YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER, MISSY GALLAGHER

“Baby in a glue trap,” says Sam, the oldest, as he steps out the kitchen door, down the back steps and onto the driveway.

He doesn’t close the door behind him so the autumn evening chill blows in. It’s soccer season, fifth among Sarah’s most despised seasons. (The first, hands down, is Halloween. Ice Hockey is number two. There are others.)

Sarah looks up from the sink filled with sippy cups and suds and, out the kitchen window, watches Sam step into the waiting minivan of Amelia, pretty Amelia. Sarah likes her smile and the way she rocks back on the sidelines, steaming chai tea in her travel mug, as the soccer players soccer around the field. Sarah feels good around Amelia. Around Amelia, she does not feel judged or lesser than.

Sarah turns off the faucet and watches Amelia’s minivan disappear down the street with Sam in it. She does feel it all disappearing some days. She was an English major at Vassar, and she still gets the poetry feeling, that tickling, airy sensation in the pit of her stomach and on the tender spots of her skin.

Stepping toward the open door, she finally registers what Sam has just said.

Baby in a glue trap.

Recently there has been an invasion of chipmunks. Sometimes they are outside. Sometimes they are inside. Derek is generally the one who takes care of such things, but Sarah is not squeamish. She will shoo them out with a broom. She will dispose of the terrified critter frozen in place, paws gnawed but unbreakably locked on the pad of glue. 

The babies. There are two. Twins, eight months old. Jack and Ben after their great-grandfathers. (With five children, Sarah and Derek have run out of the obvious namesakes.) Rebecca, the twelve-year-old, is on baby duty as part of her allowance. She treats her work as seriously as a lifeguard, meaning seriously, but also not seriously enough.

“Rebecca!” Walking out of the kitchen, Sarah grabs a dingy dishrag from the counter and dries her hands. She doesn’t panic. There’s nothing to panic about. Five kids, a house like a collection of aged wood and kindling, a financial landscape bleak as a Cleveland February—these things have taught her the limited utility of panic. She will later tell Derek that she knew immediately what she’d find under the family room’s side table, which on its surface is true, but how could she really understand what was coming?

The family room has been converted into a toppled warehouse of choking hazards, the hard angles of toys and game pieces covering the ground like the opposite of twigs and leaves. Sarah steps in and scans. “Jesus, Rebecca! You can’t leave all of these toys out! The boys will chew on these things. You know that! Where are you?”

Rebecca appears at the top of the steps, wearing her pajamas. Of all of life’s pleasures, Rebecca likes sleep the most and so changes into her sleeping clothes as soon as she gets home from school. “Calm down, Mom. I was in the bathroom.”

“The babies. Where are the babies?”

“I left for, like, four seconds. They were playing.”

Stevie, the third of the five, wanders in from the kitchen. He’s been outside, collecting rocks it appears. He is eight, and he cradles a pile of what appears to be dead chipmunks before Sarah realizes it’s actually a collection of muddy stones. She also sees that, like his older brother, he has not closed the door behind him. October cold mixes with the room’s stale air. 

“Jesus, Stevie. You know you can’t bring the outside in. Outside things stay—” Her breath catches because she sees a flash of flesh on the floor. Two flashes really. She bends down and peers under the side table where she finds the kicking feet of an otherwise still and content baby.

       

At Vassar, Sarah once gave thought to sleeping with her Art History professor, a rugged man named Arthur Simmons who was covered in fur rather than hair, fur that his rolled-up sleeves and V-neck undershirts exposed casually and exotically. She felt herself soften whenever he was near and would lose herself during his lectures on the Renaissance as she pictured their affair and then their marriage and then their life on the bluffs of Tuscany, a braless, workless life filled with grapes and sun and oil paint and wild fights and then the fucking on countertops and beneath marble statues, beautiful marble people frozen in time, their hands cupping crowns and oranges.

She never did much more than imagine this life, though. She did well in the course, earning an A- on the final exam.

       

Sarah pulls on the baby’s foot and slides him from under the side table. He wears a white onesie with the ghost stain of pureed peas. He also wears a moderately full diaper. It is Ben, the more adventurous of the twins. He is generally a happy baby with a rolling laugh. At this moment, though, his face is serious and perplexed because one of his wrists is stuck to a tray of glue. It is a rectangle roughly the size of an ice cube tray. It covers Ben’s arm from the bend of his wrist to the bend of his elbow.

“For fuck’s sake.” Sarah exhales, sliding her hands into Ben’s armpits. “How did you even get to this thing? We hide them so you can’t reach them!” The baby doesn’t respond. “You guys, find Jack now!” She is not panicking. She bites the inside of her cheek to push it all back, and suddenly she feels calm. A baby in a glue trap. Who hasn’t had one of those?

It is Stevie who finds the other baby underneath the curtains and on his back, gnawing on a wooden block. 

“Got him!” Stevie shouts. He deposits his armload of wet rocks on the couch before picking up his brother. She does not react. What is there to react to?

“To the bathroom!” she commands. “Now! Everyone! Don’t stop.”

Rebecca steps toward her. “Is he okay? It wasn’t my fault.” For an instant, Sarah sees a woman in her daughter’s face, the lines on her forehead, the defensive flare of her nostrils. Some days, Sarah wants that, wants them all to be older so that she can breathe again, but she stops herself. She’s heard too many women at grocery stores and in line at the pharmacy gush over her five kids. She hears in these women’s voices the bare landscape of childlessness, and, though the political implication slays her in some ways, in other ways she understands their mourning. She understands it intimately. 

Still, now, with a baby in a glue trap, and three others trailing her up the stairs, she wonders what it will feel like when they are all gone, gone, gone. What kind of couch will she own? What kind of silence will greet her in the evenings as she waits for Derek to return home?

       

The adhesive in the most popular and affordable glue traps is derived from mineral oils, resins, and synthetic rubber. The major pest control conglomerates then lace this substance with rodent-attracting flavors to lure rats, mice, and chipmunks. In college Sarah would have found these traps cruel and indiscriminate and, likely, would have seen them as an elaborate metaphor about men or capitalism or her relationship with her own mother or even God —but now, there is no metaphor here, only the industry’s most effective viscous adherent, the color of semen, the consistency of deeply chewed gum. 

“Goddamn it,” she mutters. She holds Ben by his armpits with both her arms fully extended like she would hold a cat she’d found on her front porch. She hates cats. She hates how her culture has told her that she must find them adorable companions. “Fuck that,” she told her college roommate Missy. “I fucking hate cats.”

Sarah does not hate Ben, of course, but she does hate Missy, or at least her voice. Sometimes she mistakes it for her own—or maybe vice versa. She cannot tell.

She also hates being the one who must clean everything up. Derek is gone but not absent, which, she’s come to think, makes it even harder because she has no foil, no enemy. He loves her and the kids. He sacrifices for them all. Without a hint of complaint or exhaustion, he cleans the house every Saturday. He is a generous lover, sometimes going down on her in the morning before she’s showered and not even expecting anything in return. “I got the feeling you needed that,” he says to her as he slides back up, her fingers still clutching his scalp. Sarah does not hate Derek or the children. But she hates this. She has begun to worry that she hates herself too.

She’s made it up the stairs and stands in front of the open bathroom door. She gazes upon the foul and filthy closet-sized room where her children purportedly clean themselves. “Everybody in,” she commands. “Rebecca, go get my cell phone first. It’s in the bedroom.”

Rebecca does as she’s told. Sarah can see that Rebecca has absorbed the significance of this moment perhaps more than she herself has. She feels it rising now and so sucks in a quick breath and steps into the bathroom with Stevie following, the other baby, Jack, sideways in his arms like a load of firewood. 

       

According to the poison control hotline, there are no specific treatments for a baby in a glue trap. The man who picks up is remarkably nonplussed. “No problem, Ma’am,” he says. “Let me look up what we know. You just stay calm. We’ll get through this together.”

Sarah nods. Ben is in her lap. The plastic tray pokes her stomach, which is not a firm stomach, but it’s not a bag of uncooked dough either. Around her are the other kids. Rebecca has Jack now. Stevie sits Indian style—Criss-Cross-Apple-Sauce, she corrects herself—in the corner, tracing his finger in the grout surrounding the floor’s square tiles. He is lost in his imagination, and the others are calm, which makes Sarah release a sound she hasn’t heard herself make before. Maybe it’s okay, she thinks. Why am I okay?

The fluty music on the other end of the phone stops. “Well, Ma’am, it looks like these guys keep their trade secrets to themselves. That’s okay, though. We looked up what we know, and we’re going to treat this like we’d treat any other adhesive situation.” He pauses. “How’s the kid doing?”

Sarah realizes that she needs to call Derek. First, though, this man needs to finish. “He’s fine,” Sarah says. “Now what do I do?”

“Run a warm bath with gentle soap, perhaps a dish soap without perfumes and whatnot. Let it soak. And then it looks like you can use some vegetable oil, like a canola oil or perhaps a corn oil, and slather the kid up. Go slowly, Ma’am. Don’t start pulling too hard. Eventually, it should release.”

“Release?”

“You’ll have to pull a bit of course. But slowly, Ma’am. You can always take the child to the emergency room as well.”

Her body emits a groan. She knows this is true, but she can’t envision it. Not yet. A baby in a glue trap. It just confirms too much.

“Thank you,” she says and hangs up. She realizes that the bathroom is silent, which she appreciates. She really does have wonderful children. She holds her breath for a moment, just a moment, then leans back and reaches for the faucet on the bathtub. The lunge makes her lose her balance slightly. Beneath her, Ben instinctively clutches her as the room fills with the sound of flowing water.

       

When they were babies and before the twins arrived, Sarah used to place the three oldest kids in the tub at the same time: Sam, Rebecca, and Stevie. Downstairs in the basement are photo albums with picture after picture of kids in the bath, three kids with gleaming, goofy smiles and bodies covered with suds. Once they were scrubbed and shampooed, Sarah would sit with her back against the wall and let them play, a mug of Chardonnay at her side. Almost always, she would imagine them older, but sometimes she would also imagine all of it catching up to her, and so they were sick or hurt, arms in a sling, heads shaved, IV drips worming into the veins on the top of their hands. More than once Derek walked into the bathroom, arms filled with towels to help with the drying, only to find Sarah seated on the floor, red-nosed and quietly crying with her three giggling children in front of her.

Now, there is only one kid in the tub, Ben, and he bangs the water with his arm’s new appendage. He is not panicking. He seems curious about his arm, though. He stares at it intensely while he splashes. 

“Can I go to my room?” 

Sarah swivels toward Stevie. “No,” she says. “No one leaves the bathroom until this is over.”

“How long will that be?” His voice pinches, and his eyes narrow.

“I don’t know. This is all new to me.”

“But I’m bored.”

“Listen,” Sarah snaps. “Your brother is having a much worse day than you, and he’s making it work.”

“He’s a baby. He doesn’t know anything.”

The first thought that comes to her is Well, who does? But she bites down on it. She doesn’t like to use sarcasm with her kids. “Well, he knows he shouldn’t have a third arm.”

“When do we do the oil?” Rebecca asks. She’s the one who had zipped downstairs and found the dish soap from the kitchen counter and pulled the family-sized jug of vegetable oil from the bottom of the pantry. Sarah sometimes jokes to her friends that her daughter has the middle-child compliance that will make her a valued sorority sister and a thirty-five-year-old divorcée. Now, though, Rebecca’s constitution is perfect. It’s ideal. It’s exactly what is needed.

“Oh no!” That’s Stevie who no longer sounds bored. He’s pointing at the bathtub. “He pooped!”

“For fuck’s sake!” 

In one practiced swoop, Sarah plucks Ben out of the tub and holds him in front of her like a child sacrifice. “Towel!” she shouts, and Rebecca stands up immediately and pulls a damp towel from the hook on the back of the door. Before she swaddles her son, she checks to make sure he is done relieving himself, which he isn’t. Sarah feels a surge of adrenaline and exhaustion, and the smell begins to bloom just as Ben, shivering and naked, begins to wail. 

       

Sarah took Biology in high school, so she knows that the skin is the human body’s largest organ. She remembers Mr. Hoffman making the class stand in a circle to demonstrate how much space the epidermis would fill: twenty square feet. Sarah thought it was nonsensical and misleading on Mr. Hoffman’s part to stand in a circle rather than a square, which is why more than two decades later, she can remember this detail and relay it to Stevie, who is now riveted by the action in the bathroom. 

Ben’s cries fill the air, but Stevie doesn’t seem to notice. He is instead fascinated with how the tray of the glue trap pulls on Ben’s skin as Sarah tests whether it seems looser after the bath. It does, in fact, seem like it’s getting looser, but not much.

Sarah shouts the facts about the human skin just so Stevie can hear over the baby’s cries. The shouting also distracts him from looking back at the floater in the tub. She knows he wants to get on his knees and stare at it, and that repulses her, not because she’s squeamish—she has five children—but because it suddenly seems to mean something, to say something about her as a mother, which is absurd, she tells herself in the moment, but still.

“So your skin is like a heart?” Stevie asks, his eyes wide. The whole world is like this for Stevie. 

Rebecca cups Sarah’s elbow. “Mom, what are we going to do?” 

“Let’s try the oil.” Sarah’s mouth is dry. She’s beginning to panic.

“Should we call Daddy?”

Sarah shakes her head more vigorously than what’s called for, but the reaction is instinctive and total. She’s realized that she does not want to call her husband after all. Not yet. Rebecca does not protest. Instead she sets Jack on the ground and grabs the jug of oil. She twists the lid off and looks up at Sarah with doubtful eyes.

       

Sarah buys staples like vegetable oil at Costco, but she doesn’t talk about it like some of the other middle-aged people she knows. She doesn’t share information about the size and quality of their salmon fillets or reveal the secret that March is the best time to buy their home electronics or go on and on about the speed of their oil changes and tire rotations. All of that talk turns her stomach. It makes her feel lost. It makes her feel dead.

That said, she does appreciate the liberation of buying in bulk because, within an hour or two, she’s able to complete the transactions that seem to occupy other people’s whole lives. 

Sarah can’t remember when she bought the two-and-a-half gallon jug of vegetable oil or how much she spent on it, but in this moment it settles her because the plastic bottle is so large that it doesn’t seem possible for it to ever run empty. Ben squirms in her lap and continues to wail. His face is swollen now with tears and snot. She tries to soothe him while Rebecca does the same for baby Jack, who has begun to whimper too. “It’s okay, bunny gooses,” Rebecca says. “It’s okay.”

Sarah also can’t remember when she invented the phrase “bunny goose” to express affection for her children, but it’s stuck.

The vegetable oil comes out faster than Sarah expects and spills down Ben’s arm and onto her jeans and then the tile floor. Ben begins to shake his arm wildly, spraying oil across Sarah’s face. “Jesus,” she blurts and then grabs the baby’s arm to stop him. She squeezes. From the look on his face, she may be squeezing too hard.

It takes a few seconds of soothing, but eventually Ben calms down enough to let Sarah test the trap again. She pulls lightly, lifting the skin of his forearm with it, like lifting a shoe that’s just stepped in a wad of gum. But then she senses just the slightest release. Ben yelps then cries. 

“You’re hurting him!” shouts Rebecca. 

“It’s okay,” she says and stops with the pulling. She lifts the oil jug again. “Scissors. I need scissors.”

“For what?” Rebecca sounds alarmed and full of judgment.

“Just get me the goddamned scissors, okay?”

Sarah is crushed when she sees what her voice has done to her daughter. She feels the urge to apologize, but before she can, Rebecca has done what she’s been told. She is up and out the door, and all Sarah can think about is what Daisy Buchanan said about her daughter in The Great Gatsby. She can’t remember the precise words but it was something about hoping her baby girl grows up to be a fool just like her.

       

At Vassar, Missy Gallagher was Sarah’s freshman year roommate. She was from Dallas and had the flaxen hair of a miniature horse that, as a child, Sarah once rode and fell in love with at a pumpkin-picking farm. Missy Gallagher said things like: “Oh, Sar! I love that blouse! Can I help you iron it?” and “Your mother is just adorable. I just can’t see why you’re so angry with her.” She was a round, often unpretty cloud of doubt and judgment that followed Sarah around her freshman year and then disappeared as if she were a cloud made not of water and air but of birds, a flock of starlings darting through the sky in one dark mass and then, suddenly, breaking apart in a million black dots.

Missy Gallagher disappeared from Sarah’s life just like that in May of 1990, but her voice had somehow remained. For the last twenty-five years, Missy Gallagher has whispered into Sarah’s ear more than even Sarah allows herself to consider. 

Here in the bathroom, Missy Gallagher says, “Sarah, you’re being stubborn! There’s no shame in admitting you’re a fraud and a bitch.” Sarah shakes her head and then lifts the trap so that Ben’s screams fill the room and the strands of glue pull off his skin enough that Sarah can begin to snip the thin strings with the scissors.

“It’s okay,” Sarah soothes fruitlessly. “It’s okay.” Jack is on fire now too, his face narrowed into a soggy fist, and Sarah knows without looking up that Rebecca is watery and anxious as well. They’re in a moment now that they will all remember, she knows. It makes her nauseated, but she has no choice. She lifts harder, exposing a jungle of glue vines. She snips and then snips again.

       

Missy Gallagher has an opinion about Sarah’s choices, but thankfully Sarah can’t really hear it because the room is a jet engine of noise and echoes. Even Stevie has joined in. “Momma, you’re hurting him!” 

It’s almost done when the lights flick off and on, off and on, and Sarah turns to see Derek and Sam, standing sweaty in the doorway, their faces shocked and curious.

“Someone shit in the bathtub!” Sam says. He’s recently started swearing. He’s fourteen. Other things will soon change too, Sarah knows.

“Jesus, Sarah, what happened?” Derek’s face slides into disbelief. “Why are you covered with oil?” 

She is crying herself now, and she closes her eyes for a long time. The room quiets. When she opens them again, Derek is ushering the parade of her family out of the bathroom until all the noise in the room belongs to the boy in her arms and her own pounding heart.

She looks back down, and Ben’s arm is almost entirely exposed now, a red, pulsing landscape of hurt. She lifts the tray and cuts the final strings.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story WHAT CONSUMES YOU

Mornings, Saba prepares two eggs. She fries them in olive oil that heats her stale apartment with a mineral scent. When the yolks have just set, she slides the eggs from the pan to a plate and with a knife wielded like an X-Acto blade, separates the crispy-edged whites from the mounded yolks. Those she spreads on toast like butter and eats first. The whites, thin and fringed as doilies, she picks up with her fingers and deposits into her mouth whole.

In the afternoons, she eats nothing but drinks nearly one hundred ounces of water, glass after glass after glass.

In the evenings, she feasts.

 

She made her first video without watching any others. Hers are different in their selection of food. Whereas other popular accounts layer food types—chips, gooey carbonara, fried pickles, cheeseburgers, buns and all—Saba’s focus on individual dishes. In her first video, “PIZZA,” she methodically consumes seven boxes of cheese pizza, the stack of unopened boxes on her right dwindling, then regenerating as a pile of empty, conquered boxes on her left. She eats one slice at a time, sips water between bites, and never slurps, smacks, or speaks. Nearly a million viewers have devoured it.

She has, to date, posted “PIZZA,” “VALENCIA ORANGES,” “DIM SUM,” “OYSTERS,” and “BUTTERED POPCORN.” The latest, “CACIO E PEPE,” is her most popular, and the one that results in the phone call from the museum director.

 

The following Monday, Saba takes the train from her apartment to the Guggenheim. She sees the great spiraling edifice rising against the sky like a wedding cake and makes a note for a new video idea. Inside the museum, she wants to climb to the top of the corkscrew but the director’s office is on the first floor, left of the ticketing desk. The leather chairs facing the gleaming oak desk are plush, but the office is small, with a window facing a too-close brick wall, and Saba feels as if she’s inside a dollhouse.

“I understand that in South Korea, millions watch these videos live,” the director says. He looks to Saba, who only blinks; she doesn’t watch the other videos or read about their cult followings. This man certainly knows more than she does.

The director continues: “There’s a sense of community inherent in the videos, in these channels, that we want to capture at the Guggenheim. To my knowledge, no one has performed a, it’s called a mukbang, correct? Yes, a mukbang, no one’s performed one live. We’d like you to be the first, here at the museum.”

“What might that look like?” Saba imagines the faces staring up at her, her roiling, rumbling stomach, easily edited out at home, betraying her in public. She imagines her garlicky sweat, the audience’s own smells distorting her own sense of the food in front of her.

“We would leave that up to you. You would work closely with our performance curator, Helen, but we’d be taking direction from you.”

“How soon?”

He smiles as he understands he’s passed some test. “One month, if that’s enough time.”

The man is glowing, his cheeks dewy and plump above his beard like two ripened plums, so Saba agrees, then excuses herself to prepare.

 

Saba’s mother fed her children the same thing every day: steel-cut oats with thinly sliced bananas for breakfast, three slices of turkey breast on an open-faced cut of sourdough bread spread with spicy brown mustard for lunch, and butter chicken over jasmine rice with a side of steamed vegetable, whatever was on sale, for dinner. After a while, everything tasted the same to Saba. Her younger sister, Adiva, cried for chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese, the food of their friends, but Saba accepted the lack of flavor and excitement. If her mother said life was so, it was so.

It wasn’t until Saba moved to Manhattan for college that she discovered the way a grapefruit explodes on the tongue, or the layers of flavor inside an empanada. Walking through the farmers’ market in Union Square, the smells alone overwhelmed her. Other students picked at their cafeteria food, complaining of gluey lasagna and chewy chicken piccata, but Saba couldn’t understand. Food tasted of something here! Even the melted square of cheese atop her lasagna melded mozzarella with pecorino and parmesan. It was unbelievable to her that people ate like this enough to find the flavors blasé. She ate and ate and ate, and when she returned home for winter break, her mother pinched her sides and scolded Saba for her lack of control. She realized, then, that her mother knew of this other world and kept it from her children on purpose. Bitterness grew in Saba’s gut like a seed, then a stone.

When the stone became a statue, tall and pointed as the obelisk in Central Park, Saba stopped returning home on holidays.

 

There are anywhere from zero to nine seeds per Valencia orange, which Saba spits into a small blue bowl set out for this exact purpose. She picks at the peel with her fingernail, a collection of zest building beneath the unmanicured margin. Most of the oranges she undresses in a single move, the skin curling onto the table like a ribbon. She lines up the segments in front of her, removing the thick, stringy pith and depositing it among the discarded rinds. Once the entire fruit has been dismantled, she eats the segments one at a time. There’s no music, no background ambient noise; it’s so quiet that when she bites into an especially juicy piece, you can hear the skin pop. The video is thirty-seven minutes long, and she eats twenty-one oranges. When she’s finished, Saba smiles at the camera, stripped rinds piled before her, and her teeth seem to vibrate with sugar.

 

Her channel’s subscribers double in number the following week when the Guggenheim announces the performance. Saba is alone in her apartment and she silences, then turns off her phone to avoid the constant calls and notifications. When she turns it back on that night, she has over 8,000 social media notifications and forty-four missed calls. One of them, she sees, was her sister. This call she returns.

“Saba, this is insane.” She can hear the excitement in her sister’s whisper, voice kept low so as not to wake her husband and two-year-old boy, Jazzy. “People have been calling the house, asking about you. Reporters!”

“Mmm.” Saba examines her toenails, points her feet. Something in her arch twinges and she rubs it.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you excited?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“Mama knows,” Adiva says.

“So?”

“Oh, Saba.” In the background, she hears her nephew stir, mewling softly as Adiva soothes him. Saba closes her eyes and lifts the covers of her bed to slip beneath.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“She’s worried. I showed her your videos. She can’t believe this is healthy.”

“Adiva, it’s late. You should get back to your family.” When she doesn’t say anything, Saba adds, “Thank you, for trying. So I don’t have to.”

“We love you, you know. We both do.”

“Sure. Yes. I know.”

Her sister sighs and Saba can picture her sitting up in bed, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, one hand rubbing her son’s back, the other worrying her own earlobe, a nervous tic she never outgrew.

It’s not until they hang up that Saba realizes she’s been clenching her jaw the whole time, creating an ache that climbs up her temple that she can’t rub away.

 

Two eggs, toast, and today, a tea, milky in its mug. One month to prepare. Saba feels the days tighten across her temples like a vise. With the advance from the Guggenheim, she quit her job at the remote answering service, so there’s no longer the demands of answering calls in her apartment, pretending to be at the defense lawyer’s office in Kansas City, or sitting beside a fish tank like a giant jewelry box at the national dental chain’s Tampa location. There is only the food left to consider. Helen, the museum’s performance curator, has given her carte blanche in that regard. The museum has certain requests about lighting, necessities for videotaping, certain patterns and colors Saba mustn’t wear. But as for the food, that is entirely up to her.

She spends the day walking the city for inspiration, letting smells guide her down this street or that. In Chinatown she stops at her favorite dumpling spot, but she’s done something similar with the dim sum video. There’s the rice pudding place on Spring Street, where she samples Oreogasm, I Gotta the Panna Cotta, and Sex, Drugs, and Rocky Road. Too thick, she decides; the sticky rice coats her throat. Fresh buffalo mozzarella, eaten standing in front of the cheese counter after waiting in an hour-long line, seems like a real possibility for a time, but as she outlines the performance in her notebook on the train back from Brooklyn, it’s too boring, too white, like the museum building itself. For a similar reason she dismisses her original wedding cake idea, inspired by the Guggenheim’s famous architecture—too on-the-nose.

Tired, feet and stomach aching after a whole day exploring, she returns home idealess.

 

It took Saba three weeks to amass enough steamer baskets for the dim sum; the restaurant preparing the food stipulated that she supply her own for such a large order. She wanted something authentic; an Amazon order wouldn’t do. She considered ordering the tea from the restaurant as well, but decided to make it on her own. It’s the only video featuring something other than the starring item, but tea is technically food, she reasoned. She practiced with her chopsticks, to make sure she was fluent before the big meal. It’s not easy with the broth-filled ones.

In the video, each steamer basket contains a different dish—a mix of dumplings and buns. There’s har gua, cha siu bao, xiao long bao, wu gok. Her favorite part is cutting each open, so soft they split beneath the gentle pressure of a spoon. She loves the steam, its heat on her cheeks as she bends over to breathe everything in. She loves the smells, earthy and tangy, though she knows each bite will contain a heart of sweetness.

Commenters note that if you look closely, pausing the video at 26:34, you might catch the small, closed-lipped smile Saba allows herself when she’s halfway through the meal. She doesn’t look up at the video, only smiles into the full steamer basket before her. In all her previous videos, there are no facial expressions. Fans speculate as to what it might mean, what she’s thinking, who she’s thinking of.

They can’t know, though, the memory unfurling in her mind; the hole in the wall, its warmth pushing out of the plastic-tarp false front protecting the front door from the harsh winter. Tables so close together her coat brushed the other patrons as she made her way to the table in the middle of the restaurant. The menu wedged under her left leg, the red tablecloths, the water beading off the sides of her glass. Her face, sweating. Her sister’s, swollen with the final days of pregnancy. The food, the most delicious and spiciest she’d eaten yet. The harried waiter, bringing more, more, more, as she and Adiva ate and ate, and baby Jazzy, five days overdue, kicked and kicked, but did not budge.

The walk home, first snow falling, feeling like relief against her hot, flushed face, and the call six hours later as her brother-in-law tried to hail a cab in the middle of the night in the midst of the unexpected snowstorm, her sister’s voice in the background, laughter in between moans.

 

Saba will name the performance after the food, like all the others, but the Guggenheim’s official marketing campaign for the show is What Consumes You. She begins to see it everywhere. A promotional poster tacked onto the back of a bus stop bench. A billboard rising over Houston Street. A flash as a cab whizzes by. Soon, she can’t look up and down an avenue without seeing the thick white san serif font, the swirling red and black background.

Her sister calls again.

“You were on TV!” Same whisper-yell. This isn’t news to Saba; knowing the interview would air that night, she not only turned off her phone ahead of time but also placed it under her sink and left the apartment, went for a walk. Only now has she turned it back on, and only because she knew her sister would call.

“Mmm,” she says. Elbow deep in dough, she listens to Adiva’s voice fill her kitchen, listens to the way it fills the mixing bowls spread out on her countertop, how it circles back up and over the lips, overflowing the space. It reminds her of when they were kids, the way they were taught to make musical instruments of their water glasses. She can’t remember who taught them that. Maybe it was something they did in school. Certainly it was not their mother.

“We bought our tickets,” Adiva says, and this brings Saba out of her reverie.

“I could’ve gotten those for you,” she says.

“Oh.” Adiva is quiet. “Well, that’s all right.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to come.” As soon as she says it, Saba remembers the last conversation they had, her sister’s unwavering support.

“Mama had me buy one for her.”

The dough Saba works in her hands—moments ago soft and pliable, stretchy and new, the pillowy possibility of sourdough—hardens, feels like setting concrete. She pries her hands from the sticky mass and begins to scratch at the small bits sticking to her.

“I think she’s excited,” Adiva says. “Well, as excited as Mama gets. She bought a new dress, which is something, don’t you think?”

Saba scrapes the dough into the trash can, sets the bowl in the sink, fills it with soap and lets the tap run, bubbles frothing.

“Say something,” Adiva says.

“Why does everyone love sourdough? It’s not really a very good bread. So bland, too crusty. What’s the use?”

“Oh, Saba.”

“I have to go, I’ll call you later.”

Because her hands are filthy she cannot end the call, so she listens to her sister’s breath for several moments before, finally, Adiva sighs and hangs up for them both.

 

A rare Thanksgiving home, only a year after college, Saba volunteered to cook for everyone. Her family had never celebrated with a traditional turkey dinner, and she wanted to see her mother nibble some crisped skin, spoon thick slices of cranberry sauce into her mouth. For weeks Saba dreamed of falling through clouds made of mashed potatoes. She woke up hungry, smelling phantom butter and thyme.

This was when they were still being kind to one another, walking on eggshells. Saba was a wild woodland creature, something easily scared away. Okay, her mother said when she proposed her idea. I suppose that would be all right.

She went to the store and spent hundreds of dollars, her own money, money she didn’t have but dreamed into existence with the help of her credit card. There were only three of them but she bought enough to feed ten.

At home, turkey basted and roasting in the oven, she shook out the oysters from their plastic-lined paper sack. She’d found a recipe for oyster stuffing, her mouth watering as she read through the ingredients list. Her mother had never tasted an oyster, of that she was certain.

As she shucked, she tasted. How could she resist the shivering soft disk of meat, its salty brine and grit of sand still stuck to the shell? Soon she was gobbling the mollusks, slurping rapturously as she threw them down her throat. It felt like eating the sea.

“Saba! What are you doing?” Her mother stood framed in the doorway, and she saw herself as her mother must—clear juices dribbling down her chin, mound of shells emptied on the counter behind her.

“Mama, try one,” she said. Extending an experience was the only peace offering she knew. She held out the oyster she’d planned to eat next. For a moment she stood suspended from her own body as her mother reached out, hand hovering over the oyster, before she reached back and threw her hand forward, slapping Saba’s wet face. The sound was thick, slippery. She pried open Saba’s hand and let the opened oyster thwack onto the linoleum floor, the shell halves skittering beneath the kitchen table.

What pained her most was not the slap, but the small hope she allowed herself just before it.

In the “OYSTERS” video she shucks each oyster individually, and though it is her longest video ever posted, it is also one of the most popular. She sits among discarded shells like Ursula, a sea queen eating her way through the ocean. She lost count of the oysters while filming, only knew that the amount was enough to swipe clean her bank account. It was many months before she was able to make another video.

Most nights after shoots she spends in the bathroom, alternating between shitting and vomiting up the food havocking across her body. The oysters, though, remained. She swayed in her bed, wishing them up or out, but nothing. The hard rock of seafood anchored her to wakefulness, to the too-hot air in her room. This must be what it feels like to die, she thought. Then: no, to drown. Then: to be a whale that has eaten a giant squid, and feels the beast laying claim to some space inside it, a mistake she must carry now.

 

After the televised interview with the museum director, Saba turns down interview requests for the New York Post and the Daily Mail, concedes an hour-long sit-down with New York Magazine, and grants The New Yorker backstage access before the show. Or, rather, Helen does all this; Saba merely agrees. There are many questions but Saba has few answers for them. What more can be said, that cannot be seen in the videos? She can tell the reporter from The New Yorker is disappointed by her vague, single-word answers. Helen tries to make amends as he stands to go, angrily shrugging his jacket over his shoulders, arms shoved back into the too-tight sleeves like stuffed grape leaves.

After these brief media ventures, the Guggenheim releases a statement, expressing gratitude for the mounting interest but asking for privacy as Saba prepares for the show. It’s only a week away. Within a day of tickets going on sale, it sells out. She and Helen meet once more, agree to a completely darkened stage, like a black box theatre, Saba centered at a long chrome table. Matte, Saba says, and Helen agrees. During the show there’s to be no photography, no music, no speaking. All light will be directed upon Saba, and only turned on once she has sat at the table and is ready to begin, which she’ll indicate to the crew with a small button placed in her palm for exactly that reason. The food should be on the table, prepared, before she approaches.

“We have a kitchen here, nothing of chef quality, but certainly we can work with neighboring restaurants or catering companies for the event. Is there someone in particular you prefer to work with?” Helen asks.

Saba shakes her head, dissipates the questions in the air in front of her with a wave of her hand. “I’ll handle all that.” In truth, she has no idea what she’ll be consuming. She hasn’t cooked or baked in days, can barely taste the food she orders. Everything tastes bland, like her childhood: oatmeal, turkey, chicken, rice. Her apartment is littered with scraps of paper, ideas once considered, now thrown out. Mangoes. Banana pudding. Taquitos from the bodega beneath her walk-up. Duck a l’orange. Nothing feels right.

Helen is hesitant. “Really, we insist. It’s our job, there’s nothing we want more than to assist you in this event going smoothly. We only need to know what you’ll need, what food items to prep, and then you can—”

“I’ve got to go, there’s much to rehearse.” Saba stands, so Helen stands, clenched in the small opening between her desk and chair. Her office is not as grand as the director’s. It’s an unfair advantage, Saba’s freedom on the other side of the desk, but she takes it and doesn’t look back as the heavy door closes behind her.

Too much time inside ivory museum spirals makes Saba’s head ache. She needs darkness, a setting akin to the conditions of her show. She walks down 5th then slips into the 86th Street station and onto a 4 train heading downtown.

 

To contrast the nearly neon butter yellow of the popcorn, Saba wears all black. On either side of her rests a clear trash bag filled with the snack—a gift snuck to her from her friend in concessions at her favorite theater. Before her is a simple white bowl filled with popcorn, which she empties in its entirety before dipping it back into one of the bags to refill.

The salt is what gets to her. Her lips feel like the desert; for weeks she will embalm them with Vaseline, day and night, only to feel the cracks splitting open hours later. She bleeds like this for what seems like a very long time. In the video she allows herself a glass of water, but sips from it only occasionally. It seems greedy, or wrong, to gulp at it as she fills her body with salt.

The day after filming the video, she was so bloated a woman stopped her on the street and placed a hand on her belly. “Bambino,” she said, eyes soft and happy. “Congratulazioni!” Saba placed her hand next to the woman’s, felt her own body. She had been up all night, alternating between drinking water, peeing, and Vaselining her lips. Her body felt hard and foreign beneath her hand.

“Grazie,” she said.

 

Film Forum is the first theater Saba visited after moving to New York. She watched A Streetcar Named Desire there for a film studies course, and among classmates loudly falling in love with Marlon Brando, found herself trying to taste the chicory in Blanche and Stella’s coffee. Movies were another thing she hadn’t much experienced. She spent many afternoons there.

The cool, dark theater is like the relief of a damp washcloth on the back of her neck. Saba settles into her seat, one of only a handful of patrons. The movie’s already begun so she tries to sort out what’s happening, watching as Paul Newman washes his hands and kneels before a mound of hard-boiled eggs. She leans forward and relief floods her body, then adrenaline as she leaps up and exits the theater as quickly as she’d entered it. It’s perfect, simple yet visually striking. Exiting, she leaves a wad of bills in the donations bin.

There are only six days to prepare so she must begin instantly. Though the food appears simple, she must practice boiling the eggs so they come out just right, the yolks yellow, no green-gray tinge, with shells that peel off smoothly in one fractured ribbon. She buys dozens and dozens of eggs, her cart at the store filled with nothing else. People stare.

With three days left, she wakes up with a surprise ending. A roast chicken. It will come as she is finishing the last of the hard-boiled eggs: crisp, golden-brown, glistening, smelling of rosemary and thyme, garlic and butter. She imagines that though the audience will have been instructed to remain silent throughout the performance, here they will gasp. She has never ventured outside of one food in a video. The chicken will be big enough to feed an entire family. The audience’s mouths will water.

Now Saba goes to the butcher and fills her cart with chickens, stopping at the farmer’s market for fresh herbs, the bodega for packs of butter. Her apartment windows appear permanently fogged. She smells like butter all the time, catches people on the street leaning closer to her to sniff her hair. Her days take on a new routine: boil, cool, rest; baste, dress, roast; smash, roll, peel; eat, eat, eat. The chicken she only cooks, and does not practice eating. Everything about this performance will be unorthodox. She hasn’t felt so alive, the world so cracked open and unknown, since she first left home and moved to the city so many years ago.

Two nights before the show, she works through the night and does not sleep.

On the morning of the performance, she is ready. Excited, nervous, committed.

Outside her apartment is the town car the museum has sent over, ready to take her uptown.

 

There’s something aesthetically pleasing about bowl after bowl after bowl of pasta, dressed in nothing but a melted sauce of butter, pecorino romano and grana padano cheeses, and freshly cracked pepper. Saba knows this “CACIO E PEPE” video will be a challenge, that by the final bowls, the sauce will congeal into a gluey paste she has to force down. That’s part of the excitement—she isn’t sure she can do it. Starch plus cheese plus changing viscosity of the dish combine to create an uncertain outcome. All the videos have been challenging, have exerted themselves on her body, but she has never assumed she won’t finish one. That she might fail excites her, sends trills down her arms, into her empty stomach, along the braid laced too tightly across her scalp. She breathes deeply before the first bowl. This is her favorite part of making the videos: the moments right before beginning, when she is hungry and calm, poised before the food and the camera. Saba is a professional, dedicated to the art form. She makes no effort to connect with the people who send her messages about their binge eating, their body dysmorphia, the pyramid scheme they’d love her to join. How many—and who—watches her videos has never concerned her, and never occurred to her, until the museum reached out. She cares only about the food.

By the end of the video, she is sweating. Her braid has come unlooped and sticks to her forehead; her blouse is sheer in the places it’s become damp. After she finishes chewing the last forkful of pasta, she looks up at the camera, face smeared with cream, and swallows. Smiles. Big, all teeth. The video cuts to black.

 

From behind the black curtain the museum has erected for privacy, Saba hears the room fill. It’s like being inside a beehive. She’s not alone, as stagehands move quickly all around her, but they’ve been instructed not to disturb her so she remains a silent oasis in the midst of their bustling.

It’s strange, not to be in her apartment. She misses fiddling with her camera, checking the lighting, making sure the tripod is level. A few minutes before the show is due to begin, Helen and the museum director approach her from the side. The museum director smiles and touches her elbow. Helen checks her mic, the button in her palm, the zipper on the back of her dress.

“Ready?” the museum director asks, and Saba nods. A stagehand appears and walks her to the edge of the curtain, then walks her onstage, to the table. She can barely see it except for a slight gleam, the glint of red reflecting off the stagehand’s walkie-talkie onto the edge of the table and back at them. He helps her sit then disappears. Everything is silent and though Saba knows the audience cannot tell she’s there, something in the room feels changed for her, like everyone has sat up straighter in the chairs, if only by a few molecules. The air in the room feels raised. She wants to breathe deeply but won’t allow herself the sound. Instead she steadies her hand on the chrome table; it’s cold to her touch, so different from her own kitchen’s linoleum counter. In her other hand, she finds the button and presses it.

The lights come up but Saba’s view doesn’t change; all she can see is black. Adiva and her mother will be in front, she thinks, and she wills her energy to that part of the audience, but she cannot feel their presence for sure. For all she knows, it’s only Adiva sitting there. For all she knows, no one sits in the five-hundred-odd seats, laid out in careful rows earlier this morning.

In front of her is a mound of hard-boiled eggs, the same fifty as the film. They’re piled into a lopsided pyramid, as requested, which she knows will tumble and dismantle as she begins. That’s okay; she’s planned for such disruptions, means it to be part of the show, an injected sense of chaos only the audience will feel. Saba knows which eggs she will eat when, in order to avoid one rolling off the table, bouncing away into the darkness. She will, as always, go slowly.

She picks up her first egg and smashes, then rolls it to loosen the shell. With the tip of her fingernail she picks at a crack to unfurl the whole thing. It comes off singularly, just as she’s practiced. She drops the shell, clinging to itself along the membrane. With a knife placed at her left, she slices the egg in half, the yolk perfectly yellow, bright as a surprise. She tilts the halves toward the audience, then looks up at them, takes the deep breath she wouldn’t allow herself earlier.

She begins to eat.

The yolks are chalky, the whites like rubber; none of this is new and yet it is, somehow, in this space where she is alone but not alone, in which she can hear nothing but can also hear the medium-rare ribeye beaten into pulp by the acids in the stomach of the man sitting in the fourth seat in the sixth row; can hear the roiling sea of the fast food hamburgers in the videographer’s stomach, beef patties several days past their prime, gluey cheese product resisting disintegration; just as she knows the exact feeling right this very moment inside her mother’s stomach, the reliable weight and sensation of the broken-down butter chicken and rice, the precise moment later tonight, before bed, when her mother will put down the length of floss and go to the toilet for one final shit.

She is seventeen eggs in and cannot disappear inside the food. The seams between her and the world, and the food and the world, and her and the food, are ridged and impossible to rend. Saba stands, suddenly, the loud scrape of the chair against the floor so jarring she jumps before realizing she’s the one who’s made it.

“The chicken,” she says. “Bring the chicken.”

There’s a hum now, coming from the audience. When no one emerges from backstage, Saba says again, louder this time, “Bring me the chicken!”

It appears as she’s been imagining it would, floating through the black box on a gleaming silver platter, but all she can see are the slabs of turkey her mother carved from the bird she over-roasted each week, slicing breast meat onto the same cheery blue Fiestaware platter. Saba’s mouth is dry and she can’t smell the chicken though she can see it dripping in its own juices.

“I can’t taste anything,” she says, in a whisper though her voice crescendos as she repeats herself. “I can’t taste. I can’t taste anything.” Now the audience lets out a full gasp as she opens her mouth and scrapes at her tongue, flecks of yolk and egg white spraying the black tablecloth. Is this part of the show? The chicken, still steaming, sits like a wedding cake in front of the remaining tower of eggs and without warning Saba stops clawing at herself and reels around to face the table once more.

“Oh, my,” says a small voice in the crowd, as it becomes clear her mouth is bleeding.

Saba never ate a single bite of the many perfect chickens cooked and discarded over the last three days. Such a waste, she thinks. And for what? Her hands curl back against the heat as she plunges them into this bird but she pushes further, feeling the tiny weakened ribcage crush under the weight of her palms. The audience screams. She tears off a hunk of breast meat and stuffs it in her mouth, lets the fatty skin slick her face with butter. It’s food, she yells, or would, if her mouth were not full. This is what we’re meant to do with it!

“No.” It is impossible to say for sure, but Saba knows the tone of her mother’s disappointment. She feels it as she hears it, like a wet thwack across her face.

The primal, depthless scream that comes out of Saba is unholy yet fundamental, wild yet manifest to everyone in the audience. With a seemingly inhuman strength, Saba grasps the chrome table by its edge and wrenches it from its home on the stage, sending it and the mangled chicken and the pile of still-shelled, uneaten eggs clattering, splattering, tumbling into the dark abyss of audience before her. There is the acciaccato noise of the performance’s destruction, then silence.

Then, a child’s voice. Her nephew, Jazzy? But her sister wouldn’t have brought a two-year-old to such a performance, would she?

“Mama,” the voice says. Saba imagines Jazzy, little fingers opening and closing as rubbery eggs roll off the stage, stumbling out of his mother’s grasp and moving toward the mess as everyone else falls back.

 

THE SPANISH CRISIS

The night Dominick and his friends got on the One Line and Dominick wouldn’t shut up about the girl from the party with bunny-soft lips, the metro car was empty except for an older woman reading a book near the front. The boys took seats in the middle section. It was odd to find an empty car on a Friday night in Madrid, almost impossibly odd, and one of them likely said as much, probably Jorge, who, of the three of them, was the most likely to comment on the obvious. Nathan Matías was the most likely to agree with what anyone said about the obvious or about the girl with bunny-soft lips. And Dominick, sitting across from them, was the most likely to talk stories. He was the loudest among them, which some girls liked but a lot of them didn’t. They told him he sounded too Spanish.

They were all in eleventh grade at the American School in Madrid. Jorge was a Spaniard, but he’d lived in the States and spoke perfect English. His parents were diplomats. Dominick was born in Missouri. His parents decided when he was six that the United States was fucked—their words, not his—and they’d uprooted the family and moved to Madrid. His dad did website design and his mom taught English and debate at the American School, which is how he got a spot there in the first place. She had been the Missouri State debate champion back when she was his age.

Nathan Matías was an American, too, but he’d just moved to Madrid in ninth grade. He was rich and tall and good-looking, with a Justin Bieber shag and sleepy eyes that the girls liked, but his Spanish was still pretty rough. At the botellón earlier that night, Dominick had mocked him every time he slipped up. “It’s echar un polvo, man, not hecho polvo,” he’d shouted when Nathan Matías had basically said that he liked being tired when what he’d meant was that he’d like to get laid.

“I’m telling you,” Dominick was saying now, leaning across the aisle to stare at Jorge and Nathan Matías. “Her lips were extra soft, like she’d rubbed them in baby bunnies. Or like they were baby bunnies and kissing them was really just my whole body curling into a nest of bunnies deep in a forest somewhere.”

“Fuck,” said Nathan Matías.

“Hombre,” said Jorge. “That’s kinda gross.”

“Not gross, man, fabulous,” Dominick said. “It was like Disney mixed with porn.”

The woman at the front of the metro car was facing in Dominick’s direction, but she never looked up, not when the boys got on and not when Dominick started talking too loud about the girl with bunny-soft lips, first in Spanish and then, when he noticed her sitting there, in English.

She was at least sixty and had the look of someone who’d worked in an office her whole life. Her short hair was thinning, and, beneath it, you could make out the slightest glint of white scalp. She looked small and was wearing gray slacks and a partially unbuttoned red peacoat. Her handbag was big enough to hold a human head. Dominick would’ve bet ten Euros that she was reading The Alchemist.

“But the best part is what she was doing with her hands,” he continued, looking over at the woman again. She didn’t look up from her book—even when it was clear he was staring. There was only a set of sliding doors between her and Dominick and his friends. She suddenly seemed so close.

Of the three of them, Dominick was the only one who lived near old ladies like her. His parents had bought an apartment in Alcorcón just outside Madrid because it was one of the few places they could afford and still have money to fly back to Missouri each summer to visit family in the Ozarks. Alcorcón was a midsized city, but it often felt like a village. There was a pedestrian walkway running through the commercial district, and it was there that parents and kids and tired, sad-looking old women went for a walk before dinner every evening. As a kid, Dominick used to like to watch those old ladies, walking alone, and try to imagine what their lives were like.

“Where are their families?” he’d asked his mom once when he was probably seven or eight. He’d never really known an old person. His dad didn’t talk to his parents anymore—they were hypocrites, he’d said—and his mom’s dad had died of a heart attack before he was born. His grandmother he could remember, but just barely. She’d died in a car wreck the year before his parents moved the family to Spain.

“Why don’t you go ask?” had been his mom’s response. He knew she was joking, but then one day he did. The woman he approached wasn’t all that old, probably fifty or sixty, but she had the same bowed look of most of the older women he saw walking in their town.
He was alone that day. His mom had sent him down for bread. The woman was just coming out of a café, probably heading home. She had short hair—like the woman on the metro car—and eyelids that were beginning to droop over her eyes, which he realized were green when she turned at the sound of his voice.

“Do you have a family?” he’d asked in Spanish.

Her eyes got smaller and she grabbed the strap of her purse in her fist, pulling it to her chest.

“Don’t be a dumbass,” she had said, and before he could answer, she’d walked away.

He never spoke to anyone on the streets after that. And in the years that followed he stopped wondering about the secret lives of older women. He entered middle school, made more friends, met girls. He still looked at photos of his grandmother every once in a while, but older women started to seem less like a mystery and more like a nagging reminder of something that once was.

On the metro car, the woman flipped a page, then held the book in one hand as she scratched at the hairline along the back of her neck. There was something familiar in the way she held her back so straight and the book so squarely before her. It was as if she were trying out for the role of old woman and had just now perfected the posture. Dominick suddenly wished she wasn’t there.
“So what’d she do, bro?” Nathan Matías said when it was clear Dominick wasn’t going to finish his story. “Give you a dick massage?”

Dominick ignored him and continued to stare at the old lady. “I bet you ten Euros she gets off at the Cuatro Vientos stop,” he said.

The other two looked over and for a moment the woman glanced up at them. Dominick still had his cup from the party and tilted it back and forth so that the ice clunked against the plastic. In a bag at his feet were two Coca-Cola bottles and one nearly empty bottle of vodka. Nathan Matías had a cup, too, and every once in a while he passed it to Jorge. Dominick did the same from across the aisle. The woman returned to her book.

“She’ll go home to a dirty apartment and masturbate watching Saber y Ganar,” Dominick continued, looking just past the woman at an advertisement for some restaurant or hotel that read ¡pare aquí!

Nathan Matías laughed hard, spitting part of what he had been drinking back into the cup.

“What the fuck, man,” he said. “She might understand you.”

“No way,” Dominick said. “I know that type. She’s Franco-era. The only English she knows is ‘Santa Claus’ and ‘Tank you.’”

Both boys laughed that time, but neither of them looked over at the woman again.

“I bet she hasn’t had sex in thirty years.” Dominick raised his voice slightly, unable to stop.

“Hombre!” Jorge warned. He reached across the aisle and grabbed the cup from Dominick and downed the rest. “She’s an old lady.”

“And she really might understand you,” Nathan Matías added.

“You’re a bunch of pussies,” Dominick said. He turned to face the woman and yelled: “You’ve got awesome tits!”

The woman looked up at the sound of his voice. He waved at her. She stared hard before looking back down at her book, shaking her head.

“See.” Dominick turned to his friends. “Don’t you think if she understood English, she would’ve beat me flat with that rock of a bag?”

His friends laughed, Nathan Matías the loudest. “Sick, man,” he said.

It got quiet again, but Nathan Matías interrupted the silence.

“So what about the girl?” he asked. “What was she doing with her hands?”

Dominick looked back at him, suddenly annoyed that Nathan Matías was there, too. Even the name Nathan Matías pissed him off if he thought about it too much. It was like trying to make a sandwich out of American and Spanish names and then coming up with something that made no sense in either place. He’d heard it was some sort of compromise between Nathan Matías’ parents, one a Spaniard and the other a conservative Republican from Texas.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You come up dry again?”

“No way, man,” Nathan Matías said. “The Spanish girls love me.”

“Whatever,” Dominick said.

The announcer made the call for the next stop, Colonia Jardín, and repeated that this would be the last train for the night. The boys were quiet as the doors opened and closed, but no one else got on their car. They could hear high-pitched chatter coming from somewhere else as the metro pulled away from that stop and toward the next.

Their car was warm. The woman laid her book facedown on the seat beside her while she undid the last buttons of her peacoat and took it off, folding it gently in half and placing it on her lap. Once all was back in order, she picked the book up again and continued to read.

“Including Bunny Lips, I made out with three girls tonight,” Dominick said after the screeching had stopped and they were again surrounded by tunnel. He was still looking at the woman but talking to his friends. “They were all good, but Bunny Lips was the best. She got my dick so hard.”

Jorge laughed. Nathan Matías finished his drink.

“Bullshit,” he said finally. “I’d believe two, but not three.”

“Fuck you,” Dominick said. “What do you know about Spanish girls anyway?”

“I know enough to know they don’t like you,” Nathan Matías said. And for a moment it seemed like either he or Dominick was going to stand up, but Jorge stepped in. He always did.

“Don’t be a punk,” he said to Nathan Matías. “And Dominick, finish your fucking story.”

But the doors opened again, and this time someone did get on: a couple, probably about five years older than Dominick and his friends. The girl was good-looking, though her eyes were a little big. The guy had thick eyebrows, a closely shaved head, and the body of a rock climber. They found seats at the back of the car. Once the metro had lurched to a start, the girl got up and sat on the guy’s lap.

Dominick looked over at them and then back down at his own feet. The truth was he’d never really done much with girls. He’d kissed a few in Spain and once he’d made out with his cousin’s best friend back in the Ozarks. He’d even convinced her to take off all her clothes, except her panties. But when he’d tried to touch her, she’d pushed him away and said she was saving herself. He’d gotten pissed and never spoke to her again. Not that he spoke all that much in general on that trip back to Missouri.

When he was a kid, he loved the Ozarks. Every time they visited, he felt like someone’s exotic pet. His cousins asked him to teach them swear words in Spanish and his aunts and uncles cooed over his good manners and tidy style. His parents always complained about the trip in the weeks before they left, but once they were there, they disappeared into the landscape. His mom drank Coors Light on the dock and his dad talked about baitfish and the Tigers’ new quarterback. They let all the cousins call him Nick. They rarely fought.

But at some point, things changed. His cousins said he’d turned into a snob, and once, when he said it was disgusting to eat a hot dog on the street, his Aunt June had slapped him hard across the face.

“Get off your high horse,” she’d said, and his parents hadn’t done a thing.

The past two summers it was he who resisted the trip to Missouri and his parents who talked more about missing home. Spain was in full-on crisis by then, and even the American School was talking about layoffs. Whole families showed up outside grocery stores begging for food. In Madrid, a woman walked into a bank and set herself on fire. Another woman was stabbed to death by her husband. He said he’d been fired from his job and when he came home and she refused to have sex with him, he just lost it.

And then there’d been the affair. It was over now, but his mom sometimes tried to blame Spain for what she’d done. His dad told her to stop using debate tricks to avoid responsibility, and she’d yelled back that it was his idea to up and move the family to this fucking country in the first place. Mostly Dominick stayed in his room and looked at pictures of naked girls online. Nothing really dirty, but at least it made him feel good.

Dominick hadn’t realized he’d been staring at the couple making out at the other end of the car until the guy looked up and stared back at him.

“You want my girlfriend?” he asked Dominick in Spanish.

Dominick looked back down at his feet and shook his head.

“I think you do,” the boyfriend said, pushing his girlfriend onto another seat and standing up. The girlfriend tried to pull him back down.

Dominick kept his eyes on the ground, shaking his head. His friends looked anywhere but at the guy walking toward them.

“Or maybe you wanna kiss me?” the guy was saying, now standing in front of Dominick. He smelled like hashish. To avoid his eyes, Dominick looked toward the front of the car and saw the old woman staring at him.

“He didn’t mean it,” Jorge said finally.

The guy moved closer. His crotch was now in Dominick’s face.

“Say something.”

“Man,” Dominick said. “Man, I was just thinking. I wasn’t even looking.”

“Where you from, fag?” the man said.

“He grew up here,” Jorge said. “Let him be.”

The old woman continued to stare, but like Nathan Matías she was quiet. She looked at Dominick with the same expression she’d had when he’d told her he liked her tits. Like she could see through him.

When Dominick turned his head, the guy was unzipping his fly. He tried to stand up, but the guy pushed him back into his seat. He heard the girlfriend yelling something, “stop” maybe, but a second later, the guy’s dick was in his face and then Dominick felt his shirt and pants grow hot and wet. Drops of piss misted his chin. He could feel the old woman staring. He could hear the girlfriend scream and then, he was pretty sure, laugh softly. The tunnel was dark around them, but the bright lights of the car illuminated everything.

Dominick closed his eyes just as the announcer made the call for the next stop. For a moment he could see the Lake of the Ozarks. They say it has the body of a snake, but you’d never know that looking out at it from ground level. From that perspective, the lake is only flat blue-gray water and the distant roar of outboard motors. His grandmother used to call it “the little man’s paradise,” and when he was young he thought that, by little man, she meant him. Only later did he realize she was talking about poor people.

The guy was laughing hard as he zipped up his pants, and in the next second he was in his seat at the other end of the car again. He and his girlfriend got off at the next stop, still laughing.

For a long while no one talked. There was just the whirl of the metro and the sound of pages turning. Dominick could taste salt, smell sourness. The wet heat of the piss had begun to cool and his shirt clung to his chest. He remembered how he’d pissed his pants once walking home from school. He was seven years old. It was soon after they’d arrived in Spain and the sense of cultural disorientation had only made the accident worse. Everyone seemed to be staring at him. By the time he got home, he was crying hard. It was the last time he remembered really bawling like that, like it might be possible to get every feeling out and be done with them for good.

When Dominick finally spoke, it wasn’t to his friends.

“I bet you’ve got a bunny in that bag.” He opened his eyes and turned to face the woman at the other end of the car. “That’s your girlfriend, that bunny. And you take her home and sleep with her.”

His friends stared and then, as if the world had suddenly grown hilariously tiny, they both began to laugh. The woman continued reading her book, its back turned toward him now. Dominick could see it wasn’t The Alchemist after all, but something by Ernesto Sabato. He recognized the cover from his Latin American literature class the year before. It looked like she was close to the end.

“I bet you’re so lonely, you sit by yourself every night in the bathtub eating chocolate and crying about how long it’s been since you got laid,” Dominick continued, still in his seat, empowered by the sound of his own voice.

“Gross, man,” Nathan Matías interrupted. “I don’t want to think about her naked.”

“Shut up,” Dominick said, and stood up. He realized he was drunk.

“You’re so lonely you wake up in the morning to an empty bed and then you just go back to sleep.” He walked closer to her. “You’re invisible. We’ve forgotten you exist.”

He knew the woman could hear him, but she kept her eyes on her book. He thought he might take it out of her hands. Actually, he wanted to do more than that, he realized, and the realization made him sweat. He wanted to push her off her seat and knock her to the ground. He wanted to kick her in the stomach, between the legs. He wanted to hear her scream and beg him to stop. He wanted to take his dick out and piss all over her, all over that bag and her neatly folded peacoat. He wanted the roaring in his ears to stop.

The announcer called out the next stop and repeated that this would be the last train for the night. Dominick sat down in a seat by himself and wiped the piss splatter from his cheeks. Neither of his friends were laughing anymore. What that girl with bunny-soft lips had been doing with her hands, really, was pushing him away. She’d said she had to go. She’d told him to leave her alone.

As the metro slowed, the woman closed her book and clutched it with her free hand. She unfolded her peacoat and put it back on. Jorge and Nathan Matías looked down at their feet, but Dominick stared. It was the Cuatro Vientos stop.

The woman stood as the metro came to a stop. She put her bag over her shoulder, the book clutched to her chest, and passed between the rows of seats where the boys sat. She didn’t need to go that way. She could have left through the door closest to her. But she chose to pass between them.

Then, for a moment, almost as if it were an afterthought, she paused before Dominick. His pressed jeans were soaked at the crotch. He smelled like one of those defeated old men, drunk or passed out, who were now so common in the city.

It would be best if she let him be. If she just walked on and forgot about the boys on the Metro that night. That is what it means to survive as a woman. To not be anyone. But she reached down anyway, and she touched his shoulder. She held it there for only a second.

“Stop,” she said in English.

When the doors closed behind her, the silence of the metro car was replaced with the dim hum of the station. The woman turned to find the boy staring at her, his face growing smaller in the window as the metro pulled away. She stared back at him as if from across a stretch of time instead of space, until eventually the metro picked up speed and the boy and his friends disappeared into the darkness of another tunnel.

First Comes Love

They could smell it all, the couple: they could smell all the kids, the kids, the kids, could hear the kids, could taste all the sour kidness on the air. So, in her mind, the wife, Kate, reached for the biggest bottle of Febreze ever made and sprayed and sprayed it all away, and then, in additional response to having learned via email from her cheerful doctor that they couldn’t have children of their own—at least not without resources they currently lacked, i.e. and e.g. time, money, emotional strength, and good health insurance—the couple decided to get a kitten.

At least the husband, Kevin, did. Across the street from their bank was a pet shop; whenever they went to use the ATM, Kate would skip across and coo at the kittens in the window. Hello, pussens, she’d say. And hello to you, second pussens, she’d say.

Money gained or money lost, Kevin would join her at the window.

That orange guy, he’d say, grinning, is a little outlaw.

Don’t quote movie lines, Kate would admonish. But look, look how cute he is!

The night they got the news, after an extra round of margaritas, Kate slept and Kevin, restless, walked around the apartment, listening for leaky pipes and worrying about his current novel. As he held his ear beside the bathroom faucet, Kevin thought: Kitten, why not? The next day, as Kate was teaching her final class of summer school, Kevin drove to the pet shop. The countergirl assisted him when he asked what else he needed, besides of course the kitten, and he went home laden with food and litter box and little colored plastic balls with jingle bells inside. He released the kitten from its box and it scurried beneath the sofa, and he tried to lure it out by kicking a pink ball across the room.

He laughed about the name—jingle bells!

All afternoon, Kevin played with the kitten. Your name, he pronounced, holding the tiny warm animal before his face, will be Peeve. The kitten, orange-furred and blue-eyed, squinted and sneezed. She was a tabby so tiny that, when he held her in his hand, she pooled softly. He opened a can of cat food and the kitten sniffed it and walked away. Then he poured the kitten a saucer of milk. You like milk, he said, right, Peeve? The kitten lapped greedily, purring as it fed.

After she finished, she began licking her chops with startling urgency.

You okay, Peeve? Kevin asked, worried.

She looked at him, made a sound more yowl than meow, and puked out the milk.

Shit, Kevin said, cleaning up the vomit. He opened a can of tuna and spooned the fish into a bowl. How about this, Peeve? Chicken of the sea!

The kitten ate happily. This time, she didn’t throw up. Kevin stood over her, arms crossed, pleased. You and me, Peeve? he said. We’re going to be some sort of team. All three of us. We’re going to fight crime and have superhero names and we’ll dress you up on Halloween. He considered it. I think we’ll dress you as a black cat, Peeve. We can dye your fur!

The kitten bounded away, chasing a fly.

When Kate came home, Kevin wanted to surprise her. He asked her to shut her eyes and hold out her hands. The kitten galloped up to her, nosing her shin.

A kitten, a kitten! Kate said, lifting the kitten to her face. I get to name you! Don’t I?

Of course! the husband said.

So the kitten’s name became Polly.

In no way had Kevin considered the cross-country trip they were taking in two days; this is what Kate reminded him of as she cuddled the kitten to her neck.

Shit, Kevin said. I wasn’t thinking!

Kate nuzzed Polly. No he wasn’t thinking, was he, Polly?

So they needed a cat sitter. Kevin stapled signs on the four television poles at the nearest intersection, and three teenage girls called and made interview appointments for the next day. That night, as Polly stepped across the bed pillows, licking the couple’s hair, Kate and Kevin devised interview questions. They would, they decided, ask the same questions of each girl: best to observe protocols. Questions: experience with cat sitting; experience with cat owning; preference of dog vs. cat; willingness to clean up vomit (Why should we ask that, Kate wondered; Kevin shrugged: Just in case?). The next morning, the girls appeared in turn, each ponytailed, each serious—offering handshakes, wearing slacks and suit jackets, armed with their own questions: was there Wi-Fi on the premises? Hulu? Would the couple travel often? Could they bring guests? How many? What about AC? Kate and Kevin were impressed. They were not at all so composed at that age (they weren’t sure they were so composed at their current age). They asked their questions, they observed the girls with Polly, and, after the last girl left, they asked each other who they’d like best. They couldn’t decide. Who could tell? They asked Polly. She demurred. They wrote the girls’ names on index cards and put a spoonful of tuna on each card. Polly ate all the tuna.

They shrugged and called the first girl.

She spoke slowly, enunciating clearly. After further consideration, she informed them, I have decided to decline your offer.

The second girl, too: A thing, she said, has come up.

The couple began to panic, but the third girl was excited: Yay! she said. I loved Pilly!

Polly, Kate and Kevin said.

Polly! she said. I loved Polly!

Then, funnily enough, they flew to Philly, which was the name they’d been using for the city since they’d made their travel plans months earlier. We get to go to Philly! they’d been saying to each other. They told their friends: First we’re going to Philly—and then we’re going to the Poconos! Most of their friends were confused by this: Why the Poconos? Were they taking foxtrot lessons from Patrick Swayze? No, no. They were visiting Kevin’s stepbrother and the stepbrother’s wife and daughter. The three had a weekend cabin in the Poconos, and it’d been a long time since Kate and Kevin had seen them. The last time, the niece had been just a baby and now she was eleven, and they were excited to see family, especially young family.

Goodbye, Polly! they said to Polly. Behave! See you next week! Thanks, Margo! The cat sitter was looking at her phone, but she gave them a thumbs up, and off they went.

On the flight, Kate was sleeping, and Kevin reached over and tweaked her nose.

Her eyes blinked and she cried out. Then she quieted, assessed, and glared at him.

Poke a nose, Kevin said. Get it ha ha?

Kate mumbled a curse and turned back into sleep.

It was a redeye, so exhaustion upon arrival, but at least they had the whole day ahead of them. We have the whole day ahead of us! Kevin said. They were jostling on a downtown train from the airport. At one stop, a family of three, a father and two preteen daughters, boarded, the father clad in tourist gear, Phillies hat, backpack, baby blue Ben Franklin T-shirt. As the train rolled, the girls took pictures of one another with their phones, vamping, then sat together and compared the images. Kate observed their pubescent vanity, mildly annoyed. Kevin nudged her. Let’s go see the Liberty Bell first, he said. Kate shrugged. The Liberty Bell: Sure, why not? The train made their stop. They walked toward the Liberty Bell. That market there, Kevin said, possesses wondrous scrapple, ever had wondrous scrapple? Kate yawned. They passed a Chinatown, passed noodle shops, enormous old cemeteries. The city was tighter than Los Angeles: small streets, honking cars, old buildings and buildings new, and its air was heavy, warm and damp, stank of hot trash. A woman stepped from a doorway and tossed an arc of creamy water right onto the street.

Kevin and Kate laughed. They both, in their travel weariness, felt loose and easy.

What a place! they said. Pollydelphia! they said.

The Liberty Bell was the Liberty Bell. They considered the cracked bell’s shape. Kevin said, I’m not sure if it’s grand or if it’s meaningless.

Maybe, Kate whispered, that’s precisely the trick of the thing.

The bell? Kevin said. Or liberty?

Kate nodded sagely.

All day they were tourists. They waited in line for tickets to Independence Hall. They listened to the story about all the flies, the story about George Washington, the story about the heroic delegate who wore a veil; why was he heroic? They didn’t know, they didn’t listen. They saw, across the river, the factories of New Jersey. Cheesesteaks? Yes: Pat’s! They rode a tour bus to a prison famous for something Kevin didn’t quite grasp. What’s the big deal? he asked.

It’s a penitentiary, Kate explained. For the penitent.

They walked the prison’s low halls into cells with trees growing right through the concrete floors, pressing up through the concrete ceilings. Can’t stop nature, Kevin thought. He stood in a cell, alone, thinking about the word ‘cell.’ It came from monks first, he recalled, and then it came to also mean the littlest parts of the body. The little homes in the body with all the little bits. Sometimes, he thought, those bits that failed a person.

He pressed his hand to the chalky wall. He breathed in the must.

He tried to imagine it. Being stuck here. In this sad cell. For years. In silence.

It sounds awful, he said to Kate.

He’d left his cell and had come upon her touching the tree in her own cell, next to his cell—not with her hand. She was touching her forehead to it, in communion.

That’s because, she said, eyes shut, voice sorrowful, it is awful.

Was, Kevin said.

Kate tiredly opened her eyes. Was, she said. Is, she said.

Same same, Kevin said.

They left the sad prison and rode a bus to the museum. Kate held her fists high beside the boxer statue. Yo Adrian, Kevin said, I am leaving, I am leaving. Kate grinned. They walked up the grand steps, too travel-tired to jog. At the top, they touched fists. Inside the museum, they wandered the rooms, and in each room, each gallery, they debated which picture they’d take home. I prefer the lady with the glowing eyes, Kate said. I’ll hang her on the front door.

I believe, Kevin said, his wife jumped out a window. While, he added, she was pregnant!

Kate frowned. Who wife? she asked. The Russian poetess?

Kevin shrugged. He wasn’t very sure what he knew or didn’t know.

They peered through the peephole at the reclining naked lady.

Where the men can see it all, Kevin said. Get it?

Kate rolled her eyes and they kept walking, through the museum, out of the museum, through the narrow city streets, beneath the city hall, past the new skyscrapers, past parks and donut shops and pizzerias, walking all the way through the friendly if stinky city. And everywhere: children. Babes bandoliered to moms’ chests. Toddlers straining against monkey-tail leashes. Can we see the fanatic later, Daddy? pleaded one boy, this at the prison. Can we, can we please see the fanatic? Of course! the father said. Fanatics! Kevin thought. WTF? And sulking teens, shoulders scraping the sidewalk, sulking parents looking in generational frustration at the teens.

But happiness, too: cheerful families in matching T-shirts, jogging, taking pictures, pointing, posing, laughing. Babies in strollers, squawking. A baby puked on a father’s shoulder; the father laughed widely. Whoa, nice job, Theo! he said, patting the kid on the head.

You have to be positive, he explained to Kevin. Then it’s a good time, all the time.

That, Kevin agreed, is a good rule of thumb. Hear that, Kate?

But she wasn’t listening. They were in line at the famous donut shop, and she was frowning at the donuts in the display case. Kevin thought about nudging her and repeating the question, but he let it go. He let it all go. All along that day, Kevin wondered if she were thinking about it too: no kids. He wondered if she felt sensitive. Sorrowful. Probably not; Kate wasn’t the sorrowful type. Kevin felt a little pang; he didn’t mind kids. He might, he thought, even have been a good father. Though he’d have to change, take life more seriously.

But I could change, he thought. I’d do a good job.

It’d been well over a year of trying, and the effort had worn them to nubs. Every month they’d driven an hour in LA traffic to the clinic where the nurse would take the plastic cup of Kevin’s sperm off to a lab where the sperm was enriched in a bath of orange vitamins, spun into energized motion, and gathered into a tube that, later, in the exam room, the fertility doctor slid hurtcrampily into Kate’s uterus and there discharged, setting the dumb little fuckers on their delicate mission. Each time, the little assholes failed. And, too, over a year, every single week, Kevin shot Kate in the belly with a drug that made her tired and angry, bruised and trembly. All year-plus-long, Kate felt emotionally thin; all year, Kevin felt emotionally thin. Instead of sex, Kevin jerked off into plastic cups. This, he’d think, tugging, sucks. This, Kate would think, looking at the bathroom wall as he pushed the needle into her stomach, fucking sucks.

And for what. For kids! And in the end, all that effort for naught.

That night, Kevin asked her. Hey, he said. You thinking about it, too?

They were in their tiny old hotel, with the elevator that didn’t work and the thin coffee and the stale pastries laid out each morning, swarmed by the guests; they sat in their tiny room, eating takeout Indian food and drinking too-warm cans of local beer and watching the Phillies game (Kevin understood: Phanatic). They were exhausted, their feet swollen with tourism. The air conditioning unit pumped icy air, though at meager distance; they sat close, facing it, wearing only their underwear, dipping spoons in dal, bringing rich spoonfuls to their mouths.

Kate set her spoon down and looked at him quizzically. Huh? Thinking about what?

Kids, Kevin said, exasperated.

Kate snorted. She took a bite of dal; mouth full, she said, I was thinking about Polly.

And Kevin felt so much love. This, he thought, is my wife!

What do you think she’s doing? Kate said. Right now? Polly?

Sleeping or eating or purring, probably.

Sleeping, Kate decided. Another beer?

Yes, please, Kevin said, gratefully.

And that was it: that was their day in Philadelphia.

 

Next, the Poconos. They were excited as they drove through the greengreen Pennsylvania landscape: they’d slept well, they were in a strange land, they felt free of constraint, hungry to live, and they were happy to see Kevin’s family. Kevin’s stepbrother Eric greeted them outside his cabin in the woods. He held to his shoulder, absurdly, an axe.

You made it! he said. Yumiko! Leyna! he called to the cabin. They’re here! He directed Kevin to a parking spot and they parked and he gathered their bags from the trunk. While this is paradise, he explained, it’s also dangerous. Every night, he admonished, striding to the cabin’s front door, remember to check for ticks. Check your scalp, your crotch. Check your buttcrack. Check your hoo-hah, Kate.

His daughter Leyna laughed. Hoo-hah, she said.

I’m serious, Eric said, tightening his eyes. No one wants fucking Lyme disease.

Eric and his wife Yumiko were immigration lawyers in New York. Leyna was eleven. Eric was from Arizona, like Kevin, but Yumiko was from Queens, and she wasn’t quite five feet tall. She and Eric had bought the cabin as a future retirement home, and Eric had insisted for several years that Kevin and Kate visit. Kevin felt guilty it’d taken so long, and guilty that he didn’t know Leyna, his only niece (if step-niece), as well as he should. Sometimes Yumiko sent links to pictures of Leyna: Leyna skiing, Leyna swimming, Leyna doing karate. Leyna was an impressive young woman; that she seemed, in most of the photos, to either be laughing hysterically or scowling at the photographer (Eric) made Kevin and Kate like her all the more.

So, Kate asked Yumiko, who stood in the kitchen peeling asparagus, you like it here?

I fucking hate it, Yumiko said. If Eric died today? I’d leave and never come back.

Kate grinned. At least you’re safe against zombies here.

Yumiko swiped the peeler along the asparagus. Zombies can all fucking die for all I care.

Oh, god, Mom, Leyna said. Drama queen much?

I know, I know, Yumiko said. She patted her daughter’s head and looked at Kate. I’m supposed to try to be nicer. I’m supposed to be working on that. Being nicer. She set the peeler down and leaned to Leyna. Because everything we do is for other people, isn’t it? she said, her voice sarcastically sweet. Because all that matters is other people, isn’t that so?

Kate laughed. She adored Yumiko.

Outside, Eric was giving Kevin a tour of the property. Eric had spent the spring clearing a trail that would be, he explained, exactly one mile, wending along steep slopes, beneath a maple and birch and hemlock forest, crossing twice over a low creek and through a boulder-strewn clearing where, he said, he liked to camp out overnight.

You camp alone? Kevin asked.

Eric nodded. The ladies won’t go with me, he said. Do you like fireflies?

Do I like fireflies! Kevin cried. That’s like asking if I like chimichangas!

In summer, Eric said, you step out of the tent to piss in the middle of the night and the sky is glowing with them, and the stars, and it’s just so fucking silent and enormous. He looked at Kevin thoughtfully. Want to camp out tonight?

Kevin shrugged; he was worried about ticks. So instead they all went to the store and bought fireworks and that night set them off in the darkness and drank. Whenever Eric poured shots, he gave Leyna a little bottle of yogurt drink, and she toasted and tipped it back.

Cheers, you drunks! she said. Cheers!

Cheers! they all said back, laughing.

After the fireworks, everyone was quiet and tired. Eric had started a fire in the fire pit, and everyone watched the flames pensively.

We just found out, Kate admitted. We can’t have kids.

Eric shook his head. That’s life for you, he said. Being a motherfucker.

I never wanted to be a mother, Yumiko said. Leyna was walking past, arms laden with firewood. Yumiko pushed her leg out, halfheartedly trying to trip Leyna. I still don’t, she said.
Leyna hopped over her mother’s leg with ease. She dropped the firewood and wiped her hands.

Why not? she said to Kate. Why can’t you?

We tried, Kevin said. It’s not like we just gave up right away.

Leyna frowned. What does that mean?

He leaned forward. Say there’s like four doors that lead to having kids. One is the normal door, the first door that everyone sees. They go up to it, turn the handle, it opens, they go in. That’s where you just screw and have kids. You know all this, right?

Leyna rolled her eyes.

For some people, though, Kevin said, that first door is locked.

It’s locked?
And the next door, Kate said, is this magical fucking place where the woman gets shots that make her weird and depressed and the doctor shoves things into her that should make babies come.

That’s the second door.

But it’s locked, too? Leyna said.

Locked, Kate agreed.

The third door, Kevin said, is even harder than level two. That door is called in vitro, and it costs twenty-five grand, and there’s no guarantee that if you pay, the door even opens.

That’s bullshit! Leyna shouted. What about door four?

Door four, Kate said, is adopting.

Leyna considered this. Adoption, she said, is sort of weird.

Leyna! Eric scolded.

It is, though, Kevin agreed. Probably most people get over it. But you sort of have to know in advance you’re the type of person to get over it.

Kate said, He thinks I’m not that sort of person.

Are you? Yumiko asked.

Kate shrugged. Not really.

Leyna was looking at the dirt, thinking. She raised her head. That sucks, guys.

Kate reached out and gave her a hug, and Leyna squirmed in happily feigned resistance.

Anyway, Kevin said, to make a long story short, we gave up at level two. We’re quitters, he said, and that’s why you get to take care of us, Leyna, when we’re old and frail and crazy. This whole trip is a scouting mission to see if you’re capable. We’ve decided you are.

Leyna looked at Eric. Do I have to?

Of course not, Eric said. So, he said to Kevin and Kate, no kids. That does suck. But it’s just another thing to accept, right? How life is going to be.

I accepted it when I was ten, Kate said. I didn’t even like kids when I was a kid.

Yumiko laughed; Eric laughed; they all laughed, even Leyna. Plus, Eric said, if you think about the pros and cons, it’s basically a tie. He ruffled Leyna’s hair. We’ve lost a lot of time to this one, a lot of attention we could have given to each other.

He’s right, Yumiko agreed. It’s Leyna time all the time.

Leyna beamed.

Maybe, Eric continued, it’s a good thing, having kids. For democracy, I mean.

Everyone looked at him.

What? he said. So what if I’m stoned?

Kevin said, It’s like books. It’s like a person is a standalone novel. You know? You get to the last page and that’s it: the end. But a family is like a whole series of books. Like Harry Potter: you finish the one, and that’s nice, but it’s even better because you know it’s going to keep going. Even if your own book is ending, it’s nice to know the story isn’t totally over.

You’re a confusing person, Leyna said.

Yumiko said, It’s just a tradeoff: happy solitude now for sad loneliness later.

Kevin nodded in agreement, and they all felt pleased with their handle on the situation. Then it was bedtime for Leyna. She didn’t want to go. She screamed, she writhed. She yelled at them all because they got to stay up; she yelled at the forest, because the forest got to stay up.

Yumiko winked at Kate. See what you’re missing?

Eric bent down to Leyna. Leyna, he said, I need you to go to bed because tomorrow we want to tour the coal mine and hike to the waterfall and come home and make stuffed pizza, remember? And when you’re tired in the morning you can’t do all those things, but you really like doing those things, remember? The four of us can all stay up and get drunk and feel shitty in the morning and still do all those things. When you’re old enough to do that, you can stay up, too, okay? We’re all in this together. I do this for you, you do that, and your mother does—

Leyna yawned. Then she wished everyone goodnight and went to bed.

The real trick to parenting, Yumiko explained, is talking your kids to death.

The next day they were in the deepest darkness that Kevin and Kate had ever known, hundreds of feet below the earth. The tour guide had said, Ready? and before anyone could answer, he killed the lights. Listen, he said. They listened. All there was to hear was existence. A trickle within the slow vast seethe of the earth. They could smell more than they could hear—the sweetness of dirt, the tang of rust. In the pitch black, Kevin waved a hand before his face. He thought he could see it, but he knew it was only a picture in his mind; he asked Kate to wave her hand before his face, and he saw nothing, nothing. Blackness. He wondered if everyone on the tour also thought of Descartes, of what it meant to be. Ten people on a coal mine tour in Pennsylvania, thinking of French philosophy.

This, Kevin thought, is a totality. The place for the grandest thoughts. It’s not so different from sleep.

A hand grabbed his own in the darkness. A small hand. Leyna. He grasped her little hand and felt her smiling in the darkness beside him, and he felt so grateful, so comforted.

Beside him, Kate was thinking, too. Too much life in the world. Kids, sure; she really didn’t care about not having kids. But also all the green they’d seen in Pennsylvania. All the trees. All the grass. People. Breathing. Right now they were in a hole in the earth that thousands of men had died in, and because why? Because life needed death to live.

How about, she thought, no life? And skip it all?

No kids. The years ahead of her now were a vast emptiness. So much to live out, she thought. Maybe Kevin and I can go on a cruise that will never end. I would like, she thought, to see foxes. Or a sloth. No matter what, she thought, we’ll be happy. Happy enough. Happyish.

In the last email, her doctor had also mentioned a cyst that Kate would have to get removed. There was no rush, but it annoyed Kate. More unwanted life. I’ll frame it, Kate thought. Have the little thing cut from me and framed. I will make a scrapbook of my body.

And Kate suddenly felt so lonely, there in the deep dark mine, caught in immense silence within the crust of a planet floating through the universe.

Who would be reassured by that? Who wouldn’t feel terribly alone?

After, as Eric drove home, Leyna and Kate played cards in the back seat.

Hey, Kate said. What’s that?

What’s what? Leyna said.

Kate pointed at Leyna’s neck, at a tiny dark spot. That, she said.

Yumiko leaned forward.

Fuck! Yumiko cried.

What? Eric said.

Did you check her last night? Yumiko grabbed Leyna’s chin. Did you check yourself?

Leyna shook her head.

Fuck! Yumiko shouted. She took a breath. Eric, she said, pull over.

It was a tick. Blooddark and bloated on Leyna’s neck, nestled within her soft black hair.

I got this, it’s fine, Eric said. He produced a pair of tweezers from the glove box. Kevin, you want to do it? Remove the tick? It’s good to know how to do these things.

Yumiko smacked his shoulder. This isn’t a survivalist lesson.

Eric nodded and went to work. Leyna squirmed. Her face was pale.

Well? Yumiko said.

Eric scratched his head. I didn’t get it all.

On the drive to the ER, Eric moped. They’re all survivalist lessons, he muttered. Kevin and Kate were quiet. On her phone, Yumiko frantically read all she could about Lyme disease. Everyone was silent, everyone was scared for Leyna, scared of the bug attached to her neck.

Leyna knew she was fine. They were all so nervous; it was annoying. Of course she was fine. She saw Kevin watching from the front seat. He winked at her, and she scowled at him, warmly.

Kevin grinned. He knew she was fine, too.

Oh, darn it, said the PA at the urgent care center. I missed it, too!

Yumiko nearly punched him out, but a moment later, he whistled. There we go, got it. He dropped bits of brown bug into his gloved palm. These little guys, he said, and all the trouble they cause. He pulled his glove off. We’ll have the labs back tomorrow, and we’ll call, but you did a good job, I’m sure it’s fine, okay?

Okay, sure, fine, but still Yumiko worried, still Eric worried. That night they made dinner quietly; they didn’t drink; they went to bed early. It was a little disappointing: Kevin and Kate wanted fun, more fun. And once again, life got in the way. The next morning the email came, and it was indeed fine, no Lyme disease, no problem. The worry lifted away, everyone was in high spirits, all that worry blown and gone forever. What worry?

Worry: such a strange thing, Kevin thought. How easily it vanished.

Sort of, he thought, like hope.

And then they had to say goodbye to Eric, Yumiko, and Leyna, and they felt sad again.

Halfway back to Philadelphia, Kevin said, So. I have a story idea.

Do tell, Kate said.

I will tell, Kevin said. So you follow these characters and they do these things, whatever the story is, who cares. Maybe it’s a novel. And then at the end, they die or whatever.

You already said this, Kate said. At the fire.

The thing is, Kevin said, the novel doesn’t end. It switches to someone else.

Weird, Kate said.

But it’s not weird, Kevin said. It’s like life. Writing is about life. Life isn’t about people; life is about life. If there’s a book where the world blows up? The next chapter should be about the world next door. Or, even better: the photons of the blown-up world shooting off into space, what happens to them? What grand adventures do they go on? Don’t you want to keep reading?
Kate yawned. I’m so ready, she said, to go home.

To see Polly?

Yes, she agreed. To see Polly.

But that night their flight was canceled. A storm surge, that afternoon, flared up and tore through Philadelphia. They were at the airport, exiting their rental car, just as the rains came. They had to wait damply in the terminal with thousands of other strandeds, awaiting the fate of their flight. Waiting. Waiting. Canceled. For two days, canceled. Stuck two more days in Philadelphia.

They tried to make the best of it. The weather turned. There was no Lyme disease. No kids, either, but that evening the city heat was gone, the trash stink was gone, and the city was dry and quiet. The clerk at the hotel’s front desk frowned as the couple approached.

Forget something?

Kevin tugged at his rain-soaked shirt. Not so much us as nature. Can we get a room?

Sure, the clerk said, skimming the computer screen. All we have is the accessible room. No AC. It costs less, though? Is that all right?

Kate laughed. All right? No, I don’t think it is, she said. But we’ll take it.

 

IN THE MUSEUM OF TENSE MOMENTS

I tell my daughter I’m taking her to the new museum for her birthday present.

“But what if I don’t want to go?” she asks. “What if I want another Bot Buddy for my birthday present?”

“You’ll like it,” I say. “And you don’t need another Bot Buddy.”

Of course, I’m not sure she’ll like it. It might be too soon to go; the museum is so new, the crowds are still terrible, there are still kinks to work out. The average TripAdvisor rating is only three stars. It’s expensive. Also, maybe Jane is too young: she just turned eleven. The museum is intended for older audiences—but not too old. You have to sign a waiver promising not to sue if you have a heart attack or suffer from “emotional distress.”

“All the cool kids are going,” I say. “The high school kids.”

This is true. You see them around town in their MTM T-shirts, which feature a big bloodshot eyeball and the slogan I’m Not Telling.

Jane is going through a difficult stage, spending too much time in her room with her VR animals and her Bot Buddy, Naomi—she works on a virtual ranch she designed when she was seven with her VR father before the Glitch. She stays up late feeding tigers and roaming the camp with her rifle, stalking a shadowy bandit that steals eggs and sets fires. Her teachers report that she’s intelligent but unmotivated. Instead of thought-waving with other kids she just watches movies on her finger screen. She made Naomi punch another kid’s Bot Buddy and then denied it, even when there were goggles everywhere recording it.

I tried to tell her stories of my own childhood, the things I’d endured, my own loneliness. And look, I turned out fine! But we don’t seem to share the same language. I told her how I used to carry a phone device in my pocket or in my purse, how I had to send text messages to people to know what they were doing. And her grandmother—wow, she had to wait by the phone for a boy to call her. It was a plastic machine, I told Jane, and it hung on the wall with a long curly cord, and it rang when someone wanted to talk to you.

She said, “I have no idea what any of that means,” then clamped her VR set on and went off to hunt the bandit.

 

The line begins a block away. A cold rain is spitting down, and we shiver in our coats. I’m glad I made Jane wear her boots. We haven’t been to the city in almost a year, not since we last visited her VR father in his midtown loft. I designed him myself. He played the piano and the trumpet. He told jokes. He said, Atta girl. I gave him a face like a friendly lion and hair like a twentieth-century rock star. He wore skinny ties and chinos and had big yellow paws. He was perfect, and Jane loved spending time with him, but when the Glitch happened, he was deactivated and I never got around to reformatting him.

“Are you nervous?” I ask Jane, as we shuffle toward the entrance.

“A little,” she says. The other people in line are in their thirties, forties, and older; a few give us disapproving glances, and one woman says, “This is no place for a child.” But the scanner beeps  green as Jane and I enter, and I feel vindicated—especially when I see the scoldy woman beep red and be taken aside by Nurse Bots for extra Health and Wellness scanning.

You have to deactivate all of your screens, and Bot Buddies aren’t allowed past the cloak room.

The marble hallway opens to a set of eight rooms, and the crowds stream into them, disappearing into more and more rooms. There are no Bot Docents; there is no map.

“I guess just start anywhere,” I say.

“I wish Naomi was here,” Jane mumbles as we follow a line of people into a brightly lit room. “What is that?”

“It’s a bench,” I say. “And an old man.”

Because that’s what it is. A green wooden bench, the kind you used to see in parks. And a white-haired man in black trousers, a tattered blue windbreaker. His face is both gray and yellow. He’s hunched, staring into space.

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s sitting.”

“Ohhh, he’s a Povvy.”

I forgot that she even knew about Povvies. They were pretty much swept out of the country a decade ago.

We watch as a young woman in blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater walks into the exhibit. She has long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Hey,” the man calls. “Pretty lady.”

“Oh no,” says Jane.

There’s some shoving behind us, and a man whispers, “God, I hated Povvies.”

“You got any change?” the Povvy shouts, but the woman ignores him, walking past, looking straight ahead. “So I can buy a meal? I just want a meal.”

“No,” the woman says, and then another glass door swings open and she walks up to a window that says ice cream and hands a piece of paper to a man in a paper hat.

“That’s money,” I tell Jane.

“I know that.”

The old man is walking toward the woman with the ice cream. “I saw you,” he says. “I see you. You said you didn’t have any money, but you did. You too good to talk to me?”

“Let’s move on,” Jane says, so we follow a stream of people into the next room, where three suitcases churn around on a conveyer belt while a woman and her tiny son stand next to it, gripping each other’s hands. All the suitcases are marked not yours.

“They don’t have their stuff,” I explain to Jane. “And there’s nothing they can do about it.”

“Huh,” says Jane.

We make our way through more rooms. There’s a teenage boy sitting on a single bed, staring at a phone—“See, it’s one those old ones,” I tell Jane—picking up the handset, putting it back down again. Picking it up.

In another room: a dining room table with six people eating silently, not making eye contact. Two sputtering red candles on the table, a turkey carcass.

“Who are those people?” Jane whispers, and I say, “I think it’s a family.”

I’m starting to think it’s all getting through to her: the ways the world used to work, all the opportunities for missed connections and miscommunication and misunderstandings and helplessness. We hurry past blue flashing lights, past small children holding out candy bars. A man with a clipboard, calling, “Just a moment of your time.”

A woman sits by herself at a restaurant table and stares at her wristwatch, a concept I once tried to explain to Jane. Then she takes out a phone device and starts pushing its buttons.

“She can’t use thought-wavers to find out where her friend is,” I say. “She has to try to find her with that phone, using words. But her friend isn’t answering.”

“Is her friend dead?” Jane asks, her eyes wide.

“Maybe. But the woman won’t know it until later.”

“Ohhh,” says Jane.

“Do you see how easy it is for you?” I tell her. “You have it so easy.”

She doesn’t say anything.

We enter a room strung with crepe streamers, a disco ball twirling from the ceiling. A girl Jane’s age sits by herself in a chair while a group of boys stands nearby, laughing. One of the boys keeps looking at the girl. When he looks away, she looks at him. There’s a window behind them, rain slanting in bright shards through the night sky.

“It’s a middle school mixer,” I explain. “He wants to dance with her and she wants to dance with him, but they don’t have thought-wavers or finger screens.”

“I can’t stand this,” Jane says. “It’s awful.”

I watch the boy drift over to the girl. “It’s beautiful,” I murmur, but Jane has already turned away. She’s staring at her fingers even though the screens are deactivated.

“This isn’t even a real museum,” Jane says, loud enough that several people stop and look. “I want Naomi and my animals. I want to catch the bandit before he burns down another fence.”

I watch the boy and girl staring at each other, their faces flushed and terrified. The last time I felt this way was when Jane was still a baby, before the screens and the lion-father, when my heart was like that glittering ball twisting just out of reach, suspended and cracked open. Maybe now is the time to tell Jane that the bandit is me, that I’m keeping an eye on her, tiptoeing through her animal kingdom and setting small, harmless fires. I open the traps and let the wild rats roam free. Sometimes I’m a snake slithering just out of sight.

I turn to tell her how proud I am of her, that I’ll buy her whatever she wants in the gift shop. “This wasn’t so bad, was it?” I say.

But she’s gone.

Maybe she’ll come back, or maybe she’ll find her way to the exit, and the doors, and the world beyond it. In a moment, I will look for her, calling her name, stopping strangers and asking, “Have you seen my daughter?” They will think I’m just another exhibit, and maybe I am.

Through the big window, the rain has turned to snow, swirling past the silver buildings. We don’t have snow anymore; I don’t think Jane has ever seen it.

The Greensboro Review Literary Award Story BONHAM FERRY ROAD

Little Joe hit Buster from behind with a three-foot section of galvanized steel, hit him so hard the single flat note of it echoed through the welding shop like a bell. The whole shop stopped working and watched Buster drop to his knees. His eyes rolled back and he fell flat to the ground. There had been no argument, no warning. When Joe ran back through the front office and out to the street with the pipe still swinging in his right hand, no one tried to stop him. After he was gone, I watched while the others gathered around Buster, shouting at each other to call an ambulance, to chase Joe, to do something. Instead I simply walked out the back door where my truck sat in the parking lot. Joe had changed everything and I needed time alone to think it through.

I left the shop and drove through Bonham, down Main Street, over the tracks at the far end of town where a green tractor hung its sickle bar over the levee’s edge and laid waste to the goose grass on its slope. The news of Buster and Joe followed me like a shadow. A sheriff’s car roared past with its carnival lights bright beneath the overcast sky. I drove down to the river with the cold wind at my back, down Bonham Ferry Road where Buster and his wife, Sarah, lived on a hump of ground raised up out of the bottoms. The cornfields, cut down to great stretches of stubble, left the road naked and lonely in the emptiness. I drove to Buster’s house even though I knew Sarah wasn’t home. If Buster was still alive, she’d already be on her way to the hospital in Hannibal.

The house was empty and quiet. I parked at the foot of the long gravel drive and shut off the engine. It had been three years since the house I rented in town had burned along with almost everything I owned in the world. When Buster heard about the fire, he insisted I stay with them until I got back on my feet. He drove me to his place through the tall summer corn after work, telling stories the whole way to take my mind off things.

“There’s no ferry on Bonham Ferry Road,” Buster told me. “They moved it to a better landing downstream twenty years ago. There’s only one reason for people to be down here now. That’s the way I like it.”

Buster put me up in his spare room for over a month while the insurance company processed my claim. I wore Buster’s clothes, ate dinner at his table. While he was gone in the evenings throwing darts or shooting pool in town, I would sit on the back porch with Sarah and watch storms sweep down into the bottom from the south.

Now I was glad Sarah was gone. I needed time to get my head around what had happened to Buster, to understand what it meant for us. The truck windows fogged up as I sat in the cold, blocking my view of the empty house and the ruin of the cornfields.

 

Sarah called after midnight, but I was still awake. “Everyone’s gone,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

“Is he dead?” I asked. There was a pause. I could tell she had been crying.

“No,” Sarah answered. “He’s up in the hospital now. They’re not sure about anything yet. He may never wake up again.”

“Maggie’s boy got him good,” I said. “The whole shop saw it happen.”

“Christ, Charlie,” she said. “Have you talked to the police?”

“Not yet.”

Her uneven breathing filled the silence. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.

I remembered the way it sounded when Joe took his shot. I remembered the way Buster lay on the floor, still and quiet as a dead thing. “It depends on who finds Joe first,” I said. In the dark of the new moon I stared at the dim outline of the bedroom window while Sarah breathed into the phone, saying nothing. She knew where Buster stood in the town.

“I just hope the cops find him first,” I said. “The way Buster treated Maggie, Joe had a right to do something. Cops may understand that. Buster’s friends won’t.”

“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” Sarah whispered.

I kept staring at the ghost of the window. “Call your sister. She’ll come stay with you.”

“I want you to come over, Charlie.”

“I can’t.” The neighbor’s dogs were barking wildly. “Call your sister.”

“I love you.”

“Don’t say that,” I told her.

Her words sounded ridiculous there in the dark with Buster still breathing, with his friends out for blood, with Joe on the run somewhere. I hung up the phone as the German shepherds slammed into the chain-link fence like fists knocking on a door.

 

I remember seeing Little Joe pinned up against the wall of Pop’s Bar in town just a year before, his face crushed against a framed picture of Johnny Cash, his cheek bleeding from the broken glass. Buster had Joe’s right arm wrenched up behind his back. The boy screamed as Buster put his weight into him, a high-pitched, unnatural scream as the tendons stretched tight. At fourteen, Joe was already a big, awkward boy, but Buster was a man. His thick neck flushed red even as he smiled. He was drunk. I was drunk. The whole bar was drunk, watching Buster put the boy into the wall.

Old Pop came up from behind Buster and put his face up to his ear like he was telling some big secret, but I knew what Pop was whispering. I wanted to say the same thing. “Put him down. He’s just a boy.” Joe’s face was livid with hate and pain. He screamed as if Buster was tearing his arm clean off. Buster tried to smile again, as if it was all a joke, a lesson Maggie wasn’t strong enough to teach her own boy, but the scream changed everything. We all knew better.

“Go easy on him,” said Pop’s wife.

“You don’t want to break his arm, do you?” said Buster’s best friend, Randy, laughing.

I wasn’t laughing, but I may as well have been for all the good I did. When Buster finally let him go, Joe staggered toward the door, sobbing. He cradled one arm with the other and kept his eyes on the floor.

“Go home to your momma, Little Joe!” Randy jeered. “Go home!” echoed the other voices in the bar. For Christ’s sake, go home, I thought.

Joe pushed his way out the door without looking back. Old Pop just shook his head and went back to business. The show was over.

 

The cops came to the welding shop the next morning and finished taking statements. Mrs. Murphy, the boss’s wife, stopped me at the time clock and frowned. “They’ve been asking for you, Charlie,” she whispered. “They want to know why you took off out of here so fast yesterday. I told them you were just upset about Buster. We’re all upset about it. What Maggie’s boy did was awful.”

“Awful,” I said. Maggie’s time card was still untouched in its slot. “Where is she?” I asked.

Mrs. Murphy frowned. “She tried to ride with Buster in the ambulance. Thank goodness the sheriff stopped her before Sarah showed up. Right now she’s waiting at home in case Joe turns up.”

When it came time for me to give my statement, I told them everything I could remember. “We were working just before lunch yesterday when Joe came in. His mom, Maggie, is the receptionist here. Before anyone could stop him, Joe took a piece of pipe off Petey’s workbench and hit Buster in the back of the head with it. Buster had his back to the door. He never saw it coming. Then Joe took off.”

When the cops asked if I knew Joe’s reason for going after Buster, I thought of the murder in Joe’s eyes when he swung the pipe. I remembered how he looked at Pop’s Bar, screaming, his arm pulled back.

“Buster fooled around with Maggie,” I told them. “He beat her up pretty bad a few times. Everyone knew about it.”

“Are you friends with Buster?”

“I’m friends with Buster’s wife,” I answered.

 

Maggie started flirting with Buster from the day she began working at the shop. It was early summer. Buster rode his Harley to work that morning, his sunglasses hiding everything from her, but Maggie grew up in Bonham and knew he was married. Buster wore his thick gold high-school ring on his left hand instead of a wedding band. In fights he would lead with his right and end it with his left. “A lot of people wear scars from that ring,” I told her when she first asked me about him. His buddy Randy had a four-inch scar beneath his right eye from a fight with Buster over a girl their senior year. The next day they were friends again. Buster was like that.

Maggie didn’t seem to care that Buster was married. She didn’t care that almost everyone knew someone Buster had beat up over the years. Buster was confident and dangerous. Welding for the shop made him more money than others, and he wanted her, that was clear. Maggie was young and pretty in a careworn way. She smiled at him every morning and blushed when he teased her. The first and only time she did that to me, I almost fell in love with her, too. I guess Maggie was dangerous in her own way.

 

I first remember seeing Buster, Maggie, and Little Joe together at the county fair the summer their affair started. Joe was thirteen then and seemed to like having Buster around. Buster threw money around all day long, buying nachos and Cokes for Joe and tickets for the roller coaster. When he thought no one was looking, he put his arm around Maggie.

Mrs. Murphy fanned herself in the thick summer air and smiled at them. “I think it’s sweet how Buster’s started looking out for Maggie’s boy.”

It wasn’t sweet. As night fell and Buster got more beer in him he got less careful with Maggie. Soon Joe was alone spending Buster’s money on the carnival games while Maggie sat on Buster’s lap in the beer garden beneath the hard tent lights. It was then, with Maggie draped drunkenly across Buster, both of them laughing like fools, that the whispering started.

“Where’s Sarah tonight?” Mrs. Murphy asked. I knew Sarah worked the night shift every third weekend at the nursing home on Route 3. Somehow that made her suspect, as if she gave Buster the opportunity to cheat on purpose. Rumor in town was that Sarah refused to give up her job and raise children, denying Buster the family that everyone believed would settle him down for good. Maggie was too close to Buster, too alluring, and Sarah was at fault, as if Buster also had something missing inside him, some great space that Sarah refused to fill.

I remember how they all looked that night, so good the whole town pretended that they were a real family and Sarah was the enemy of all that was good and wholesome. At the time I thought they might be right. I could still laugh about it, remembering the stolen nights Sarah and I spent in the spare bedroom while Buster was out fooling around with Maggie.

 

Night in the bottoms is a special kind of dark. During the new winter moon, with the air so clear and cold you can see the faint blur of the Milky Way, you feel utterly alone, like an astronaut in space. I drove down Bonham Ferry Road toward the steady light from Sarah’s house as if it was the only light left to follow, the only shelter in the cold void between the river and the bluffs. I knew there would be people at Sarah’s that night. It was the only safe way for me to see her.

Buster’s friends sat out on the front porch smoking cigarettes beneath the stars as I walked up. “How’s she doing?” I asked them.

“Just got back from the hospital,” Randy said. “Buster’s still hanging on.”

I nodded and looked around at their hard faces. “I know Sarah’s got plenty of help right now, but I just wanted to stick my head in the door and see how she’s holding up.”

“The cops said they’ll try Joe as a minor,” Randy said, ignoring me. “He’ll walk out of jail on his twenty-first birthday like nothing ever happened.”

“He’s only fifteen,” I said.

Randy shook his head. “He’s a man now.”

“There’s nothing we can do about the law,” I told him.

Randy dropped his cigarette on the porch and ground it out with his boot. He studied me while the faint murmur of voices drifted out from the house. I could hear Sarah talking, trying to get rid of Randy’s wife and the other women who’d followed her back from Hannibal. I could still hear Minnesota in her voice. She had two older brothers, both Swedes, tall and blond with thick shoulders and bright white teeth.

“We figure Joe’s holed up somewhere in the state forest,” Randy said at last. “He used to go hunting up there with Petey’s boys. Tomorrow we’re all going out to find him.” He stared through the shadows, waiting for me to answer.

“What do we do once we find him?” I asked.

Randy paused, a heartbeat. “We bring him back,” he answered. “Are you coming, Charlie?”

I couldn’t get in to see her. Randy and the rest of Buster’s friends stood on the porch like guard dogs, their eyes half closed, waiting for someone, anyone to challenge them for her. “What time are you heading out?” I asked. “I’ll meet you there.”

The light from the kitchen shone on Randy’s scar, making it seem new. With Buster, all was forgiven the minute he slapped you on the back or bought you a drink. No hard feelings, no questions. Buster’s friends were ready to hunt down Joe out of love, not fear. Only love could forgive pain. Without it, pain festers into hatred, as it had in Joe, in Sarah. In myself.

 

I kept my dad’s old Winchester .30-30 stuck in the back of a closet. When I was twelve, I stole the rifle from his locked cabinet and walked into the woods alone, my pocket full of cartridges, hoping to escape far enough out into the trees to avoid being caught. An hour later, on the banks of Walker Creek with the rifle in my lap, I sat trapped between the desire to shoot the gun and the temptation to run home. I loaded the magazine, levered a cartridge into the breach, opened it, kicking the shell to the ground, then loaded another. In time I started sighting in everything around me: a beaver bullying his way through the honeysuckle, the last sycamore leaves waiting to fall, my own shoe, as if to dare fate.

Then the dog came. She was a ragged, feral mutt, white and black, full of burrs and half-starved. She shambled down the bank to the cold water and drank deep, ignoring me. I could see her ribs beneath the fur and the knots of bone along her back. The deer rifle went off like a cannon, driving my shoulder so hard I fell back against the muddy bank, yet the shot was good. The dog dropped where she stood.

My father had never been a good shot. He used soft points to help his chances even if it meant wasting meat. The dog’s entry wound was little more than a vague blemish in the thick white fur behind her shoulder, a bit of blood, a pale glimpse of naked bone. The other side, where the fattened slug came out, was an obscene mess. I stood trembling over her while the creek bubbled across the rocks, my ears ringing as I fought the urge to throw the rifle down and run away.

When I got back I cleaned the rifle like my father taught me, careful to remove any evidence of what I had done. Then I locked it away and didn’t touch the gun again for fifteen years.

 

We gathered before dawn to look for Joe. Randy stood spring-tight with his old scar livid in the truck lights. His brother Ray smoked in silence, hulking up behind him like a ghost, every bit of six and a half feet tall and built like an Angus steer. Petey crouched down and drew pictures in the fine gravel of the drive. Bob Cotton brought his four grown boys, all dressed in brown duck coveralls with morning beards and clean new rifles. Amos and his half brother Roger shared sweet black coffee from a thermos lid. Ross from the farmer’s co-op chewed the last of his breakfast with his eyes on the ground. I recognized Skip and Paul from the river, and John the ferry pilot with his buddies Dave and Jake and poor Dumb Bob who opened and closed the gates when the boat landed. Buster’s only neighbor, Buddy Creech, came with his binoculars and a cooler full of sandwiches his wife made that morning. The Smith boys were down from Hannibal and Old Pop was there too, still half-drunk as he rooted around in the back of his truck for his gun.

Everyone was there to look for Joe, familiar faces even in the dark, familiar voices, all but a handful. Six of Buster’s friends from across the river stood at the edge of the group, muttering back and forth, smoking cigarettes like soldiers.

 

What Little Joe did was hardly in cold blood. No one could keep a secret in Bonham, and Buster didn’t even try. When trouble started between him and Maggie, it happened in front of everyone. They would argue in the bar or Buster would show up to throw darts, alone and angry. Some days they would work all day without saying a word to each other.

One day, Maggie showed up to work with her eyes red, holding her purse close to her ribs, keeping her face turned away from everyone. She sat down at her desk and let the first phone call of the morning ring itself out without answering. When Mrs. Murphy cleared her throat, Maggie jumped in her chair.

“Where’s your head this morning?” the old woman asked.

Maggie shrugged and settled back against the hard-backed desk chair, obviously in pain, as if she could hardly stand the weight of her own body pressed against the wood. I stared at her from the break room and stirred sugar into my coffee. Sarah had warned me about Buster from the beginning, how he acted when he got angry.

“Buster’s just an overgrown boy,” she told me. It was our first night together. She paused, pressed her hand against her stomach. “No, I guess he does think, at least with me. He never hit me where it would show, not even when he was drunk.”

That night I lay beside Sarah on the hard spare bed and felt my gut coil up tight as I studied her face. I ran my thumb across her cheek, so delicate, so easy to break. It was something she and Maggie had in common. Both were small. Buster stood six foot four. He could carry pieces of steel I couldn’t lift off the ground. Buster wore heavy steel-toed boots everywhere he went. Buster could’ve killed either one of them without trying.

“Do you think he hits Maggie?” I asked. It was the first time I had mentioned Maggie. Sarah seemed startled to hear it, but sighed and draped a thin arm across my chest.

“The only good thing about Buster and Maggie is that he stopped hitting me,” she said.

Driving out Bonham Ferry Road with Buster after my place burned down, I felt like we were friends. Now hatred sat heavy on my chest.

Sarah seemed to fall asleep after that. I watched the numbers on the clock glow above her pale shoulder. Buster played darts in Hannibal every Friday until well after midnight. We were safe for a while. Finally Sarah stirred and turned her back to me. “If he hasn’t beat her yet, he will,” she said. “There’s no reason for him to change. And she’ll take it, too, you just watch.”

As I pulled out of her driveway, my stomach was tight at the thought of Buster’s headlights coming toward the house. There was no ferry on Bonham Ferry Road. I had no business being down there in the middle of the night when Buster wasn’t home.

 

As the sun came up through the trees, I hiked into the woods with the boys from the ferry to look for Joe. Randy had decided we were the worst fuckups of the bunch.

“Go check the campsite up by the spring,” he told us.

I knew there was no chance Joe would hide somewhere so obvious, but I didn’t argue. Randy took Buster’s out-of-town buddies to the caves along the bluffs where Joe was sure to be hiding. I led our group to the least likely spot with my father’s old rifle slung, unloaded, over my shoulder. Dave and Jake had never hiked in the forest before. It wouldn’t have mattered if Dumb Bob had been born there. No one would ever follow him anywhere except off his ferryboat.

We found the tiny campsite late in the morning, five miles off the main trail in a grove of shabby hickories at the top of a hill. The fire pit was cold and empty. Dead branches and leaves lay undisturbed on the ground. Even Dumb Bob could tell that no one had camped there in months.

“It’s a long way back,” he said, sighing. Dave and Jake nodded and crouched together next to the fire ring.

“No shots yet,” said Dave. “I guess no one found him.”

We sat together beneath the hickory trees and waited, telling stories about Buster while the rising sun warmed the air. None of us knew what we were waiting for. Jake shared the rumor that Buster ran cocaine across the river, how he hid cash all over his sprawling property.

A cold spread through the backs of my legs even as the sun climbed higher. Out in the woods I could hear the first stirrings of a warm fall day, the kind of day every deer hunter hates. I could remember a warm November weekend long ago when my father came home from the hunt without a deer, sweating in his coveralls, his face red. We sat together in the kitchen with the windows open and the green smell blowing through the screen. We stared across the table at each other, helpless against the warmth. Now the warm sun and cold ground fought a silent war inside me. My hands shook as I wiped the sweat from my face.

Dumb Bob told the story of Buster and Dottie, the dancer he’d met at the River Club before he got mixed up with Maggie. Bob was in awe that anyone could have a girl like Dottie. “He just reached out and took her,” Bob said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how he did it.”

“Coke,” Dave said under his breath. “That’s how you date a stripper.”

“You remember the night Buster fought that trucker outside Pop’s place?” Jake said. “He put the guy down with one punch, broke his nose just like that. Everyone thought it was over.” He rubbed the back of his neck and shrugged. “Then Buster started kicking the poor guy as hard as he could while he was crawling away, one shot after another. The guy tried to cover up, but it didn’t do much good. If I hadn’t pulled Buster off of him, he would’ve killed the guy. I’m sure of it.”

I hadn’t seen the fight with the trucker, but I could picture it in my head, except in my mind it was me on the ground trying to cover up while Buster took his shots. Every time I left Sarah I thought about what would happen to me if Buster found out. “Do you think Maggie ever bothered to fight back?” I asked. The guys stared back without answering.

My father never touched me, not once, but he was an angry man. There were days I’d come home from school and hear him slamming around the kitchen cabinets or pacing up and down the hallway in his heavy boots and a scream would rise up from my gut and burn its way to the back of my throat. If I wanted to, I could count the days I held that scream in my mouth like a bird bashing itself bloody against its cage.

When Buster put Joe against the wall at Pop’s Bar, I recognized the sound. Later, when Joe took his shot at Buster, I knew the boy was empty. The scream had left him wide open. The day I left home, my father hugged me like nothing had ever come between us, as if we were normal, he and I. I hugged him back with that same scream still burning inside me. Sitting there talking about Buster, I realized that it was still there. I had never dared to let it go.

“Would you do what Joe did?” I asked the ferry boys. “If someone hurt your mother over and over again, would you have the guts to make it right?” They still didn’t answer.

Three gunshots echoed through the trees. Dumb Bob jumped to his feet and raised his rifle to his shoulder even though the sound was far away. We waited in tense silence for a fourth shot, but none came. A cloud of gnats hovered between us, drawn out by the warmth of the day, lured close by the smell of our sweat. When nothing else came, we started back down the trail. This time I marched last in line, nursing a familiar, sick feeling. I was glad the others couldn’t see my face.

When I left the hunt, I didn’t bother making an excuse and the others didn’t ask. It was almost dark when I pulled out of the park and headed out toward Buster’s dead-end road.  I knew Randy had found Joe, that the gunshots meant the hunt was over. I knew Sarah was back at the house alone. Hot and sweating in my coveralls, I drove to Buster’s house with my window wide open. The air grew cold as the sun went down and the wind swept out of the north.

The house was dark and quiet, the driveway empty, the door to the pole barn open and swinging. Everyone had gone. I walked slowly around to the back where Buster’s mud-caked boots stood empty beside the door. I walked and listened for voices, looked for light behind the curtains. The back door was locked. I found the right key after four tries and opened the dead bolt with a dull scrape of metal.

Buster used to sit by the back door on a kitchen chair and smoke with the door cracked, blowing his smoke out into the night in an effort to appease Sarah. The smell of tobacco lingered there, guarding the door with the threat of him, the unquestionable fact that this was his space, and he would be back to claim it. Walking in that night, with Buster gone, I noticed the empty space he left behind. The memory of his cigarettes was old and faint, obscured by the warm food smell of the kitchen and the sweat that stuck the shirt to my back.

The house seemed empty, still as frost. I walked into the master bedroom and stared down at their bed. Sarah always folded back the covers. Now the blankets were tucked up beneath the pillows like a closed door. Someone else had made it up that day.

A sudden creak of weight shifting on the floor braces at the back of the house made me jump. The noise came again and I followed it slowly out of the bedroom and down the dim hallway toward the back of the house. Buster kept a loaded .38 revolver beneath the bed, but I left it alone. I could see the back bedroom in my mind, the mismatched furniture, the stiff, cheap sheets on the bed. An old rocking chair sat in the corner by the window, hard and uncomfortable. The nights I spent with Sarah were always in the back bedroom. I would sit in the chair and watch her dress in the moonlight, my weight shifting back and forth on the floor with the same rhythmic creak. Someone was there now. I recognized the desperation that hung heavy between us as I knocked softly and pushed open the door.

“It’s Charlie,” I said quietly.

Sarah sat in the chair rocking back and forth. Little Joe slept on the bed, his filthy clothes leaving mud on her grandmother’s quilt. Sarah looked up at me with her eyes full of the ruins of her life. I started to talk, but couldn’t.

“He showed up this morning,” she whispered. Her voice was bruised from crying. “He hasn’t slept in days. I told him I’d help.”

“He can’t stay here,” I sighed.

Sarah nodded. I took a blanket from the closet and covered him up. His face was peaceful beneath the dirt. “He’ll be all right for now,” Sarah said as she closed the door behind us. In her bedroom I watched as Sarah got undressed and slipped naked beneath the sheets. I followed with my jeans still on. She pressed tight against me and closed her eyes while I stared up at the ceiling. Their bedroom was a foreign place. My hatred of Buster was cold and useless there.

“Buster’s gone,” she whispered at last, then took a deep breath. “I love you, Charlie.”

I closed my eyes and let her words sink in. Buster’s gone.

“They called me just before you came. He never woke up.” She squeezed harder and buried her face into my shoulder. “What are we going to do now?”

I kept my eyes closed and felt my body tighten beside hers. I was in Buster’s bed with Sarah, surrounded by his things, the smell of him. After hearing the news, I felt helpless even against his memory. Buster was gone. Before, it had seemed just a matter of time before he would sit up in his hospital bed and pull off the wires and hoses that bound him. Now he was dead, his ghost just an echo in an empty room.

Little Joe had screamed when he cracked, but I was a full-grown man. My fear passed silently out of me as the truth came in. There was no ferry on Bonham Ferry Road. No dogs barked there in the empty night. In the other room, Little Joe slept for the first time in days.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story SNARES

Gordon reached across the jumble of plates for the bottle of raki. He’d lost track of the conversation around him. The taverna sat high on a hill, its balcony overlooking the Sea of Marmara, but even at a height the smell of murky water and dead fish reached his nostrils. Citronella candles flickered on the tables. Gordon filled the bottom of his glass with the aniseed liqueur and then splashed in mineral water. He swirled the glass in his hand and watched the mixture cloud. How did it happen? How did two clear liquids combine to form a hazy one?

So many things had become unclear. Three weeks ago he’d been in Missouri. Now here he was in Turkey, drinking late at night, no longer ensnared by thoughts of wife or child.

Earlier in the evening, Gordon had eaten stuffed grape leaves. He’d dipped flat pita bread, still warm to the touch, into an eggplant puree that tasted of wood smoke and garlic. After clearing the dinner plates, the waiter had brought out a handheld vacuum sweeper and, as if he were holding a silver brush and pan, had run the whirring Dustbuster across the tabletop. For dessert, Gordon had been served sweet Turkish coffee, but he’d drunk too far down into his cup and tasted the bitter grit of coffee grounds on his tongue.

Across the table, one of the experienced teachers—Matt, a pockmarked twenty-something—licked the rolling paper and twist-sealed the ends of a joint. He wore a red t-shirt with an emblem of a crescent moon and a single star, the Turkish flag. His biceps were the size of Gordon’s thighs. Matt looked up and met Gordon’s stare. He nodded his head toward a Ziploc full of grass on the table. “I scored it today in Martiköy.”

“Obviously you haven’t watched Midnight Express.”

Matt clicked the wheel on his Zippo. “Dude,” he said in mock-surfer, “you so need to chill out.” He lit the joint, dragged deep, and passed it to Kari, his girlfriend. Gordon felt certain that Matt had swapped place cards in order to sit next to her tonight.

The restaurant had been rented for the night by the school’s director. This was the first party of the year, one she called “a mixer.” In her officious manner, she’d stood at the start of the evening and announced, “I’ve jumbled you up, new teachers and old-hands.” She’d clapped. “Go. Find your places.”

A bit later, a band had played and Gordon had watched the Turkish women on the faculty dance to frenetic Eastern rhythms played on instruments he couldn’t identify—lutes and zithers, perhaps. Unlike the expats, the Turks had dressed for the evening, and many of the women had worn short skirts and tight blouses. As he’d watched their hands snake overhead, he’d felt a sexual frisson, although he knew that they weren’t dancing for him.

Now only this table of diehard drinkers remained—the others, both Turks and expats, had taken the minibuses back to campus. He wasn’t even entirely certain where they were. Somewhere beyond Martiköy. A little village on the coast. How had he missed that last bus? He was drinking too quickly, he thought, and not paying attention. Tierney had a car; he’d said he would drive them all back to campus. Tierney was ass-falling drunk, but Gordon had no choice but to wait for the man to give him a ride.

The waiters were gathered around a television at the corner of the bar where they watched a soundless soccer game, waiting, apparently, for the table of inebriated Americans to go home. The skunk-sweet scent of burning cannabis drifted across the table, and Gordon wondered how long it would be before the waiters smelled it too and called the police. “Don’t you teach civics?” Gordon asked. “And ethics?”

Matt exhaled a lungful of smoke. “I only teach the theory.”

The woman who sat to Gordon’s right was named Sheryl, and she was the new librarian. Like him, this was her first overseas job. She was divorced. Childless. She wore Birkenstocks and a linen dress, and her dark hair, parted in the middle, hung around her face. She reeked of patchouli oil, and her legs were unshaven, but he was willing to overlook those faults because she kept herself fit; because she was attractive in an earthy way. He’d decided that she might be his only reprieve from a year of sexual abstinence. The younger people had already coupled up, and the other women close to his age—thick-ankled and graying—repulsed him.

“Let’s go down to the sea,” Sheryl said suddenly.

Gordon looked down the hill to the sea. It was a steep descent along a narrow dirt path. The trail disappeared into darkness. He doubted they could hike it in their street shoes. “Sure,” he said. “If you like.”

All night he had been filling her glass when it got low, telling jokes, cupping his hand around a match to light her cigarette. He wanted to reach out casually; to wrap his hand around her upper arm and feel under his thumb the scarred circle of her smallpox vaccination, but he was unsure of his timing. Perhaps he was too drunk to make good choices. But then, he thought, that I’m aware of being drunk means I’m not too far gone.

“I love the water,” Kari said. She pinched the joint between thumb and forefinger. “I want to live on the water.”

This was Kari’s first trip outside of the U.S., and earlier in the evening she had told the group stories of her adventure: “On the flight, there was a picture of a little airplane on the television screen that showed you just where you were. We flew over Greenland!”

A cat mewed near Gordon’s feet—a group of strays had gathered on the balcony. Two of the braver ones jumped to a nearby tabletop where leftovers still remained. Others swished their tails around the perimeter of Gordon’s table. They were filthy-looking creatures, their faces puffed with scar tissue.

“I’m going to forage for food,” Matt said. He took an empty plate and began to travel from table to table.

On the other side of Sheryl sat Tierney, a man a bit older than Gordon, a long-term expatriate. A fat poseur, in Gordon’s estimation. Tierney was drinking Turkish gin, spelled on the label with a “c” instead of a “g,” a gut-rot concoction that Gordon couldn’t stomach even when mixed with Schweppes. “You know, last year’s math teacher vanished,” Tierney said. “One day he just didn’t show up for school.”

Gordon realized that he was being addressed. He had heard the story of his predecessor. He knew the man had packed a single suitcase and taken a cab to the airport, leaving the rest of his belongings in his apartment. Gordon had heard the story, and he knew the point of it: Tierney thought that he, too, wouldn’t last out his contract.

Tierney motioned for the joint and Kari handed it across the table. As she leaned forward, Gordon caught sight of her breasts under her loose blouse. The pink of her nipples. “Turkey will do that to you,” Tierney continued.

Matt returned with a plateful of odd appetizers—dolmas, half-eaten pita bread, fried fish. “We’re not just expatriates, you know,” Matt said. He plunked the plate onto the middle of the table. “We’re, like, refugees from reality.”

“Stop trying to scare us,” Gordon said. He reached again for the bottle of raki. “I think we can all cope.” He could tell what these two thought of him—that he was a naïf, a romantic, not tough enough for the expat life. It was ridiculous; as if anyone couldn’t start anew. Gordon sloshed the raki into his glass, surprising himself with the unsteadiness of his aim.

Tierney flicked a bit of fish off the table and the cats leapt upon it, fighting and hissing.

“Does nobody else want to go down to the sea?” Sheryl reached out and took the joint from Tierney. She took a toke and blew smoke out through her nose. Gordon wondered what it would be like with her. Her armpits, he thought, like her legs, would be unshaven.

“You’ve heard there’s a spook on campus?” Tierney seemed to be speaking directly to Sheryl.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Kari announced, as if this opinion were a sign of her intellectual integrity. She wasn’t pretty, Gordon decided. Her lips were full and her eyes were large, but her features were overexaggerated.

“He means a spy,” Matt said. “CIA. One of my students says he heard it from his father, who works in intelligence. If you believe that.”

Sheryl held out a forkful of salmon and a large black cat inched toward it. “What would those fuckers be doing at our school?”

“I’m betting on Gordon here,” Tierney continued. “A neo-con James Bond for the new millennium.”

Gordon wondered if he really might be the spook that Tierney was talking about. That would be fitting irony, wouldn’t it? Tierney would have to revise his opinion of Gordon as a Midwestern know-nothing.

Spook wasn’t the right word. He hadn’t been recruited, not exactly. There had been no papers signed, but he had been in contact with a woman who worked for the CIA—Marnie, an old classmate. She had been interested when he told her that he was moving to Turkey, and she’d suggested they talk again. Unlike Matt and Tierney, she valued his opinions about the world.

Suddenly one of the waiters ran from the bar, shouting, clapping his hands, towards their table. Shit, Gordon thought, we’re busted. The waiter must have caught the scent of the marijuana. But no—the man kicked at the cats, which scattered and leapt over the wall of the balcony into the brush, and then he returned to the television at the bar.

Matt pinched out the last of the joint and threw it over the balcony. He picked up the bag of pot from the table and crammed it in his pocket. “The sea,” he said. “To the sea.”

“Let’s take the bottles,” Tierney said. “We’ve paid for them.” He picked up the gin in his left hand and handed the bottle of raki to Gordon. “Be careful with that, Gordon,” he said. “Drinking is the expat’s disease.”

Gordon rose to his feet. He took a step and realized that he would have to concentrate to walk a straight line to the door. As he passed the bar, he noticed their waiter reaching for the telephone.

Tierney stopped in front of Gordon at the exit and turned back to face the waiters. He touched the top of his head. “Allahaısmarladık,” Tierney said.

The waiter covered the receiver with his hand. “Güle, güle,” he replied.

They walked around the back of the taverna to the seaside path.  “What was that you said?” Sheryl asked.

“It’s a kind of goodbye,” Tierney said. “The person leaving says, ‘Allahaısmarladık,’ which means something like ‘God watch over you,’ and the person left behind says, ‘Güle, güle,’ which is ‘smilingly, smilingly.’”

“It sounds like it’s easier to be the person who stays than to be the person who goes,” Sheryl said. “‘Güle, güle’ I can say.”

Staying and going, Gordon thought. Jeanne had stayed; he had gone. The memories sneaked up on him when his guard was down—when he lay in bed waiting for sleep or, like now, when he was drunk.

He had been fixing breakfast when Jeanne had come into the kitchen. “There’s a puddle in the bed,” she’d said. “It doesn’t smell like pee.”

He’d looked at her, not understanding.

“I think my water broke.”

She was only in her twenty-third week. They rushed to the hospital, but the baby was coming too early, far too early. “Not viable,” the doctors said, an ugly term that he still couldn’t shake from his memory. Jeanne went into labor; she seemed to be in shock when the contractions started. “Push,” the nurse shouted. “Think about what you’re doing.” When the baby was born, the nurses wrapped it in a blanket and let Jeanne hold it. A girl. Gordon had held out his pinkie finger to the baby, and she grasped it with her tiny hand. She lived only a few minutes.

Jeanne never recovered. After the baby died, her milk came through, just as if she had a child to feed. It leaked through her bras and T-shirts. It left stains that wouldn’t let her forget the child that they had to bury. Gordon couldn’t escape his vision of the baby, its flesh almost translucent, but Jeanne’s pain was deeper, unfathomably deeper. There was no consoling her.

She started smoking again, buying cartons of unfiltered Chesterfields. Her skin was bad and her complexion sallow. When he suggested therapy, she turned on him, like a cornered animal. “What do you know about it? When have you ever grieved?” He was shocked by her anger; it was as if she was another person.

Gradually he gave up. He wasn’t wanted. He took the dog, and he found a single trailer outside of the city in an area surrounded by woods. It meant a long commute to school, but the rent was cheap, and he liked the feeling of living in the country.

 

The descent to the beach was even steeper than Gordon expected. The path was a soft silt that gave way under his feet; he found himself grabbing at clumps of stiff grass to keep from sliding all the way down the hill. His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness, and he could barely see what lay in front of him. Gordon took a swig from the bottle and slipped again, spilling some of the raki onto his shirt. He felt the cool alcohol evaporating against his chest.

Sheryl stopped suddenly and Gordon bumped into her. In the darkness, his hand brushed against her ass. “I’m going to kill myself in these,” she said. She took off her sandals and carried them.

“Fuck!” he heard Matt yell. “Fuck, I’ve lost the goddamned bag of pot.” Gordon could hear him shuffling his hands around. “Shit. It cost a fortune.”

Gordon thought again of Sheryl, the momentary contact, the firmness of her flesh under his hand. He imagined them together; would she want to be on top? The thought excited him.

“Found it,” Matt said. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

Gordon was already so sick of him. Matt, who had lived in Istanbul for one year and hence regarded himself an expert on all things Turkish. And then there was Tierney, with his practiced blasé air. They thought Gordon was a Missouri hick—poorly traveled, poorly read. But he knew about Turkey. He’d read histories and guidebooks; he’d always wanted to travel. After Gordon had gotten the job in Istanbul, he’d watched the opening scene of From Russia with Love on DVD—Bond arriving in Istanbul by rowing through the Basilica Cistern. And when he first arrived in Turkey, he’d stood in the cistern, amid the myriad columns, thinking that he had done it. Istanbul was no longer a pipedream.

The trail flattened out at the bottom. Gordon’s eyes had begun to adjust to the dark. The beach was rocky and littered with plastic bottles and beer cans. At the water’s edge, they picked their way across huge slabs of stone. They sat on the seawall.

“I’m going to roll another one,” Matt said. He took out the bag from his pocket. “Shit. I can’t see if there are seeds in here or not.”

“Let’s chance it,” Kari said.

Gordon took a swig from the bottle of raki. Drunk straight up, the taste of licorice was overpowering. He sat on the rock wall and listened to the waves.

“The cats were pretty,” Kari said. “I’ve hardly seen an animal since I got here. Except lizards.”

“Muslims don’t keep dogs.” Matt flicked open his lighter. His face was briefly illuminated by the flame. “They think they’re unclean.” He blew out the end of the joint, letting it fade to a glow, and then passed it to Tierney.

“You want to see a dog?” Tierney pinched the joint and took a  long toke. “Go to the zoo at Topkapi. They’ve got dogs in cages.”

A flashlight combed the beach some distance down the coast from them. Crabbers, Gordon thought. At night, after the tides, one could spotlight crabs on the beach. They froze in the light as if mesmerized and waited to be netted.

“My dog died last year,” Gordon said. He wondered why he had begun this story. He knew it was a bad idea. “She was an Irish setter, and my wife named her Priscilla, after Priscilla Presley. Our first dog had been named Elvis.”

“Do you know,” Tierney said, “that in Turkish you drink a cigarette instead of smoking it?”

“Then you must be fucking thirsty,” Matt said, reaching for the joint.

Gordon took another drink from the bottle. The story was unlikely to maneuver him any closer to Sheryl’s bed, but still he blundered ahead. “Priscilla’d had pups that I’d given away, but she still had her milk. And then this kitten came into the house. It was just tiny, but Priscilla adopted it. The dog used to nurse the kitten. I’d never seen the likes.”

This would be a good place to stop, he thought, while the story was still cute, but the raki had loosened his tongue. “Then Priscilla disappeared. One day she just didn’t come home.” He paused, hardly able to speak. “And the kitten didn’t understand that all dogs weren’t his friends. He got torn apart. Strays.” Gordon felt the tears coming, but he wouldn’t be caught crying over the story. He took a swig of raki from the bottle and pretended to choke. He held his hand up to his throat.

Sheryl pounded his back. “Can you breathe?”

“Give him some water,” Kari said.

“Fuck that,” Matt said. He flicked the roach into the sea. “If it’s not mixed with raki, he won’t know what to do with it.”

The beam of a flashlight swept across the area where they sat. “Oh shit,” Tierney said.

It was the polis, two young cops. They looked like boys, brothers perhaps, barely old enough to shave. The shorter cop aimed his flashlight from face to face, and Gordon held up his hand against the glare. Bigger brother spoke brusquely in Turkish.  No one answered, and it occurred to Gordon that the others were too drunk, or too fucked up, to be of much use. “Do you speak English?” he asked.

The taller one spoke again. Gordon could recognize only the anger in the voice.

Tierney turned to Matt and whispered, “Itch-day e-thay ot-pay.”

“Speak English,” Matt said. “They don’t.”

“Get rid of the smoke!” Sheryl hissed. “Get a brain.”

“I’ve dropped it. Don’t worry.”

Tierney seemed to be waking up to the situation—he began to speak to the cops in Turkish. The cops pointed up and down the beach, talking loudly. At last Tierney turned back to the group. “Drunk sweep,” he said. “They say we can’t have liquor here.”

Gordon thought back to the empty beer cans littering the beach. “Tell them we didn’t know.”

The shorter cop suddenly grabbed Tierney’s arm and pulled him towards the road. “I don’t think he cares.”

The other policeman gestured for the bottles. He took the gin in one hand and the raki in the other, and then he gestured with the whole of his outstretched arm, pointing up the beach, across the rocks and to the road, where a paddy wagon sat.

Although he’d made a fool of himself by talking about the dog and the kitten, Gordon thought, at least there were a few parts of the story he’d had the sense to censor. He hadn’t told them about moving away from Jeanne. And he hadn’t told them that the dog hadn’t simply disappeared—when Priscilla didn’t come home, he’d gone looking for her.

Gordon had walked through the woods that surrounded his trailer park. “Priscilla! Here girl,” he’d called out, listening to hear her scurrying through the brush towards him. He walked hours before he found her. She looked unmarked, but she was dead. And then he saw the dark wire wrapped around her neck. Strangled to death. Poachers had set a snare under this fence to catch whatever animals might be using the run.

He had called Jeanne, drunk. “Priscilla died,” he’d said.  “Can we talk?”

“Let me get this straight. You’re upset because the dog died.” She’d begun to cry. “Gordon, just leave me the fuck alone.”

It was soon after that Gordon had remembered his dream of Istanbul. He’d realized he was free—no wife, no pets, nothing to tie him down.

 

The paddy wagon smelled of drink and body odor. Three dirty, ragged men, habitual drunks from the look of them, sat glumly on the bench that lined the far side of the van. Gordon took a seat on the bench opposite them. Sheryl and Kari sat next to him, and then Matt and Tierney pushed in.

The taller of the two cops climbed into the wagon and sat opposite Gordon, still holding a bottle in each hand. The short cop climbed into the front of the van, a wire screen separating him from them.

The paddy wagon lurched forward onto the road. The van braked hard and he slid into Sheryl. “Sorry.” He wondered if he might put his arm around her.

“Are they really going to run us in?” Sheryl asked.

“Cool,” Matt said.

Gordon felt horribly, painfully sober. The raki had left him with a licorice slosh in his stomach, but his mind felt clear. The others, incredibly, seemed not to understand their situation.  “Look around at these people,” Gordon said. The hard-looking Turks in the wagon stared at the floor and did not speak. “They’re scared shitless. This is no joke.”

“What?” Kari asked. “Is drinking some kind of hanging crime here?”

The van picked up speed again, and Gordon looked for a handhold. His back bounced against the hard backrest. The van slowed suddenly and then thumped through what seemed to be an open trench. Gordon went airborne.

“These roads are un-fucking-believable,” Kari said. “There are more potholes than road.”

“Once, on the way to Martiköy, I flatted two tires,” Matt said. “The second time I bent a rim.”

Sheryl laughed. “There must be a good Roman road down there somewhere.”

“If it was a Roman road, it’d be straight,” Tierney said. “These things are goddamned goat paths.”

“Can none of you focus on what’s happening?” Gordon said. This trip was bad news—he didn’t know much about the Turkish police, but he had a feeling that there would be no reading of Miranda rights. “We’re being taken to a Turkish jail.”

“Dude, chill,” Matt said. “We were drinking on a beach. They’ll make us pay a fine.”

“Maybe the waiters phoned in the marijuana,” Gordon said. “Have you thought of that? You all weren’t very subtle about it.” Through the front window Gordon could see headlights coming straight at them. The driver made no move to change lanes.

“Do you think we should offer up some baksheesh?” Tierney asked. “I’ve bribed my way out of a speeding ticket but never out of a Black Maria.”

The headlights in the windscreen grew larger and brighter. Gordon gripped the bottom of his bench with both hands. Shit, he thought, we’re going to die before we’re even interrogated.

“Maybe I really should have ditched the pot,” Matt said.

“You don’t still have it,” Kari said. “Do you?”

“Fuck, yes.” Matt patted a noticeable bulge in his front pocket. “I only got it today, and I paid way too much for it.”

The headlights seemed to be right on top of them. “Allah, Allah!” the driver shouted. He twisted the wheel hard. Kari slid off the bench and went to one knee on the floor. Sheryl clutched at Gordon’s arm. He could feel the van begin to tip. The driver jerked the wheel again and the van rocked from side to side before settling on its suspension.

“Holy shit!” Sheryl said.

The taller cop had also toppled to the floor. He knelt now by the wire mesh, still holding their bottles, and shouted at the driver.

“They drive like children in pedal cars,” Matt said. “They don’t steer, they just point their cars in a direction.”

“Lane markers and road signs are just advice here,” Tierney said.

Gordon wanted out of the van. He wanted to go home to his lojman and lie down; he wanted this day to end. So many things had gone wrong, starting with his morning classes. In Kansas City, Gordon’s strength as a teacher had been that he made math fun. Every teacher wanted to be liked—it was the great secret of education—but a math teacher had to work so much harder than most. Gordon had kept a pair of Groucho glasses in his desk. He’d played Jeopardy with the homework answers. Each March, he celebrated Pi Day.

But here, the students weren’t amused by him. They insisted that they had exams to prepare for, pressing him to move faster, but the math was more advanced than anything he’d looked at in years. There were problems in the book he couldn’t solve. Sometimes he’d resorted to asking his best students to show their work on the board and then nodded appreciatively. But today he’d been caught—two of the students had disagreed on a proof and had asked Gordon who was right. “Let me double-check my work and get back to you on Monday,” he’d said lamely.

How the fuck could Matt have held onto the marijuana? What if they were searched at the station?

He thought again of his meeting with Marnie. If the worst happened, if they were jailed, would she have some pull? Could he mention her name to the embassy? Perhaps that would somehow compromise her.

The paddy wagon seemed to have reached a town. Gordon could see streetlamps overhead, and the driver turned down one road and then another. At last they stopped. The short cop opened the back door, and the Turkish men began to pile out. The other policeman motioned for Gordon to follow.

Outside the van, the night air was cool. “Where are we?” Sheryl asked.

The Turks began to single file into the police station, as if it was a drill they knew well.

Tierney glanced up and down the street. “Welcome back to Martiköy, Gordon.”

 

During Gordon’s first days in Turkey, the school had organized a bus to Martiköy so the new teachers could do their shopping. The Saturday market had sprawled throughout the city, and Gordon had left the group to explore. Vendors’ tables filled every available space on the sidewalks. In America, food was wrapped, sanitized, sealed; here, huge bags of spices sat open, whole sacks of saffron, stick cinnamon, and cumin. Pigeons pecked at sunflower seeds until they were shooed away. Gordon went a block further and the smell of the fishmongers’ stalls assaulted him.

Women haggled over prices and men walked arm in arm.  Despite the heat, the men wore long trousers; some had jackets and woolen skullcaps. Many of the women wore headscarves and their bodies were made shapeless by long raincoats. He saw one woman dressed head-to-toe in black being led by a man—no slit was cut into the veil for her eyes. Gordon had worn shorts, and a white-haired man slapped his cane into Gordon’s bare legs as he passed.

He tried to make his way back to where the bus had parked. Before setting out, he had picked out a merchant selling huge stainless steel pots as a landmark, but since then he had come across others selling identical goods. Was this mosque the same one that the van had parked near? The world had become a mass of the unfamiliar. Surely this was what it was like to grow old, to become senile and confused. He felt nauseated as he realized that the bus had surely departed. At last he found a taxi driver who understood where he wanted to go. “Twenty dollar,” the driver said. Gordon nodded. He was probably being ripped off, but what else could he do?

When the taxi had pulled up at his lojman, a group of teachers sat on folding chairs in his lawn. They’d cheered as he got out of the taxi. “Gordon! Gordon!” Matt had handed him a can of Efes beer, and Tierney had said, “We always have a bet at the start of the year—who’ll be the first person to get lost.” He’d motioned to the others. “We’re your backers.”

 

Inside the police station, the group was herded into a dimly lit room filled with Turkish men, picked up, apparently, on earlier sweeps. The men stood quietly, heads bowed. Many held their hands protectively in front of their genitals.

“This isn’t looking so good,” Tierney said.

No shit, Gordon thought. Already he was wondering how he would explain this to the headmistress. In the country for less than a month and already busted. Matt with his fucking marijuana. Were they allowed to call the embassy? “I should tell you something,” he heard himself say, but then he stopped and began again, whispering. “If this gets bad, I may be able to help. Before I came here, I talked to a CIA agent,” he said.  “An old girlfriend. She says she works for AID, but everyone knows it’s some kind of light cover. When I told her I was coming here, she asked me to keep my eyes open. I can contact her.”

The others stared at him for a long moment without speaking. At last Tierney said, “So you think you’re the spook?” There was a laugh in his voice.

“Maybe,” Gordon said. “I don’t know.”

“Haven’t you just blown your cover?” Kari asked.

“Dude, I never took you for a snitch.”

Gordon studied Matt. “What do you mean?”

“A snitch. A fink. A narc.” He patted at his bulging pocket. “Who do you think she wants you to spy on? It’s not like you speak Turkish. You don’t have access to secrets. If she wants you to spy on anybody, it must be on us. The other expats.”

“Maybe she was just talking,” Sheryl said. “‘Keep your eyes open.’ I mean, it doesn’t sound like you’re on the payroll.”

This wasn’t the reaction Gordon had expected. He’d pictured himself as a quiet hero, helping with national security, fighting terrorism. He’d thought they might be grateful for his help. He’d thought Sheryl might be impressed.

The two young cops sprawled in folding chairs, smoking strong cigarettes. The room was quiet. At last, a mustachioed policeman entered. He looked around at the silent group. When his stare fell on Gordon and the others, he called out in Turkish. The brothers sprung to their feet. They dropped their cigarettes on the floor.

“We’re foreigners,” Tierney said. “Yabanciyiz.”

The police officer spoke in harsh tones to the two young cops, who looked away. After a moment, he walked up to Gordon’s group, motioning with his hand. “Gelin,” he said. “Come.” He led them out of the room. At the exit, he pushed the door open and wagged his finger in their faces. “Only a drunk on bar,” he said. “Never in beach.”

“Right,” Matt said. “On bar only.”

“We understand,” Gordon said. Matt, the idiot, was asking to be searched. “It won’t happen again.”

Sheryl sniggered, at what Gordon was unsure.

“Iyi Geceler,” the policeman said. “Goody night.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Gordon said. He walked down the street and the others followed, laughing. At the corner, he heard footsteps behind him. “Bakarmisiniz?” the tall policeman called. “Raki. Cin.” He handed the bottles to Tierney and jogged back towards the station.

Maybe Tierney’s right, Gordon thought; maybe there is some kind of madness to this place. Gordon had arrived thinking only of the adventure, but these past days had been harder than he had expected. Chaotic.

Already he was sick of living out of a suitcase. He’d brought only a few days’ worth of clothes; he had nothing for the colder weather that was approaching. In his shipment there was a trench coat that he’d bought in Kansas City, a Humphrey Bogart kind of coat, replete with epaulets and belt. He’d chosen it not only for its practicality but also because he associated it with foreign correspondents and spies. But his shipment had never arrived. He was using a jam jar as a drinking glass. He had to wash out his few clothes in the kitchen sink.

Yesterday, Gordon had left school early and caught a ride into Istanbul. He’d gone to the shipping agent’s office with the belief that he might get a firm answer if he spoke to the man face-to-face. “Very good news,” the agent had enthused. He was sweaty and beer-bellied. “We are only waiting for your shipment to clear customs. Perhaps tomorrow.”

Gordon felt his jaw tighten. It was the same thing he’d heard every day for the past weeks. Always tomorrow, Gordon thought. “Does a bribe need to be paid?”

“We take care of baksheesh,” the man said. “Don’t worry. Soon. Perhaps tomorrow.”

“So I can call you tomorrow?”

“Yes, yes, call. But perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow tomorrow. We will let you know.”

And then Gordon had begun the trek back to school. Without a car, the journey took hours: a ferry ride across the Bosporus, a crowded commuter train, and then a minibus. Near the ferry station he’d been surrounded by a pack of grubby shoeshine boys calling out “Shiney? Shiney?” Gordon had waved them off. “Suede,” he said. “Don’t shine.” But one of the kids daubed brown polish on the leather regardless. Gordon had shoved him, perhaps harder than he’d intended, and the boy had tumbled face first, his shoeshine equipment clattering on the cobblestones. Gordon had turned quickly and walked away, but the boy had followed him, reciting all the English words of abuse that he had heard others hurl at him, words he probably didn’t fully understand: “Piss off! Bugger off you little prick. Go to hell.”

 

Gordon looked down the street. No traffic. No pedestrians.

“We’re miles from my car,” Tierney said.

Most of the shop windows were dark or shuttered, but opposite them, a window display of headless mannequins dressed in puffy wedding gowns glowed violet-blue under an ultraviolet light.

“We’re not going to find a taxi now,” Matt said. “We might as well wait until morning.”

“What a window dressing,” Sheryl said. “It certainly makes me want to get married.”

Tierney held up the half-empty bottles. “Let’s have a drink.” He sat on a park bench facing the bridal gowns.

“I just want to get home,” Gordon said. “I want to find my bed.” His wave of sobriety had passed. He realized that he would feel very, very sick tomorrow. Or perhaps it was today.

Sheryl slumped onto the bench next to Tierney. She held her head in her hands. Gordon hesitated a moment, and then sat next to her. Kari and Matt glanced at one another and folded themselves up cross-legged on the sidewalk, facing the bench. Tierney placed the two bottles on the ground in the middle of the group. “Şerefe,” he said.

Gordon leaned forward for the raki. As he reached for it, his hand outstretched, he watched the liqueur begin to slosh inside the bottle. The entire bottle, he realized, was vibrating. He sat back and put his hand against the wooden bench; it too trembled. And then in the shop window the black lights flickered off; the wedding dresses vanished. The streetlights, too, faded to a glow and then went out.

As suddenly as it began, the vibration ceased. He became aware of the din of the street. Sirens wailed and horns honked, each with its own steady cadence. Car headlights flashed on and off along the otherwise dark street.

“Holy fuck!” Sheryl shouted above the hubbub. “Was that an earthquake?”

“A little temblor,” Tierney shouted in response. “We get them all the time.”

One by one the alarms began to quiet. “I’m so freaked,” Kari said.

Matt said, “Don’t worry. It’s over. It was nothing.”

“I don’t know what happened to the power, though,” Tierney said. “That’s unusual.”

As Gordon’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized that Matt and Kari had begun to make out. He could just see Matt’s hand moving under her blouse. He couldn’t stop himself from watching.

The lights flickered back on in the shop window, and Matt and Kari separated. Gradually, the overhead lamps began again to glow. Tierney picked up the gin and took a swig. “You see? All’s well that ends well.”

“Does it end well?” Sheryl asked. “Is this a major fault zone? I worried about lots of things before I took this job—terrorism, hospitals, the blood supply. I didn’t think about earthquakes.”

Tierney shrugged. “Someday there’ll be a big one, and then Istanbul will be screwed. A lot of these buildings will collapse like sandcastles. I’ve seen trucks hauling used rebar—they wait for the concrete to set a little, and then they pull out the rods to use somewhere else.”

Gordon reached out his hand to touch Sheryl’s arm. He meant it as a gesture of reassurance, but she stiffened. “What are you doing?” she asked.

He had failed so miserably this evening to impress her. He reached for the bottle of raki and took a pull. He felt suddenly dizzy. Why was he so unable to make a connection with this group?

No matter where you go, there you are, he thought. There would be no secret dockings in the Basilica Cistern. He wasn’t James Bond, only a would-be snitch. He wasn’t free, only alone. No one gave a good goddamn about him.

Matt and Kari engaged in another embrace, no longer worried about an audience. She moaned softly. “I’m going for a walk,” Gordon said.

He put the bottle on the ground and rose unsteadily to his feet. The sidewalk seemed to move with him, and he stumbled forward. He made his way across the street. In front of the bridal shop he stopped and studied the oddly-glowing dresses.

Gordon thought again of his dog lying dead under the fence. The snare, a cable with a locking slide, had been designed to tighten as the animal struggled. It gave back no slack. If Priscilla had stayed still, if she hadn’t tried to fight her way out, she might have lain there until he’d found her. Instead, she had twisted and turned, pulled against the wire, until it strangled her to death.

Gordon tried to force the image from his mind. He leaned forward and rested his head against the shop window. From behind him, across the street, he heard again the clink of bottles. A burst of laughter. Gordon lifted his head and turned to face the group.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, PART IX: FREDDY VS. THE MADSEN BROTHERS

Part I

 

1984.

A grainy picture, speckled with static and imbued with blue as if someone had taped cellophane over the television: this is how I saw the original, the first, the best. The sound was harsh or, at times, muffled and inaudible. My parents had left me with my brother Owen for the evening. He was fifteen, five years older than I, and said, “Tonight, we’re going to watch what I want to watch.”

The commercials for A Nightmare on Elm Street had been playing for weeks, and the other kids in my elementary school were already talking: “There’s this burned-up guy, and he kills you in your dreams.” Until then, the scariest movie I had seen was Godzilla vs. Megalon, and I cowered in the couch as Godzilla battled a humongous cockroach with a drill on the top of its head. They trampled Tokyo, kicking cars out of their path, snapping telephone poles like toothpicks. When it seemed as if the cockroach had won—Godzilla lying on the ground, foam oozing from his mouth—I started to cry, and when my brother saw what I was watching, he said, “Paul, you’re such a wuss.”

Our parents forbade Owen from seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he snuck in after buying a ticket for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. He smuggled our video camera—the size of a cereal box—into the theater. And now, I was his test audience.

He watched as I squirmed and shuddered. At one point, a silhouette rose, and I thought Freddy was emerging from the television screen (he has a penchant for materializing out of solid objects), but it was only a lady going to the restroom. On the tape, Owen admonished: “Move it, bitch!” Occasionally, the picture jiggled as he repositioned the camera on his lap. His jeans rustling, the squeaking of the seat: these became dead leaves blowing down Elm Street, the scrape of Freddy’s fingernails against pipes.

I thought Owen would protect me, but when Freddy sprang from the shadows, I jolted from my seat, and he pushed me away. “God damn it,” he said. “If you’re going to be a pussy, I’ll turn it off right now.” He pulled the bag of potato chips closer to him, and his tube-socked foot pushed a Coke can off the coffee table. The music started screeching, and I covered my eyes. “This part isn’t scary,” he said. “It’s cool.” When I unlaced my fingers from my face, a geyser of blood erupted from a bed.

For weeks afterwards, I had nightmares. None involved Freddy, but I remembered Owen walking ahead of me, wearing his blue NASA T-shirt. I saw the back of his head, brown curls sticking out like coils of wire. I ran towards him, but my movements were labored, as if I were running through Bisquick batter. I fell further and further behind, and with each step, I became more and more frightened that I was going to lose him.

After the movie was over, he asked, “Wasn’t that awesome?”

I was still quivering.

“I bet none of your friends have seen it yet.”

I shook my head, not wanting to seem uncool.

“You should tell all of your friends how sweet that was.”

“Okay,” I said.

He leaned towards me. “Good,” he said. “If any of your friends wants a copy, tell them to give me a blank videocassette and six bucks.”

 

Part II: Freddy’s Revenge

 

1985.

Once Owen got his driver’s license, he disappeared frequently. He saw Freddy’s Revenge at a drive-in with two friends Dad disapproved of. He skipped dinner that night, and my parents and I ate in tense silence. Dad stabbed his pork chop with his fork and chewed as if the meat wouldn’t break apart.

I stayed up until I saw headlights come into the driveway. I listened: the grind and crank of the parking brake, the transmission winding down like an asthmatic. Owen, smelling of beer, stumbled up the stairs, and I tried my best to quiet him. I didn’t want Mom and Dad waking up.

“How was it?” I whispered.

“Not as good as the first.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed down, propping himself up.

“Was it scary?”

“Nah,” he said. “It was kind of gay.”

The floor creaked. He had trouble going faster than a shuffle.

“What do you mean, “gay”?”

“Like in the first one, you see a tit, but in this one, there’s no boobies anywhere. Just sweaty guys walking around in their underwear.” He leaned against the wall. “And there’s this one part where an old guy’s naked ass gets whipped bloody. That’s totally gay.”

Looking back, Part II is totally gay; or at the very least, homoerotic. Phallic signifiers include a pop gun held crotch-high, a snake wrapping itself around the protagonist, and, of course, Freddy penetrating male bodies with his trademark fingerknives. I won’t even mention the disco-housecleaning scene. Some critics contend that the film reflects mid-80s conservatism; for instance, the predatory coach who sets his lascivious sights on the protagonist arouses a horror rooted in homophobia, rather than in Freddy himself.

But back then I was eleven, intrigued. “Gay” was how you described someone one step down in the social pecking order; how could a movie be gay? I’d never seen another man’s backside before, although I’d been spanked: once for talking back to my mother, then again for skipping school. But whipped bloody? The thought made me shiver.

“Gross,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “gross.”

Months later, my parents and I were browsing the video store when I saw the cover for Part II. The still photo: a shirtless guy, hair wet and slicked back, water beaded on his face, holds up Freddy’s glove. Was he in his underwear? Was he the one that got whipped? I brought it to my parents and begged to see it, but Dad replied: “You’re too young for that trash.”

So I did what every red-blooded adolescent does: I finagled a sleepover at a friend’s house. He had laissez-faire parents who had no problem renting an R-rated movie for us. I sat on the far side of the sofa, away from my friend as the movie flickered into life. I clasped a pillow to my chest and pretended not to be transfixed when this ugly, scarred monster, who had slowly been taking possession of a teenager, burst fully formed out of the beautiful boy’s body.

 

Part III: Dream Warriors

 

1987.

This is where everything changes.

With Dream Warriors, Freddy hits the big time. Dokken, whose logo embossed three-ring binders of countless freshman girls, sings the theme music. Indeed, Freddy, with his sardonic one-liners and uncanny ability to pinpoint his opponent’s weakness and exploit it in the most gruesome way possible, becomes a pop- culture phenomenon. Part of the thrill of a prototypical slasher film, I’ve read, is the conflicting identification process that the audience undergoes: they see themselves as both monster and hero.

In the meantime, Owen fed me a stream of gore: the entire Friday the 13th opus, Sleepaway Camp, any movie featuring a knife, blood spatters, or a chainsaw on its cover. He also used me as an alibi: “I’m taking Paul to the movies.” If my parents gave me money for candy or popcorn, Owen confiscated it. Babysitting fee, he called it. He bought my ticket, and while I watched the movie, he went elsewhere. Afterwards, I was expected to wait. Every Friday night around eleven, I sat on the curb and watched boys leaving with their arms around their dates, watched them drive cars blaring heavy metal from tinted windows, rolled down halfway. The parking lot emptied before Owen picked me up, the theater lights off, me in the dark.

After Dream Warriors let out, I waited three and a half hours. Security drove by twice, and I told them that my ride was coming any minute now. On their third and fourth patrol, I lay in the shadows near the dumpsters, imagining what my super power would be. Magic? Kung fu? More than anything, I wanted to be like Kristin, the heroine: able to bring anyone I wanted into my dreams.

When my brother finally arrived, I was standing in a field of broken glass. For the last hour, I wandered the parking lot, picking up empty beer bottles, and throwing them hard against the wall of the theater. The shattering, the shards, the glints of light from the highway—I felt powerful.

“I’m sorry, man,” Owen said. “Guess I lost track of time.”

I crossed my arms, refusing to speak.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Let’s get something to eat.”

We went to a Village Inn far from our house. “Get whatever you want,” he said, eyes bloodshot. The lamp hanging over our table gave him a dusty aura.

I ordered a hot chocolate, which my parents never let me get because it had too much sugar. We ate our burgers in silence. He reached for my French fries, but I pulled the plate away from his greedy hands.

“If Mom or Dad asks why we’re late, tell them the truth, okay?” He slumped in the booth, his boots sticking into the aisle. “Tell them I took you to get something to eat.”

The waitress came by with our bill.

“I know you’re mad at me,” he said, sitting up. “Let me make it up to you. Do you want to drive my car?”

I nodded. I’d never driven my brother’s car.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Yes,” I said. I was willing to make that concession.

“Good. Pull the car around front and get in the passenger seat. Honk the horn when you’re done.”

My father had been giving me lessons in the family Buick, but kept one hand on the parking brake, ready to pull it back at a moment’s notice. Even though my brother’s VW Rabbit was smaller, the seat was set way back so that I couldn’t reach the pedals. As I fumbled underneath for the lever, I found a chain of foil-wrapped condoms.

Five seconds after honking the horn, my brother tore out of the restaurant and jumped into the car. We squealed out of the lot. I looked behind us and saw the manager, his red tie flapping like a panting dog. He was yelling, but I couldn’t hear anything over the revving engine.

“We should do this more often,” Owen said, accelerating into the night. “Just the two of us.” I was hyperventilating, the buzz running through my hands and feet. I was scared. Not jump-scared like when a cat comes screeching out of nowhere, but scared like the person in the audience who murmurs, Look out, look out, he’s right behind you!—the fear of a person who isn’t prepared for what comes next.

 

Part IV: The Dream Master

 

1988.

I admire the series’ willingness to kill heroes. Nancy survives Part I, but dies in Part III. Kristin bests Freddy in Part III, only to succumb in Part IV.

Owen had gotten kicked out of the house by Part IV. He couldn’t hold a job for more than three weeks. His stints as a line cook, golf caddy, and parking valet ended when he, respectively, slept through three shifts, smoked weed in the clubhouse, and stole money from people’s glove compartments. When he drove drunk into a ditch, totaling the Rabbit, my Dad told him to leave. He packed his belongings in black trash bags. He crashed at a friend’s place before finding an apartment, which he shared with three roommates.

For a while, I worried that my parents would tighten the screws on me—curfew, withholding car keys—but I was the good son. I had compiled a list of colleges I wanted to attend and left it where they could see it.

Every three weeks, Owen called for money. Dad obliged, mostly, but those times he refused, Mom would send me out the next morning with an envelope. I usually skimmed ten dollars off the top. Deliveryman’s fee. So when Owen called to talk to me, I was surprised. Mom said, It’s for you, in a voice that made me think that someone had died.

“Do you want to go see the new Nightmare on Elm Street?” he asked. Metal clanged in the background, as if he were in a junkyard. “I hear it’s awesome.”

“Sure.” Our conversation felt like a long-distance call, like we didn’t want to rack up charges.

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.”

When I told my parents that I was seeing a movie with Owen, they looked at each other like it was a bad idea. My horror movie habit was worrisome enough. Now, they were concerned how else my brother might influence me.

“Midnight,” Dad said. “No later.”

In the car, Owen reached towards me like he was going to muss my hair, like he did when we were younger, but punched me in the arm instead. “Why do you always have to dress like a doofus?” he asked. At the theater, he made me buy the concessions and upgraded the large popcorn to an extra large tub with lots of butter. He kept it in his lap until there were only broken pieces and old maid kernels left. When Freddy made his first kill, my brother raised his arms in a headbanger’s salute, and I saw that the lettering on his Poison T–shirt had chipped off until only a ghost of a lower-case “s-o-n” remained. His jean jacket had holes in the wrong places for them to be deliberate. And he smelled the way Freddy might: smoky, sour, stifling. When he laughed, people in the rows ahead of us turned and glared. I sank low and shook my head when he offered me a sip of the soda I had bought.

Afterwards, in the lobby, he clapped my shoulder. “Wasn’t that great?” he asked.

“Don’t be gay,” I said, ducking away. I let him walk a few steps ahead. I knew I could catch up if I wanted.

Years later, in grad school, I defended the movie: “Clearly, it’s a Marxist text,” I said. “Freddy, a patriarch who commidifies and consumes souls, is defeated when Alice, in a show of unity within social class, absorbs the powers of her dead friends. Sure, its surface is capitalist and bourgeois, but the use of Brechtian aesthetics and alienation effects add a subversive, avant-garde subtext.”

“Yes,” my professor said, “but you seem to ignore the fact that the film was crap.”

 

Part V: The Dream Child

 

1989.

Coolest death ever: The victim, Mark, is sucked into a black-and-white comic book by Freddy. Mark is still full color and whimpers as Freddy terrorizes him, destroying the scaffolding around them. But when Freddy mocks a girl that Mark had loved, he morphs into a superhero with guns strapped to his arms and shoots repeatedly, until Freddy falls to the ground, perforated. But before the audience can relax, Freddy rises as “Superfreddy,” impervious to bullets. Mark quickly runs out of ammo and backs into a wall. With the first slash, Mark, who has now been transformed into a two-dimensional drawing, bleeds out his color, which collects in a pool at his feet. He’s as pale as a pen-and-ink drawing, and Freddy rips him to shreds.

Or so I’ve been told.

Owen was serving an eighteen-month sentence for driving with a suspended license. The car was stolen. And there was a switchblade under the passenger seat. Dad didn’t disown Owen as much as he started forgetting Owen. He took Mom and me to the photography center at Sears and slid the new three-person family portrait in front of the one that included Owen. Whenever someone asked, “How’s your son?” he’d reply, “Oh, Paul is doing great.”

Mom and I paid Owen a visit in early September, a month after the movie’s release. Our time was limited to twenty minutes, and as Mom spoke with him, she started choking up. Owen rolled his eyes. She beckoned me over to talk while she composed herself.

Owen had grown a beard, and his hair was long and shaggy, covering his neck. His hands were brown and rough, like he’d been breaking rocks all his life. People had always said that the resemblance between us was strong—I thought I was better looking—but when my reflection on the plexiglass superimposed onto his face, I felt like I was looking into my future: me, with a few extra pounds, six inches taller, dark lines of worry etched into my face.

“I need you to do me a favor,” Owen said. His voice had ragged edges. “Go to my apartment and grab my stuff. Just cram everything into some bags and hide them in the storage room at home. Can you do that?”

Here he was, behind bars, still bossing me around.

“I’ve got a Nintendo,” he continued. “Keep that for yourself.”

Most of my friends had Nintendos, and it was a pain going over to their houses to play Super Mario Brothers. Whenever it was my turn, they chastised my lack of gaming abilities: No, you’ve got to jump on the mushroom, then over the pit.

“Just promise me something,” he said. “Promise that you’ll wait to see The Dream Child. You can’t see it without me, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

“All right!” We high-fived either side of the inch-thick glass.

I was too late, of course: his roommates had already sold the stereo system, the cassette tapes, and rifled through his closet. At the foot of his bed, however, was a two-foot-high pile of clothes that reeked of cigarette smoke. To my surprise, at the very bottom of the pile, as if he’d hidden it for me, was the Nintendo. I wrapped it in a pair of jeans to slip it out, and when I got home, my fingers trembled as I connected the cables. On the underside of the console, written in permanent black marker: Property of Danny Biemiller. I’d never heard of him.

I never got the chance to see The Dream Child with Owen, and only recently put it in my DVD player for my dissertation. Drew, my boyfriend, who freaks out if you yell “Boo!” in a dark room, sat down to watch it with me.

“These movies are hilarious,” he said.

I had read about the movie extensively; I knew its plot, its structure, its contribution to the Freddy mythology. It was all spectacle, no specters. And yet, when the sound of ripping flesh heralded the opening credits, I had trouble breathing. Drew paused the movie, and red slashes froze on the screen; the words A Nightmare on Elm Street had not yet emerged from them. I hit stop and buried my head into Drew’s chest.

It’s still the only one I’ve never seen.

 

Part VI: Freddy’s Dead, The Final Nightmare

 

1991.

Lamest death ever: Freddy draws a stoner into a psychedelic television show, which devolves into a poorly animated video game. Using a joystick, Freddy knocks the guy around, makes him hop back and forth. His friends attempt a rescue by detaching the controller, but Freddy has a PowerGlove, which was, back then, an exciting development in Nintendo gaming. The stoner is knocked into a mob of angry father figures wielding tennis rackets and is, presumably, pummeled to death.

I wanted the movie to be better than it was. During the previews, I jittered. Owen knuckled me in the leg and whispered, “Quit shaking the whole goddamn row.” I couldn’t help it: not only had this movie been touted as the definitive end of the series, but I had also sneaked out of the house for the first time. I followed the path Owen had taken for years: open the second-story bedroom window, dangle from the ledge, drop into the wet lawn below. Nothing was going to keep me from enjoying this movie, not even the fact that my parents had grounded me for two months.

Earlier in the week, I had been at K-Mart to buy a new game, but the Nintendo cartridges were stored in a cabinet that had to be opened by a cashier. It was a lot of trouble. But as I was leaving, I noticed Marble Madness on a stack of steering wheel covers in the automotive aisle, as if someone had changed his mind on the way to the checkout. It wasn’t a game I particularly wanted, but no one was around: no shoppers, no workers in their red polyester vests. So I shoved the game into my waistband and untucked my shirt. And suddenly, I was no longer a Goody Two-shoes who collected comic books and occasionally cheated at Dungeons and Dragons; I was bad. My fingertips and toes tingled. It felt like I was breathing helium. When I noticed the rectangular bulge in my stomach, I hunched over. I looked for security, double-checking each aisle, but no one was following me, no one that I could see. But, at the exit, a heavy hand grasped my shoulder with a grave, “Come with me, son.”

Dad picked me up from the holding room. In the car, the air between us crackled. I rubbed my wrists, trying to erase the red handcuff gouges on my skin. At home, Mom was preparing dinner. When I explained what had happened, she slapped me, then went back to chopping celery. I remembered this same silence from when Owen had lived at home. Each time the school called with a delinquency report, we ate dinner with disappointment hard and cold in our throats. I only caught the periphery of the emotion then, a hand-me-down sadness. Now, I felt as Owen must have: caught in a nexus of shame and resentment, unable to say either I’m sorry or Why won’t you say anything?

I think the early ’80s mantra of teenager control—never yell—had affected my parents unexpectedly. When my father’s anger emerged, it resulted in a complete communication collapse. That night, he only said one thing: “Jesus, two fuckups in one family.” But the comment wasn’t directed at anyone. It was a thought that had mistakenly taken form. Mom wrote her feelings on a yellow legal pad, in which she apologized for striking me and outlined my punishment. I found the note pinned to my door the next morning as I was getting ready for school.

This was in my mind as I sat in the theater. I wanted to have a good time—that was the whole point of sneaking out—but the movie was a total letdown. Owen laughed out loud at scenes that made me cringe. The 3-D effects gave me a headache. Even worse, Freddy was given a bizarre backstory: he had a wife and a daughter. America’s favorite psychopath was a father.

After the movie, I ripped the earpieces off my 3-D glasses, punched my thumbs through the red and blue cellophane, and threw the scraps at the screen. As he drove me home, Owen talked about how cool it was when the girl wrapped the cord of an electric coffeepot around her arm and pounded her abusive father’s face into putty. I commiserated, telling Owen of my grounding, adding the same indignant huffs that I’d heard him use. When I was done, he said, “You’re such a dumbshit, Paul. Don’t you know that those globes in the ceiling actually hide cameras?” Without swerving the car, he nailed me hard in the chest, in the muscle where it would leave a bruise.

At home, my parents’ bedroom was dark. As I unbuckled my seat belt, Owen leaned over and said, “If anything ever happens to Mom and Dad, you’re the one who has to bail me out. You know that, don’t you?” When I didn’t answer, he opened the ashtray and threw the contents at me. “Stupid fucking idiot,” he said. The passenger door shut itself as he peeled away. I brushed myself off, then realized that I was locked out. There was no way to reach the window. When Owen snuck out, I had always been there to open the door for him. But I had no superpowers, not even in my dreams. I couldn’t conjure someone to open the door for me.

The ash stung my eyes, and I closed them. I sat on the stoop, shaking my head, trying to wake up.

 

Part VII: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

 

1994.

Owen called my dorm at Columbia. He didn’t announce himself. Just asked, “So what was that all about?”

He was working as a bouncer; I was preparing for midterms. The previous semester, I had been given a foundation of Freud, Jung, and Foucault and was now wading through Mulvey, Bazin, and Silverman. The twice-weekly screenings in an auditorium classroom, sitting at cramped desks designed to prevent comfortable slouching, had already resulted in three nervous breakdowns. A group of us realized that our sanity required a momentary escape from the Bergman oeuvre, and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was our trashy fun du jour.

But I found the film fascinating rather than mindless, and now that I was a film studies major, I wanted my brother to cease being a passive observer. I wanted him to engage in the issues the film raised: the collapse of the nuclear family; suburbia as wasteland; the narrative of self-esteem and self-reliance. I wanted him to go beyond the body count.

So I explained: New Nightmare jettisons the schema of the original series for a more postmodern, self-reflexive stance. It creates a liminal space that exists between story and reality. Its meta-movie qualities (the “fictional” Wes Craven writes a script which is exactly what the actor Wes Craven performs) help blur the lines between ‘real’ and ‘not-real.’ The parallelism between the ‘real’ of the movie/the ‘not-real’ of the movie-in-a-movie and the ‘real’ of the audience/the ‘not-real’ of the movie evokes a disjunction, a fission between levels of reality. It begs the questions: What is reality? What is fiction? What is a story, and what are actual events in someone’s life? Are these lines as distinct as we’d like? And what happens when someone (or something) transgresses these lines?

“Oh,” said Owen. “So that means Freddy’s dead for good, right?”

Yes, I assured him. Freddy is dead.

 

Part VIII: Freddy vs. Jason

 

2003.

For years, a rumored showdown between the two great horror franchises of the ’80s circulated on the Internet. Various treatments and scripts had been pursued and rejected. And now, almost twenty years after the first Nightmare on Elm Street, the two icons will go head-to-head.

I can already imagine Owen’s enthusiasm: Wasn’t that cool how Freddy burned that dude alive? I really hoped that it was gonna be gorier, but they’re probably saving some for the sequel. I’m glad he’s back, after all this time. I’m sorry we didn’t see it together, but it’s in my blood, man, and I know it’s in your blood too.

Owen had cleaned up: he had a steady gig as a warehouse night watchman, a girlfriend—all the trappings of reality. Dad had even welcomed him back into the family. He told me how Owen had him pretend to be a former landlord so that he could rent an apartment, how Owen tried to get him to invest in a downtown parking lot that would be converted into condos any day now.

“Since when did your brother know anything about real estate?” Dad asked me.

I had just started my master’s program and lived in a studio above an Italian restaurant.

“Search me,” I said.

When I last spoke with Owen, he was still freaked out about my being gay, but said that as long as I was happy, he was fine with it. He was proud that I had gotten so far in school; he couldn’t wait for my graduation, and I made him call me Dr. Paul, even though I hadn’t finished.

He’d already been dead for three years when we had that conversation. The police said that there’d been a robbery at the warehouse, and he was shot trying to stop it.

Bullshit, he said. I fell asleep on the job and you-know-who got me.

Really?

God’s honest truth.

Am I in trouble? I asked. What’s keeping him from getting me?

He started to answer, but I woke before he finished.

I only catch glimpses of him now: his elongated face in the convex security mirrors that stores hang high in the corners. Or, on the street, a whiff of dusky cigarette smoke makes me suspect he recently passed by. Once, when I was stuck on a Byzantine problem in my dissertation, his voice, distant, distinct, called out: Duh, Dr. Paul. Lacanian levels of observation.

I relish the signs of the new movie’s arrival (the machete-versus-claw poster, the trailers pulsating with subsonic bass and sharpened knives) because it is in my blood, the blood that brings life to fear, that gives meaning to anyone who’s ever walked down a dark street by himself.

We who watch horror movies know three simple truths: first, you can never escape your dreams; second, when you’re alone, the world is a darker and much more dangerous place; and finally, most importantly, you can never kill the monster.

But you can be ready for him. When Freddy comes for me one of these terrible nights, when even Drew can’t wake me, my brother will rise up and say, Man, you’ve picked the wrong brothers to fuck with.

THE FALL OF ROME

He shouldn’t have worn sneakers. That was a mistake. A shower would have helped, too. Why could he never remember that skipping a shower didn’t lend him a feeling of rebelliousness, as his mirror would like to have him think, but only made him feel slimy, insecure? Conner stopped to retie his shoelace in front of the library. The library was closed now, as were the dining halls, the student center, and the university bookstore; a week ago Conner had sold back his books for Professor Palma’s course, Ancient Rome. Forty-one dollars and ninety-three cents. Conner felt guilty for selling these, and so had kept The Twelve Caesars by way of apology. He’d imagined Professor Palma watching him from a hidden window, nodding.

The campus in summer had always pleased Conner. He walked through the rose garden watered, dusted, and weeded only for him, it seemed, and across the quad, where frisbees no longer sailed; through the memorial tower archway, whose marble crest Conner had never taken the time to read—it was a luxury that he could now, if he wanted to. If he wanted to, he could do just about anything. He stepped out of the way to let a grounds crew pass.

When he entered Professor Palma’s office, the professor greeted him by saying, “Looks like you’ve been shorn.”

“Shorn?”

“Your hair.” Professor Palma gestured Conner to a leather chair. Conner sunk into it, so that his eyes were barely level with Palma’s desk. “You’ve cut off your long hair.”

“Oh,” Conner said. He hadn’t cut his hair. It was odd, seeing Professor Palma seated behind a desk. Conner had never noticed, until now, how mottled his beard was. Up close, you could see patches of red, brown, blond.

“My mother always used to call that a summer cut. Every June she’d take me and my brother to the barbershop. They’d put a wooden board across the chair, to make us higher. Afterwards, we’d get to pick a prize out of a plastic barrel. It was called Joe’s Secret Barrel. How do you like that? Joe’s Secret Barrel.”

“Joe’s Secret Barrel,” Conner said. “Well.” He felt himself smiling his nervous smile.

“Comic books, mostly. And bubble gum. Bazooka Joe.”

What would happen, Conner wondered, if he never got around to asking his question? “Professor Palma,” he said. “I have a small problem I’d like to bring to your attention.”

Professor Palma nodded. “I see.” In class, Professor Palma sometimes steepled his hands across his face in the middle of lectures. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he’d say, “let me submit the following.”

“It’s about my final grade,” Conner said. “You gave me a B-, which I totally understand, because of the midterm and everything, but the thing is—” Conner suddenly had no idea how he was to finish the sentence. How did anyone know how to finish their sentences? Professor Palma was looking at him like he was explaining how to butter toast. “The thing is, I was wondering if there was any way you could change it to a B+.”

Professor Palma drew his lips together and nodded. “I see.”

“I’m really sorry to ask,” Conner said. “I know how annoying grade change requests can be. That’s why I didn’t email you about it. I thought a meeting would be better.” He offered a clumsy smile.

“A meeting,” Professor Palma said.

“Right.”

“Face to face. Mono e mono.” Professor Palma chopped the air with his hand.

Conner nodded. Behind Professor Palma, he noticed a bulletin board crammed with postcards, cartoons, photographs. In the largest photograph, Professor Palma was standing atop a windy mountain, a woman beside him, a little girl in a pink baseball cap clutching Professor Palma’s leg.

“I’m not quite sure where to begin,” Professor Palma said.

“I’m sorry,” Conner said. “I’m only asking because I think my participation towards the end of the semester really picked up and I didn’t miss a class all year and,”  Conner felt himself losing some sort of advantage, “and if I get a B+ I’ll be able to go to the honors graduation ceremony next year.” Why did he always say more than he wished? He felt his face grow warm. “My parents are coming,” he added, idiotically.

“Well, that’s quite a lot for us to think about, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Professor Palma next addressed his fingers, which were quite large, Conner noticed. “Please know that I’m not in the habit of giving grade changes, although my students seem to be forever in the habit of asking for them.”

“I know.”

“Students seem to think that a grade is something negotiable. I’m not sure why this is,” Professor Palma said, then raised one eyebrow, “but I have my theories.”

Conner, expecting one, was surprised when the professor only opened his desk drawer and rummaged through. The open drawer gave off a smell of chalk dust and damp wood. “As I was saying, I have my theories. A part of me wonders if the feeling of negotiability arises from a student’s sense of entitlement, a problem I’ve wrestled with all my academic life, but more in recent years. I wonder if there’s a new breed of student on the rise, quick and on the make, philosophically opposed to failure, but morally blind to failure’s lessons. Do you see what I mean?”

“Mmm.”

“And another part of me wonders if, as students evolve, as a university certainly hopes they will, their thinking evolves too, and, attendant to this growth—I think of it as peeking over a high fence, for some reason—is the slow realization that all grades, as all knowledge perhaps is, are inherently subjective. Am I right? That question of ‘What really is the difference between a B- and a B+,’ or that nagging question ‘What are the clear, defensible, and unalterable criteria for an A?’”

“Right.” The flesh around Professor Palma’s eyes nurtured a single brown mole. “I see what you’re saying, but it’s more that—”

“The Unanswerable Question!” Professor Palma laughed, as if this had been a joke between them all along.

“Right.”

Outside, two pigeons landed on the sill of Professor Palma’s window. They made a noise like iced tea pouring into tall glasses.

“I wouldn’t ask. Normally, I mean.”

“My wife says I have too many theories about things. A little secret for you to remember: no one knows you better than your wife.”

“Right.”

Professor Palma looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, but I’m meeting someone else at noon.”

“I’m sorry to ask for this,” Conner said. “I really am. But I’m not asking because I think an exception should be made for me.” He tried to read Professor Palma’s expression, but the expression conveyed only imperfect vision, cloudy skies, and a single, unasked question: was it Colin or Conan? “I’m just asking because I think I’ve earned it.”

“Well, I’m sympathetic,” Professor Palma said, “to a point. But you most certainly are asking that an exception be made for you. That’s without debate.” He continued before Conner could point out that one of the pigeons had now made its way inside the office and was currently bobbing towards the glinty magnifying glass atop Professor Palma’s Oxford English Dictionary. “But I suppose that’s the human condition, isn’t it? Thinking an exception will be made for us. Hoping the universe is Godded indeed, and hears our call.”

As if a punchline, the phone rang.

“Excuse me.” Professor Palma picked up the receiver. “Yes, speaking,” he said. “The Camry. Right. Yes, I spoke to Henry about that. I said I spoke to Henry about that. Right.” The pigeon, forgetting the object of its desire, was now sitting just inside the window. It looked at Conner without really looking at him, somehow. Eyes like shrunken pennies. “That’s not what Henry said at all.” The professor shook his head. Was the change of grade form in his desk? Conner wondered. “Well, you’ll have to let me talk to Henry about that,” Professor Palma said. “I said you’ll have to have to let me talk to Henry about that. Right. Fine. Yes, that’s my home number. Right.” He hung up. “Mechanics,” he sighed. “But of what?”

“Professor,” Conner said.

Professor Palma checked his watch again, then pulled a carbon ledger from the desk drawer. “I will keep this with me,” he said, “as a reminder of our meeting.” He filled in a few lines, then folded it in half. “I will keep this with me and think about our meeting.”

Conner felt the advantage swing his way, like a hurled rope. How could he mention that the form needed to be submitted by tomorrow? “Thanks,” Conner said. “There’s just one more little thing. It seems that the deadline—”

At that moment, Professor Palma’s door flew open. A beautiful, impossibly skinny woman entered the room and immediately began swatting the pigeons away with a rolled-up newspaper. “Dirty, filthy birds!” she cried. She knocked into Conner’s chair. “Why do you let them do this, Gerald? Why?”

“Calm down, Magda,” Professor Palma said. “Please.”

Magda closed the OED with a sudden, thunderous clap. “Making filth on these beautiful books. Please to go! Go!” She chased one pigeon out the window, then cornered the other near Professor Palma’s bookcase. The pigeon bobbed its head and spread its ugly wings. For a moment Conner was afraid the pigeon was going to fly around the room, when Magda unrolled the newspaper like an enormous catcher’s mitt and, with one, startling motion, scooped the bird up and deposited it out the window. “There!” she said. She pushed the window down, which screeched to a close. “Filthy birds.”

It would be hard to say that anyone looked attractive scooping a live pigeon into a newspaper, so how had this woman managed to do so? Perhaps it was the breath heaving in her chest, or the way she now brushed her gorgeous, silky hair—it really was silky—from her eyes without the least trace of self-consciousness. Maybe it was the clothes she wore, a white halter top and strangely dark, European-looking jeans, cut low enough to expose her brown stomach, with its taut belly button like a punctuation mark. But, more likely, it was because Conner had been in love with this mysterious woman all semester. Magda. This woman who sat in the front row, challenging Professor Palma with her sharp, angry questions, flipping the pages of her exotic notebook with a barely contained rage, crossing and recrossing her long legs from which expensive-looking, high-heeled shoes dangled, even on snowy days. His friends had a name for her, one of Conner’s inventions. Frenchy.

“Do you know Magda?” Professor Palma said. “Magda, this is—”

“Conner,” Conner said. He shook her hand, which had rings on every finger.

“Magda is helping me on a dig this summer,” Professor Palma said. “In lovely Tunisia.” He laughed like this, too, was some sort of joke.

“Oh,” Conner said.

“These filthy birds, I hate them. Why do you let them have their way, Gerald?”

Professor Palma made a beats me face. “I suppose I’m too soft,” he said.

Magda made a tschh noise, then pulled a spool of tape from her purse and tossed it onto Professor Palma’s desk. “This won’t work,” she said. “They fall down.” She removed a bundle of yellow flyers, half-sheets of paper bound with a rubber band. “Please try something else.”

“Magda is helping me look for volunteers for the dig,” Professor Palma explained.

“Every one, down. I go back, try again, but forget it. Down again.” Magda lifted a stapler from Professor Palma’s desk. “Maybe this,” she said. She tried stuffing the stapler in her purse, but it wouldn’t fit.

“I was just telling Conner that I was on my way to another meeting,” Professor Palma said. “With Dr. Ancusi.”

Magda threw her hands up in the air. “Why? We’re never going to get out of here. Already it’s—” she checked her watch. “Please, come on, Gerald.”

The rope that had once swung so close now made a second appeal. “I could help,” Conner offered. “I mean, with the flyers. It’s no problem.”

Professor Palma looked not at him, but at Magda. “Sounds like you’ve found a volunteer,” he said.

Magda sighed. “Fine,” she said. “If this is how you do it, Gerald.” She handed Conner the stapler. “But we’re leaving soon, right? I’m so hungry.”

“Right,” Professor Palma said. “We’ll meet back here in fifty-five minutes or so.”

“Fifty-five minutes or so,” Magda said. “You American men. Can’t even say ‘an hour’ without covering your tracks.”

When they were about to leave, Professor Palma glanced at Conner and said, “I’ll be thinking about our meeting.”

 

Outside it was getting cloudy. It would be a rainy day after all. How had Conner not noticed the saplings along the college mall offering up their silvery undersides like raised pom-poms? Clouds gathered above the administration building, blanching the gold from its dome. He and Magda walked along the mall, where work crews were repairing the pedestrian walkway, whose intricate brickwork had always secretly pleased Conner. He liked it that the university lavished so much attention on his walk home, to the dining hall, to the classrooms where he was so often a star.

“Already they fall apart,” Magda said. She kicked a small stone a remarkable distance. “A quarter million dollars, for what?”

“Yeah,” Conner said. “It’s crazy.” He had already given up on flirting, from the moment Magda descended the history department stairs in twos and threes, leaving him to his hurried, but cautious single steps behind her. But maybe he’d given up too soon. Although it was growing darker, Magda donned a pair of enormous yellow sunglasses.

“This whole place is crazy,” she said. “Look!” She pointed to the workmen walking the scaffolding outside the geology building. “The whole place falls down. They throw money away on nothing!”

Conner nodded. Listening to Magda, with her waving arms and mirrored lenses, was like being scolded by a gorgeous, fantastic insect. “I know,” he said. “This place drives me crazy.”

They separated to place flyers on the notice boards flanking the walkway entrance. The boards were freckled with concert notices, sublet announcements, weeks out of date. It saddened Conner to think of the old notices; he didn’t like their suggestion of empty apartments, darkened stages, of good times long gone. He stapled Professor Palma’s flyers atop posters for free condoms. Want To Earn $$$ AND Discover The World? the flyers began. Conner couldn’t imagine Professor Palma thinking up the dollar signs. Maybe those were Magda’s idea.

She returned to him now, and began her conversation again as if no time had passed whatsoever. “They throw away what is worth keeping and keep everything that is junk. Junk!” She ran ahead to the next board and stapled three flyers in the time it took Conner to staple one. “This is a junk place, right? Just look around. Tell me this isn’t!” Before Conner could answer, Magda grabbed a handful of his flyers and began stapling them to a large tree.

“Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Conner said.

Magda turned an angry look on him. “Why?” She punctuated her question with a punch of the stapler. “Why should we care when they don’t? Tell me why.”

“Well—” Do not say, Because I like these trees. “Because I don’t think that’s what Professor Palma wants.”

“Ha!” Magda said. She ran ahead to the next tree and stapled another flyer. “There! That’s what Professor Palma wants.”

Conner, sensing whatever chances he had of gaining Magda’s interest slipping beyond his reach, grabbed one of the tree flyers and tore it in half. “I don’t think so,” he said. He stuffed the torn flyer into his pocket.

Magda looked at him with what seemed new respect, he thought. “Ha!” she said, then raced to another tree, stapling two flyers at once.

“Not the trees,” Conner said. He tore the flyers down, but Magda only laughed and darted across the quad, where a grounds crew was distributing mulch beneath a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Garden was intended to make Jefferson look deep in pastoral contemplation, but somehow conveyed the sense that he was horribly lost and preposterously overdressed, a wedding guest wandering from a wrecked car. When Magda passed the crew, the three crew members stopped working, gawked. “I’d run too, boy!” one of them called to Conner. Conner turned to acknowledge him, but only caught Jefferson’s bronzed gaze.

“You have very high morals,” Magda said when Conner reached her. She swiped the rest of Conner’s flyers from his hands. “You are a moral person, right?” She laughed, then stapled a clumsy row of flyers along a low tree branch. “A good boy.”

Conner was about to contradict her, when the clouds opened up and rain began to fall. He pulled the flyers from the branch. “It’s starting to rain,” he said.

“But not on you,” Magda laughed. She kept stapling the branch, testing him. “Not on the perfect student.”

I’m not the perfect student, Conner wanted to say, but, in a way, he was. He had a high grade point average, arrived early to every class, pledged the best fraternity, volunteered to lead blood drives, food donations, Toys for Tots. Would you like to lead this class? one professor had written across the bottom of his essay exam. Let me know when you need a letter of recommendation—please! But, for all his other successes, Conner had failed to gain Professor Palma’s admiration. Every day, he’d sat in the front row, taking copious notes, raising his hand to nearly every question. He’d memorized whole passages from Suetonius, and occasionally worked these into his responses, hoping Professor Palma would recognize them, but Professor Palma only nodded, dismissing him. “Yes, well, there’s that, of course,” he’d say, then call on someone else, his gaze passing over Conner like a swift cloud. When Magda spoke, Professor Palma nodded enthusiastically, said, “Yes, right. Good observation,” or, most aggravating to Conner, “That’s perfectly said.” Each week Conner kept a private count of who had raised their hand more often, him or Magda, making sure to keep ahead. Now, he watched her staple another flyer to a sapling still tied by ropes, and wondered if she and Professor Palma were sleeping together.

“We should get out of this rain,” Conner said.

Magda ignored him. “Who cares if it rains?” she said.

“Well, I’m going back.”

Magda turned to face him, revealing, for the first time, the outline of her breasts through her rain-soaked shirt. She smiled a crooked smile. “So, go back, then,” she said. There were tiny beads of rain on her sunglasses, like jewels. It began to pour.

Conner was deciding whether he really wanted to leave or not—what did that smile mean?—when Magda broke into a sprint and ran to the Jefferson statue, where the grounds crew had since fled. Conner followed her without trying to appear to. Magda was eyeing the Jefferson statue for a likely staple spot, when she took one flyer and speared it over Jefferson’s bronze quill. The flyer sagged in the rain, but Magda had places for others: the points of Jefferson’s three-corner hat, his pondering finger—raised, as if asking a question—even, against all physics, the tip of his nose. Conner stood behind her, watching her handiwork. Then he stepped closer and found himself touching her shoulder, her damp, exciting shoulder. “Magda,” he said. But Magda sped away, laughing. Conner followed.

“You made him into a clown,” Conner said, when he reached her under the memorial tower archway. He wanted his tone to be conspiratorial, but it came out as an accusation. He could not catch his breath. Magda was watching the rain, her arms hugged to her chest. She shrugged. “This place makes lots of clowns.” They stood that way for a while, not talking. Conner wondered whether he’d done the right thing, touching her, then felt angry at himself for worrying about that. Why wouldn’t Magda face him?

“Do you know they want to get rid of Professor Palma?” Magda said.

“They do?”

Magda nodded. “They say they want him to retire, but they just want him out.”

“Oh.”

“But Gerald wants to stay. He wants to stay, but they want him to leave.” Magda made a noise that Conner thought might mean tears, but when Magda faced him, she was not crying. “It’s crazy. Even his wife—his own wife!—wants him to leave. Can you believe it? For what? So she can play golf and drive a big car. Gerald would die living that way. Can you see him playing golf?”

Conner could very well see him playing golf—he was surprised he didn’t already, actually—but shook his head no.

“No,” Magda said. “But his wife—” she waved her hand. “Don’t let’s talk about her.”

Conner stepped close enough that he could see the gooseflesh of Magda’s damp arms. A thin bracelet clung to her wrist, made entirely of string. In class, she sometimes pared a large apple with a small knife while Conner watched, the lecture a sudden jumble of slides and maps, Professor Palma’s voice a radio from a passing car. “I’m sorry,” Conner said.

“For what?” Magda said, then began to cry. When Conner placed a hand on her shoulder, Magda pushed it aside. “You shouldn’t pay attention to a woman’s tears,” she said. She walked to the other side of the archway, peering out at the rain falling across the quad. At times, the rain blew in from the archway, but Magda did not move to the middle where Conner stood, so he wondered if he should approach her again.

“I’m so hungry,” Magda said, to no one in particular.

“Yeah,” Conner said. Once, he’d followed Magda after class. Just for a few moments, until she turned towards south campus, walking against the traffic lights, her notebook clutched beneath her arm. Conner stopped at the light, feeling suddenly ridiculous and creepy. What was he doing?

“I’m so sick of this,” Magda said, but Conner couldn’t tell if she meant the rain or university or something else altogether. But he knew one thing, and it was a surprise to him: he was about to approach Magda and put his arms around her, gently, if she would have him. If she would have him, he would lean in for a kiss.

“I’m so sick of waiting,” Magda said. She wiped her eyes. “I really am.” And, before Conner could reach her, she was off running again, through the rain and across the quad, puddles exploding from her feet. Conner hesitated, then followed. Thank God, he thought, as he reached the history department, where the door was still flung open wide, rain blowing in. Thank God I didn’t.

 

Conner found them in Professor Palma’s office, Professor Palma donning an enormous raincoat thirty years out of style. Magda was behind him, looping a thick belt through the coat, straightening the shoulders.

“Rain gear,” Professor Palma said. “Ah, who knows the caprices of the weather?”

“Please keep still,” Magda said. She reached the belt around him, then tightened it in the front. “You move, it’s not going to work.”

“I’m under strict orders, as you can see,” Professor Palma said. He had his arms raised like a child.

“I see,” Conner said.

“I was just telling Magda, as it turns out I didn’t have a meeting at all,” Professor Palma said. “I had my days mixed up.”

Magda clicked her tongue. “You get everything mixed up, Gerald.”

“I make no argument. Guilty as charged,” Professor Palma laughed. Conner offered a weak smile. How good it would feel to leave this office. How good it would be to leave this campus. Why had he come here in the first place? “But I’ll have you know I made a nice hour of it, listening to the rain and catching up on my reading. It’s a fortunate day when I can find the time to catch up on my reading.”

Conner was about to mention the deadline for the grade change, when Magda pulled a floppy rain hat down over Professor Palma’s ears. “There,” she said.

“Well,” Professor Palma said, “as you can see, it looks like we’re about to depart.” Magda placed a folded umbrella in his hand. “Whose is this?” he asked.

“Yours,” Magda said. “Let’s go, Gerald. I’m so hungry.”

“We’re going to eat,” Professor Palma said, “but I’ll be thinking about our meeting, won’t I, Colin?”

“Thanks,” Conner said.

“Gerald,” Magda said. She tugged his sleeve.

“You can leave the rest of the flyers on my desk,” Professor Palma said. “I hope I can trust you to close the door behind you until it clicks, if you don’t mind. We seem to be having a small food emergency here.”

Magda pulled Professor Palma out the door. “Oh, he’s very trustworthy,” she said. “He’s got high morals.”

Professor Palma seemed not to hear. He gave one last look at Conner, his smiling head pinched between the folds of his rain hat, a look that conveyed how happy he was to be bundled in his coat, a meal on the way, the pleasure he took in being someone who could be looked after and adored, whose most minor requests were matters of consequence, someone who, despite all his years, still mattered, who deeply, deeply mattered. “Until it clicks,” he said.

Conner stood in the office until he could no longer hear their footsteps. The rain beat against the windowpanes, closed now. He placed the flyers on the desk and was about to leave the office when he saw a solitary piece of paper in the trash can. The grade change form, still folded in the middle. Conner unfolded it to find that Professor Palma hadn’t filled in a thing, except, absurdly, his signature at the bottom. The signature was oversized, nearly illegible. Conner folded the form into his pocket.

And it wasn’t his walk across the rainy campus that perplexed Conner, nor was handing the slip to the woman at the registrar’s office, who barely read it over while chewing a pen, nor was it the ease with which he’d found himself saying, “It’s an A,” when she asked what grade to enter—none of these things troubled Conner on his walk home. Only this: why, with all the rain shading them from the world, with its sudden loan of permission, why hadn’t he the courage to kiss Magda?

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE GLASS MOUNTAIN

“Quiet, now,” she told us. “It’s like Tinker Bell.”

“What’s like Tinker Bell?” Gnome asked. It was a stupid question, but we forgave him because his eyes were the color of a sandstorm, and he sat still as an injured bird.

“If you don’t believe, it won’t come true.” Aunt Halina was patient with these types of questions. She wasn’t really our aunt. She smelled like melted butter, and she had a scar on her chest that she wouldn’t let us see. She started the story again.

“The glass mountain is very far from here, but you can find it if you know where to look. Past the dirt road that forks toward the empty sea, past the tree whose white flowers yawn open for the moon. Past the stone pillar shaped like a monk. If you are faithful, the mountain will let you find it.”

Eva and I had heard the story at least seven hundred times. It was our favorite. We even liked it better than the ones Halina told about her dead husband, Fillip, who had worked on a barge, and the parties they had floating in the middle of the river. Gnome, on the other hand, was new. He sat on an upside-down bucket, holding his breath, listening to the sounds of the world getting dark. We were jealous of his hearing the story for the first time. Eva picked a daddy longlegs off the screen door and dropped it on his shoulder.

“Does it break?” he asked. He cupped the spider in his palm and released it into the grass. Eva pouted.

“It doesn’t break,” Halina pronounced solemnly.

“Are there princes?” he asked.

“The princes all die, you know,” I told him.

Halina put on her splinter face, and it stuck inside me until I squirmed. “Hanna exaggerates,” she said. “She’s not to be trusted. She doesn’t believe.” She leaned in close to Gnome and put her hands on his sunburned cheeks. “Do you believe, little Gnome?”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe.” His ears were kind of pointy, and out of all of us, he was the one who looked like he belonged in a fairytale.

Eva let her head plunk against my shoulder. The stars were blinking awake in the summer blue sky, egged on by crickets and lovelorn frogs.

“We’ll begin again,” Halina said. “The glass mountain is very far from here.”

 

The glass mountain was just a story, but we pretended to believe it so Halina would tell it over and over again until we felt like we understood. The story went like this . . .

Sometimes you didn’t know you were at the glass mountain until you walked into it. The townspeople used to find it by the smell of dead birds at its base, but at some point the birds learned to fly around it. The glass mountain was smooth and heartless and perfect. At the top, a princess lived in an enchanted castle, hidden by the clouds. The princess didn’t have a name. Of course, she had a name before, but when the witch flew her up to the castle, she cast a spell. If the princess ever spoke her name again, the castle would shatter. Glass would rain down on the people she loved—her mother, her father, her sweet, tone-deaf sister whose lap had always been her pillow.

In front of the princess’s castle, the witch planted a tree with white apples. She sent a sparrow down to the town with a message—if any man could make it to the top of the mountain and pick one of the apples, the princess would be saved. The witch wasn’t jealous of the princess’s beauty, though the princess’s hair was made of crushed moonlight and her eyes were violet-bright. The witch was under a curse and had not slept in seven years. One afternoon, the princess wandered into the witch’s field and fell asleep in the goldteller flowers. The princess didn’t wake until the witch had her in midair.

 

Part of the reason I loved this story was that I related to the witch. While Eva would fall asleep during a five-minute car ride to the grocery store, I stayed up nights staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, turning the dripping spackle into shapes and characters, creating stories about an evil school bus driver who captured children and drove them to the forest where she kept a secret lair. Some nights I pretended to be sleepwalking, and I’d wander out of the house and into the yard, feeling my way past the trees blindly, arms extended, mouth half open and drooling. Which is how I discovered Gnome, a few weeks after he moved in next door with his father, curled up in our garden and watching me silently.

 

The rescue missions were constant and ill-fated. A knight would ride his horse partway up the mountain’s slick surface then slide back down and break his neck. The men of the town dug a mass grave nearby, but the bodies of the horses were too big to fit. Inside the windows of the princess’s castle, fingerprints and nose smudges accumulated. The witch cursed her with sleeplessness, and she sat, listening to the high, harsh scratching of the glass, the screams of the horses, the dull thuds when men and animals landed on the ground. She wished they would just stop trying. She wished she could lay her head in her sister’s lap and sleep.

 

Gnome’s mother had died of lymphoma the year before he moved next door, and his father, a brisk and obsessively neat lawyer, didn’t like stories. He thought they were indulgent and, more importantly, useless, since they were incapable of beating back grief. Gnome’s mother had always used different voices when she’d told him stories, and sometimes she’d even made shadow puppets to highlight the most dramatic scenes, such as when little boys fought ooze-dripping monsters and won using the improbable technique of running through the monsters’ legs. Gnome told me all this under the tent created by an overhang of ivy off the side of his garage, a place infested with mosquitoes due to stagnant water trapped in warped gutters, a place where it was impossible to sleep and where night after night we tried.

Eva, with her easy sleepiness, was banned from the spaces that Gnome and I inhabited. I held tight to the excuse that she was too young and the tent was too small, but the truth was that I was jealous of my time with Gnome, just as I was jealous of my time with my sister. I was careful to guard against overlap, protective of what belonged to me alone. Eva didn’t know of Gnome’s desperate fear of hospitals, the way he turned pale and sweaty when he heard his mother’s name. Just as Gnome didn’t know of Eva’s dreamlife, the way that in her dreams she slept behind glass, the way that this was peaceful for her.

Eventually, Gnome’s father started dating a woman with eyes and hair that matched his dead wife’s, got remarried, and moved Gnome away from me, but for a few summers, at least, he was mine, curling at night like a fern against my body as we hunkered down in the green scents of our hideout. I even let him tattoo a mountain on my back with a safety pin and a licorice-scented marker, let him carve me with pinpricks that ascended toward my neck. When my back got infected a week later and landed me in the hospital on IV antibiotics, Gnome didn’t come to visit. I told Eva that the pain was worse than anything else in the world, so she would blow on my skin when it started itching. When the scabs fell away and uncovered the scars, I missed the hot salve of her breath.

 

In seven years, only one knight came close to saving the princess. He arrived in golden armor, and in the sunlight, he looked like a man made of fire. The princess bowed her head when she heard him charge, but the sound she expected, the sound of gold kissing glass, was replaced by the sound of horse hooves cracking their way closer. From her window, it looked like the knight was riding on sky, and he leaned forward, readying his burning body to pluck an apple from the tree. Just as he approached the peak, the witch, who had turned herself into a hawk, sailed down and sunk her talons between his horse’s eyes. The horse fought for only a moment before it began its downward slide, its hooves engraving the mountainside with a deep furrow.

The princess listened as the townspeople began digging a new grave. She lay her head against the window and closed her eyes.

 

Eva became obsessed with saving things. I tried to tell Aunt Halina that the story was going to kill my sister, but by then she’d decided I was not a reliable source of information. Eva’s crusades were always huge in scope, limited only by the shortness of her legs and her attention span. She once spent the entire month of June going door-to-door and asking people not to kill bugs they found inside their houses, to instead scoop them up with a newspaper and release them outside. The summer she was eight I convinced her that the clouds were going to retire at the end of the year, and she tried to build a ladder tall enough to reach them, to try to talk some sense into them. That was the summer she broke her leg.

 

In the winter of the seventh year, a young man arrived at the glass mountain at dawn. His shirt was dirty, and his pants were shredded over his left hip. He didn’t have a horse, but he’d tied the claws of a wildcat to his hands and feet. As he stood at the base of the mountain and pressed his pale forehead against its cool surface, the townspeople crowded together and gossiped. He was much too small to have killed a wildcat. He was so skinny a wildcat wouldn’t eat him. Death by a wildcat would be a kinder fate than death by the mountain.

It began to snow. The young man smiled, blushed, and started climbing. A thin layer of glistening white settled on the glass so that the outline of the mountain was clear against the horizon. The young man’s movements were slow and careful—first one hand, then the other, then each foot behind him. This was going to take a long time, the townspeople thought. They wrapped themselves in blankets and got comfortable.

When night came the young man could go no further. The glass was too steep, and he was tired. His hands were crusted with a thin layer of frozen blood from where the claws had worked into his skin. In the morning, he thought, he’d just let go, let gravity carry him down to the pretty white grave below. But tonight, for one night, he would hook his claws on a glass ledge and sleep. He dreamt of falling through the glass and landing on the mountain’s inside. He dreamt of shattering glass and the sky rushing up around him.

At midnight he was woken by the calls of a hawk flying down from the apple tree to inspect the shadows. Hunching his shoulders, the young man braced himself for the waking sensation of talon tearing through flesh, and when the bird had him fully pierced, he reached upward, releasing the wildcat claws and holding tight to the bird as it carried him up toward the castle. At the apple tree, the hawk swooped down, heavy with the young man’s weight. He had dreamed of this too. He pulled his father’s knife from his pocket, sliced cleanly through the bird’s woody legs, and fell through the silvered branches to the ground.

 

The rest of the story—the young man throwing his white apple at the dragon and freeing the princess—we hardly cared about, fixed as we were on the moment when he plucked the splinters of bird feet from the unraveling skin of his shoulders. But Gnome wanted more of the story, more and more, until he was so full on it he could finally curl up and sleep.

“Then what happened?” he kept asking.

Aunt Halina indulged him, telling him how the body of the hawk was found days later in a neighboring town, telling him how the dead knights came back to life at the bottom of the mountain, mounted their dusty horses, and rode off with their shining armor into the winter light.

Eva had fallen asleep by this point, her melon-heavy head in my lap, her lips blowing kisses at the sky. “Why didn’t the mountain ever shatter?”

Aunt Halina would answer questions about anything, all the hard ones that our parents would ignore, about her dead husband, our dead dog, the dead baby that was found in a dumpster that we weren’t supposed to know about.

This question stumped her.

 

When Halina died, years later, I was in college, where my sleeplessness had grown deeper and settled in under my eyes. A few days after her funeral, I got two letters in the mail, which I took to the basement physics lab where I worked as a research assistant. A tree had recently fallen against the building, damaging the ventilation ducts in the basement, and the ducts that had been rerouted into our lab carried with them the smell of outside, frozen grass and rotten leaves that were thawing and cooking in the steam heat. I’d been up all night talking to Eva, who was wearing headscarves and stringing her apartment with Christmas lights in Halina’s honor.

The first letter was really a postcard from Gnome stuffed inside an envelope with a postmark from Chicago, where he was in law school. I read it absently, wondering how he’d heard, if his ears had finally rounded out, if he’d turned out handsome and well-rested. I hadn’t seen him in almost eight years, although we’d been writing to each other, sporadically, since the summer he moved away. I read the card a few times before I finally caught his postscript: I hate law school. Every time I dream about you, I wake to the sound of shattering glass.

The other letter was from Halina, sent by the executor of her will, and it smelled like melted butter when I opened it. She’d left me a box of seeds she’d dried from her flower garden, a photo album filled with pictures of her as a young woman, wearing scandalous dresses and dancing on a barge, and her wedding ring. She’d also left me a key I was supposed to give to Gnome. Tell him he was my favorite, she’d written. And tell Eva she was my favorite. You were also my favorite.

I smelled the letter for as long as it took me to start crying, which was longer than it should have. My eyes had been awake too long, and they were reluctant to produce tears even when I told them to.

 

Eva died three months later. She’d come down with a fever in Puerto Rico, where she’d been busy with her new crusade of saving the baby sea turtles, and by the time the doctors had found the welt from the spider bite in her armpit, there was little they could do. Gnome showed up at my apartment two days later, his body slim and drooping like a willow tree, wearing a tie and sunglasses and carrying a vase filled with ivy. He offered to go to the airport and wait for her body to arrive. He offered to drive me to the funeral.

“Where are your things?” I asked him.

“I didn’t bring any,” he said.

The Puerto Rican funeral parlor hadn’t put any makeup on her, and when they opened the casket at the funeral home, her skin was covered with purple splotches that fanned out like spiderwebs. My parents left the room. Because Gnome put his hands on my shoulders, I tried to stay calm and resist the urge to vomit. I wanted to give the director instructions—make her look natural, not too much rouge or lipstick, no blue eye shadow—but I couldn’t.

“She’ll need something else to wear,” he said. They’d sent her to us in what looked like a tie-dyed bathing suit cover-up. “Do you have any of her clothes? Are you the same size?”

I couldn’t speak. All I could hear was shattering, and when I opened my mouth, no words came out. We’d never been the same size, but in my mind, I slipped on her clothes, her swollen skin, her spider bite.

“I’ll bring something this afternoon,” Gnome said. Then he reached across me and closed the casket.

 

After the funeral Gnome disappeared for a week. When he came back, he had a tent and a sleeping bag strapped to his back.

“I forgot to give you your key,” I told him.

“I dropped out of law school,” he said.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m going to go find it,” he said.

“Find what?”

“The mountain.”

The sun was setting behind him, and I squinted my eyes and looked for a line of glass in the distance. All that I saw was red light flooding the doorway and the glowing outline of Gnome’s darkened body. I was tired.

“Come with me,” he said. “I want you to come with me.”

When I turned to go inside, I had to step over the failing branches of his shadow, tilted in a puddle of purple red light. He waited in the doorway while I gathered my things.

 

We headed west. It was already dark when we left, so after a few hours of driving, we pulled off onto an abandoned road and found a patchy forest to camp in. The ground smelled like burnt wood, and the dew crept up around the tent while we drank cheap whiskey to keep warm. With the wind blowing in the branches above us, it sounded like the trees were singing.

“She always had a crush on you, you know.”

“Who?” Gnome asked. “Eva?”

“She used to put apples outside her bedroom door before she went to sleep, in case you came at night to rescue her.”

His face screwed up, and I could tell that it upset him to hear this, but I kept talking, telling my sister’s stories, listening as her name filled the dark spaces between us, until I felt too tired to talk anymore.

Neither of us expected to fall asleep, so Gnome took out a can of Sterno, and we roasted marshmallows and ate them until they made us sick. Part of me kept expecting him to lean over and kiss me, even though it was only partly what I wanted. I’d kissed Gnome before, a million times, behind a curtain of ivy, with bugs crawling up our legs and biting us. I wanted it and didn’t want it the way I wanted and didn’t want physical pain. Just before the Sterno burned out, Gnome pulled up a pantleg to examine a mosquito bite, and I suddenly wished that I had shared him with Eva, wished that I had shared them with each other. I was waiting for the light to go out so I could cry.

I didn’t really want Gnome to kiss me. I wanted him to let me sleep in his lap like a sister.

 

Day two on the road we ate raw potatoes from a vegetable stand. A hummingbird flew in through the rear passenger-side window and rammed its tiny, panicked body into my headrest until I shooed it out with a newspaper. Gnome got an angry call from his father, so we found a nice, quiet river, made a little boat from sticks and leaves, and sent the phone sailing away from us.

“I would’ve been a terrible lawyer,” he said. “I’m too gullible.” Then he added, “Not like you.”

The breeze gave out, and through the water, we could see a wreath of minnows encircle the makeshift raft, until the phone started ringing and the vibrations made it capsize.

“It’s not so different,” I said.

“What?”

“You believe in things that couldn’t possibly be true, like Halina’s stories. I believe in things that sound like they couldn’t possibly be true, but they are. Dark matter. An expanding universe. I believe in alternate dimensions.”

Gnome stared into the water for a minute as his phone sent up bubbles like a cartoon fish. “That’s a start,” he said.

The next day we gave up on direction and took roads based solely on their names. Rabbit Hash Road. Bliss Boulevard. Lonesome Highway. We counted roadkill and hitchhikers and honked when we saw someone litter. Through the open windows, it felt like summer. We talked about home and the nights when we had known each other. We talked about Eva and the things she’d never get to save. We compared the sunburns on our forearms and breathed the sticky air.

At sunset, we drove into a lumberjack festival. From the car, as we approached the river, all we could see above the crowd was a line of men running on the water. Gnome reached over and grabbed my hand.

We made it just in time to see the chopping competition, the men hacking fiercely at their piles of wood, and we browsed through the winning stumps from the chainsaw carving competition. Gnome bought us T-shirts and homemade sausages, and we sat at a picnic table with a family who didn’t have nearly as much awe for the festivities as we did.

“If you think this is something, you should drive out to Spangler,” the woman said. From her cooler she dispensed juice boxes to her writhing sons and a beer to her husband. “They have an arboretum with all the weeping trees you could ever imagine.”

“I can burp the alphabet,” the younger boy announced.

“Jacob.” The father made an unpleasant face but went back to his sandwich when Gnome started belching the alphabet backwards.

“They built the whole thing around these Japanese trees called star magnolias. They don’t know how they got there, but they’ve been there for ages. Huge flowers, like blown up softballs.”

“White flowers?” I asked.

Gnome wasn’t listening, distracted by the eruption of a war sound from the other side of the crowd. The boys shot up and began tugging their father’s arms.

“It’s the Super Chain,” he said. “They rig up a chainsaw with a motorcycle engine.” He signed to his wife that he was taking the boys to go see it. Gnome trailed off behind them.

“White flowers?” I had to yell to be heard.

“It’s in Spangler,” she shouted. “A couple miles past the Stone Monk. Just stop and ask for directions. People around here are friendly.”

 

We were driving again, avoiding the question I would’ve asked before we left, had I actually thought we would find the place. What would we do when we got there? Gnome had returned from the chainsaw exhibition with mild hearing loss and a glinty axe whose handle was stained with hand sweat.

“Hold it,” he’d shouted, placing it in my hands. “It’s heavy.”

Behind us, dust bloomed wide across the road. We drove with the music off, bracing ourselves for what we could brace ourselves for. When we found the Stone Monk, we got out of the car and stood back from the tourists and their pictures. Neither of us had brought a camera. The monk’s head was pointing downward, in a pose of apology or shame.

At the arboretum, Gnome took a white flower from a star magnolia and hooked it through my hair. I felt shy about plucking flowers from the tree, so I gathered them from the ground and dropped them in my purse. For a moment, I thought I’d press one in a book and send it to Eva, and then I remembered. The petals left white dust on my fingers. They smelled like crushed moonlight, the way I’d imagined it to smell, after traveling through cold space to squeeze though curtains of ivy.

“Where does this road go?” Gnome asked a man with a rake.

“Landfill,” the man told him. “Where the lake used to be. The road keeps going, I think, but I wouldn’t drive that way without a gas mask.”

“What do you think?” Gnome asked, back in the car.

“Landfill or bust,” I told him.

He reached up and adjusted the flower behind my ear, and I could see that he was afraid. I wasn’t sure if he was afraid that we would find the thing or that we wouldn’t. Most likely, he was afraid of the same thing I was—the wakeful space that would come after.

“Drive,” I told him.

 

The glass mountain is very far from here, past the dirt road, past the empty sea, past the stone monk with his eyes that look like mourning. The glass mountain is smooth and heartless and perfect.

Inside the car, it smelled awful. Outside the car, it smelled worse. We stood together and pressed our hands against the glass, so cool, so quiet, so beautiful. I wished Eva were there to see it. I was tired, and I wished Eva were there, so I could sleep.

Gnome got his axe from the car and stood at the base, staring up at all that glass. His eyes looked tired. There was no castle at the top. The mountain had brought us to it, and we stood there, obedient, waiting to find out what happened next.

Gnome raised the axe over his head. His name wasn’t Gnome, but I had found him in our garden.

I was afraid that if I said Gnome’s real name, everything would shatter.