing an Introduction which skews good vibes, in order to increase the net good vibes of the document as a whole.

Todd is my cofounder. He does the business and I do the tech. Would I call our association successful thus far? Michael Allen advised us in the beginning that we should each get a therapist. Two therapists from two different clinics. Yes, I tell my therapist, at present I am successfully related to Todd. I love Todd like a brother. Todd and I bring out each other’s authentic selves, which is excellent, because a creative and constructive company culture depends on employees bringing their authentic selves to work, each and every day.

“Add that,” I say, and knock back my third Vitamin of the evening.

“I guess.” Todd types up my authenticity statement. “Don’t OD.”

Vitamin, noun proper, being a popular wellness pill containing a vigorous potpourri of B vitamins, D vitamins, chamomile, L-theanine extract from green tea, and lion’s mane mushroom powder. “You can’t,” I say. “It says so on their website.”

“They can say whatever they want; they’re not FDA-approved. No one’s checking for legitimacy. There’s no legitimacy with these kinds of things.”

“Explain, then, how I’m down to two cups of coffee a day,” I say. “How my Zensor has stopped buzzing to suggest memory-boosting brain games. How my skin now emits the radiant glow,” I say, “of someone who spends all day cavorting around in nature under the light of a moderate sun.” I say, “Please do explain to me—”

“Either finish the Introduction,” says Todd, “or accept that it already looks great and let me send it to the printer.”

“Almost,” I say. “It’s almost there, but not quite yet. Here, let me copy over the About Zen section from the Organization’s website.” Organization referring to the mindfulness acceleration collective located on the ground floor of our flexible shared workspace, along with a gym and cycling studio. I have been attending the Organization’s group meditations six to eight times per week since the day we moved the Company into the building. “There,” I say. “Look at that. Now it’s perfect.”

“Isn’t that plagiarism?” says Todd. “Couldn’t we get sued for that?” Todd has been sued before and won’t take any chances.

“This is about spirituality,” I say. “The Organization doesn’t have a patent on spirituality. Do we have a patent on authenticity?”

“Those Vitamins are screwing up your brain,” says Todd.

There’s a faint meow from somewhere beyond the wall. I make a shushing gesture. “Listen.”

“What?” says Todd.

I stand up. Then I sit down again. I think I catch some purring, but it’s too soft to know for sure. “Cat,” I say.

“That’s my cue.” Todd leans in and, before I can react, confiscates my laptop. “I’m not letting you hold me past eight one more night, especially on a Friday. I have a friend to meet and you have a vacation to start.”

We have to stagger our vacations, and my week’s up first. “So leave without me.”

“Can’t. I’ve been told by Allen to make sure you actually take the week off. I think I’ll hold on to your office key.”

What I find is, people who act decent most of the time can let slip some alarming flashes of cruelty. Todd is entirely aware, for instance, that I would rather chop off my left arm than take a week off. All these years getting the minimum optimal level of sleep—waking up before everyone else, going to bed after everyone else—in order to get ahead of the curve, only to plunder it all via seven days of doing nothing except falling behind. In my less logical moments, I toy with the possibility that “burnout” was invented by Michael Allen, who didn’t make it to Forbes until he was forty, to sabotage Company operations. Which is to say, more logically, that sometimes, the young should be wary of the envy of the old.

I dry-swallow another Vitamin. Todd is gazing at me with questioning intent; I reply by closing my eyes and nodding with flowing grace.

“Hey,” he says. “Calendar notification. You’re supposed to be at group meditation in three minutes.”

“I’d like my computer back, please, so I can finish the Introduction.”

“You’re joking me,” says Todd. “You’re playing hooky on meditation? For this?”

“A pagan,” I say, “ought not complain about a Christian skipping church.”

“Take yourself a little more seriously,” says Todd, “I dare you. And since when does this Christian skip church?”

Since last Friday’s group meditation, when that new girl showed up. Her name is Ana K. According to Ana K, five years ago Ana K survived a car crash that killed her entire family, causing her to quit her phenomenal job, sell her many material possessions, and go live in a nunnery in Lhasa. Ana K says that for five years she spent the entire day, from four in the morning to ten at night, silently meditating or tending to the garden.

Everyone else at the Organization is in love with her, might as well marry her. I have my suspicions. For instance, Ana K claims that, living at the nunnery, she only ate rice and steamed broccoli, sometimes carrots, some of which, she confided to us, were purple, which she had never seen before. A person doesn’t live on carbs and steamed vegetables for five years and come out of it looking like she does. Besides, she’s only twenty-seven years old, as stated by her driver’s license, which I saw by accident in her cubby when I was retrieving my shoes and wallet from my own cubby.

Ana K, everyone is saying, has seen the Truth.

Who is she? I don’t know. What is she here to do? Nothing good. Group meditation is all about the harmony of the group. It’s delicate. It requires trust. How I feel about it is, I could definitely use a group meditation right now, but I couldn’t use walking into the Organization and seeing Ana K. That’s how I’ve felt about it all week.

“My friend,” says Todd. “It’s official. I think I’m actually worried about you.”

“Sounds like a you problem,” I say.

“Get up,” says Todd, “and go look at yourself in a mirror.”

“Let’s do dinner,” I say, “and then you can go. I’ll drop my office key in your mailbox on my way home.” At the thought of dinner, I observe that my Zensor has not buzzed a suggestion all day, even though I skipped lunch. This is promising; I’ve heard rumors at the Organization that some members, thanks to sustained meditative practice, can metabolize efficiently enough to thrive on only one meal a day, liberating time for other, more valuable activities.

“I could do dinner,” says Todd.

Together, we leave the office and walk down the hall. Even this late, the shared workspace remains occupied with hundreds of startup founders hunched at their desks, squatting on their chairs, walking and talking at a steady pace on their desk- treadmill hybrids. Each office is lit with the same single frame of fluorescent light. I have the notion I’m traveling through a space zoo, with every exhibit flicking up its unfamiliar eyes to scope out my threat level as I pass.

I’ll admit that, years ago, when I first started the Company, I too was starved for a slot in history’s credits. Then I attended my first Organization event, a weeklong silent meditation. One could say that my life is enriched by spiritual development. To put it lightly.

In the microkitchen, Todd retrieves two plant-based health drinks, each of which contains all the nutrition per meal a person on the standard two-thousand calorie diet needs. We tap them together like they’re flutes of champagne. “Cheers,” he says. Then he goes to the pantry and selects a bag of cheese puffs which, despite being vegan, are still, at the end of the day, cheese puffs.

People like Todd, they can’t fully comprehend what they’ve been given. The gift of existence is limited by a fixed number of years. We call this a constraint, in data science. And the optimization equation is what allows one to make decisions so that the ultimate desirable quantity, such as profit, or perhaps happiness, is maximized—within the given constraints.

I’m not saying anything new here. I just look at Todd munching on his cheese puffs, with his rumpled clothes and Friday-night plans to go bar-hopping with some friend who’s getting a divorce, and I feel truly sad for him. Out of brotherly love. I have seen his Zensor buzzing him to spend more time in idle contemplation, among other things, but what does the man do? Hits Snooze on his own Company’s Product.

I suppose there is only so much an outside influence can do. Like the About Zen section states, the only way to achieve complete synchronization with the Truth is self-awareness. And that must necessarily originate from within.

Back in the conference room, I think I hear another meow. But when I switch on the lights, the place is empty, and what appears to be cat hairs at the far end of the table turns out to be a few wilted microgreens from my breakfast bowl.

“Tough luck,” says Todd. “I saw the tabby just a few days ago.”

“Me too,” I say, even though, as a rule, I prefer not to lie unless the situation is dire.

 

That night, I dream that I’m delivering a sermon. “Life,” I say.“The eternal question. For what is human experience but gems of meaningless emotions, strung together by the thread of a soul to form what feels like meaning, only to turn out ultimately to be a bracelet of a life that is but an accessory to the planet we call Earth?”

Too late, I realize I’m reciting the latest advertisement for Zensor. The white speck of light by my webcam winks in the darkness, signaling the live broadcast of my face to zillions of people across the dream world. “Can you all hear me?” I say.

We can all hear you, replies God, a woman.

I’m not sure I’m enjoying this dream. I feel deeply, abstractly unwell, which is wrong, because I know for sure that I am living my very best life.

Through sheer curtains, I see tiny cats with tiny wings flying through the sky. Having no idea what I just said, and being unsure how to proceed, I start spit-balling phrases from books I’ve read in the past year. “Success,” I say, “like happiness, cannot be pursued.” I say, “If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled.” The white speck winks at me in Morse. “Virtuous deeds make up the light of our lives.”

As I speak, I’m clicking through my open tabs, and in slow, wading motion, I notice a calendar notification for 5:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. I check my watch. It’s 5:37 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Apparently, I’m not dreaming.

I’m giving a virtual keynote on discovering joy in entrepreneurship for the Stanford University Alumni Association’s “Putting the I’m in Impossible” conference in Singapore, where it’s not 5:37 a.m., but 8:37 p.m. As a matter of fact, I spent half of Thursday working with our content team to generate a five-page speech for this very event.

The woman’s voice says, “Wallace? I think you’re frozen.”

The chat box says the event host is Kylie Wakita, the head of the Stanford Alumni Association. The toolbar says 781 participants are present.

I turn off my camera.

“Now we can’t see you at all,” says Kylie Wakita.

“One moment, please,” I say. “Just hold on for one moment.”

I conduct Deep Breathing Exercise 3 from the Organization’s corporate breathing class and start scrolling through my recently opened documents. In-breath. PDF of blood test results. Out-breath. More blood test results. In-breath. Cat adoption certificates. Out-breath. Vision tests, hearing tests. In-breath. Blood tests; I get them once a week, just because.

And it hits me like a chunk of ice: the script is on my work laptop, which is in my office, which is not only a fifteen-minute drive away, but also locked with a key currently locked by Todd’s key in Todd’s house with Todd locked inside it too, probably deep in the most productive phase of REM sleep.

“Wallace?” says Kylie Wakita. Her microphone produces a slight reverberation around my name. “Wallace, are you there?”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “My sincerest apologies. I believe my internet may be faltering.” I say, “Two moments, please.” Then I shut the lid of my laptop.

Outside, the early birds, not tiny cats after all, are flying back and forth between telephone wires in a peachy predawn light.

I am at a loss. If I were still susceptible to the shallow and unproductive emotion that is hate, I would hate myself for this. Wimping out is hardly a regular occurrence in my playbook.

I spend some time staring at the backs of my hands. Then I realize that I’m barely breathing, which is odd, because my Zensor isn’t buzzing me. In fact, my Zensor hasn’t buzzed me this entire time. No Spend fifteen more minutes in bed. No Drink a glass of water. Nothing at all. I tap it to check on its battery—

And receive my second shock of the morning.

I can’t remember exactly how Company protocol goes, but a Product bug like what I’m seeing must be Code Red. I look closer. It’s not just a bug—it’s a potential PR crisis. I dial Todd, put him on speaker, and start pacing the room to get my heart rate up, in case the issue’s in the hardware. “Good morning, sunshine,” I say, “where did you hide my office key?”

Todd says, “Jesus Christ.”

“This is an emergency,” I say. “Company protocol. Code Red.”

“What Company protocol? What the hell,” says Todd, “is Code Red? I thought you didn’t do drugs?”

“Okay, forget that. My Zensor isn’t working. I need to access the code to see if this is related to the features we’re beta testing, or if valued customers across America are actually experiencing this problem real-time. Can you imagine? Right after we broke into Silicon Valley?”

“What do you mean, not working?”

“Right, don’t panic, but now I’m realizing we might have been hacked.”

“Hacked?”

“There’s this new girl at group meditation, her name is Ana K, she has green eyes, maybe you’ve seen her around the building; she presents as, well, I don’t know, all I know is she’s not who she claims she is. I suspect we may be under attack from some competing—”

“My Zensor’s completely fine. It’s actually buzzing me to get the hell back to sleep.”

“My Zensor says I’m dead.”

For a few beats, the line is quiet.

“Well, you’re not,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m aware.”

“I didn’t even realize we had this as a feature.”

“Release 9.3.2,” I say. “I wanted to demonstrate how death and life are harmoniously intertwined, like the heads and tails of a coin.”

“Oh,” says Todd. “God.”

“It’s probably the beta,” I say. “Which is why it’s still in beta. Is my office key still in your mailbox, by any chance?”

“Buddy,” says Todd, “just relax. It’s definitely the beta.” He says, “If I put a ticket in on Monday, I’m sure the dev team will have a look by Friday.” He says, “Hello?”

“How about,” I say, “the dev team has it fixed by Wednesday?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” he says. “We’re way ahead of schedule.”

“Sure,” I say. “Sure, we have loads of time. Time here, time there. All we have is time.”

“Hey,” he says, “that’s the idea.” He says, “I’m going back to bed.”

“Wait,” I say. “Wait just a minute, here.”

“Have a good vacation,” he says. “Hope the keynote went well.”

Which reminds me: I haven’t checked my Zensor in a while.

I stop my speedy pacing and tap the wristband. Even with my intensified pulse, the display hasn’t changed. “Yeah,” I say. “The keynote. Of course. The keynote went well beyond comparison. I’ve never met such an insightful crowd.” If Todd finds out what happened, he’ll sic Michael Allen on me, and I just know Michael Allen is going to call burnout and put me on another vacation. “Todd?” I say. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry about me at all.”

“All right, then,” says Todd. “If you say so.”

“I said it,” I say. “You go back to bed, now.”

“Wow,” he says, “thanks, pal,” and the line goes cold.

For an emergency breakfast, I consume a twelve-ounce smoothie that contains 110 percent of my daily servings of fruit. It’s somewhat lacking in vegetables, so I compensate with a multivitamin gummy, a biotin supplement, an iron supplement, and two Vitamins. As I’m parsing through my stash, I notice that the cap to the sleep-aid melatonin is screwed on crooked. I must’ve taken too much last night. I chew twelve edible mini-espressos to negate the residual drowsiness and, since I will be reviewing thousands of lines of code when I get to the office, swallow another three in quick succession. Anticipating jitters, I empty the contents of a lavender honey tea bag into a bowl, crush it into powder using a rolling pin, wet my fingers, and rub it gently into my gums. I overheard Julian F and Reynold R talking about this at group meditation; I trust it, because they both went to well-ranked med schools. I didn’t stick around to hear how much of the effect is due to placebo.

I dash to the door with my keys. Hand on the knob, I’m struck by the possibility that my Zensor is glitching because I skipped my group meditations last week. I dash back to the kitchen. Cross-legged on my yoga mat, I open the Organization’s mobile app and hit Start on a random guided track.

A male voice says, in a British accent, “You’re standing in an elevator.”

I get inside my elevator.

“You’ve been wobbling at the fiftieth floor, unstable, like you’re at the top of a ladder. Let the elevator take you slowly to the forty-ninth floor. Breathe in—that’s right, slowly, very slowly, descend another floor. Yes, you’ve reached the forty-eighth floor now.

Breathe out. Forty-seven. There’s a window in your elevator— what do you see? Now, breathe in, slow, tracing the breath all the way into your stomach, feeling the sensation of lowering closer to gravity, to gravitas . . .”

The edible espressos have achieved their full effect. My gentle British narrator is still on the thirty-ninth floor when I hit the lobby. Which, yes, I understand is not how the guided meditation is designed to work, but I’m operating in Code Red, over here. I open my eyes and tap my Zensor. No luck.

At Todd’s, I find his key under a rock in the rock garden and enter with ease. I jog up the hall on my tiptoes. I slow down outside his bedroom, for stealth reasons, and then I speed silently into the living room. My office keys are on the end table, all jumbled up with Todd’s wallet and keys. Crumpled napkins. Two plastic forks. Mustard packet. Bottle of aspirin. Superimposed over this scene is an image of Todd from a few hours ago, drunk, knocking back an aspirin, watching fake life play out on television as his real life falls away at constant velocity into the irretrievable past. Man is given a brain and he poisons it with alcohol; given body, and he fills it with chemicals. And—he is given time.

Todd used to invite me over every Friday, but I have trouble getting along with his friends. They slouch around on Todd’s three couches and drink beers; gossip, play cards. I myself own just one couch. I enjoy it with great care, knowing that my future self will thank me for preserving my posture.

I am proud to confess: I certainly haven’t always been this way.

I give a little laugh, thinking of how far I have come.

 

When I first started attending group meditations, I was in a bad state. My group leader recommended adopting a dog or cat— taking care of a life, she said, is a sure way to find happiness and fulfillment in one’s own life. Stroking a pet’s fur, or even seeing your pet, she said, is enough to generate a rush of happy chemicals. So I went straight to the shelter and signed the papers for Lovely, a slender black cat with white paws. I took her back to the office and let her wander as I set up two ceramic bowls and a litter box. She was curious about me in the beginning—if I called to her, nicely, fairly in a whisper, she would come and sniff my fingers. But every time I tried to touch her, she scooted just out of reach.

After that day, I never saw her again.

When I couldn’t get ahold of Lovely is when I adopted the tabby. Then, when I couldn’t get ahold of either of them, I adopted a third. Everyone else at the office has sighted a cat at one point or another. The litter boxes fill up. The food and water disappear. Once in a while, I find hairs on my chair or a trail of barely perceptible litter-smelling pawprints on the surface of my desk.

And I have to say: I don’t understand.

Nor does anyone I’ve talked to. They say to keep trying. This is just the way cats are, they say. It’s nothing personal; next time, rescue a dog or something. Or try harder.

What am I doing, then, if I’m not trying?

Now, in the conference room, I clean out the litter box, then straighten up Todd’s and my chairs from last night. I go to my personal office and I boot up my work computer. My hands are shaking, likely from the edible espressos, so I eat a chamomile stress-relief gummy as I start to check the code for errors.

After some time, I think I hear lapping at the ceramic bowl in the conference room. And maybe the cats are wandering around in there, playing under the cover of the table, just rollicking about, all fluff and delight, but when I stand up, a can of cat food in my hand, I realize that somehow, despite everything, I don’t have the heart to go after them and check.

 

It turns out that no one has hacked into our system.

No one has reported a bug, either. The parts of the code I worried about are clean. Now, it’s a matter of exporting the data out of my Zensor into a spreadsheet for analysis, which, judging by the rate of the USB transfer, means three or four hours of waiting, if not five.

The Organization is down three flights of stairs from our office. Exiting onto ground level, one first passes the gym, then the cycling studio, before finally arriving at its double glass doors.

Lately, I have been submitting weekly complaints to building management about the cycling studio. The cyclers possess two large speakers, which they leverage to play today’s pop hits at blast decibels. When asked, they claim the volume is kept on the lowest notch. I can’t say I believe them. People who indoor-cycle for sport parade about like they are fitness kings and queens, but judging by their taste in music, can be nothing more than hacks. I imagine it is difficult for them to cycle peacefully with the idea that right on the other side of the wall sit people who are truly integrated with their inner selves. The brain-dead pop music that bleeds through the walls and into the Organization’s group meditations, I have written to building management, could, at worst, be a ploy to even out the playing field. Which I don’t find particularly conducive to the safe, inclusive working environment this building declares itself to have.

Upon entrance to the Organization, the visitor is faced with an employee at a white desk who, backed by a glowing pine-green infinity logo, emits a peculiar luminescence of her own, the way the moon emits the sun. Plants and T-shirts for sale line the windows. Turn left after checking in at the reception, and there extends the long, dim corridor lined with multicolored doors. Beside each door stands a cubby shelf for personal belongings. Each shelf is outfitted with an essential-oil diffuser, so puffs of steam roil all along the walk, alternating left and right. An otherworldly catwalk for an audience of none.

Usually, on Saturdays, I attend the afternoon session. But here I am, Saturday morning, with a few hours to spare, having gone a whole week without meditating. I see some people gathered outside the blue door, making small talk—Blue Room must be where the morning session takes place. I fade in to the circle, looking forward to meeting new faces. Instead, I see Julian F, Reynold R, Allison S, and Frankie M, all of whom I know from the afternoon session. Which means they have been meditating twice a day on Saturdays, whereas I, heretofore unaware, have only been meditating once.

Of course, like a punchline, Ana K is present too. I consider leaving, but everyone has already given me a warm, welcoming nod. If I don’t return the greeting, I could be passively excommunicated, and many of the Organization’s members are industry leaders or influential venture capitalists.

“So, where are you living?” says Allison S to Ana K. She might as well jump in front of a train for Ana K, if she plans to keep looking at her like that. “Now that you’re back in the States?”

“I’m waitressing at a small family-owned restaurant in exchange for free room and board,” says Ana K, smiling ambiently. “The kindness I’ve encountered is absolutely incredible.”

“Do you find time to meditate?” Julian F is desperate to know.

“The way I think about it,” says Ana K, “if you can’t meditate while you’re washing dishes, you can’t meditate at all.”

“Sublime,” says Allison S. “Truly sublime.”

“You can only say that because you’re advanced,” says Reynold R. “Me, I still have to put myself into a trance state in order to have a meditation that really fulfills me.”

“That’s funny,” says Ana K, “you must be far more advanced than I am; I don’t even know what a trance state is.”

A trance state is Reynold R hyperventilating into a paper bag for five minutes, and then, more likely than not, supplementing with a microdose of psychedelic. “It’s like,” says Reynold R, “it’s like, I kind of like to wander the streets of the city after dark,” he says, “on account of night-walking being, in my mind, the best manner in which to reflect upon the self and self’s relation to the greater world.”

“If that’s what you mean by trance state,” says Frankie M, “I’ve gotten into the habit lately of fasting until noon while taking longer in-breaths than out-breaths, which I find puts me into a prolonged meditative state, not to mention a rather wonderful mood.”

“That’s all great,” says Allison S, “but really, isn’t the whole point to connect with other living creatures, not only the self? I’ve started doubling up on group meditations and I find that I feel a more tangible connection between myself and my peers, and our conjoining fabric in general, than I have in my entire life.”

She turns to Ana K for confirmation.

“You know what,” says Julian F, “I started loving-kindness meditation last year, and you all won’t believe this, but I’ll smile at a crying baby and it’ll stop crying. Just like that.”

No one has anything to say to this. “Well,” I say, “I’m going to go get a warm-up session in.”

“Snaps for Wallace B,” says Allison S.

There’s nothing I want less in the world than Allison S’s snaps, but I fill myself with loving-kindness and float myself straight through the circle and into Blue Room. Which is progress. If my life weren’t enriched by spiritual development, I would have departed in a fit of fury the moment Reynold R plagiarized what I said last month about night-walking. The moment he plagiarized it practically word for word, hands in his pockets, not even glancing in my direction.

Reynold R might as well patronize the cycling studio. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reynold R turned out to be a spy for the cycling studio.

I sit facing the back of the room, because in the front, there’s the air vent. The air vent has always made me nervous for no specific reason. It’s larger than average, but other than that, it’s exactly like any other vent, and normally, I have no trouble at all looking at vents.

I shut my eyes.

I am clean.

I am lush.

I am a mountain with clouds drifting past my peak, representing my thoughts, which I allow to enter my awareness but not stay, representing that impermanence is the root of all truth. On my peak, shrouded in mist, is a powerful white tiger. What the tiger represents, I’m not sure. But it’s been there since Frankie M said she had a white tiger on her mountain, which made me want to get one for my mountain too.

The white tiger purrs and the vibration courses through me, making the clouds release cool veils of rain which soak me in pure ecstasy.

The tiger opens its muscular jaw and goes, “Take it easy.”

The fact that the tiger has Todd’s voice unsettles me. I choose to ignore him and sink myself deeply into the sensation of bliss.

“It’s time for vacation,” says the tiger, in Todd’s voice. And he begins to purr so loudly that I feel my entire body quiver atop the mat.

After a few more breaths, it hits me that my heart’s going mad and there’s bile in my throat. I swallow it down and that makes my eyes water; I have the sudden, devastating urge to stand up and start jumping rope, though I have not touched, or even seen, a jump rope in many years. “Focus,” I say out loud. “Breathe. Transcend.”

The tiger is choked out of sight by a thick mass of clouds. The jackass, I think. He’s supposed to protect me. “Focus.” I start yelling. “Breathe.” I yell so loud I run out of breath. “Transcend.”

My eyes fly open. The door is open and Ana K is peering around it. “What exactly is it,” she says, “that you’re hoping to transcend?”

“My vacation,” I say, without thinking.

And—she laughs.

Via that easy laugh I see that, despite her being only twenty-seven, she already has smile wrinkles around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. And maybe it’s this laugh, in juxtaposition to everything I know about her, that causes me to go, “So your whole family really died in that car crash, huh?”

“To be completely honest,” says Ana K, “I find it hard to believe too. Still.”

“Five years in Tibet,” I say, “and you can still speak perfect English.”

“Oh, there was another American at the nunnery. And an Irish woman.”

“You didn’t eat any meat at all?”

“I ate a lot of beans.”

“Scurvy?”

“We had oranges.”

“You didn’t share any of this with the group.”

“Wallace, right?”

I hesitate.

“That’s okay,” she says, “you don’t have to tell me. I’m just curious, why transcend vacation? I mean, before I went to the nunnery, I loved my job, but still, I always looked forward to vacation.”

“I can’t stand being on vacation,” I say, “because there are certain things I wish to achieve every day in order to make the most of my life. I have to work. I have to do a kindness. I have to exercise and meditate. Every day,” I say, “I want to be the best that I can be, and make a dynamic and rewarding experience out of my very limited time here.” I say, “We’re only visitors on this planet, after all. That’s what the Dalai Lama said.”

“He did say that,” says Ana K. “Hold on, I promise I’ve been listening to you, but do you hear that?”

“What?” I say.

Ana K walks over to the air vent I’ve been trying not to look at and, crouching, pries the cover right off. She executes eachmovement with the confidence of a thief, a con man. Someone totally dishonest. I look around. Naturally, I’m the only one here to witness it.

Something inside the vent enthralls her, because she gets on her knees, bends over, and wriggles her entire torso inside. “Jesus Christ,” I say. Whatever this woman is trying to prove, she’s proving it to the wrong guy.

But then her shirt slides and I see the scar. “You won’t believe this,” says Ana K.

She shimmies out and turns to me, expectant. And I have no clue what to say to her.

No idea whatsoever.

Seeing that scar, I have nothing.

“You won’t believe it,” says Ana K, “but there are cats in here. A beautiful white one and a tabby,” she says. “And I think,” she says, “from the meowing, there might even be a third.”

A tectonic shift occurs in my head. “Cats?”

“Yes.” She’s laughing again. “You think I’m crazy.”

“No,” I say, and it comes out in a whisper. “Do—do they seem happy? Healthy?”

“Come see for yourself.”

At first, I worry I won’t fit, but then there I am, inside the vent.

My shoulders are wider than Ana K’s. They block out all the light; only a few thin rays get through.

Ana K’s voice is muffled. “Do you see them?”

I can’t really see my hands, even.

Distant music from the cycling studio buzzes through the walls of the vent and I feel it in the tips of my fingers: this vague, joyful melody, right where my pulse flits against the metal. And out of nowhere, maybe because of the strange, musty darkness, I’m suddenly a kid again, six or seven, in some school friend’s barn for a game of hide-and-seek. I’m hiding on my belly in the crack between two stacks of hay that have tipped against each other. And this sensation fills me. This big sensation. The sensation of lying there, propped up on my elbows, with specks of silver dust drifting through the slanted rays of light.

“Wallace?”

Instantly the haystacks vanish, and I’m kneeling on a hard floor with my torso in a vent, palms pressed against the cold walls. And I find that I am crying. But not in a bad way. Not in a way that I have ever cried before.

I grip the walls hard and start to pull myself deeper, but a hand grabs onto my ankle. Two hands. The huge, invincible hands of Reynold R, or maybe Julian F. Whoever is out there blocks out all the light; the thin rays disappear. Somewhere, an infinite distance away, someone is talking to somebody else. The hands on my ankles begin to tug.

And what I do is, I pull this trick of going completely slack, because I have heard somewhere that dead weight is harder to move. Sure enough, the hands come off of me. I keep lying there, though. I lie there all slack in this vent. The walls tremble. The air conditioning might rush forth at any second.

I say, “I’ve got my eye on you.”

My neck is wet. My own voice sounds unfamiliar. All around me is the buzzing of the music, the darkness where things could be.

HOW THE OCEAN HATED TAMPA TOM

Everyone hated Tampa Tom. His friends hated him and his enemies hated him. His parents hated him and never called. His wife and his kids hated him and moved to the other side of town. His neighbors definitely hated him and hated his lousy lawn. They made fun of his old car and called him poor. His dog, too, hated him, and ran away frequently, but always came back because no one else would feed it. His boss hated him and his coworkers hated him the most because they had to be around him all day. His school teachers hated him already as a little boy. Crossing guards, police officers, and tax attorneys totally hated him.

The trees hated him. The sun hated him. The water he bathed in, the ground he stood on, in fact, the very air around him hated him and tried to pull away from his lungs. Tampa Tom was always a little bit out of breath. Doctors thought he had asthma but it was just the angry air. His doctors also hated him and wanted him to die.

Even the cells of his own body hated him a little bit, and he was always cancerous.

Tampa Tom was not from Tampa. He went to Tampa once on vacation and rode the rides and slid the slides and saw an egret, which is a kind of bird on two legs, and when he got home he told his coworkers about the trip, so they started calling him Tampa Tom to make fun of him openly. This story has nothing to do with Tampa, so try not to focus on it.

Tampa Tom didn’t know. Sunk in the deep end of mass hatred since before he was even born (his mother hated being pregnant), it was normal to him. It was as normal and tasteless as room temperature tap water. He was never loved and so he never reacted to hate. He lived his life like it was a Tuesday in June.

Despite growing up in a hateful seaside town, set apart a bit from the rest of the world, Tampa Tom was always cheerful. He hummed when he walked, usually an upbeat tune he’d heard on the radio that morning. Everyone hated this most of all. They hated him with all their hateful hearts, they tried and tried to hate him more, to hate him enough, but he always smiled and was nice in return. He gave honest and heartfelt compliments and noticed people’s new haircuts. He said hello to tourists and strangers, who hated him immediately, and he was a good listener when people told him sad stories. They told him a lot of sad stories. No one else would listen to their sad stories, but he would, so they took advantage and poured out everything that was hurting them. Still, Tampa Tom was never sad for himself and everyone hated him for that.

So it was a warm Saturday in the summer, and after making some French toast and reading the newspaper (he never read the opinion page, and good thing too, because they mostly expressed their opinion of Tampa Tom), he put on his favorite hat and walked to the harbor. It was a beautiful day but the day hated him. The warm sidewalk he tread upon recoiled in hatred from his feet but it was concrete and could not move away. Tampa Tom walked slowly down the hill, saying good morning to the shopkeepers and fruit merchants, who all puffed and scowled as he passed. They swept angrily and restocked their shelves angrily after seeing him. One guy punched a wall and hurt his hand. 

Gravity helped carry him gently down the hill, but gravity hated Tom too, so Tampa Tom was too light for his size. His clothes hated him and didn’t protect him from the elements. He was always a little too hot or a little too cold or a little too wet. But he was oblivious. That was just life in Tom’s clothes.

Tampa Tom walked down to the harbor to watch the birds and the seals, who hated him. The seals would swim away and the birds would try to peck him. There were longshoremen down on the docks who hated him as they loaded and unloaded crates from a merchant vessel that arrived that morning. 

Tampa Tom noticed the lighthouse was open to the public that day and spoke to the old lighthouse keeper, who had maintained the lighthouse for forty years. There had never been an accident on the rocks outside the harbor as long as he had been there. The lighthouse keeper was very proud about that, and also he hated Tampa Tom and he hated that Tampa Tom came to his lighthouse and ruined such a beautiful day at the shore, but his wife had recently passed away and he was lonely and Tampa Tom listened carefully and tried his best to comfort the old man, and even cried a little bit in sympathy with him, but still the lighthouse keeper hated his guts and his stupid hat. The old man walked off to get a fried oyster sandwich grumbling. He even grumbled as he ate the sandwich. It was a hate sandwich.

The lighthouse was the tallest in the state, and could be seen for many miles out to sea. Tampa Tom ducked below the little brick archway and walked up the many spiralling iron steps to the top, pausing to rest a few times because he ran out of breath. But the view at the top was gleeful and the light was spinning slowly around with a faint and reassuring hum which Tom found comforting. The hum hated him.

He looked out at the great expanse of blue-green water and inhaled the salty sea breeze. He loved the sea but the sea hated him. It hated him even more than God did, and God hates many things quite a lot and hates them omnipotently.

The sea hates a lot of people too, but it especially hated Tampa Tom. It began to retreat from the shore, trying to remove itself from his presence. It began slowly—dropping—and the skiffs and skipjacks anchored in the harbor fell slowly to the bottom and listed to one side as they touched down. Tampa Tom could see the oyster beds rising from the ocean floor as the water’s edge ran away from the docks, swallowing the harbor, until the waterline fell into the deep, beyond the harbor’s boundary, and vanished from sight.

The seals were left bouncing and sliding and howling in the sand near the tiny beach at the edge of the harbor. The sea birds tried to chase the ocean as it fled the land, but couldn’t catch it.

Tampa Tom stood at the top of the lighthouse holding the guardrail without words or rational thought. His inner voice was swallowed up, sunk beneath logic and reason, by this grand mystery. He stared out at the miles of bare ocean floor and the thick glistening oyster beds without any understanding of how an ocean disappears. Perhaps… he thought, but nothing followed. Or perhaps… Still nothing came to him. 

Two hundred feet below, the longshoremen were shouting and scrambling. He looked over the edge to see them abandoning their wares and running from the shoreline inland. He shouted down to ask what was happening, but they didn’t call back. They only ran. The seals, too, were scooting their fattened bodies to the shore in a panic. But looking out at the empty sea, he saw nothing but clean sparkling ocean bottom colored by patches of limp sea grass, and great shoals of oysters that extended beyond sight, and faint plumes of sea water evaporating everywhere in the summer sun.

The sea, however it hated Tampa Tom, did not really have this power. It didn’t have the power to fight the physical laws God had created for it, though it tried mightily to delay returning. It held itself in a watery escarpment miles and miles from Tom and the town for as long as it could. But just as a man cannot hold back the sea, the sea cannot hold back itself for much time, and miles out, it surrendered its purchase at once.

The water was miles away, but the harbor was abandoned. Tampa Tom was alone at the top of the lighthouse and watched the horizon. Whatever was coming, whatever the longshoremen had been running from, it was too late to descend the iron stairs to the bottom and flee. And he was high above the ground, and felt safe.

At the edge of the horizon, where the earth conferenced the sky, a sparkling ribbon like a silvered seam splitting his vision lengthwise appeared. It breathed and changed without motion. Gradually, the silver sparkle faded, turned to white, and became a dense spatial fracture. It was the crest of a huge wave, and its approach, at first, was silent. The channel guides were the first to fall.

As the roiling waterline reached the harbor, it crashed over the jetties and piers. It crashed into the skiffs and skipjacks lying at the bottom of the harbor, pulling them off their moorings and sending them into the shore tumbling over the rocky seawalls. The docks were lifted from their pilings and mangled into splinters—the boards split like a gunshot. A merchant vessel was pushed sideways into the base of the lighthouse and the structure shook around him. Tampa Tom gripped the guardrail to not be sent over the edge. 

The ocean took all the boats and all the docks and shoved them up the town. The seals were gone. Soon the whitewater leading the tidal wave disappeared behind buildings and trees. Tampa Tom watched the tallest tree in the harbor topple over and get swept away. The water below him was no longer blue-green but black, and the tsunami carried behind it the stench of ocean death from decaying underwater plains far out at sea.

Tampa Tom watched from above as restaurants and homes and shops were swept up the same street he had just walked down, were dashed into one another and crumbled into the heavy currents. Over the roar of the rushing water, he thought he heard screaming from the town, but he wasn’t certain of it. The sound of the flowing tide and the sound of screaming mixed together into a single unbroken note. The water which hated Tom lifted the harbor and carried it a mile over land. It carried the people who hated him farther than he could see and took them all away from him. And then the water slowly receded, back into the harbor, pulling with it the detritus of the entire town, leaving the ground below him covered in mud, bodies, and tangled debris. The natural and the man-made were indistinguishable from one another.

Tampa Tom descended the stairs. The bottom of the lighthouse had been filled seven steps high with salty mud and oyster shells. The door was barricaded with boards and brush. He pushed them aside and slipped out onto an unstable ground. He noticed a foot in a shoe by a tree, and turned away.

Every building in the harbor was gone. The boats were gone, the seals, the birds, the longshoremen, and the lighthouse keeper. Any small tree and all the low-lying brush was uprooted and carried away. The land was gray, jagged, and alien. The village had been shredded and scattered. His dog, surely, was dead. His family too. Only the lighthouse still stood. Only the lighthouse, Tampa Tom, and the sun and the sea and the air in his lungs.

He was rescued soon enough—flown away from the junked remains of his village in a brilliant yellow helicopter and taken to the city far inland. The nation mourned. The village could not be rebuilt. But the lighthouse became a symbol of strength and courage and persistence, as did Tampa Tom. He gave interviews, went on all the talk shows. And even though the sea had hated him, and removed from the world everything he had known or lived for, he remained cheerful. He smiled, and was humble. He sat on a talk show couch next to Veronica Vargo, the most beautiful actress in the world, and told her in front of a live studio audience, without irony, that he thought she was very lovely, even though he didn’t know who she was. The audience roared and the show was rated highly. Tampa Tom shifted in his seat uncomfortably, not sure what to do next. 

He was simple, that way, in his cheerfulness and humility. He refused to ever be angry. And they asked him, aren’t you mad? Don’t you hate the sea? Don’t you want REVENGE? On the SEA?! But he didn’t. Of course he felt sad about it and missed his little village, but he couldn’t hate the sea. He couldn’t hate water. He couldn’t hate anything.

His answers to their many questions didn’t satisfy their anger, their thirst for revenge. Tampa Tom could only shrug when they asked him, “Why did this happen?” And before long, the rest of the world began to hate him too, as his old village had, and he moved to a new village where everyone could hate him again forever.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story MANTIS

Shaken as an infant, abandoned by my father, and squeezed through time and circumstance, I find myself some thirty-odd years later, here, retching onto a frosty hedgerow outside the town house I rent with my mother. I pull myself into focus, and my stomach feels stretched and snapped like a surgeon’s glove. This is coastal Florida. Our row of homes sits along the Gulf shore, but it’s freezing, so I pretend there’s snow and tilt my head to catch an imaginary flake on the tongue, a miracle. An egret on the sidewalk pecks at a worm and fails to kill it. I stamp it out of its misery and grind with the heel. Then, finally, after I stare down the sun, it begins to set for the last time before The Great New Millennium, century twenty-one. 

Inside, my mother’s on the couch with her boyfriend. The King of Sanitation, they call him. (“You’re not customers. You’re family.”) They link hands and watch Jeopardy!, both wearing their New Year’s hats. There’s glitter on their brows and on the carpet, too. 

“You out there for some air, bud?” says The King. “Cold weather to end the year on, but that can be good for you.” I don’t bother telling him that, no, dumbass, my pharynx is contracting from the fluid produced by an acute anxiety spell. The television goes static, and he gets up to fidget with the antenna, as he is wont to do these nights he visits. 

Mom looks good, rosy and done up for the first time in a while, and that admittedly makes me happy. Her hair bobs above her shoulders. Her lashes are curled long, and she wears a slender-fitting dress that covers one shoulder and exposes the other. For all of last week Mom wore the same sweatpants, and when she burned her wrist on the oven rack, she spent the rest of the night crying about death and the pearly gates, the inevitability of her struggling ventricles, her failing heart. To help I recited that joke about the Chihuahua and the top hat because she likes that one, but it only worked insofar as she could take a few breaths of calmness. 

“We’ve got those dinner reservations later,” she says with tenderness. “We’d both like you to come, get out into the world. Could be back to watch the fireworks over the water after.”

I swallow the acid in my throat. “Told you no, but thanks. I have to grade papers.”

“School’s out for break, my man,” The King says. Just like that, he catches the fib and has to remind me of my embarrassing things, throw them in my face: That this PhD is worth a square of toilet paper. That I’m only a history adjunct at the state college, and I am stuck in-progress on my book of the Roman emperors. That I don’t get offered many classes, and when I do, a lot of them don’t even make enough enrollment, so I can’t afford a place all my own. 

I say I’m headed to my room and touch my mom on the shoulder to signal I love her but I just can’t leave the house with this disposition, and certainly not with him, The King. She nods because she always tries to understand. We ride the same wavelength. Her style is compassion.  

I boot up the computer, and the internet begins to gargle, to dial up. I wait. There’s the pornography folder, but my heart’s not into it. I’m distracted by what happened earlier, this guy who came by in a backpack selling doomsday gear, like radiation goggles and non-perishables. I asked him his deal, and he said that come the year 2000 all the aircraft fall from the sky, the grid fails, the microwaves explode, the chips burn out. He scratched his shin. “Okay,” I said. “But then what does this mean for my mother’s pacemaker?” He said, “Don’t know, broseph. Sorry to say, but she might be a goner,” and turned to haul away his batteries and peanuts. 

I’m aware of all the apocalyptic speculations—who isn’t by now?—and I think of them as absurd and pathetic but my worry does stay with my mother and that precautionary yet essential electronic machine designed to zap her heart, her fundamental organ. 

This sort of panic I now type to Mantis in our private chat, so I can get these worries out into the open. I don’t have to wait long; she’s always online when I need her. I’ve never seen Mantis in person, but I choose to imagine her as such: a tidy woman my age, her plush visage illuminated by a computer screen in the wet, stone basement of a convent in Rome, perhaps, or at least in some adjacent township. Because of this glowing, one must be able to see the moisture on her upper lip and the tiniest amount of peach fuzz, almost translucent. She will occasionally press her palm down the front of her habit to smooth any wrinkled fabric. Undoubtedly, it’s past sleeping hours, and if caught, the reprimand she would receive from her superior would be severe. But I am worth that risk to her. 

And for that I am in love, whoever she might actually be. 

If all collapses, Mantis says, her text appearing in our chat thread. You know. How will we communicate without the web? Give me your address now, sweetheart???

I’m not ready for that, not quite, not yet at the phase of my life for a romance to become tangible. I steer the conversation back to my mother.

But the end of the world, it’s not factual or actual, right? I type. And my mother’s pacemaker isn’t necessarily needed anyway, right? It’s like break-in-case-of-emergency, right?

I pick at my thumbnail and examine my space, the dinginess in here, the dusty vent, the one bulb. And then there’s what’s taped to the modem: a scrawl written by Mom’s fingers on the back of a heart-healthy pamphlet, a poem from her most recent hospital stay. I don’t like crying, so I never read any lines except the last one. In heaven or blazing hell, we’ll love each other just as well. That’s true.

If real, Mantis says, one startle, and if that heart stops without the machine? She dies??

Possibly. Yes. 

My poor baby, Mantis says, because kindness is among her highest virtues. Then a couple beats. So address yet??? she asks. 

The King knocks, opens the door like he’s a chum or some kind of dad. “Bud, I want to beg you,” he says. “I’ll even bribe you if I have to.” He tosses his gaudy silver watch onto my bed as an olive branch. “It’ll mean the world to your mother if you tag along.” I close my eyes but glare at him through my lids, which can be a more potent strategy. “I know it’s because of me,” The King says. “But it’s not like I can back out, can I? Me, you, we’re both trying to help her enjoy the simple things while we still have time to.” He extends his hairy hand for a shake.

I summon courage. People know of my width but forget my length, so I stand to exist above him. I’m quiet. I spin the ceiling fan blade. 

“Okay, I get it,” The King says and turns to leave because I have used intimidation. “Keep the watch.” I secure The King’s timepiece around my wrist and it suits me well—me in my finery. 

I lock the door and feel almost brave enough to give Mantis my address. I type in the coordinates and hover my index above the ENTER key, only to delete without sending. Again, there’s the porn folder, and this time I’m feeling it. 

Just moments after my culmination there are gunshots—no, firecrackers—outside my window. A group of starlit teens launch the explosives overhead, and I twitch when they ignite above the ocean tide. A wiry kid in a jacket and shorts tosses one of the bombs to his friend, who runs before the bang, before there is damage to any extremities. Their bare feet leave spastic imprints in the sand. The impact zone of their debris inches closer to the marsh-end of the beach and toward what they probably can’t see in the darkness: my pal Rex’s RV, stationed among the sea brush.  

I open the window. “Stop it,” I whisper, even though I too would like such fun. I’ve never been a good disciplinarian. Cases in point? My students. Occasionally they break my chalk before I arrive to the classroom, as if I were a dunce. They sometimes snicker, heckle my belly. There has been snorting, frightening faces during lectures. I speak toward the floor to prevent any conflict because they are unkind company.  

 My wall rumbles with the sounds of pipes and faucets, which means Mom or The King or both are showering for dinner. Out of fear of being within earshot of possible intercourse, I step through the window threshold and slide myself out and onto the sand. It triggers the floodlight. I tremble even though I’ve secured my peacoat, and when I raise my arm to wave at the children, they scatter as if I’m the village ogre. 

Rex must’ve noticed me from his RV. He hobbles out the door and flashes a peace sign to beckon. My left ear rings vaguely, a result of my anticipation flaring up, and my tinnitus. My boots conceal my feet and ankles, so as I walk toward Rex’s place and turn back, my prints appear blocked and mechanical in contrast to the feral steps of the teens.  

He pours me something warm and gritty from a blender, and I drink before saying hello because this is our ritual. Rex handles the maintenance in our complex and is the only man who’s slept with my mother I appreciate. I just about love him, my only true offline friend. He is nearing seventy. So perhaps due to his tenure, he’s accumulated his fair amount of the world’s paraphernalia. He’s got it all: bean bags, katanas, ashtrays from every state. Books climb from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. He says he’s written more than twenty. I can’t even complete one. 

I give him the brass tacks regarding my mother’s artery channels, her shock-rhythms, her emergency defibrillator.

“Can’t help with your mom, dude,” Rex says and pulls me to the space next to him on the sofa. “Been there. Tried that.” A calico claws itself onto Rex’s lap, then paws at the hair hanging from his chin. “I might be good with appliances but nothing like that, nothing on the inside, all that squishy stuff. Gal’s been on her way out for a while, besides.”

He pushes away the cat, crosses his legs, and fills a balloon with nitrous. Inhales. I do the same—my self-granted indulgence and as far into the underworld as I’m willing to venture. The gas unscrambles my innards, and for those thirty seconds all thoughts are fireflies, all worries miasma, far above the ozone. 

Rex asks if he can snap a couple photos of me with my arms behind my head, says I’m cute that way. And even though it’s odd, I can’t help but turn flushed and flattered. He takes a few, and I sit again while he winds the camera film. 

“I’m no mystic,” Rex says. “But this end-of-the-world bullshit might actually hold some merit. Just think of the rhymes: JFK. Y2K. And what’s the common denominator?” He uses the inside of his shirt collar to blow his nose. “That’s right, my dude: the fucking CIA.” 

“Hmm.” I can’t blame Rex. Like with the constellations, when there are so many billions of burning suns, how can you not be tempted to connect them all, to sketch the handsomest images to mend the loneliness? “And then there’s MLK,” I gift him. “But why would the CIA want to kill my mom?”

He palms my knee, massages the top and then tries to pry at the cap with his index finger. “Why wouldn’t they?” he says. 

Rex has the shakes of a motor, so he asks if there’s any booze at my place and if anyone’s home. And yes I do have a few bottles in the high drawers, even though The King has recently convinced my mother to stay on the wagon. Rex takes the lead and we exit toward the sand, but out of impulse or kleptomania, I snag the disposable camera he’s left on a stack of old newspapers and put it in my coat pocket. 

I show Rex in the front, since The King’s car is gone for dinner. The heater is buzzing, so I toss my coat on the kitchen counter. I pour him two fingers of some kind of scotch and he drinks it like he’s sucking on honey. He insists I match him, but it’s difficult, I say. It tastes like towering Vesuvius, the metro killer. Rex has no idea what I’m saying—which is nothing, really—but he laughs and lifts himself to kiss my earlobe, nonetheless. This is nothing to make a fuss about and far from the first time. He nods toward my room, and as we pass the television, Dick Clark winks at the camera, snow on his shoulders. 

My bed is dusty, but we are warm under the quilt. Rex holds my fetal body from behind and reaches for my member. This is as far as it ever goes, and he understands. I am not of that persuasion, I don’t think, so I lie un-erected. 

After a bit, before I’m asleep, Rex releases his grip and glides his hand over my chest. I am glad for this, Rex’s presence, his encompassing, sweaty comfort. I wonder if The King provides this security for my mother. I’m tempted to hope so. Eventually Rex grabs and yanks the hair on the top of my scalp, the wiry bunch barely clinging to the follicles, then exits out the open window, leaving nothing but drool on the pillow. 

I load up the instant messenger to check on Mantis’s New Year’s situation, to see if there’s devastation to her time zone, but no response even after seven-plus minutes. 

Systems down? I ask. Send SOS? To what latitude/longitude???

I shut my eyes and visualize: Much ruin. Her town aflame. Mantis clutches her rosary beads, dodging sparks from outlets and fixtures. The other sisters cower in desperate prayer. She holds a candle stick both for illumination and defense, and when she makes her way out and into the mist, she slips and cuts her cheek on the sharp stem of a poison hemlock. The wind snuffs her flame, and after she spies her way up the brick path to the medical clinic, half of the structure has crumbled to rubble. A howling queue of civilians waits outside. Mantis falls forward onto her elbows, and the gravel makes its way into her like splinters of shaved metal. Despite the circumstance, she is affronted by the power of her own slender beauty. She curses the Lord for this matter—that she cannot match the ugliness of the scene around her, that she stands out. She is an outlier, living as contrast. Her eyebrows furl and she screams my name for help. I cannot reach her without the web, and in this instant, I fear our tether has been clipped, umbilically.

I type my address into the message box, delete, type again, then finally press SEND.

Mantis does not reply, so I do the same again, hoping for any sign of life and to give her a place to run toward. But no. There is an error message, and our chat window closes. When I attempt to reboot the program, it fails. Her username no longer exists, it tells me. Gone. Evaporated. 

I pop an antacid. It lodges sideways in my throat, and I choke until my cough ejects the tablet and my spittle seeps into the carpet fibers.  

In the kitchen I gargle water from the tap, then dampen a slice of white bread with milk to soothe my esophagus and to provide myself a meager amount of sustenance. A cockroach claws its way out of the electrical socket by the telephone, and I think of what people say about their ability to survive nuclear fallout, but I don’t want to muse on that. I slam it, smear it across the marble surface with the edge of my fist and rinse it down the garbage disposal. 

Headlights cut through the window blinds, the deadbolt releases, and in struts Mom with a plastic bag. She’s all giggles, happy and filled with three courses. She comes in for the hug, and I press my chin to her forehead. 

“Where is he?” I say. “The King.”

“In his car listening to his cassettes.” She extends the bag for me to reach inside, and I remove a box of sparklers. “He wants to give us space.” She sees the trail of insect. I wipe it away, and she smiles like it never happened.

Mom insists on lighting the sticks on the beach, so she wrenches her feet out of her heels, and I notice they’ve ballooned again, swollen from ankle to toe. She stops me when I bring up her circulation. Mom breathes heavily, and I wonder if it’s tipsiness from the night out, but there is no whiff of wine. I ask if she hurts. She doesn’t answer, just tugs my wrist to follow. I grab my coat. 

The sand takes her up to the ankle, but me, I feel buoyant. I am lighter alongside my mother. I could float across the Gulf of Mexico if I chose to, big belly up, drawn by the Gulf Stream into the Atlantic beast and back. Mom stifles a wheeze into her elbow and tries to play it off as a laugh. Her breath has gone short. She points eastward down the shoreline, and in the middle distance, a lonely hot air balloon glides gently home to Earth. Probably lovebirds, high on kissing and helium inhalation. Its small flame dims. They land safely from such height. 

“I didn’t know anyone was allowed to fly those at night,” I say. 

Mom looks at me with a shine in her eyes—the sort I know from her old yearbook photos, gleaming with youth and a long, fortunate future. “How about,” she says, “we let everyone off the hook tonight?”

I shuffle into the ocean only because she asks me to. It’s coldest around my toenails. The hem of her dress is now soaked, and I can’t help but look to where her lungs are hidden, then to where her heart lives, imagining the struggling artery that connects the two. 

“Your pacemaker,” I say aloud, and my mouth dries from the rough texture of the word. “Does it really work?”

“It works exceptionally,” she says and walks backward, barely missing a pile of tangled weeds. “Unfortunately, exceptionally is all it can do.”

Finally we strike up our sparklers and do a little marveling at the size of the moon. I accidentally allow the stick to burn my thumb. It hurts like grieving, so I let it fall and hold the finger out to show my mother.

“What is life to you?” she says. “To you specifically.”

The world has me cornered, so I say, “I don’t know. An accumulation of seemingly minor moments, that, when compressed into segments, create escalating consequences which eventually influence our collective experiential decisions on the planet, thereby causing a perpetual series of syllogistic patterns until we inevitably extinguish.” 

A big fish, now, swimming unusually close. 

“Why don’t you love yourself as much as you love me?” she says. 

I try to conjure a response, but this only makes my memories activate, those of a single mother and her only son, infant images: bubbles in the bathtub, the surprising palms of peekaboo, birthday candles and tree ornaments, car seat buckles, the tickling of my soles. “Are you afraid you don’t deserve it?” she says.

I try to breathe more deeply, from my diaphragm. There are tears, obviously, but the ocean mist conceals them against my cheeks. Mom reaches to hold me, and I bend to press my temple to her shoulder. In a tenor, she sings the hymn I used to love from Sunday mass, “On Eagles’ Wings,” that windy song. I step back, eased. 

She lights one last sparkler, and The King’s watch shows a quarter to midnight. I remove Rex’s camera from my coat pocket in order to capture a spirit all but vanished. My mother twirls. Her hair is newly short and dyed red. Before, she’d always found that color too daring. She is gaunt in face and stature, but in her current movement it is no longer jarring—an unwinding figurine in a jewelry box. I snap away. I capture grace. She poses, then steps over a blue crab and kicks the surf in my direction. Sure as hell she would swim if she could, but her heartbeat won’t allow it. My mother asks me to guess the letters and words she writes in the air, her flaming, winding strokes, and I use the last click of the camera to preserve the instance. The ball will soon drop, but here, over the Gulf of Mexico, the stars remain random. They cross each other’s brilliance and dance over and behind us to the mainland side—the vibrance of ’99 waning. 

 

A week before the spring equinox, year 2000, my mother died of cardiac arrest, and I try not to dwell on it too much or too little. 

It occurred the night we went to the bowling alley. We both made fun of my foot size as I struggled to knot the laces of the rented shoes, and I joked that she was one to talk. My mother could barely lift the lightest ball, so I would hold her arm and help guide it backward, then forward, to push and urge toward the pins. She winked with both eyes when a few would fall. The two of us, slipping on the hard wood, clumsy as clowns in baggy clothes.

Now it is just The King and me. The King has moved into the house, into Mom’s room, because he misses her. He still spends his nights in despair—crying in the living room, in the bathroom, sometimes even on the floor of my room when I am compelled to join. We are closer now, after many months of this year. At the end of each, he writes me a check for half the rent. I brew the coffee in the morning. In the evening he prepares supper. 

Rex, the over-lover of life, stopped by to deliver his sympathies and salutations, but he wrote no card. He was cruising west to find California, he said, to pursue late-life political ambitions, or maybe even a little commercial acting. I wished him well with a handshake and nothing more. 

I’ve taken to pedaling my Schwinn to campus, but this morning I hitch a ride on the back of The King’s garbage truck because he gets a kick out of it. I white-knuckle the rail and nod to all who will never experience this privilege and power. Today though, The King doesn’t drop me at the pedestrian trail. Instead, with no decal, he parks in the student lot—who is going to tow a vehicle like this?—and asks if he can sit in on my classes. He’s a fish out of water in his company polo. I wear my wool suit jacket even though it’s ninety degrees. 

8:50 is Roman Mythology. The King takes a spot in the back corner, and I tell the kids he’s here to evaluate the learning experience. Confused, they engage their best behavior. The King asks the student next to him for a sheet of looseleaf and a pen. He writes when I speak. 

I’ve grown more confident manipulating the accoutrements of the classroom, so I use the projector to bring to life a rendering of the Roman deity Cerberus, a three-headed canine, the guard and minder of the underworld. A springy boy in glasses asks if this animal is indigenous only to the Mediterranean, or has it ever come to the contiguous U.S. Before I can respond, The King pipes up. “Listen, bud,” he says. “It ain’t real. None of this shit is actual or factual.”

So as not to pierce anyone’s bubble, I tell them mythology is as real as we perceive it to be. The Romans saw in these gods beauty and hope and justice and fear. In my opinion, a figure of the past is only fictional if you let those truths fade or be forgotten.

In my office The King wants to know what the fuck that even means, and I shrug and say that in this line of work you have to think on your toes, that it’s part and parcel of the gig, and sometimes words might simply spew as such. I ask if I can see what he wrote down, and he supposes so as he tosses the folded paper across my desk. The sentimental element in me expects a romantic moment in which the sunlight splits the cloudy shawl over my window to illuminate a vulnerable poem, The King having connected the metaphorical implications of today’s lesson with the sweetness of Mom’s legacy. But it’s not much, a crude sketch of Cerberus the dog smoking a cigar and a scribble to further look up the subject at the library. 

There is an hour before my next class, but The King doesn’t take the opportunity to leave. He sticks around, folds his arms over his stomach, and falls asleep with his mouth open. Rex’s camera sits on my bookshelf, and no doubt its contents have overwhelmed The King, to whom I’ve told what’s on the film: my mother lives there, undeveloped.

A trait I’ve absorbed from The King’s demeanor is the desire to console. So I stand to reach and hold his shoulder. I even wet my lips to whisper like my mother would, but the door opens with no warning. 

For a moment I expect Mantis, as I do lately, often, paranoid and fearful. Now thrown into the bin along with my computer, she remains a specter, no longer needed, and I am unsure if I would even be welcoming of her arrival. Mantis was born of my past self, not of my present maturation. If I were to meet her, or whoever controlled her messaging account, I would like to say: Thank you for the help and benevolence, but your manifestation is a stark reminder of my tendency for agoraphobia, the diabolical characteristic I am in the process of expunging. Or something to that effect.

However this, here and now, is only a frantic student, a boy with hair to his narrow shoulders. I struggle to recall his name, and he pays no mind to the sleeping man in the chair. He’s been absent this week, he says, because his dorm has flooded, he says, because his car is getting repaired, he says, and his parrot is sick. He has documentation. The boy asks for an extension. I grant it.

When my classes finish, The King is off to complete his rounds, so I get home by way of city bus. Inside the portico of our town house, against the door and nestled beside a clay pot of grayed soil, rests a delicately wrapped bouquet of calla lilies, tulips, peonies, and one rose—beautiful and tenderhearted—a gift which arrives every twelve or so days since my mother’s passing, that one might reasonably conclude is, in fact, from Mantis herself. But the card is nameless. 

Inside, the refrigerator drones, and a wren sings along from outside the kitchen window. The word is harmony. I clip the stems, remove any browning leaves, and I lay the flowers on the dinner table for The King to arrange later. 

 

MEN WITH GUNS

I entered the phase of my life when I began to date men with guns. The move to Montana helped accelerate the onset of this stage. This felt new and exciting, like it had things to teach me. These men—mostly hunters, but also the occasional personal security guard or a private contractor for the army—seemed sturdy, masculine, steeped in knowledge that to me was occult. Aren’t sex and death intimately connected? Wasn’t a tender primal truth present here? If only I could grasp the link. I was curious. I imagined their muscular fingers would tear ribcages apart, imagined them sink into the still-warm flesh of elk, red and wet with blood. Images that were distinctly erotic. Just think what those fingers could do to a woman. But could they?

This phase of my life could alternatively be titled: my mid-twenties. I was searching for something for which I had no name. Exile played a big part in this. What part exactly was difficult to say. I wasn’t from here. I wasn’t from anywhere near Montana. Most days I felt tugged right and left in bouts of improvised performances upon a blacked-out stage before no audience. My parents had just died. I think I was trying very hard to become something new, or possibly get back to what I once had been. These men felt like archways to step through.

The first man took me to a speakeasy-style bar inside a building’s basement: floorboards creaked overhead, a musician strummed a guitar flat on his lap. The place seemed sincere and strange. It was exactly the kind of exotic experience I moved here half-hoping to find. The man in question was tall, sveltely muscular, with a blondish-reddish beard. He stood up when he saw me. A hunter, if I ever saw one, and I never had.

He’d only ever been to one country in Europe—not mine—and the fact that most of the population did not possess guns unnerved him. He said it made him feel unsafe. I said I felt that way about here. He offered to take me shooting one day. I said: okay. I had no idea what “shooting” entailed. Would a carcass be involved, a bulletproof vest, face paint? I moved to Montana for grad school. I was a painter. I could have gone to Yale or NYU or Bard but I came here. Why here? I had no answer for him. Jasper, his name was. He worked for the government as a road engineer. Hunting came purely from the heart—everything he knew he taught himself. I understood passion, I understood self-taught. His articulated fingers carved quick gestures as he explained the rivers in which salmon ran and the migratory patterns of pronghorn elk.

Jasper asked to hear my mother tongue, then smiled as if seeing me for the first time. I asked him to tell me something I did not know.

“Do you know the difference between how a mountain lion and a grizzly take apart its prey?”

I shook my head.

“The mountain lion will pluck out the fur, bit by bit; the bear will use its claw to slowly peel the skin.” Jasper glowed with a fleeting copper haze of passion.

I felt at ease. None of this talk seemed eerie or out of place. His eyes, god, his eyes did not leave mine. They shimmered in that low light, colorless.

All night I heard my body decide: yes.

The next time I saw Jasper, he picked me up in his blue truck. When he got out my stomach did a complicated tug, a simultaneous backward and sideways spin, like a planet revolving in space. Damn, he was beautiful. The intervening week had dulled this effect and now here it was, in full force. I did not let this on. We drove east of town, following the hum of rivers, between steep red canyon cliffs and faraway trees turning copper. Birch trees, I wanted to say, but that would be wrong. It was early October, the air was cool and full of woodsmoke. He pointed to the river and said, “Later in the fall I trap beaver here.” I waited for the follow-up of laughter, but it was not a joke.

People back home gave me deep, grave looks when I said I was moving to Montana. Almost always they cited cowboys, guns, rodeos, cartoonish images of saloons, canyons, desolate stretches of mountain, and, quite wrongly, mesas—before abruptly running out of associations. Since moving here I’d only seen one man in cowboy boots, and it was at Walmart. I did not tell them this, not wanting to spur them on. Why, they wanted to know, as though my choice were an affront to the old world they believed we were bound to. What will you do out there? They wondered, or alternatively wished me well, with the sincerity and seriousness appropriate to one they might never see again. I listened to these anxieties with forced patience. I listened as an anthropologist might listen to the valley tribe’s stories of the mountain tribe, knowing the valley tribe has never been up the mountain. But then I landed at the local airport and saw the walls of mounted carcasses and creatively posed taxidermy, men with chest-long beards, women in camo socks, and thought to myself: you idiot.

For what felt like a long time, Jasper drove us down a dirt road. He kept glancing at his phone, an app that marked public and private land. The lines kept shifting between roam free and trespass.

“That’s another thing about America,” I said to him, “you can’t go where you want to go.”

He looked at me, then frowned like someone receiving bad news. At last we pulled over. Behind us a steep reddish cliff, in front of us a long field, somewhere water flowed. A few camper vans went by, prayer flags in the windows.

“Dirtbags,” Jasper said.

He opened the trunk and pulled out a colorful bull’s-eye, a case of empty beer bottles, and three serious-looking black suitcases I realized were guns.

“Shotgun, air rifle, hand pistol,” Jasper said, setting them carefully one by one on the ground.

I nodded like I knew exactly what that meant. We carried everything into the field. I watched him set up targets, walk there and back while he counted steps—measuring what, don’t ask me. Jasper asked for the three rules I was supposed to memorize: treat all guns as if they’re loaded, always point the muzzle to the ground, and keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.

“Good, good,” he nodded, and handed me a bullet that weighed nothing.

“You have any questions?” he asked, the look in his eyes boyish and bright.

“Yes,” I said. “What’s a muzzle?”

He smiled, shook his head, and laughed.

“That’s the muzzle.” Jasper pointed to the end of the gun, then placed giant headphones over my head.

It did cross my mind, at least once, that shooting guns with a man I just met might not be my finest choice. Although, it did seem exactly the kind of behavior Montana required. I had a good feeling, is all I can say. Jasper seemed straightforward and simple, a lake so clear you can see each detail of its depth. When I gave my roommate all the pertinent information she raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Be safe.” I thought that was reasonable advice and left.

As I watched this handsome man lie on his stomach in the tumbleweed grass, and lift a rifle to his left eye and shoot a clean bull’s-eye, I couldn’t help but smile. This was as Montana as it could get. This was the West. I imagined my thumb between Jasper’s teeth, his forearm round my waist in the back of the truck, guns scattered across the backseat as a distant prop, a counterweight. What was the source of this attraction? I didn’t care for excessive killing. I used to be vegetarian. I couldn’t understand, which did nothing to lessen its hold. There was something about men with guns.

But when it was my turn to shoot, Jasper’s arms did not wrap around mine, his hands remained at his sides, trusting I’d be competent enough to follow his example, and I was. I was surprised to feel the gut drop of genuine disappointment at his lack of guidance. I shot. I hit the blue ring on the bull’s-eye, then the red. I shot three glass bottles that exploded gleefully into the air. It was so easy. Bullets were light as air. It was not terrifying, as I expected. It was not terrifying at all, I would report to my friends back home, it was fun.

That’s the problem, I thought. Luckily, it wasn’t my problem.

After we finished shooting, Jasper asked me to help collect the broken glass and I thought: environmentally conscious. Not that it mattered to me, not at all. Darkness started to dim the sky. By the time we drove up the dirt road, his two headlights were the only discs of light. Jasper asked if I would want to go shooting again, maybe do a hike. I asked what a typical hunt looked like. He said it involved focus, a lot of patience, then told me about a hunting trip he did in northern Minnesota. The way he talked made me calm. He reminded me of autumns at home, chestnuts, and red leaves of oak. He reminded me of who I once was, of The Tallest Man on Earth songs, of longing for things I had no knowledge of—remote cabins, artistic renown, multiple lovers.

In the passenger seat, I felt full of chill and outdoors, as though I’d accumulated the day’s luster and could glow. Jasper asked what my parents are like. We were back on the highway. Names of places rose and flattened on the road signs, sounding tense and vaguely folkloric: Kalispell, Great Falls, Polson. I misread the last one as Poison. I didn’t know what to tell him.

“They’re fine,” I said, and for a while we did not speak.

Then, driving over the river that ran through town, Jasper said, “I think I’d like to have a daughter one day and name her June.”

I said nothing.

So, there are people like that, I contemplated afterward, people whose desires followed a straightforward track, as an arrow being shot, uncomplicated and aimed at a single place to land. Desires with no commas, no question marks. Jasper did not have to tell me he was looking for a wife. He did not have to tell me his parents were happily married. His worst pain, he did tell me, arrived after losing Winnie, his childhood black lab. I wondered if the two of us could be happy together. I wondered if it was possible for someone who has not yet suffered to understand one who has. Jasper was content in this small Montana town. Jasper did not long for elsewhere, or perhaps that was to be my role: supply his life with an uncanny flicker, be somewhere he could never truly know.

When he suggested a hike for our third date, I said yes.

At the trailhead, Jasper pulled out a heavy-looking backpack and explained he needed to train for hunting season.

“After field dressing a deer I hike it out in my backpack,” Jasper said, “an average carcass weighs about a hundred pounds.”

That number meant nothing to me.

I glanced at the fine blond hairs on his knuckles. I imagined them pulling out plush sacs of guts, breaking ribs apart, proficient, and matter-of-fact. I felt the base of my stomach snap to attention. Red-tailed hawks circled overhead.

“Man, I love that sound,” he said.

“I can hear trains whistle from the lecture rooms,” I told him.

“Oh,” Jasper laughed, “is that your emblem of the West?”

I was surprised at his use of ‘emblem.’

He told me he read The Gulag Archipelago twice, which surprised me even more.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s important to know what happened over there, what humans are capable of,” he said. Then after a while, “Well, you’d know.”

“I’m not Russian,” I replied and he laughed like it was such a funny joke.

I was not Russian. Where I was from was irrelevant. I was not from here, that is all.

Midway up the mountain Jasper and I sat on the base of a giant white letter. Giant white letter? Correct. A Montanan custom, or perhaps a local fetish, who knows, to decorate mountainsides with the first letter of the town below. It was the kind of thing my friends back home found amusing or registered with some degree of pity, like, “Oh, that’s what Americans are up to.”

In those conversations with Europe I found myself torn between laughing along and defending a place I was—at least spatially, at least geographically—now a part of. I had a predilection for its dirt-road charms. I knew dirt roads. I knew countryside. I knew riding boots and broken bones.

The shape of the letter was L. We sat at the base of it. Jasper offered me a neon-blue sports drink, the sugar made me wince. There was a lick of light in his eyes. He wanted to kiss me, I could tell, but there was not enough cue to go on. I wanted to watch him flail, see what he would do. Here’s the thing, he did not flail. He did not force a sexual undertone as men are so often apt to lead with or panic their way into. We continued going uphill. At one point he said I walked like a fat person. I spun around and half-laughed, half-yelled something at him. Jasper gently placed both of his hands on my shoulders and smiled.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s true. Your feet, you stick them out sideways.”

The warmth of his hands on me, the tightrope way he teased me, it all charmed me very much.

I was adamant about not falling in love. That’s not what this was about. Love has nothing to do with exile.

Actually, love has everything to do with exile.

When I left home everything was devastatingly beautiful and I was devastated. The blueberries were going from violet to blue, apples were almost ripe, sun touched the ears of wheat and of deer equally. There was not a corner of the house that did not slant with familiar patterns of shadow and light. I knew every dirt road by heart. I knew the intervals at which the church bells tolled and by the ways the mournful men marched down the hill, whether it was a wedding or a funeral. I knew the gap between the birches where the moon rose. The river ran low, there hadn’t been rain in months. In the fields, poppies scattered their reds into crumbling tractor marks. Black beetles crawled over forest paths. In the ditch: blue chicory flowers, rosy bindweeds, yellow buttercups. It was too much to leave, and I left.

Without love there would be no exile. We would not long for what we lost.

At his apartment, Jasper gave me a tour, pointing out the beaver skulls, stuffed pheasants, the antlers, fossils, and the rocks. He lived alone. An American flag hung in the kitchen, below it were jars of pear preserves he had made himself. On his bookshelves I found Doctor Zhivago and, indeed, The Gulag Archipelago. I thought Jasper was a man who never told a single lie in his life. When I asked what his favorite part of hunting was he said, “It changes you forever.” On the couch his lips were delicate, fingertips slow and tremulous. Not what I expected from a hunter, yet the contradiction pleased me. Such dissonances were full of possibility.

I took Jasper’s bearded jaw between my forefinger and thumb. His hands moved down my sides, traced my stomach, to where the hip bones arced.

“Your breathing changed,” Jasper said.

“My what?”

“Your breath.”

“How can you tell?”

A grin devoured his face. “I can tell.”

I felt full of happiness and hope. If he could read my breath imagine what else this man could do. I stood up, pulled off my sweaty shirt, and led Jasper through what I correctly guessed was the bedroom door.

“God,” he said several minutes later, “I’m sorry, this doesn’t—”

We were both looking down.

“—usually happen.”

He pressed the base of his palm into his eye socket, half-suspended over me.

I said it was okay, not because it was okay, but because that’s what is expected of a woman in situations like this. I’m not a particularly nice woman, but sometimes I like to pretend to be.

We were silent for a while.

“You’re just so—ah.” He pressed a closed fist to his forehead, then moved it over his lips. “You’re just so.”

I rolled my eyes, pulled his face between my legs, and thought—this won’t work.

      

One day I drove through the vast fields at the edge of town, past trespassing after trespassing sign. I could get shot, I thought, and kept driving. I played a song. What song is difficult to say—some song. Some song that made me very, very happy. It’s possible it was not a song, but a classical composition. It’s possible it was Chopin. Only Chopin could make me burst into long, ugly tears. I drove. My wet eyes blurred roads to rivers. A deer jumped in front of the car and I did not stop. Did I mean to hit it? I wasn’t sure, but somehow, in the correct symmetry of crisscrossing speed, the car and the deer managed to miss each other. I stopped then. I stopped and got out of the car and knelt in the rising dust. I pressed my forehead into the loose gravel, and cried. I cried until I remembered my name, then I stood and drove to the house, where my roommate glanced at me and said, “Some guy called.”

I hadn’t realized I left my phone.

In my land, back home, I never liked the Virgin Mary shrines. Webbed with ribbons in the usual alternating pattern of red, blue, green, yellow, white, they stood on nearly every other corner. I didn’t like Mary’s blue dress or the infant she was always holding, all those contradictory statements on reproduction and sexuality so quietly therein contained. I never liked seeing them at the edges of villages or the older women, kneeling with scarves folded into triangles on the backs of their heads, lips moving in the rhythmic motions of prayer, but now, driving back and forth across this town, beside the McDonald’s, the Starbucks, the Wendy’s, the sight of a single shrine would have changed everything.

      

The second man I met was in one of my mandatory elective classes, in English Lit. He was studying sustainable construction but in fact wanted to be a writer, and behind that, what he truly and secretly wanted was to be a leader against climate change. I laughed when he told me.

“You want to be Greta Thunberg?”

He shook his head, smiling, like: shut the fuck up. Then he looked at me hopelessly. The whole thing seemed a little hazy. He was a few years younger than me, too young, maybe, to predict the mute remorse of lost years. But I also knew occasionally it was necessary to move in the opposite direction of what you desire in order to get to it. It did not fail to occur to me that might be what I was doing.

His name was Charlie. He was from a small Colorado town, had brackish water eyes and long hair he sometimes braided. And he owned a gun. That was essential. When I asked why, he looked at me like the question was beside the point.

“I used to hunt with my dad,” Charlie eventually replied, “and it’s good to have.”

I nodded.

“I also have one gun in storage that’s not mine.”

“Oh,” I said. “Whose is it?”

“My roommate’s.”

I gave a soft hum, as if that made sense of everything.

In Charlie, I found a more equal match. For hours we moved through one another. I wanted him down the length of me. When I saw him naked for the first time I almost sighed. I’d never seen a more beautiful outline drape midair. Charlie seemed indifferent to his own body, which only made my passions for it more heated. I could claim it as my own without having an owner to negotiate, and I did, or at least I did my best. Occasionally in bed one of us would pause, smile, and shake our heads, because it really felt too good for this Earth. “You’re this perfect sex creature,” I once told him. He laughed and replied, “Look who’s talking.”

Charlie wanted to see my paintings, not the pictures I had on my phone, but stop by the studio and see the big canvases in person. He stared at them for a long time, then said he wasn’t sure what they were about but one, that one, moved him very much. It was a painting of two thick white lines intersecting across a chaos of grayish black: everything textured, everything pained.

“They’re not supposed to be understood,” I told him, as though the mere suggestion of understanding abstraction was childish and passé, but of course, they were. Meant to be understood. Or rather, I understood them. I was saying something specific through them. Of course, I did not expect my audience to be receptive to undertones of exilic emotion, but nonetheless, I hoped Charlie would understand.

For the following week he texted me interpretations of the painting. Nazism and Europe, he wrote and I laughed. The principle of seriousness and jest. Past and present. All of them wrong, except the final one, meant as a joke: you and me. That could be correct, I typed, then deleted everything and replied with a laughing emoji instead. In the face of being found out I have learned to be trite.

All was going well. Charlie sustained the correct ratio of sex to guns. I didn’t know how many guns were part of the equation, but I knew the equation was right. His dramatic jaw bone fit perfectly inside the palm of my hand. His hazel eyes were unlike the eyes of anyone back home, and that, in itself, was another triumph. I left long scratch marks down his back that he adored. We didn’t do much besides have sex and go to questionably lit bars at late hours of the night. In his truck, giant and gray, he once asked what I listened to. I plugged in my phone and played Biggie Smalls to make him laugh. Charlie widened his eyes. “Seriously?” I laughed and said, “Yeah, sometimes.” I saw it lock in slow-motion behind his gaze: the fact that he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did.

There were nights, lots of them, when his erection flickered on and off. It might seem like this was a sudden development, but it existed from the start, this interruption in momentum. What is it with American men, I asked myself. Is this a national problem? Does everyone know? During one of these forced intermissions, I ordered Charlie to describe field dressing for me.

“In detail,” I said.

He looked at me like it was an insane request, given the context.

“Ah, I don’t know. It takes a lot of time—” he paused. “You’re mainly just quartering out the animal. It’s a lot of rough cuts around joints. You’re also skinning the animal, so you want to cut in the direction of the hair. Before any of this you should gut the animal so none of the intestines spoil the meat. It’s an involved process to cut the pelvic bone—”

I shuddered, noticing he was describing the process backwards.

“—avoid breaching the bladder and spilling urine on the meat. You also want to avoid touching the metatarsal glands with the knife, that can give a bitter taste to the meat. Once the animal is gutted, best practice in grizzly country is to drag them one hundred yards downwind.”

A man, I comforted myself, unafraid to get his hands dirty.

“Satisfied?” He pinned my arms into the mattress.

I smiled. “No,” I said.

Charlie ran his lips over my left nipple.

Weeks passed. It became winter and the deer carcasses started showing up.

They always revealed themselves in a double take, half-shrouded by tarps, riding in the backs of trucks or casually parked in front of a grocery store, the edge of an antler sticking out.

I could be indifferent to it. No, I could not.

I thought of Jasper’s body pressed into the snow, serious-eyed, forefinger flipping the safety guard. I thought of the ruffled soil of fresh graves, the way rain slides down a double headstone. The relief of such silence. I saw myself as a young girl. A small mysterious figure, opaque, compact, with blond looping curls. I thought of the woman who sold balloons in front of the park. I saw the balloons. Chestnuts in tall blossom. Clouds sailing over faraway church spires like battleships. When the woman lifted a hand to bring down a blue balloon, I flinched. Who could have hurt you? I wished I could ask her; though, of course, I knew.

Only once did I summon the courage to walk up to such a carcass, strapped to the back of a parked truck, and peer underneath the covering tarp. I saw a mess of reddened fur, a tongue sticking out, the head twisted in a pose suggestive of agony.

Was this the initiation I had hoped for? Evidently not.

Charlie and I continued. In class our gazes brushed with pleasurable and pretend indifference. I loved knowing how every square inch of him looked naked. Seeing his lean torso slouch in the classroom chair made me want to walk over there and slide onto his hips. An incremental increase of pleasure until the final bright exclaim: one hundred eyes opening at once. It became necessary to restrain my carnal impulses.

Gaps began to show themselves within our more intense moments.

Charlie was desperate to cook for me. It was obvious this held some heightened significance for him; perhaps it was a hallmark of ritual courtship, the kind of thing good men were supposed to do. The offer, evidently meant to please me, evoked instinctive resistance, hostility even. I postponed it for as long as I decently could, thinking up the strangest excuses, including, “I need my paints to dry.” God knows what that meant. Charlie knew nothing about painting, and, it was becoming gradually and painfully clear, he knew very little about me.

I could have told him anything—where I was from we have no internet, we communicate through fax, we ride reindeer to work. He might have believed it.

I explained the lack of interest as a result of impoverished knowledge, lack of imagination—one of the two, or possibly both. Probably both. Charlie wouldn’t know how to begin, what to ask about. He couldn’t approach me through the most distant metaphor. And is that not what I wanted?

Only very rarely did a wind pick up the familiar scent of forest—pine, moss, dew—and almost bring me to my knees. The pain was too visceral, a hard kick under the skin.

Nothing else in Montana reminded me of home. Not the gentle slouch of hills that people called mountains, not the pawn gun shops, not the police tape cordoning off entire blocks when another kid brought a gun to school. Not the drive-through ATMs or the low steep of smog. Not the bison, not the railway yard or the absence of blue eyes.

Eventually I agreed to dinner. When I arrived, after a late evening lecture, darkness seeming eternal, Charlie greeted me with two glasses of wine. “Here,” he said, then announced, rather gleefully, we’d be having elk lasagna.

“Did you hunt the elk yourself?”

He nodded. “Last season, so it’s frozen.”

Charlie asked me to set out plates, slice carrots, grate the cheese. I felt unexpectedly summoned from the audience to fill a part onstage. I felt ill-prepared, required to perform—I wasn’t sure what.

Charlie hummed jovially as he spiced elk meat. I’d never heard him hum before. He turned around to glance at me, and I quickly pulled on a smile. None of this was very like me. We made garlic bread, which seemed a strange addition to the meal. We ate. The food tasted like salty nothing, but otherwise everything was fine. I shouldn’t have made a big deal of this dinner. This is what women want, I told myself—want this.

Charlie stood and scooped what was left on his plate into the trash. I’d never seen anyone throw out that much food. He told me that cooking was something he was trying to get better at, that he used to do it quite frequently, but then just kind of stopped. A silent beat followed. “Cooking together is a great way to find out someone’s character,” Charlie added.

That last statement, apart from being ridiculously and obviously incorrect, confirmed a latent suspicion. This had all been a test.

There’s a perfect word in my mother tongue for what I felt in that moment, but no translation exists and I don’t think I could explain.

I tried to steady myself, but the damage had been done.

Another night I asked him, “Do you ever think about the fact that I’m not from here?”

We were sitting in his gray truck, waiting for a break in the rain to run inside a bar. Charlie thought about it with a serious look on his face that made him all the more beautiful, then said, “Beyond your accent, no. Not really.”

We were silent for a while.

“You?” he eventually asked. “Do you think about me being American?”

I must have smiled, raised my eyebrows.

“I don’t have to think about it. It’s just always there.”

He gave that some thought.

“Well, I don’t consider myself to be, you know, a typical American.”

I laughed. He was serious.

A variation of this story has already been told. It’s been told as a painting and therefore, is not this story at all. The image is by René Magritte, it’s called The Lovers. Two faces, a woman and a man, as indicated by the clothing, are kissing. Both faces are wrapped with white cloth. All the obvious themes of longing, isolation, suffocation, and blindness apply. We’re strangers to each other, et cetera, et cetera. Desire and death, one could make those words rhyme.

I won’t.

Winter wore on. The number of dead bodies increased, then abruptly ceased. It occurred to me that for every deer carcass in town there was a man with a gun. A man with a pulse, with crisscrossed veins on his wrists, a particular cadence of voice, and a particular pattern of hair down the abdomen.

“Can I do anything I want to you?” I asked Charlie.

He nodded.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Anything you want,” he confirmed.

A few weeks before Christmas, Jasper texted me. He said he didn’t know if I was going home for the holidays. If not, I was invited to celebrate with him and his family. I interpreted that to mean he wanted a second chance. Around that time, Charlie asked me to be his girlfriend.

“I’m not the girlfriend type,” I told him gently.

Charlie appeared irritated. And I couldn’t believe he so misunderstood the nature of what I was.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he snapped.

“What I want?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “I don’t want anything from you.”

He flew to Colorado for a few days to visit family. I stayed in Montana.

It approached, the dreaded time of Christmas. Occasionally I saw the L on the mountainside and smiled; otherwise I was miserable. Only those born into happy families enjoy Christmas. My roommate flew home. Then it was just me.

In the house, silence sharpened its even teeth.

I drove over to Jasper’s place one night, knocked on the door, expecting him to be out. I shuffled from foot to foot, the snow was half a meter tall. I had started to turn around when I heard the door unlock.

“Hey?”

The question was inflected with such joy I knew at once what I would do.

“Hey,” I said and walked inside. I did not take off my jacket or my boots. I put one hand against his chest and pushed him back across the kitchen, across the living room, then with a flick of a wrist backwards onto the bed. Of course, he let me do all this.

“Well fuck,” Jasper said. “Okay.”

His beard a rasp against my chin. His hands pulled off my jacket, my sweater, my jeans. I felt like sparks were catching off me, a circuit full of faults.

Jasper ran his tongue flat up my thigh. I flipped us around and pinned his face to the bed with my hips. There is no way to explain the look in his eyes, the delighted slow upward roll to meet mine. “Now fuck me,” I said, and he did.

Everything went as I originally hoped it would.

Afterward, panting, Jasper looked at me with a face of optimism and hope, like a man about to hear the verdict knowing he’ll be proclaimed not guilty. I thought: oh no.

“Look,” I started to say, searching for the correct name to give things.

“Listen, you don’t have to,” Jasper cut me off. “I know it’s Christmas.”

I paused because it was such a strange and accurate thing to say.

Then he stood up and kissed my temple, a gesture that pierced me with its sudden sincerity. I got dressed. Jasper handed me my two limp white socks and walked me to the entrance. The door hadn’t fully shut earlier and a few snowflakes had drifted in. He stood there naked, and said, “The Christmas Eve invitation stands.”

I thought: stop being nice to me.

I drove back. One after another, the streetlights turned green. I sped past the Starbucks, the McDonald’s, the Wendy’s. I was almost at the house, taking the second to last turn when I saw a misshapen pale heap, slumped and disfigured. A shape of death. A carcass? A corpse? My heart flattened. My ribs wrapped around a gasp.

I slammed the brakes.

I couldn’t tell whether it was a deer or a human. Warm skin tones glared against the snow. I was preparing myself to see something hideous, jaw clenched, when the image shifted into focus: it was a chair. Tilted against it were a few planks of wood. On top of the chair stood a cardboard box with one flap lifted so it did not seem like a cardboard box. Hanging off the back was a billowy white mass, a fitted sheet. Underneath a small sign read: FREE STUFF.

Dizzy, I slouched in the car seat. I took a few breaths, turned on the engine, and turned the car around. I couldn’t go home. Grief pressed down, a long dark tide poured itself through me. I became a sieve incapable of separating all its black grains. No, no. Please, let this stop.

I drove back across town, texting: Where are you?

Home. Got in this morning.

Haphazard in my desire, I knocked on his door.

“Let’s do it differently this time,” I said when Charlie appeared in the doorframe.

His body was receptive to this change of direction. I moved us through new coordinates, layering sensation over sensation, closing my eyes and forgetting my name, letting everything blur. If only I could live there, never exit the antidote. The pitch of him in me expanded, a stone tossed into a body of water, concentric circles, until the entire surface rippled and I let out a hard scream. Then his penis went limp.

It was only briefly, face between my thighs, that I worried he might taste another man on me. I had no idea what I’d say if confronted. But Charlie only gave his usual preliminary exhale and said, “I missed you so much.” I grabbed a fistful of his hair. He seemed perfectly unaware.

This felt like a dangerous absolution. Not for me, dangerous for men. A woman can do anything.

I had forgotten all about the strange skin-colored shape, all about the billowing sheet, and more importantly, I had forgotten what these shapes evoked: shrouds, loss, a thousand dark grains demanding to be felt and sorted. I had hoped moving half an earth away, killing all associations, would exempt me of all this. If not for the chair maybe it would have.

I took Charlie’s Adam’s apple into my lips and we lay there, skin indistinguishable from skin, heat from heat. He moaned.

I remembered something I wanted to ask him. “Why do you have your roommate’s gun?”

“Oh.” Charlie propped himself up on an elbow and looked at me. “He, ah, he told me to take it because he wanted to kill himself.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, he asked me to lock it away from him.”

His roommate worked night shifts at a shabby casino near the airport. I never met him.

Guns. We do not choose our symbols; we inherit them.

“Shower with me?” Charlie asked.

I could have gone anywhere but I came here, to Montana. All my life I believed I’d be happy once my parents died. They’ve been dead for a few months. A car crash, five hundred meters away from our house. A gun was found in the glovebox after. What was the gun for? Good question.

In the bathroom I watched Charlie step into the shower. I watched the beautiful dimples on his ass, the hazel path of hair between the two indents of his lower hips, and had to ask myself: is this what happiness is?

The Greensboro Review Literary Award Story JENNY LYNN & BUDDY

When Buddy meets Jenny Lynn, she has a hole in the side of her ankle about as big around as a nickel, a shallow well of gore at the end of the knobby bone. She doesn’t seem to mind it too much; she is laughing a lot and when Buddy thinks of her now, he thinks of her laughing. She tells him that her leg got stuck under a car, just now. Buddy asks to see it and she lifts her pant leg and pulls down her bloody sock to show him. The bleeding has stopped and the sock is starting to get stiff. It peels away from the skin, letting the fresh wound finally breathe. 

“Holy shit,” he says. 

She laughs. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” 

The ankle is starting to swell, there’s purple from the bruising and black from the asphalt, or maybe it’s from the tire. He can’t tell, but now he’s picturing her flesh and bone being ground into the road and this makes him feel sort of sick inside. It looks pretty bad. 

“What the fuck,” he says. “How is it not broken?”

She laughs. “She ran me over.” She points behind her, into the house. “I don’t know.”

“Jesus.” Now Buddy is laughing too. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Jenny Lynn says. “You wanna get stoned?”

They are sitting on the front porch, on a ratty couch that no one admits to bringing here. It’s May and there’s a June bug banging against one of the screen windows and there’s a broken pint glass on the windowsill and cigarette butts on the wooden floor. There are piles of incense ash where the floor meets the wall and stacks of little yellow sticks on the sill, left from when the Nag Champa burned away. Buddy takes a new stick and lights it with a paper match and blows out the match and drops it. Watching it fall through the slats of the floor, he wonders if there’s anything flammable beneath them. 

“You wanna get stoned?” she asks again. 

He looks to her on the other side of the couch and raises his eyebrows, forehead crinkling, lids heavy and red in the whites of his eyes like webs of paprika. He blinks.  

She pulls out a clean little glass pipe and sets it on the sill next to the broken pint and she takes out a handblown jar with a cork lid and a bunch of stinky buds inside and tosses it onto Buddy’s lap. It lands just barely on one of his testicles and he flinches, wincing in pain as Jenny Lynn watches this happen in slow motion, her face distorting in horror. 

“Oh Lord!” She says this and reaches over to him and puts her hand on his shoulder. 

He makes a face and he laughs and brushes it off, says it’s fine—neither one of them wanting the other to feel bad or wrong or embarrassed. 

She takes the jar back and packs a bowl and gives it to him to light. While he smokes, she takes out a prescription bottle and shakes it, the green-coated pills rattling against the orange plastic, a sweeter sound he never heard. She sets the bottle, so gently, she balances it on his leg, just above where the blue jean is worn white at his knee. 

“Let’s get fucked up,” she says. 

      

They become fast friends and stay that way for a year, though Buddy knows by now that she wants more. This scares the shit out of him because he is twenty years old and still a virgin, and it’s all very confusing. The way he sees it fluctuates. Sometimes it’s because he’s shy. Sometimes it’s because women are terrifying to him, sex is terrifying to him. He still thinks of the girl in grade school, who ruffled his hair with her hand, the plastic bracelets dangling off her wrist. Riding his bike home afterward, feeling weird. Sitting next to a girl at the movies in middle school, feeling weird. On the couch with a girl in high school, feeling weird. 

Other times it’s some misplaced romantic pride, like he’s waiting for “The One.” 

What does that even mean? he wonders. Fairy tales from his youth. 

Horrified by the whole deal, he just wants to get it over with. So they finally have sex.

It’s late July and it’s hot and it’s sticky and Buddy will close all the windows in his room so the neighbors can’t hear and they will sweat together with David Bowie playing in the background. He’s high on OxyContin, and he won’t remember how it went.

They’ll keep having sex, and it will mostly be fine. Neither one of them will ever call the other their boyfriend, or their girlfriend. They are just “Buddy.” They are just “Jenny Lynn.” 

      

Some weeks later, Buddy loses a condom inside of her. He’s high and gone soft and he can’t feel anything and he doesn’t realize it’s missing until he gets up to go to the bathroom. Standing weak-kneed over the toilet he goes to take the thing off and it’s already off. He looks around. He goes back into the living room and looks around. He’s on his hands and knees crawling around the floor while Jenny Lynn smokes a cigarette, one hand holding it toward the open window, the other running lightly through her pubic hair. 

Buddy starts feeling under the couch cushions. 

She asks him what he’s doing.

Buddy looks at her. He can’t think of how to say it. 

She asks him if he lost a pill.

He looks at her, panic rising within him. 

“Do you feel weird?”

She smiles, sweetly. “What do you mean?”

“Like, inside?”

“Do I feel weird inside?”

“Like in your guts.”

“You’re crazy,” she says, and stubs out her cigarette. 

He puts his hands on her shoulders, looks into her eyes. “I think I lost it inside you.”

“You came inside me?”

“No, baby, the condom came off, it must be inside of you.”

He can tell that he’s scaring her and this opens something new in him, something unexpected. What would be his own fear melts at her feet and he feels only calm, and strength, and the need to protect her and reassure her and in this moment, he knows that he loves her. 

“What do I do?!” She meets his eyes. “Get it out, baby!”

“Okay,” he says.

He puts his hand behind her neck and feels fine hairs against his palm. He kisses her forehead and then he puts two fingers inside of her and tries to find the condom but he can’t. The fear is back in him now and never in his life did he see himself in a situation like this. Never did he see himself in love. He leans over and kisses her on the mouth and kisses her on the cheekbone and kisses her on the eyebrow. He reaches deep inside of her, his lips resting now against the folds of her ear and he says, “There it is baby, I got it.”

Within the year, they get pregnant. Jenny Lynn finds out at the doctor’s office, when she’s there for undiagnosed pain issues. She’s just hoping they’ll give her some pills, but the doctor makes her take a urine analysis. “You’re five weeks pregnant,” the doctor says. 

“Damn that’s crazy,” Jenny Lynn says. “Can you give me anything for the pain?” 

She’s nervous about a baby, she never thought of the realities of pregnancy. She’s excited though, she’s thinking they can do it, she’s excited to tell Buddy about it. She can clean up, she thinks. She waits for him in the kitchen of their now-shared apartment. 

He wants an abortion. “I grew up on government cheese and crappy white bread,” he says. “I’m not raising a kid like that.” He’s angry about it, and remembering things from his childhood. Getting teased for hand-me-down sneakers. Stomach grumbling in classes and everyone looking at him. Dollar bills stuffed in his locker vents with lewd notes on them. 

Jenny Lynn just stares at him. 

“We’re bums,” he tells her. “We’re poor people.” He’s getting worked up now and Jenny Lynn steps back. She’s not crying. She’s mad too. She sees her father in Buddy for the first time, and it breaks her heart. “We don’t know how to do anything, Jenny. We can’t care for anyone.”

Two weeks later she has a miscarriage. 

It’s just before Halloween and a thin layer of snow covers the ground.

It will melt away by morning. 

Four years later she has gone to school and finished a nursing degree. She gets a job as an RN in a senior living facility. Buddy is working as a bartender in a hotel until one night he falls down a cement stairwell and breaks his leg. He’d been stealing bottles of liquor from the supply closet and hiding them in a room of the hotel that was under repair, sneaking around and drinking them between room service calls. One of the hotel guests finds him at the bottom of the stairwell, sucking on lemon slices he carries in his pocket and writhing in pain. 

They’ve been living apart for the last year, but after this, Jenny Lynn moves in with him again. To help him recover. Together they blow through his prescription Dilaudid in a week and she starts stealing pills from the old folks’ home. 

She’s caught and fired; she loses her nursing license. 

She takes the city bus to Applebee’s and meets a guy in the parking lot and buys some heroin. She gets out of his car and finds a big pine tree and crawls underneath its wide skirt of branches. She puts her hands against the tree trunk, sap sticks to her palms. She lowers herself to the bed of brown pine needles and turns and leans against the trunk. She fixes up a shot. Two hours later someone calls the cops about a dead body outside Applebee’s. When they get there they find Jenny Lynn, her feet sticking out from beneath the edges of the tree. 

She wakes up and tries to hide the syringe that’s still clutched in her hand, the shoelace she was using to tie off, the little aluminum cooker. The cops are pissed because she doesn’t have any heroin left, no actual drugs. But there’s enough paraphernalia to arrest her on possession charges. Later they claim there was still junk in the syringe and give her first-time felony possession. She spends a week in jail. She is released after pleading guilty and agreeing to residential AODA treatment and probation.

The night before she goes to rehab, they listen to Mariah Carey’s “Daydream” on Buddy’s little cassette player and when the B side ends they flip it over and listen to it again and when it ends they flip it and when it ends they flip it and when it ends they flip it again. Both of them have core memories of this album from their childhood. Both of them know that they’re making a new memory, now, in real time. They know that they’re trying to hold on to something. 

She calls him from the treatment center and tells him that everything’s going well and that she loves him. She writes him letters; she keeps them light. She doesn’t ask how he is doing, instead she says, “I hope you are doing well.” She never says she misses him. She feels a weight lifted from her shoulders. But she doesn’t know how to talk about it, what it means, what it says about the two of them. She goes to meetings and she feels something positive in her life, not for the first time, but it’s been a while. It’s right on time. She has faith again. She connects with women in the house and she gets their phone numbers when they leave. She makes friends. She’s not sure if being totally sober is possible, but it sounds nice. Buddy calls and she can hear the dope in his voice. She can see him, through the phone; his eyes half closed, the spit on his lips. She can hear him suck his cheeks. Click his tongue. It’s disgusting. He doesn’t even realize it. 

She’s embarrassed for him. Most days he’s sad—dark and morbid and she wonders if they shouldn’t talk anymore. Her counselor agrees. His name is Ted and he’s balding, usually red in the face, with a kind smile. Jenny Lynn thinks he’s stoned all the time. But she also thinks that it’s none of her business, and never asks about his own sobriety. Ted tells her that it’s too hard, when one person gets clean and the other doesn’t. He tells her that relationships are the leading cause of relapse. He tells her that you can’t have any reservations. Ted’s office is filled with pictures of single lions, looking off into sunsets, looking content, at last, maybe, finally. 

One day Buddy calls and he asks her if she remembers the baby. “What if we coulda done it, Jenny? What if we coulda made it work? It’s my fault you lost it.” He’s drunk. 

She cries, sitting in the creaky wooden chair outside the women’s rooms, in front of the old wooden desk where the phone waits. Names and numbers and dates scrawled into the desk, some scratched raw into the wood. 

Her roommate takes the phone from her, the long, curled cord reaching over Jenny Lynn’s shoulder as she sets her face on the desk.

“She can’t talk to you right now,” the roommate says. 

When she gets out of rehab, Jenny Lynn moves in with her grandmother. The same grandmother that she lived with after losing her mom to cancer. After her dad traded his tools for an old shell camper and left Wisconsin, to live in Montana, without her. At four years old, this might be her first memory: she stands in front of her father’s legs, smelling the engine oil in his jeans, smelling the engine oil under his fingernails and the tobacco-stained yellow fingers that lay on her shoulders as together they wait for Grandma Maggie to accept her. Her father is crying, and squeezing her shoulders. “Take her, Maggie,” he says. “Take her from me. I can’t keep up.” Jenny Lynn is shivering, though bundled in a snow suit. She stands on her grandmother’s porch like a little stuffed toy. 

“Goddamn it, Joe,” her grandmother says. The same grandmother that took her to see Disney’s Pocahontas in the movie theater when she was six years old. The same grandmother that took her to McDonald’s whenever she got A marks on her report cards. That gave her an old thin wedding ring, the diamond chip almost invisible, and told her someday she’d know. That told her—when Jenny Lynn was awake all night, another sleepless night, another anxiety attack—to breathe. To think of the good things. To believe in the Lord and to believe in herself and that if she really waited, and had faith, she’d find the things she was looking for. She stares up at the glow stars on her ceiling, she looks over at her grandmother. “But I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” she says. 

      

She stalls for a couple of days after getting out, before seeing Buddy again. She picks him up and within five minutes, he asks her to split some dope with him. “I don’t want to,” she says. 

He doesn’t understand what she means. 

“I’m sick of this bullshit.” 

Buddy picks at his fingernails. “Are you mad at me?”

“Drugs, Buddy, I’m sick of doing drugs.”

He looks out the passenger seat window, where he sits in his first girlfriend’s grandmother’s minivan. She’s driving it without a license. They’re parked in front of his own grandfather’s house. He doesn’t understand what she means. Why doesn’t she want to get high?

A few months later, Buddy checks himself into rehab. The same one she went to. She’s not clean anymore, but she won’t admit it to him. He would never say he’s doing it for her, he’s not. But seeing her when she got out was the closest thing to hope he’d had in years. Something changed. Something was possible. After a week he’s allowed to use the phone and he calls Jenny Lynn to tell her how well it’s going. He tells her that he’s ready and that he wants to get married and buy a house and get a dog and make a bunch of babies. He tells her that he’ll do anything. 

She is eleven weeks pregnant. She says nothing. 

When Buddy gets out, the baby is gone. She says nothing. She can’t.   

He stays clean, he gets a job, he gets a mountain bike that’s too small and rides it around town making amends. He stays clean; Jenny Lynn does not. 

She violates the terms of her parole; she ends up back in jail.

She ends up back in rehab. 

She meets a guy in treatment who’s tall and skinny and wears expensive shoes. He’s got tattoos all over his arms that look like they’ve been there since high school. Buddy is embarrassed by this guy and he knows something’s going on but he just sits there quietly when he goes to visit Jenny Lynn in rehab and she introduces them. She tells him that the guy wrote a novel. She tells him that he lost his father. She tells him that they’re just friends. She kisses Buddy on the cheek and thanks him for coming to visit. 

“I’ve got to go to group now, Buddy,” she says. 

He says that’s good and he says that he’ll see her at the same time next week and before he leaves, he tries to talk to this new guy. Buddy asks him if he wants to stay clean.

“Yeah,” the guy says. “I guess.” 

Jenny Lynn leaves rehab early. She and the guy she met get a little apartment together, the bottom floor of a house down east of the train tracks, about three blocks from the park. Buddy goes to see her and she shows him around, shows him the kitchen with the little window over the sink, shows him the little salt and pepper shakers. A chicken and an egg. He fixates on the coffee pot. He imagines them getting up in the morning, waking up together, talking about what they need from the grocery store or when they have to go to work or . . . he imagines them getting drunk together, getting high. He pictures them honking blow off the little yellow plates that she’s showing him now. They have fuzzy ducklings printed on them, all in a row, following their mother to a pond. She shows him the living room and the couch and they have sex on it and then they lie there together. Buddy looks over and out the window and sees the guy standing on the front porch. He can see the guy’s jean jacket through the window, just his torso, just standing there. Then the guy is gone. Buddy gets dressed quickly and when he leaves, the guy is getting out of his car in the street, walking toward the house, acting like he just got there. 

Later that night Buddy starts getting text messages from a number he doesn’t know. They say that he has a small penis. They say that he’s a junkie and a loser. They say that Jenny Lynn claims Buddy raped her. He gets scared and blocks the number. He blocks Jenny Lynn’s number too. He will occasionally hear from friends that the couple moved down to Whitewater. He hears that they’re fucked up all the time. 

He hears that Jenny Lynn has overdosed in the back of someone’s car. 

He hears that she jumped out of a window. 

He hears all sorts of things. 

A year later his phone rings and Jenny Lynn’s number pops up. He stares at the phone as it rings and then he picks it up, unsure of how she got through. They talk for a minute and it’s fine and then another minute and it’s fine and then Buddy starts yelling. He freaks out, screaming into the phone. When he hangs up, he hates himself, and has no idea what he was yelling about. 

He decides to go to college. He’ll get a bachelor’s degree, even though everyone has one these days and he’s not really sure what it will do for him, but he’s sure it will do something. He thinks about going for psychology, or anything that might help him to be a counselor. He thinks maybe he’d make a good counselor. For other drug addicts, an AODA counselor. But he doesn’t want to work for the state; he doesn’t want to talk to cops all the time, be nice to them. He’s not sure how any of this works but a friend tells him that that’s not a problem. That you just start somewhere. That you figure it out as you go and all of a sudden, it’s over, and you’ve found your place in the world.

Fake it till you make it, like they say in the Program. 

He thinks of how much his own counselors helped him. Ted, and Ken, and Steve from the outpatient program. He thinks of where he would be without them. 

He runs into Jenny Lynn’s best friend at the grocery store, the one that ran over her ankle with a car. He sees her pushing her cart toward him and he sees two little kids in the cart and his heart falls to the floor of the store and rests there on the waxed linoleum and he runs it over with his shopping cart. A wheel on the cart starts squeaking. They stop and talk, and she tells Buddy that Jenny Lynn is doing great, that she really is doing great. She’s trying to get her nursing license back and she’s sober or supposedly. Yes, she’s still with the guy but she’s sick of him and he’s drunk all the time and he pisses the bed, or so the friend says. 

When Buddy drives home he thinks he should be more pleased about all that than he is. 

He gets a voice message one day and it’s from Jenny Lynn from a different number. She just wants to say hello. A couple weeks later she texts back and asks him if he would consider getting a cup of coffee with her. He says he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. She says that she understands. But her heart breaks again, maybe for the last time. She knows by now that he is the love of her life, and that she’s lost him. She’s heard nothing for two years but good news about him, how great he’s doing, how happy he is. How he’s a totally different person. But she knows better, he’s not different, he’s who he always was, who she saw so clearly, all that time ago, when they met on the front porch. She wants him to be happy, like he was back then. 

Some time goes by and Buddy thinks about it. He thinks that maybe he’s just being stubborn, and that there’s no good reason not to see an old friend. He starts texting with Jenny Lynn and they try to decide where to meet. They pick a neutral city that has no connection for either one of them. A sort of no-man’s-land. Buddy tells her that he’s got a bum leg again, and they joke about all that time ago, when he was a no-good drunk and she was a junkie and they did their best to take care of each other. It comes back to him, truly and sincerely, how much they cared for one another. How sweet they could be to one another. How they helped each other. He remembers all the times that he couldn’t score and how sick he was and she would always show up with a little something, she would always help him get well. She always came through for him. On the phone, she asks him how he hurt his leg and he tells her about the shitty apartment he lives in now and how everything is always broken and how hard it is to get a maintenance guy over. He tells her the place is pretty crummy but he likes it all right. He tells her that things are pretty good these days, alone. He tells her about the landlord’s buddy who looks like Hoggle from Labyrinth and that he’s the closest thing to a repair man the landlord will send but that he’s a nice guy too. Buddy likes the guy. But he came over to replace a faucet, finally, and didn’t tighten the fixtures enough, and water sprayed everywhere. Buddy ran about, grabbing towels and moving artwork and yelling into the basement to turn the goddamn water back off. He slipped on the linoleum kitchen floor and all 200 pounds of him went down at once with his leg beneath him and he swears he heard something snap. 

She laughs with him, as he tells her this.

When Jenny Lynn and Buddy finally meet again, he is thirty-three years old and she is thirty-one. He’s been clean and sober for three years, five months, and seventeen days—if you want to get specific. She says that she’s been sober for seven months and he doesn’t ask any more questions about that. He didn’t ask in the first place. He tells himself it’s none of his business really. He has ruined her life enough; he’s realized that through the years. She’d have been better without him, less of a mess. The whole problem in the past was worrying about what she was doing, trying to control her—disguised as protecting her, worrying about her. He wonders about the guy that supposedly wrote a novel. Buddy wonders if she ever saw it. He doesn’t ask about that either. About him. 

He just wants to be here with her now. It’s mid-October and it’s crisp outside and the air is full of memories. He’s thinking about their first baby again, the things he said. The snow on the ground and how it melted so fast. On her drive there, Jenny Lynn thinks about this too and she thinks about their second, and how she’ll never tell him. She can’t.

Buddy’s been walking without crutches for a few days now and he knows that he’s pushing it. Everything seems to be fine until he parks his little red truck in Fox Lake, across the street from the coffee shop, and he gets out and he starts walking across the road without thinking about how fast the traffic is moving. He doesn’t realize until he’s in the middle of it all that he’s going to have to run to make it across. He hasn’t tried to run since tearing the ligament in his leg, and when he does, something pops again. Like shooting a rubber band from your thumb, he feels it let go. He hops and hobbles across the road, wincing in pain, swearing. 

Inside the coffee shop, Buddy finds a booth facing the door. He waits for Jenny Lynn patiently, worrying about his leg only. When she comes in, he sees her but doesn’t get up until she is standing at the end of the table and when he does, she can tell that he’s in pain. He hugs her and he’s surprised that it feels normal. He’s been worried about the hug. About whether their bellies would press together. How long they would hold it. What if he got a hard-on, or what if it just felt wrong? What if her hair brushes his face? Would she still smell faintly of patchouli? Lavender? He’s grateful right then, for the pain in his leg, distracting him from this. But it all happens fast and normal. She is very nervous. He wants to comfort her. He says he is fine.  

Buddy’s birthday was last week and Jenny Lynn has brought with her a homemade card and a BIC pen from the nursing home she is working at again, with probational restrictions. She almost has her license back. She wants to be a traveling nurse, if she ever really gets it back. 

“I remember your birthday every year, Buddy,” she says. He nods before she can finish her sentence. “Every year,” he says back to her. “I remember yours too.” He doesn’t think she’ll believe him, that that’s true, but it is and always has been.

They stay there together for an hour before he has to get up to use the bathroom. She asks if he wants help and he says no, but as he walks down the hall, putting his hand against the wall every other step, it’s clear that he’s seriously injured again. That the leg is not healed. That he has made it worse. He takes a piss, leaning lopsided against the wall of the stall. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s scared. He comes back and she is at the table, smiling at him, quite still. She’s calm now. She’s so happy, just to see him. She smiles at him as he limps back to the table. 

“Buddy,” she says. “I’ve got to tell you something. I fucked up back there Buddy . . .”

“Not so, Jenny Lynn.”

“Yes Buddy, I made a mistake. I wasn’t honest. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

“No,” he says. “No, it wasn’t like that. I’m sorry too, Jenny.” 

      

They get up to leave, and Jenny Lynn heads to the bathroom. Buddy walks to the front door, weaving between tables, putting his hands on them for support. Outside he stands in the sharp wind, early hints of snow blowing through the road, dancing like dandruff against his hands and his face. He knows he can’t make it across the street, back to his truck, not alone, not in traffic. He doesn’t want her to help him. He doesn’t want to need her for anything. But she comes outside now and she stands there squinting into the street. She clears her throat. He looks at her and says “okay” and she smiles and puts her arm around him. He leans into her and she feels strong, she smells good, like she always has—warm.

MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY

We call her the wild girl because she is naked and unafraid when she first appears in the Meiers’ cornfield near the collapsing barn. Mr. Meier brings her a can of tuna and sets it down in the field along with his eldest daughter’s old dress and a saucepan of water. Mr. Meier remembers the winter he found a dead fox under the graveyard road’s slope, two fox cubs curled up under her. He took half a can of wet dog food and the same pewter saucepan to the Calvary crosses every other day. He kept his vigil over the foxes until spring but never saw them again. Mr. Meier is a faithful man.

Like the foxes, the girl hides herself. She takes the food but not the dress. The dress is a formality she does not understand. When Mr. Meier takes it back into the house it is damp and sweet-smelling but his daughter refuses to wear it. Sometimes Mr. Meier can catch the wild girl’s silhouette if he stops halfway to the house and turns back. She is slender, her hair like a blond flame. The wild girl continues to take the food, the water. One day she stops.

So everybody is surprised when she walks into town a month later. She is swaying on her feet and clutching a horse blanket. She is waltzing into town like a drunk homecoming queen after a night of too much and her hair is shorter, chopped ragged. It does not take long for Mr. Edzel Winters to claim her as his long-lost daughter. Look at the scar on her arm, he says. Nina had a scar just like it from when she caught her arm in the baler. He points to what looks like a deep rope burn on her forearm. It’s plain as daybreak, he says. Mr. Winters reminds us that his wife and daughter disappeared on the same day in June, ten years ago. The two of them had hiked up into the Big Meadow to fetch the horse and neither came back. Nina would have been six then, and stubborn enough to follow her mother. Nobody looked until dark, assuming they had stopped to pick sour early apples. The Jollytown Volunteer Fire Department arranged to have bloodhounds trucked down from Pittsburgh, but the search ended after a few weeks.

The wild girl lives with Mr. Winters and his six sons. The brothers coddle her and dress her. Some say they see the family resemblance, especially in the childish chin and the sharp, thin nose. Some say there is no family resemblance. Even the skeptical Mr. Meier says nothing because the glow of mystery is too warm to sidle away from.

It is devilment to cut her hair. Mr. Winters’s sons trick her with candy but the first snip of scissors against her neck makes her bolt. They dress her in their mother’s pink silk nightgown but she screams when they put shoes on her feet. The social workers descend with tote bags and paperwork. Reporters follow the social workers. Some of them pay to sleep in extra beds, but most take rooms at the motel off the highway in Waynesburg, half an hour away. The Colonial Inn is the closest bar, ten miles south on Rural Route 18, and as such becomes a de facto press club.

Mr. Edzel Winters agrees to a blood test but later changes his mind. He receives the reporters always with dignity, offers them coffee and pie. The wild girl knows only three words: mother, father, bellyache. She can use a spoon without instruction. She responds to games but treats her family with indifference. So say the newspapers that run developments on her story every day. She seems content enough but her brothers keep watch. She seems willing to disappear.

Of course there are theories. A newspaper man from Pittsburgh has examined the marks on her ankles and wrists, concluding that she must have been confined at some point. Her hair, cut short around her face when she walked into town, must have been cut by someone, he says. The police bring dogs and trackers but no trace shows.

Mr. Winters is a recognized evangelical. He is the first one to remind you, casually, that your presence was dearly missed at the most recent tent revival, that without your cabbage noodles the potluck could not be counted a success. Mr. Winters loves his new daughter like he loves tent revivals: in public. Some see him buying dresses for her at the department store an hour away. Everybody begins to wonder when the wild girl will show up at a revival, when he will use her keening and moaning to dial up his direct line to God.

With such rich material people can’t help themselves from telling stories. Francine Wyman says she saw the wild girl walk into the post office to play with the pens chained to the counter, later to mash her face into a wrapped loaf of Wonder Bread at the store. Some people say Mr. Winters shouldn’t let her roam around like that. Evelyn Rospun says the wild girl approached her in the Rospuns’ hayfield carrying a purple corn snake in both hands, holding it out as if to bestow a gift. But Evelyn has a history of hysteria and it is difficult to take her seriously.

Mr. Meier’s daughters refuse to walk to the spring up the hollow, even in daylight, unless they carry corn knives. At night they put the dog in the root cellar for safety. Myra, the eldest, claims to see a white-suited man with a slingshot and musket running along the deer paths on the hill behind the house. He wants her back, Myra explains to her mother. He wants her back and if he can’t find her he’ll take me instead.

Before her sisters were born, Myra’s parents told her she had a twin who lived in the attic. When she sassed back or pouted, they claimed she could easily end up there, too. Mr. Meier regretted the joke when he found Myra on a stepladder with a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter, looking for her imaginary twin. Now he regrets bringing her dress to the wild girl because Myra won’t touch it. It hangs in the middle of her closet, a foot of space on either side.

Mr. Meier is not given to worrying superstition, but he has noticed dark, leaping things at the edges of his vision. Lately he has found snuffed fires on his walks to mend fences or sluice the spillway at the pond. A hammer has gone missing from the work shed. Whenever he finds a wrinkle like that, he smoothes it. He doesn’t want his girls to go spooky.

The social workers drive into the hills and washed-out towns to ask questions. They check their registers of previous abuse and family trouble for the wild girl’s source. What they find only makes more work. So much family trouble has gone unregistered. In Deep Valley, they find a mother dosing her children continuously with bourbon to make them sleep. Naked, they sprawl on a mattress like mice. None of them know the word birthday.

By the high point of summer one story takes root. It is Mr. Meier, the faithful man, who first tells his neighbors that he has heard the wild girl sing. Mr. Meier has a calm way of doing things, a kind of natural reticence about wild stories. But he walks into town one day to get some bread and a can of chaw, and he has a healthy audience of midday loafers at Sissy Pecjak’s gas station. Mr. Meier tells the boys around the sandwich counter that he hasn’t gotten any good sleep lately because of the singing.

The singing? They look him over for exhaustion.

Mr. Meier says he hears things at dusk coming from his property line, about a quarter mile away from the house. It sounds like somebody singing the national anthem.

Almost nobody believes this at first. The boys go out in their pickup trucks at night to the Meier property line. They are fragrant with cheap beer and hay musk. Some of them are so ready to hear singing that they hear it before it begins. But they get their shock when the wild girl actually starts singing. This time it isn’t the anthem, but “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

She must be close by to the place where they pull their trucks into the field to sit on hoods and tailgates. From there you can see the Winters house, yellow and crooked on the ridge like a rotten tooth. When the wind catches it the song rushes down to them from somewhere. Though they are natural wisecrackers, they shut their mouths. Every night, it is always one patriotic song, over and over, for sometimes as long as an hour. They lose sleep dreaming of her. Accidents chase their waking hours.

Peachee Mitchum gets the worst of it when, fraught with exhaustion, he missteps in the hayloft and falls to the barn floor. His arm is broken and his ribs bruised. It is the kind of bone break that will trouble him for the rest of his life, according to the doctor. He can’t work for a month. He listens to the radio deep in a fat, listless annoyance. Sometimes, from within himself, he hears the bones click in disagreement.

The rest of the boys go on in his absence, listening to her sing every night. Their livid girlfriends try all kinds of bribes. Some claim they will start putting out. Some beg to ride along; others try to sneak up on their own. But it is understood, somehow, that it would be wrong to let them listen. The boys chase their girlfriends away with threats. One pulls a rifle, unloaded, just for show, to demonstrate his seriousness.

Peachee goes back the first night he is well enough to join them again. And for the first time, he finds the pure reverence on their faces repulsive. In his absence, the rest of the boys had started jacking off whenever she sang. They find their own quiet places in the dark, spread out in Mr. Meier’s field, to moan or clutch their breath. Peachee sits up on the hood of his truck and tries to look away from their shows of ecstasy. It is hard to focus on the singing like this, without their collected attention to magnify it. He finds his floodlight in the cab, the one he uses to spot deer in the fall.

With the light in his hands, Peachee aims for the source of the singing. When he feels he has a bead on it, he flips the switch. The beam hits high on the hill behind the Winters house and catches the wild girl in its circle. She scrabbles up the hill and he chases her with the light but loses her in a stand of trees.

The rest of the boys push him to the ground. One holds the floodlight on him while the others take turns roughing him up. They stomp on his cast until it cracks. They return the next night already knowing the singing is over, but it is important to verify. They can sit still only five minutes before their hearts feel raw and they leave.

By the end of summer, when ironweed starts flushing through the fields, Mr. Winters leaves a stack of revival brochures at the counter of Sissy Pecjak’s gas station. This time he springs for full color with his newly adopted daughter as the centerfold. Come Hear the Angel Girl of Western Pennsylvania Translate the Gospel Back into Tongues, it reads.

A lot more people show for this revival than the last one. It is difficult to compare, but the atmosphere has a ring of carnival in it. The women wear brighter dresses. The men wear their good boots. The Volunteer Fire Department will hold a chicken fry after the proceedings. The wild girl sits up front near the stage and Mr. Winters fans her with a program.

Mr. Meier stands near the back. His Quaker distrust of spectacle will not let him enter for fear of the urges to sweat and dance. Peachee Mitchum stands even further off, enough distance to become a spectator rather than a participant. Myra waits with binoculars in her father’s truck. She is keen for a look at the white-suited man, and truly expects him to show up.

Mr. Edzel Winters begins at noon prompt. The faces before him shine with sweat. Do you know your father God, he begins, do you know Him by His face? Do you know Him by His voice, do you know Him by His hand? Nobody listens. The story about Peachee has spread as wide as a net, and everybody who was not interested in the wild girl’s singing is a damn sight more attentive now. Mr. Winters testifies that the great hand of God brought back his lost daughter. Proof, proof, proof, he shouts.

Come home, come home, come home, ye weary. The choir invites sinners to get saved. Mrs. Martha Bedillion walks to the stage to have hands laid upon her. She does this at every revival, even though she has not built up enough sin in the interim to warrant it. When she faints, a girl with a basket of scarves leaps up to cover Mrs. Bedillion’s legs. Nobody else is weary enough to come on home.

Any good revivalist possesses an ear for the pall of silence. Silence means that belief is not running high enough in the crowd. Believers mutter to themselves and respond in kind to testimony—Mr. Winters is certain he can hear their blood heat up. With so many staunch minds to convert, he decides to turn up the dazzle full-blaze immediately and reaches for the wild girl’s hand.

Signaled, the wild girl hikes herself onto the stage. Someone has tried to teach her a pretty smile but it comes out wrong. It’s more wolf leer than feminine wile, although it looks right on her face. She balls up the front of her yellow gingham dress with her fists. It is a feverish silence, at the edges of which Mr. Winters is smiling and nodding his head. Go on honey, he says.

She starts with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” All of the boys who had listened in the dark that summer cannot stop from shivering a little. It is stunning, to hear her this close by, and to watch the breath she takes heap in and out of her chest. Some of the old boys who ribbed Mr. Meier at the sandwich counter blush impressively. Everybody seems to remember an incident they had defeated with shame. The girls in the choir look on, desperately jealous of that voice.

Because he senses the rising reverence in the tent, Mr. Winters reaches for the spotlights. Nobody had told him about the wild girl’s fanatic audience over the summer or what ended her nightly performances. He hits the switch, snaring her in a golden circle. Her face crowds in on itself. We see it for only a moment because she bolts. It takes all six of her brothers to catch her. They smooth her hair and coo to her but she scratches one’s face hard enough to draw a little blood. When he slaps her stiff on the jaw, she hardly reacts at all.

The show must go on. Mr. Winters believes in this principle. When he tries to cue the choir girls they look blankly back. Only true believers remain. Mr. Winters considers the revival a failure, but he shouldn’t. Everybody, even the ones who leave or refuse to enter the tent in the first place, leave believing indelibly in some thorny, private vision.

School starts and part of the dream is over. The social workers make recommendations regarding the wild girl’s education and return to normal life. After the revival, it is unlikely she will ever fully rejoin society, but almost everybody imagines her in the hallways at school carrying a satchel and binder. She would answer all of Mr. Tanner’s questions about the New Deal by saying either mother, father, or bellyache. She would join choir. A few VFW boosters suggest she sing the national anthem at the first football game. Peachee Mitchum imagines her as a homecoming queen. Of course it’s impossible.

The wild girl attempts escape more often after the revival. She is not allowed to wander without at least two of her brothers present, always. Calvin, the strongest, still recovers from a concussion she gave him when he tried to stop her once at the door. She will only sing if she thinks she is alone.

Peachee Mitchum ends up married to Myra Meier. In spite of her father’s intentions, she has gone spooky herself. Nobody could convince her that the white-suited man with the slingshot and musket was not real, and she only disdained them for trying. Peachee built her a house deep in Mr. Meier’s back forty and then built her a road. In the mornings she takes her coffee outside and walks the perimeter, pretending to pull weeds or look for snail shells. Sometimes Peachee worries when contracting jobs require him to stay in Wheeling for a few weeks, not out of fear that someone will take her, but because he can imagine her taking off. He suggests moving to a city but she likes her job. Myra is a social worker, driving into the hills to check on the family trouble.

She visits the wild girl often. They sit at Mr. Winters’s Formica kitchen table eating apples. One of the brothers sits, always, on the other side of the door. They can talk as long as they only use words from the national anthem or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which the wild girl learned eventually to say. Even so, she has to sing them a little. Myra tried to teach her other words, then other songs, but found that some, like “America the Beautiful,” frightened her just to hear them. Still, jokes are possible: Whose broad stripes and bright stars? Mine eyes.

SKEPTICAL ANIMAL

The second time the rat returned, it hadn’t even been gone five hours. I was working on my machine, tying a rope around a bowling pin’s neck. I planned to adjust the hoisting cord until the pin swung at the correct velocity and height to hit a matchbox car waiting on a wooden slope without bashing anything else. The process was repetitive—tie, drop, pick up pieces, reset—but how else could I get it perfect?

Also, I was sexting Boy #53. My phone buzzed with a photo of his upper thigh. When I first met him on the subway, he’d joked that I only wanted him for his body.

“Guilty,” I’d said. “You have such sensual ankles.”

So, it wasn’t sexting yet, but based on the rate at which the photos moved up his leg plus process of elimination, it would be in three to seven minutes. From the kitchen, I heard a faint but grating gnawing sound.

Mainly I was distressed because it was my fault the rat came back. A website I found, Rats Are Clever Creatures, had highlighter-yellow Comic Sans informing me, “Freaky Fact: Rats can find their way back to the nest from several miles away!” This tidbit was positioned above a Looney Tunes-style banner saying, Rat’s all, folks!

I should’ve taken the rat farther away the first time I disposed of it, but I didn’t want to leave my apartment twice. It was the kind of Hallmark-gorgeous fall day that nature shoves in your face sometimes. The crunchy sidewalk leaves were a jillion unbearable shades of red and orange, more colors than the Paint by Number kits I did as a kid. I spent so many weeks on them that my parents started calling me “little hunchback” and asking if it ever got lonely in the bell tower.

The rat’s return complicated things re: the boys I brought over. They’d all ask me the same questions: What is it? How long have you been building it? Why are you building it? How will it end? I’d give my autopilot answers: A Rube Goldberg machine, about ten months, I don’t know, I don’t know. At that point, I usually hustled whichever boy was over straight into the bedroom without turning on the lights, but now, even that didn’t work. My apartment was shadowy and cluttered; occasionally, pools of blue light from the streetlights outside seeped in through the barred windows, glinting off the milky-white marbles set atop their slopes, shining on the ribs of the little metal pails poised to slide down their miniature wires. Only, since the rat was around, I had to keep the lights on because I was petrified it’d skitter over my bare feet.

With the lights on, the boys thought they had license to linger. They’d inspect the pulleys with the worn interest of a retiree docent. They’d crouch by the PVC portion, say, “What’s a, uh—”

“Rube Goldberg machine. Chain reaction.” I’d point to sections of my project. “A ball rolls through the pipe into a cup, which weighs down the cup, which lands on a seesaw, which flips to release a string, which is attached to a pulley . . . it just keeps going.”

By then, I’d be fading fast, so hyper-focused on spotting a flicker of tail or a ripple of grimy fur that when I saw a flutter over by the windows or heard a faint clicking, I’d nearly lose it, but it’d turn out to be the curtains moving in the wind or something. Meanwhile, the boy of the night would mime stumbling into the machine or tunneling his stubby beef-jerky finger through the air teasing, “I’m gonna knock it over!” I’d be exhausted at the mere prospect of having to pretend these men were remotely original in reminding me they had the power to destroy everything I’d built.

I’d say my usual, which was “No touching!” Except, I said it sexy, like a porno prison guard slapping handcuffs shut. Or, what I imagined such a woman would sound like. The porn I watched didn’t do plots, and the women definitely didn’t speak.

Then, I’d look at the boy hard, trying to recall what about him I could have found attractive in the first place. Without fail, nothing leapt out at me, and I’d know that if I didn’t act fast, I’d lose even more interest, and then I’d lose my nerve. I’d grab his belt and tow him toward the bedroom like a sled, but it was inevitable: at some point, we’d both hear it. The rat. Bustling in paper bags or flicking its wormy tail around the baseboards. I’d re-clench my fists, suck in a deep breath, and drag the boy into the bedroom, blinding him with scattershot kisses so he couldn’t see the rat and leave before I’d gotten what I’d invited him here for.

 

I decided to send Boy #53 back a pic of my tits for efficiency’s sake. I rearranged my lamps to create three-point lighting and flattering shadows, arguably the most practical use of my art degree yet. Usually, I avoid any evidence I have a body, slug-pink and raw like a fresh scar, but I feel weirdly peaceful after sending nudes. I’m suddenly French-braided, holding a hot chocolate mug with both hands. It’s like those olden times people who shut themselves in crates and mailed themselves somewhere far, only I’m doing it piecemeal. Actually, it’s more like the ones who climbed into barrels to careen over the edge of Niagara Falls.

I mentioned that to a friend once, when I still had them.

She said, “Didn’t they die though?”

I mean, yes, they died. Of course they nearly all died. But I can imagine a moment after waving goodbye, clambering inside, inhaling fresh wood, hugging shivering knees, and closing the lid on the world. That moment was maybe kind of nice.

I was unbuttoning my shirt when the rat shot past me like a screeching hockey puck. Truth be told, I was kinda impressed. I’d taken it six subway stops away. I held it inside a trapper cage, which I’d stuffed inside a big, yellow-striped gift box I’d been saving for a special occasion that didn’t seem forthcoming. I was so honed in that the rat’s every move inside its glittery container was amplified. I felt its scuttling. Every whisker twitch reverberated in my lap.

I only intended to take the rat a stop or two away, but this guy wouldn’t stop staring. I’d stared first because he had long, dangling earlobes like he’d taken out gauges, and it inspired me to consider incorporating embroidery hoops into my machine. But he must’ve thought I was ogling. He, future Boy #53, made a whole show of giving me elevator eyes, all the way up, all the way down. We had the not unfunny exchange re: ankle objectification, and he suggested I join him on a coffee date at the stop after next. God knows why I almost agreed—I don’t do coffee, and I certainly don’t do dates—but the rat shifted a millimeter and startled me out of my seat. I said I couldn’t, that I had an important errand, but I gave him my number.

And now the rat was back. How many miles had its spindly feet traveled to find me? Haunt me? It reminds me of that kids’ movie. Since I can’t sleep, I’ve re-watched them all: Matilda, The Parent Trap, the one where talking pets embark on a cross- country adventure to reunite with their owner. Homeward Bound, it’s called. In my favorite scene, these menacing wild dogs try to flirt with Sassy, a Himalayan housecat who takes no shit, and she’s like, “Oh, great, catcalls.”

That line. It makes me so happy. Not because it’s funny, but because I imagine the screenwriters banging this script out at 3:00 a.m., absolutely dying laughing at each other’s stupid jokes. I bet they collapsed into each other giggling hard enough they struggled to breathe.

Moments like that, and all the movies, actually, make my chest tighten. They never did when I was little; I’m not sure what’s changed. All I know is that when the owner, Peter, hugs his dog before leaving him behind and says, “I’m gonna miss you so much,” and his golden retriever, Shadow, says, “I know. I know you’re sad. I just wish I knew why,” I have to pull my comforter over my head, mash my face into the pillows, and slow-breathe until my own stale exhales swaddle me into a half-asleep state.

These quicksand moods overwhelmed me more frequently those days. I thought maybe it was because I kept accidentally walking past the good deli. I didn’t mean to, but I looked up while passing it and saw the familiar candy advertisements, sun-faded into newspaper comic tricolor, and the smiley sign saying, We appreciate your patronage, and the jangly door I used to walk through. I felt a twinge beneath my breastbone, and I sped on by.

Boy #53 texted again, because I had ignored his text asking to grab dinner.

“IDK,” I texted back. “Are you a murderer?”

“Care to find out?” he wrote, which indicated either homicidality or plain horniness. I didn’t have enough context yet to know which.

I put my phone down. Picked it up. “Not really a dinner kinda girl . . .”

I tightened the noose around the bowling pin. Swing, miss, reset, repeat. I tried to stop imagining the rat’s toenails scrabbling over delicate sections of my machine, scaring off the boys I did manage to bring back here. My phone pinged, “Pinebox tm? 8:00? [not dinner].”

I knew that bar. Their gimmick was that they were a former casket factory. All the cave-like booths were made of casket wood.

“Casket, coffin, what’s the difference?” I asked the bartender once, while out trolling for a Boy #21. I pretended to stir my drink even though he knew perfectly well it was straight gin because he’d poured it.

“Not a lot,” he said. “A coffin has a flair outwards at the top, like old vampire movies. A casket doesn’t. It’s just a rectangle.”

I said unless you were Superman-level jacked up top, a coffin was just excess real estate. I told him I enjoy coziness and don’t have much muscle mass, so a casket would be perfect for me. He said I was weird as hell, but he was into it, so I should call him when his shift ended. I killed time with a truly underwhelming Boy #21 I met in the bathroom line, then stumbled out of his place at 2:15 a.m. to make the bartender Boy #22. I thought two in one night would feel special in some way, but it was just more of the same.

 

I sidled around my apartment searching for a clearing with no machine in the background—my tits couldn’t take the upstaging— but there wasn’t one. I hadn’t realized how much of my apartment it had swallowed. The water wheel section commandeered the entirety of the kitchen counter space and was encroaching on the stovetop. Black suspension cords from the unfinished pulley systems hung down, tentacle-like, from the ceiling. I had a mini portrait studio in the corner with a stool and soft, cloud-printed background fabric, but I dismantled it to make space for the particle board that held up the dominoes, tin can pyramids, and glittering paper pinwheels, the most precarious parts.

Maybe it would be good to get out.

“You’re a funny one,” Boy #53 said, and based on his accompanying hairy knee picture, he was too. Maybe I’d visit Pinebox, for a little while.

I’d gotten the pin to hit its target seventy-five percent of the time, but chance wasn’t the same as inevitability. It had to be right every single time. I let the pin go again and it slammed the car’s slope so hard the pieces scattered, sliding beneath the couch, where I suspected the rat lived.

I got down on my knees to peer underneath, ready to leap away at any sudden movement. I snaked my hand through the dust, but instead of pulling out a scaffolding chunk, I extracted a glossy pink postcard featuring a beet-faced baby with a pair of silhouetted heads, my college best friend and her husband, bent to kiss its pudgy cheeks. The card had come six months before. I kept meaning to respond, say congratulations, but then too much time had passed and reaching out would’ve been weird. Except, then I couldn’t call to talk in general, because she’d remember I’d never acknowledged her baby’s existence, so I ignored her texts altogether. Now we don’t speak.

On the card, a stork clutched a banner: Welcome To The World, Baby!

I’ll never understand how people feel like they belong enough to this earth to be its ambassador. I’ve been here twenty-eight years and I barely feel welcome myself.

I sat back on my heels, inspected my machine. I couldn’t go to Pinebox. There was still so much to do, everything so far from perfect. What if the rat terrorized it while I was gone? I dug my fingertips into my thighs until they whitened.

I texted Boy #53 my address, along with a question: “1:00 a.m.?” I added a purple devil emoji.

 

When the rat returned a third time, I lured it into the cage with a peanut butter smear, shoved it into the gift box, and took it to Times Square. The place was intolerable—all that jostling and obnoxious wonder. I knelt on the gum-spackled sidewalk. I figured if I let the rat go underneath a hotdog cart, it’d either be so bewildered by the bright lights and big city that it couldn’t find its way back, or it’d gorge itself on wiener crumbs until its arteries exploded. I was no killer, but I was okay with being an accessory.

Unfortunately, it reappeared while I was in bed with Boy #56, a cinematographer from work who sulked when I joked that his whole job was pointing a lens in the right direction. He seemed hurt, kept muttering, but then I took my top off and he got over it. We were mid-kiss when I sensed the rat’s return. He couldn’t hear it, but I knew. The rat and I were basically one. I could feel it rustling even from afar.

After Boy #56 finished and I shooed him away, I crept barefoot into the living room. The calm I felt after sex with strangers lasted for less and less time with each visit. By then, it wore off completely before the door closed behind them.

I focused on the machine’s problem section. The ball should’ve rolled down the ramp and bumped the lip of a suspended pitcher so that it poured into a waiting cup, but I couldn’t get the pitcher to pour everything out. I tried fifteen times before I got frustrated and slammed my tools around. I texted the subway guy, Boy #53.

No Repeats was one of my rules—too much possibility they’d get attached—but Boy #53 worked coat check at a gentlemen’s club, and who else would be awake at this hour? I granted myself special dispensation.

I described my problem: “Bouncy ball not heavy enough. Tried 15x. V frustrated.”

He responded immediately, “Aw, don’t despair champ, you’ll bounce back.”

I snorted and sunk to the floor to draft a response. “For real tho, you a murderer? Kinda want u to be so u can mercy kill me cuz ur pun = v bad.”

 

The rat was back from Times Square in under twelve hours. I barely rolled over upon hearing it root through my trash, just grabbed my phone. My first search yielded an exterminator’s site explaining, “Rats are skeptical animals!” I pictured my rat as a tweed-coat-sporting professor complete with tiny pipe, but it just meant rats are good at skirting obstacles. Nothing breaks their patterns from x (food) to y (foraging area) to z (nest).

I had to respect the rat. I went from x (less-good deli, for dinner) to y (machine work) to z (sex with laundromat guy/laundromat guy’s roommate/the super of their building). When I ran into the super after leaving the first two guys’ apartment, I thought it’d be satisfying, like a game—sex Pokémon, gotta catch ’em all!—but it didn’t feel like the conquest I’d hoped for. The high wore off before I hit the subway platform, and by then it was late and the LED screen’s estimated minutes remaining kept scrolling backward in time and I could only wait and stare at the empty tracks.

When I finally got home, I was tired but not sleepy. I got so wrapped up in taping the hammer to the seesaw that when I glanced up and spotted the rat blinking back at me from the countertop, I jolted backward and hit my head on the couch. I didn’t scream, people only scream when we believe someone might hear, but I was shaken up. Being scared without a witness felt strange, like the gesture you would’ve made with your hands—The rat was thiiis big!—got lodged in your body somewhere. I texted Boy #53, “mr. rat is getting v cocky.”

Boy #53 suggested I’d failed to put myself in the mind of mr. rat. He proposed I show it the world—had I considered Paris? I said I could never do that to the city of love, and he said he was appalled, clearly I hadn’t seen Ratatouille, surely the rat possessed innate talents I wasn’t recognizing. Boy #53 was funny enough to merit a half-smile, which calmed me enough to set up the peanut butter trap and catch the rat again.

Instead of Paris, I opted for the Botanical Garden. Maybe I just hadn’t given the rat a good enough alternative to life with me. When I got there it was early and the gardens were empty. I shot a wedding in the Azalea Garden this summer. The bride was very woo-woo, kept insisting the flowers were “evocative of softness and femininity,” which made me gag, but it really was gorgeous, painfully so.

The ground was dewy enough to soak my jeans when I crouched to open the cage. The rat wandered out slowly, like he was equally happy inside the box and outside it. I hovered there until he scurried away into the trees.

 

The rat took longer to return from the gardens, nearly forty-eight hours, like it appreciated the effort. While it was gone, I got out of hand. Those days are pretty jumbled. There was Boy #56 with the enormous “Be vulnerable” tattoo. I recognized the quote from clips old friends had shared, and told him nothing turned me on like a good, informative TED Talk. He got huffy. He said there was nothing wrong with being earnest and he wouldn’t let me make him feel bad.

There was another—Boy #59?—who asked to sleep over, so I yelled, “Keep the change, ya filthy animal!” I was quoting Home Alone to soften the blow of kicking him out, but I guess he didn’t recognize it.

Then, Boy #60 who yammered about his American citizenship journey and didn’t take my hints. He said his visa labeled him as “an alien of extraordinary ability,” so I tried to pivot with “Show me your extraordinary abilities, alien.”

My jokes were rusty. I was tired. I couldn’t stop envisioning the rat toppling my machine. In the end, Boy #60 stood, kissed me lightly on the forehead, and didn’t come home with me.

On non-work mornings, I couldn’t distinguish the days. It may have been longer than forty-eight hours. It was either two days, or it was nine. I fixated on the pitcher problem. My brain was on laser mode and I was so sleepless and shaky that when the rat returned, I was almost relieved. We had our routine now.

I took him to Asbury Park Beach, reasoning that New Jersey was surely far enough away. I hoped the freezing water might shock me into getting back on track and waking up refreshed for my machine.

But immediately after releasing the rat on the sand, he scampered off in the direction we came from, like he was gonna catch the next train back. I waded in the water but it didn’t work. I was inordinately deflated. I couldn’t do a single thing right. I considered hiring an exterminator, but I read a Freaky Fact explaining that exterminators don’t physically remove rats. They gas your whole place and leave you to clean up the carcasses. The rats rot in the walls around you, turning into shriveled bone sacks, little tumors behind your mirrors. But isn’t that the whole point of having someone else there? The prospect that they’ll take away the bad and leave you with an empty home in which to start over?

 

On my return from the beach, I entered the good deli instead of walking past like I should’ve. I was hungry, but also, I maybe wanted to punish myself. For what, I was not sure. I spent a while running my hands over the crinkly snack packets. Eventually, I grabbed the closest item, took it to the counter, and there he was: the nice deli man.

“She’s back!” He calculated my total. “We thought you were dead.”

I hadn’t seen him since summer, before I stopped coming. I’d been obsessed with this machine step where a knife would jut forward to pop a balloon. It was impossible to get the knife to jab the balloon with the correct force. I spent weeks, months, went through endless balloons. I kept returning because the good deli sold fifty packs and the nice deli man was always there. He started recognizing me, which made me shifty, even though he was only ever kind. It’s just so hard to let people know you, like floating atop a sea of stinging jellyfish.

One day, he pointed to the balloons and said, “Gotta beat the heat!”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. He gestured out the window at a pair of kids who’d busted off a fire hydrant cap to play in the water. They were six-ish and running, arms pumping, not afraid to want something and show it. The deli man, I realized, thought I was making them into water balloons. I let my gaze linger on the children. The little boy hug-tackled the girl in her frilly one-piece, pulling her down into the water while she screeched and laughed and clawed at him. What would the deli man think if he knew why I really wanted the balloons? That I was doing the same pointless thing over and over, alone? I snatched them from the counter and speed-walked past the hydrant, careful not to get a drop on me, though August was sweltering. And I didn’t go back to the good deli. The gap between the life the deli man imagined for me and the one I lived was unbearable.

 

Leaving the good deli after Asbury Park, I took stock. I was still carrying the cage, I was scatterbrained, and my apartment would be empty when I got home. I squared my shoulders; I’d invite Boy #53 over. Sure, I never saw the Boys more than once, but I figured the rat would come scare him away eventually anyway. Boy #53 negotiated. He agreed to come over only if I’d let him take me to breakfast at the nearby diner. I accepted his terms. Once he got a dose of me, it wouldn’t be hard to convince him he didn’t want more time in my presence.

When he arrived, I tried waltzing him into the bedroom, but he dawdled in the living room. His eyes tracked the machine’s planned path from its start.

He turned toward me. “How does it end?” I was too aware of whatever my face was doing. Was I acting strange? Mean? Needy?

“I don’t know,” I said.

He nodded at the machine’s sprawl. “At this rate, it’ll eat you alive.”

I frowned, but he was entranced by the machine. “This must’ve taken you a ton of work.”

Making my machine didn’t feel like work to me. It was just something I had to do, had to get right.

Moving to show him the pitcher problem, I tripped over the rat cage next to the particle board with unsteady pieces, and though I caught myself quickly, I felt idiotic. I set the bouncy ball atop the incline and we watched it roll down to knock the pitcher. As usual, it poured less than I wanted.

“It’s still half-empty,” I said, pointing to the partially-tilted pitcher.

“Maybe it’s half-full,” he said.

“What? No.” I looked back and forth, touched the hook the pitcher turned on. “The problem isn’t the glass, it’s the pitcher, I—” The corners of his lips turned up just a little. “Oh.” I raised my hands to my cheeks and they were warm.

Boy #53 squatted by the couch to open his backpack. I warned him, “Oh, I wouldn’t. That’s the rat’s territory.”

He shrugged, continued rummaging. “Rats are a part of life. You just gotta get him to pay rent.” He found whatever he was searching for and cupped it. “Come here. I have a gift.”

I walked over to join him. “Close your eyes and hold out your hands,” he said.

I shook my head. “I’m the eyes-open type.”

He placed a smooth sphere in my outstretched hands. It was heavy, cool to the touch. I traced my fingertips over its orange surface, turned it slowly. A billiards ball. I sensed his eyes on me, gauging my reaction. He pointed to the thirteen on it. “I brought you bad luck.” I opened and closed my mouth like a stupid guppy. He continued, “Maybe it’ll be heavy enough for the pitcher.”

He half-stepped toward my machine. “Can we try?”

I was unused to people requesting permission. It was easier when they didn’t. “It’s not that simple, fixing things.”

“I’m a patient guy,” he said, moving another step nearer to the machine. I took one too. I could swear a few dominoes wobbled.

“It might be unfixable.” We moved closer in tandem, marionette limbs tied to the same string. “I know it won’t work.”

“How do you know if you won’t let me try?” Another step. Our footfalls were sure to make the particle board buckle. Collapse.

“You don’t think I’ve tried?” The church nearby began its chiming. The grates over my windows let in slices of sunrise. “It won’t work,” I said loudly. I only meant to speak over the bells, but it came out several registers too high. It was jarring. He stepped back, I stepped forward. If we were anywhere else, we would’ve been dancing, hips mere centimeters from the particle board. If he wasn’t careful, the board would cave in. The whole machine would come crashing down. I couldn’t take that. I just couldn’t. I wanted him out of the way. Where was the rat when you needed him most? I quieted my voice and reached for the ball. “It won’t work.” He stepped back, I stepped—

I couldn’t say which happened first. They felt simultaneous. He reached over the cage on top of which I stored the parts I hadn’t yet integrated, and at the same time, I pushed him. Hard. He was taller than me and didn’t fall, but he stumbled back, his head slamming into the wall. After his shoes squeaked against the hardwood, there was a long, long silence. He didn’t break eye contact. He refused to look away as he completed the motion he started, showing me I misjudged the arc of his arm. He set the ball down gently on the cage. It made no sound.

I was suddenly desperate, reaching out for his forearm, “I didn’t mean—” and clutching his sleeve, “I thought you were going to—”

He’d meant to leave the ball for me to solve the pitcher problem on my own.

I tried to catch his hand, stop him from leaving, but he moved aside. He spoke to me how you’d speak to a little kid, low, too- calm. He said he was gonna go.

And then he walked out.

 

That fucking rat. I’d never been angrier at anything in my entire life. I was on my knees behind the couch searching out its nest before the door slammed behind Boy #53. When I found it, I’d destroy it. Dump bleach on the shredded bags and hair strands it curled into at night. Smash it. Leave no home to return to. It was the rat’s fault I came back from the beach on edge and visited the good deli. I ran my fingers along the floor trim feeling for holes. It was the rat’s fault I had to store the cage there so close, hence the confusion of Boy #53 not threatening the machine like I’d thought. My fingertips’ frantic journey around the floor seam returned only dust and splinters.

Standing offered a better vantage point. Seeing the machine in its entirety, I understood how fragile it really was. The slightest wind would decimate the dominoes and a minuscule nudge would spill the water and the tiniest floor tremor would scatter the marbles and the balloon knife could easily slip and any teeth could rip the cardboard tubes to slivers and any bump would warp the strings the buckets rested on and the tracks I laid were unstable toys and the miniature cars were constantly liable to roll away and everything I built could be destroyed so quickly and I knew one thing for certain: I needed to kill that rat.

I called the exterminator. I called nine exterminators. I left messages that made no sense.

“I need somebody who’s okay with killing.”

“I can’t get it far enough away.”

“I’m a special case. Don’t want somebody ordinary.”

“My place has a precious thing; you need to be careful.”

“It’s urgent.”

“Are your guys careful?”

“I need it gone.”

“Send me someone careful.”

“Somebody help me?”

“Call me back. Call me back. Call me back. Call me back. Call me back. Call me back as soon as you get this message.”

I threw my phone down. I had to be practical. My first concern was guaranteeing the machine’s safety. Who knew if they’d send somebody careful. I needed to defend it myself. I hustled to the dollar store and bought nineteen plastic laundry baskets. I grunted and sweated hoisting the stack of them upstairs. None of the exterminators had called back. They would soon. I grabbed scissors to cut two sides off each basket to make a protective tunnel covering the machine. My scissors weren’t strong enough to saw through plastic. I walked to the hardware store. I came back with scissors strong enough to saw through plastic. I set to work.

I stared at the neon baskets so long my vision warped. The room was uber-bright. Sickly bright. My apartment was covered in the rainbow blind spots you get from staring at a light too long. I slashed the laundry baskets with increasing speed. The washing machine in the basement churned and the old building creaked as it settled and the sirens wailed toward the hospital twenty blocks away: I could hear everything. I felt powerful, like those women who get super-strength when their kids are in danger, who flip trucks barehanded and pry their babies free. My hands pulsed and itched. It was energizing to have a singular purpose. I finished cutting baskets and got to my feet. Now no one could knock over my machine, not the exterminators if they ever called back, not the boys who came over, and certainly not the rat.

I had to hurry. The exterminators would call back soon and my machine had to be safe. I raised a basket a few feet above a domino section and carefully, so carefully, lowered it, creating shelter, then another basket for another area, this time higher, lowering it slower over the pulley part, then another over the seesaw section, the safe structure covering most by now, another basket shielding the machine, though I had to speed up before the exterminators arrived, so I put down another basket, was almost done, placed another basket, covered another section, one more basket, another, I grabbed the second-to-last basket and held it tight in my hands ready to cover the pitcher problem which, yes, the pool ball seemed like it’d solve when I had the time for testing and I lowered it bit by bit over the machine and then—

And then, such a little thing, the basket’s jagged edge brushed a marble on the way down. And the machine started to fall. The dominoes chased each other. The levers flipped. The hatches swung closed. The seesaws clattered. The machine had been hit in the center, so it fell in two directions, from the inside out, like two velvet curtains. The pitcher poured and halfway filled the cup. The bouncy balls hurtled down their slopes and pinged off the walls. The miniature cars rolled away. The knife lunged blindly. The pulleys released. It was all over in a minute.

 

I sat surrounded by my shattered machine and waited for the rat. It took hours to come back. The sky darkened outside, then got light again. My sit bones went numb. I tried counting how many days it’d been since I’d slept. I wanted the rat to come back so I could kill it for good. Also, I thought I might be lonely.

When the rat returned, it slipped under the door like its bones were liquified and, once inside, cocked its head at me. It walked right into the cage. I hadn’t even set the peanut butter trap. I stuffed the cage in the gift box and took the subway to Pier 11 on Wall Street. There was a ferry that looped between the docks and IKEA, and it was free on weekends. I stood waiting to board the ferry, clasping the box to my chest. Inside, the rat was still. I shuffled forward with the line.

My plan was to leave the rat in IKEA. It needed a real home, and maybe somewhere in that legion of cushions and curtains and lights it could find one. But edging closer to the ferry’s entrance, trying not to bump into anybody, I realized the stupidity of my idea. It was futile. The rat would just keep coming back. If I wanted it gone, I’d have to kill it myself.

We boarded the ferry and I headed for the outside deck portion even though it was freezing and the water smelled putrid and the wind whipped my hair in my eyes and it stung. I perched the box on the railing for inspection. All the glitter had rubbed off in the course of my many trips. The once-crisp edges had worn down, exposing the pulpy cardboard underneath. It was covered in dings and scratches.

A loudspeaker announcement crackled. I turned to face the direction the voice came from, though the speaker was clearly inside. I could see him through the tinted window. A skinny guy with pockmarked skin and an utter lack of interest in his own spiel.

“Floatation devices are stored and available for your safety,” he said, pointing lazily at the windows where it was clear the floatation devices were not stored. I stared at his curly hair, the way he shifted from foot to foot. If I wanted to, I could’ve taken him home with me. It wouldn’t have taken much. I could’ve made a joke about life jackets and needing somebody to save me. Mouth-to-mouth. Etc. I watched the idle flex of his jaw as he ran through safety policies. I could’ve fucked him. It would’ve been easy. I turned my back on the cabin and looked out over the water.

The metal railing had triangle patterns. I hooked my pinky around a vertex. It reminded me of something someone, Boy #14 or #32, maybe, once said. I was describing a house of cards I saw in a store window, how it stressed me out. If I were going to make one, I said, I’d tape the apexes together for a stable hinge.

Whoever it was, he laughed so hard that little spittle projectiles flew from his mouth. He kept choking with each inhale until he finally got out the words: “That doesn’t count.”

I wanted to know why. He was laughing, but I was dead serious.

By then he was pounding his fist on the bar like a cartoon character. “Because the whole point is that it might fall.”

I looked around the ferry. Inside its cage, the rat wriggled a little, causing the box to bump gently against my arm. The only others outside in the weather with me were a little boy and his shih tzu. He had a package of green votive candles, probably something his parents hoped to return, and he was rolling them across the deck for the dog to chase. The boy pitched candles left, right. The dog pounced again and again, wild, thrilled. I felt the rat nuzzling the box’s inside corners. The candles the dog had already caught and abandoned littered the deck like lily pads.

The ferry trundled toward the docks where customers stood laden with hefty blue bags and creased mouths. The bored guy got back on the speakers to drone instructions for safe disembarkation. The water below was choppy and gray and seemed so far away. The other passengers shouldered their bags and trudged toward the ferry doors. The deck where I stood was nearly deserted now and the cabin was rapidly emptying. The metal railing was cold against my forearms. I had never been good at getting rid of things.

I felt something wet and looked down to see the dog nosing my ankles. It looked up at me and its smushed face was ugly-charming, like a snooty little Persian cat.

The cat in Stuart Little has a similar face. I just re-watched it. The Persian initially hates that Stuart is his master, but near the movie’s end he comes around. He even saves Stuart when he’s threatened by some cats perched in a tree overhanging a lake. He breaks off the branch holding the rival cats and they plummet, yelping, into the water.

“Just doggy-paddle!” an enemy cat calls to one of his comrades.

“Doggy-paddle?” the other cat cries. “I’d rather drown!”

What a stupid line. I love it so much. I bet the screenwriters who thought it up pissed themselves laughing, that they play-punched each other over such a complete eye-roller. Maybe one held the script in the air and yelled, “I went to film school for this?” and everybody fell out of their chairs laughing. Imagining it made my eyes well up, it made it hard to swallow, it made me start to cry.

 

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA

It’s a shock when David Sampson says that Salome is the most beautiful girl in our class. Of course she is, by far, with long, thick hair the color of honey wheat, a tiny face with vulpine features, slim, wide-set eyes, and enchanted skin. But it seemed as though no one else—none of the boys, that is—had noticed. She’s so quiet it’s easy to miss her. But we see her. We know.

Sampson is the class stoner and should be the class clown, but he’s usually too stoned to finish his sentences. He was, until senior year, a large, soft boy, almost cuddly, if he hadn’t reeked of weed and stale cigarettes. He wore the same oversized navy hoodie every day, covering his close-shaved head like a robe, and he spoke in a drone so soft he might have been praying. But if you listened, he usually wasn’t saying anything good. He liked dirty jokes, dead baby jokes. He told sexist jokes, too, but since we shot him dirty looks, we mostly assumed he was telling them just to get a rise out of us. Besides, the ones he told were the kind with no teeth. His favorite was a silly inversion of a clichéd directive: Get in the sandwich and make me a kitchen. We have to admit, the first time we heard it, we laughed.

His mom is a feminist historian who came to our social studies class to give a talk one day. We’d never seen Sampson slump so low in his chair or pull his hoodie so far down over his face so that only his angular chin showed. His mom gave him a hard time that day, asking him questions that, shockingly, he knew the answers to. “‘I will everywhere make humanity more than sex.’ Words spoken by . . . David, can you tell us?” His mother extended a long, manicured finger in her son’s direction. A long pause, and then from beneath the hoodie came a mumble. “That’s right: Lucy Blackwell. Now, in the 1850s . . .” We all felt kind of bad for Sampson that day. He made more sense to us after that. He became softer in our eyes. He didn’t seem to mind.

 

In the fall of our senior year, we come back to find Sampson transformed. He’s dropped probably forty pounds. He wears the same oversized sweatshirt that truly is a robe now, draping off his frame, and his face is gaunt. He has let his hair grow, and the curls on his head are a shock of gold. He looks older and harder, but delicate, almost beautiful.

Then we learn (we don’t remember who told us first) he’s been sleeping with Salome all summer. At first none of us really believes it. The pairing seems inconceivable. Besides, so few of the rest of us have had sex—we who are more solid and vibrant and interesting than Salome; we who, even if we aren’t exactly gorgeous or cool or beloved, at least have a presence, a reputation, skills that we put on display in English and choir and theater, teachers who like us more than the others, we who go to nerdy summer programs in college dorms that make us seem sophisticated each time we come back in the fall.

Salome is one of the quiet girls, would be indistinguishable from the rest if it weren’t for her beauty. We see her set her notebook and pencil case (she still carries a pencil case) neatly on her desk in French class; we see her put her hand up in Trig. We watch her chew salad with her mouth closed at lunchtime and staple her English papers parallel to the top edge. We are aware of her the way you’re aware of the mechanics behind every clock and inside every wristwatch: astonishing when you look at it, but you don’t often look. But it’s nice to know she’s there.

Anyway, it’s just not fair. Not that we want to have sex with Sampson. That would be absurd. But we want, at least, to be desired, to be found beautiful—to be discovered. We want someone unusual to push past all the powdered and curled and well-dressed girls in our grade, drawn by our own unusual magnetism, and find us.

But we’re also afraid of exactly this. For as unusual as we secretly hope we are, we’re also terrified that someone will discover we are not. Better to remain a compelling mystery than become a corporeal disappointment.

 

In a move that none of us expect, Sampson turns up to audition for the high school play. The play is a big deal for those of us who have elected to take theater every semester and showed up religiously for every single rehearsal for every single production. Sampson walks in like it only occurred to him to come five minutes before auditions began.

And we are even more surprised to find that he is, somehow, good. At first, we can’t tell if maybe we’re just thrown by the body he inhabits that we barely recognize. Its movements are quicker, its gestures finer, its angles sharper. It becomes apparent that in this new body he is inventing movement, is creating its own idiosyncratic language before our very eyes. He is a new animal, a species we can’t identify.

When the casting sheet is posted on the bulletin board outside the auditorium, we are not surprised to learn that he has landed the lead. With Sampson at the helm, the usual dynamic shifts; the game has changed. An outsider has joined us, and we get to show him our world.

 

In French class, Salome has taken to sitting in the back corner. We don’t notice until Madame calls her out. “Tu es moins sérieuse cette année, Salomé?” she says, too confident in the response she’ll receive. To everyone’s surprise, though Salome squeezes out a small smile for Madame, the instant after she turns back to the whiteboard Salome rolls her eyes. We are stunned and impressed. We are just a little bit jealous. Before, when she made herself small and quiet, Salome’s power lay dormant. Now she holds it in her hands, admiring its every facet, and it glows.

 

In rehearsals, Sampson is his usual goofy self, but when he gets to work he is utterly sober. This is the first time we’ve seen him go quiet immediately when a teacher speaks to him. It’s partly the hypnotic power of our director, whose elvish qualities and spritely energy are impossible not to fall in love with. We watch her give him direction and see him really listen, spinning her instructions in his head, making something private that we can’t see. It’s the first time it really occurs to us that Sampson has a secret self, just like the rest of us—one where he gets to be the person we have not yet let him be. But something is reeling him out, little by little. Or maybe we are actually, finally seeing him for the first time.

 

Salome’s friends were two mousy girls with interchangeably forgettable names. One of them liked to tell anyone who’d listen about her aspirations to become a dermatologist, because of how much she loved securing a pimple between her two fingernails and slowly applying pressure until the pus burst. The other seemed to become nervous beyond reason whenever we spoke to her, so we generally didn’t.

But we don’t see Salome with these girls anymore. We see them sitting together at lunch, business as usual, but Salome isn’t there. We don’t know where she goes. We don’t see Sampson, either, but we’ve never known where he goes when he’s not around. We’ve never particularly cared, until now. Now we find ourselves not only aware of his movements, of his orbit around school, but curious about them.

One day, leaving school, we see him and Salome across the street at the gas station. He’s leaning against a car—her family’s—and her reedy body leans against his, standing between his legs. It strikes us how beautiful they both are. It’s almost striking enough to keep us from feeling the jolt of something like betrayal. But that’s silly. We are only borrowing him. Someone else got to him first.

 

Sampson still makes jokes that make us cringe. But at Saturday rehearsals, he makes sure there is enough pizza for everyone when we break for lunch. He lets us know when there are crumbs in our hair. He teases us, but he never pushes too hard. He recognizes that some of us are more delicate than we used to be. He is more delicate than he used to be.

When we ride the late bus home from play practice, Sampson is one of us, joking and laughing about all the same things. But in the morning, on the regular bus to school, Sampson either talks to his non-play friends or is quiet. He doesn’t talk to us.

 

Late one night at a long rehearsal, we sit with Sampson at the side of the stage during a break. He has taken to wandering over to us between scenes, striking up mundane conversations that we wouldn’t have the energy for if it were anyone else. The mundanity of conversations with him is imbued with something that makes us smile and smirk and fidget. We want to hear every dull syllable that comes from his lips.

“We should get food,” he says.

We laugh. We tell him we’re surprised: it doesn’t look like he eats much these days. We’re trying to tease him, or maybe compliment him, but our concern slides out headfirst.

“I was too fat,” he says. “Now I’m too skinny. That’s why we should get food. I’m going to waste away.”

Then he looks at me and says, “You’ve gotten skinny, too.” He takes my hand, its back facing up, and tells me to lift my fingers up by the knuckles. “See?” He taps each one of the long, delicate bones that protrude in response. “You don’t have any meat on you.”

“Neither do you,” I say.

We look at each other. Our director calls us to attention. But I can hear his mind still purring next to mine, like he and I are by ourselves in an adjoining room.

At the end of rehearsal, Sampson asks me where I live. “I ride your bus,” I say. “Every day.”

“No way,” he says. “How didn’t I know this? Why didn’t you tell me?” He faces me. “We should go get food. Let’s get food sometime.”

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s.” And I know that we won’t, but I’m praying we do.

 

We talk about it, how Sampson wants to get food with me. One of us says, “He has such a huge crush on you, Catherine. He gets so flustered when he’s around you.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, with a laugh. “He has Salome.”

“I mean, yeah, they’re fucking, but he likes you.”

“It’s like, he wants her, but he adores you.”

I don’t understand the difference, but we laugh it off. It’s sweet that he likes me, that he’s trying so hard. It’s funny, to think about getting food with Sampson. We can hardly imagine it!

But Sampson doesn’t mention getting food again for a long time. We assume that he was joking, or was stoned and forgot about it, or maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he was just hungry.

 

In French class, we match verbs with appropriate objects. The verbs are acheter, aimer, oublier, adorer, saluer—to buy, to love, to forget, to adore, to greet. The objects are abricots, devoirs, amis, cahiers, Dieu—apricots, homework, friends, notebooks, God.

We go around the room. “J’achète les amis,” says a boy in the back, snickering before he’s even finished his sentence. We would be amused, but it’s like this every day, and we are tired. He looks to Salome for approval, who does not look at him. She seems tired, too.

When it’s my turn, I say, “J’adore les abricots.”

“Non, non,” says our French teacher. “On aime les abricots. On adore Dieu.”

 

We’re in class when we hear commotion in the hallway. The door to our classroom is open. One of the English teachers is walking briskly down the hall, trailed by a lanky, smirking Salome. Our teacher pauses slightly to watch, but the trouble falls from his face just as quickly as it landed, and we resume.

When class lets out, we walk to the cafeteria for lunch and hear whispers that Salome, noticeably addled in class, was suspended for being stoned at school. As we’re digesting this, we see Sampson cut through the crowd in the hall, his bag dangling from one shoulder. The head of upper school is close behind. “Mr. Sampson,” he calls, “please don’t let this turn out poorly for you, too.” But he’s already gone, the door swinging apologetically behind him.

We’re stunned. Some of us are impressed. Some of us feel like Salome has gone too far. We frame it in worry—we’re concerned for what’s happening to her; we wonder if everything is okay— but we’re not worried. Secretly, we’re a little relieved. The awe we’ve felt for her has been tempered by consequence. No one’s burden is that light.

 

Performances begin. We’re nervous and excited and our energy spills off the stage, literally: in the first performance, someone accidentally knocks a plate into the orchestra pit, where it shatters to the sound of laughter and applause. Fortunately there was no orchestra in the pit, or things might have ended differently.

As the shows go on, we watch each other, really watch each other. We’ve all grown so much since we each slipped timidly into our roles like a chrysalis at the start of rehearsals. Now we are magnificent. We speak our lines like they’re our own words, as easy as thinking, as easy as hope. We will miss the intimacy our characters share when this ends. We will miss the close physical space the play has forced our bodies to inhabit together.

We’re thinking about this onstage and off, in the wings while we’re waiting for our cue. We’re thinking about it just before our final entrance, while we stand alone in the wings. Then there is another presence, a breath, beside me like a ghost, but this is a ghost I know. Two slender hands alight on my waist, and when I don’t move away, they encircle me, and the body that belongs to them nests itself behind me. I have never been touched this way. I can feel every curve of his body even though he barely hovers behind me, his touch so light. I feel so light. I thread my fingers through his and I feel, for the first time in a year, more than the thrill of the stage or the draw of Salome’s beauty or the divinity of an empty stomach. This is adoration.

He and I stand there in the dark, our sad, hard edges locked together to make something larger than ourselves, until we hear our cue. And so he and I break apart, and he and I drift onstage, and we resume our roles.

The play ends. Things go back to normal. We go back to riding the four o’clock bus home. We’re relieved, but a little sad. It feels like a larger kind of ending.

The season changes, and so does the light. It streams long and late through our classroom windows onto our desks. It shoots and bends through the bus like a prism. We are illuminated. We feel, however fleetingly, like we’re coming alive.

Here at the end of the year, all of us about to go our separate ways, everyone changes. It’s sort of sudden, but when it happens it’s like we knew it would happen all along. It’s like the curtain has fallen at the end of the play that has been our time at this school, and we’re leaving the theater, freed from the characters we have played for so long. We are finally ourselves.

People talk to us who have never really talked to us before. People do things they’ve never done before. Some of us get wasted at the graduation party and find ourselves embracing people we thought we hated. Some of us are a little drunk, leaning against a wall at the graduation party, watching our friends, when Salome appears.

“Come to the balcony,” she says. Then she takes my hand, and we thread through the throng of all kinds of people I suddenly don’t care about as she leads me there.

Waiting on the balcony is Sampson. He smiles, then exchanges a look with Salome.

“So,” Salome says, “we heard you wanted to try this.”

I stare. Then Sampson produces what looks like a skinny, hand- rolled cigarette.

“Oh,” I say, “it’s really okay.” But Salome has already taken it and lit it, and she puts it to her perfect lips, inhales deeply. Then she passes it to Sampson, who takes a drag, and then offers it to me. Hesitantly I take it, lift it to my lips as they watch.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit.

“Just breathe,” says Salome. I expect her to be impatient with me, but she’s smiling, eager, like we’re all in on something together.

I inhale and then cough. Sampson pats me on the back, and when I can finally take a breath, I see they’re looking at me expectantly. I’m about to give them a smile, to signal I’m okay, when it comes over me: the lightness I’ve been chasing all year, that I’ve only found onstage or in an empty stomach, or just one other time, when Sampson held me in the dark.

We pass the joint around as the sun sets behind the city skyline, until I can’t take anymore. Salome and Sampson talk a little, but I’m content to just listen to the sound: the music of two voices that know each other so well they’ve become seamless.

“I’m going to miss you guys,” says Salome. For an instant in her voice I hear the old Salome, the shy, quiet one—the one I thought everyone had missed but me. Then I think: Maybe there is no old Salome. Maybe she never really changed. Maybe it’s us who started seeing her differently. Then I remember we’re all high.

“You won’t miss me that much,” I say with a laugh. “We didn’t really hang out.”

“I always thought we might,” she says. “Anyway, it’s been nice to know you’re there.”

We’re quiet again. “You feel okay?” Sampson says to me.

I nod, but in the dark he can’t see the motion. The lightness rolls in waves. I take a breath and reach my hand out, and as I do I feel his reaching out toward mine.