NEW WORK IN NEW CHINA

Young Huli has pushed back the remnants of the Communist Party to Inner Mongolia. His tanks and yellow-shirted infantry have crushed the guerrillas that controlled the provinces below the Yangtze River and the remaining People’s Liberation Army along the Yellow River. He has declared himself emperor. His armies march across the provinces waving blue banners with yellow half-moons, the new symbol for China.  

To celebrate his victories, the young emperor builds a palace in his homeland of Tibet that borders the Gobi Desert, the remnants of the Great Wall stretching in the background. To fill it, he has chosen one virgin from every province to be his concubine. This, he explains to the Chinese people, signifies the country’s unification into greatness. And the girls, whom he will treat equally by going to bed with a different one every day of the month, represent his equal treatment of all the provinces. New China consists of thirty-one provinces, and he has declared that, in the months when there are only thirty days, he will not sleep with Manchuria.

In order to appease the growing demand for democracy—mostly among college students—the emperor has given his concubines certain powers. They will act as a sort of sexual senate. Each concubine will act as a representative to her respective province. They will be able to propose laws, suggest amendments, encourage pardons, and ask the emperor for consideration as a judge or military commander, all on their scheduled nights when the emperor sleeps with them. The college students remain unsatisfied, but the emperor understands that one cannot force-feed democracy. Such sudden freedoms might burst the nation’s stomach.

He believes his biggest problem will be keeping his palace court in order. Reforms bring about unforeseen obstacles: how will the emperor maintain control of his sexual senate? He decides to reinstate an old tradition used by the emperors of past dynasties: the recruiting and training of gong-gongs. A gong-gong is a manservant of the emperor and the emperor’s concubines who, on appointment, is made a eunuch. The young emperor has read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Dreams of Red Mansion, and he understands that in China’s past, even when eunuchs and concubines were not given any official power, public intrigue reached such levels that they were sometimes able to usurp the throne. He must pick his servants carefully. 

One of the recent appointees is a man named Zhang Mei, a cook he met in Beijing during his siege of the city. The man is unusually loyal and trusting, but the emperor did not waive the cutting of the testicles. “Traditions,” he said to Zhang Mei, who was kneeling before him. The emperor must strictly maintain a tradition as important and as commonly known as the requirements to become a gong-gong.

Zhang Mei is not from the city. He was born in the countryside, and snuck into Beijing when he was twenty using a fake birth certificate. He did not know it was the new emperor Huli who was enjoying his hand-drawn noodles during the Siege of Beijing, always sitting on that patch of dirt next to his concession stand. The man’s face looked more like a beggar’s—covered with hair, his teeth crooked, his nose long like an opium addict’s pipe. He sat there and ate and steam came out of his mouth, and he laughed with his entire body when his soldiers said something funny. Zhang thought he was an infantryman, or perhaps a tank commander. On one such occasion, Zhang was standing in front of the strange man, pouring him flour broth, when he saw a stray shrapnel flying toward them. He knocked the hot shrapnel away with his wok. In the process, he spilled the steaming broth on the soldiers. He was almost afraid the hairy man would lob a grenade at his concession stand. Instead the man thanked him and brought him to Tibet, then made him a eunuch. Zhang Mei considers his current station in New China to be most fortunate.

He has a cousin stuck in the countryside. This cousin, Pei Pei, has recently married his village sweetheart, and their dream is to live in Beijing or Shanghai. Zhang wants to help them. He calls his cousin using his government-issued phone, and urges him to come to Tibet and work for the emperor.

“You won’t have to worry about money anymore,” Zhang says in his new high-pitched voice. “Everyone will have to bow to you. I’ll put in a good word with the emperor.”

At first Pei Pei thinks that the change in his cousin’s voice is due to the dry climate of the Gobi Desert. Then he realizes that it is because his cousin is not a man anymore. Not having testicles, Pei Pei realizes, affects you beyond your penis not hardening. Not only is his cousin’s voice not a man’s anymore, it is not anything. Not exactly a woman’s voice. Not exactly a boy’s squealing. It is bass-less, like talking while being choked.

“Give me a few weeks, Zhang,” he says. “Let me think about it.”

“What’s there to think?” Zhang says.

“Well, it’s that Song and I want children.”

“You can still have children. First put the bun in the furnace, then take the position.”

“Will the emperor wait that long?”

“What do you mean?” Zhang says. “How hard can it be?”

“Well, we want more than one child. Do you think the emperor can wait a year or two?”

“I don’t think so. He has already made many amendments regarding the appointment of gong-gongs. He might start issuing an examination for it. This is an opportunity few people get. Think it over, Pei.”

Pei Pei hangs up the phone. It is October and winter comes early in the countryside. He is sitting cross-legged in his mud shack, huddling on his stone bed in his sheepskin coat, smelling of urine. He turns around and looks at Song. She is squatting by the furnace, fanning the flames so she can begin to prepare dinner. She turns around, smiles, and says, “It’s cold tonight. Dinner shouldn’t be ready for a while.” What will happen if they have children? He can see them, noses running, sitting around the fire with Song, waiting for their dinner, trails of flame flickering onto their faces. She deserves better than this, he thinks.

The next morning Pei Pei goes to his parents’ house to borrow some flour and hears his father talking on the phone. His father turns and smiles when he sees him coming in, and his mother gives him a large sack of flour, more than twice what she normally gives him.

“Brother Zhang tells me he can make you into a gong-gong,” his father says. “Congratulations. Everyone here is very happy for you. Your mother and I are proud.”

“What do you mean ‘everyone’?” Pei Pei asks.

“Your brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, everyone in the village,” his mother says. “Do you expect us to keep news as good as this to ourselves?”

Pei Pei drops the sack of flour on the floor and covers his face. He sits down at his parents’ table and becomes silent. He rests his elbows on his knees, his face still in his hands.

His father sits down next to him and pats his head. “You are young, Pei Pei,” his father says. “I know you are at an age when your genitalia are very important to you. But it would be irresponsible of you not to take this position. You are the oldest in the family, and you have responsibilities. Brother Zhang tells me the emperor has allowed you to have children. You still have time to help Song conceive. As your father, and as an old man, I can tell you that genitalia are not as important in the future as you think. You have nothing to worry about. You will still be normal. Better than normal, in fact. Everyone will respect you.”

Pei Pei looks up. His face is covered with flour, white as death. He sniffles, and then sneezes. Liquid drips out of his nose and eyes and streaks through the flour like rivers.

“Let me get you a towel,” his mother says. She takes a dirty towel from the kitchen and wipes off his face.

He leaves his parents’ house and walks home, the sack swung over his shoulder. On the way back, he notices the new way people look at him. They nod when he passes them, and smile, showing him teeth. He passes his old teacher. “Finally making something of yourself,” the woman says. Pei Pei walks faster. He looks down and tries to hide his face, and when he gets home, he locks the door and barricades it with the sack.

“What’s wrong?” Song says.

“You don’t know? You haven’t heard the news?”

“No,” she says. “I’ve been cooking lunch.” She stops fanning the furnace. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says, calming down. “Everything is where it should be.”

The emperor Huli knows that gong-gongs serve as much as they are served. He understands that those indentured to the powerful are also powerful themselves, that this is the way it has always been in imperial China. Because Zhang saved his life, the emperor has made him the head of his band of personal eunuchs. The emperor has read of a trend in Romance of the Three Kingdoms where eunuchs given to concubines aren’t used as servants at all, but are played with like pets. The concubines dress them in female clothing, and have them perform tricks and feed them treats. The emperor is careful not to put Zhang into such a humiliating situation. He respects Zhang’s opinions, and has given him a large mansion within the palace walls. 

Inside his mansion, Zhang claps his hands twice. Two chambermaids enter the room carrying his cell phone and a pot of steaming water. They take off his clothes and scrub his body. He lifts the phone to his ear and calls his cousin.

“Just come for a visit,” he tells Pei. “Take a look at how extravagantly I am living.”

“Give me some more time,” Pei Pei says.

“I can’t give you any more time,” Zhang says. He stares at the chambermaids wiping off his body. They are wearing traditional Chinese dresses, pink with colorful jasmine designs, sashes folded over at the waist and then buckled with a black belt. He touches one of the girls’ hair, and then reaches into her dress and feels her breast. He tries to remember what he felt like before he became a eunuch. He regrets not being able to do anything with her, but he manages to convince himself that he is in a better circumstance, give or take.

“If you’re even considering this position,” he says, “you need to come for a visit.” The chambermaids put his clothes back on. “The emperor, and the concubine you’re to be serving, want to see you. I can’t convince them just by running my mouth.”

He hangs up. He puts on his title hat, a black top hat with a topaz in the middle and two long rabbit-like ears protruding from the side, and opens the door. He swings his hand carelessly at the chambermaids and walks through the courtyard with his hands tucked behind his back. He passes peach trees and fountains and he forgets that it’s winter and that he’s in a desert. The entire courtyard is a greenhouse, under gigantic panels of glass.

He makes his way into the main palace. He walks past rolls of identical rooms until he comes to a red door with Lady Jing inscribed on it. Lady Jing is the newest concubine in the palace. The young emperor has recently returned from Henan province where he picked the sixteen-year-old Lady Jing from one of the poorest villages in the country. He told the people of Henan that he picked Lady Jing “because of her beauty, grace, and excellent acumen for law and justice.” 

The chambermaids lead Zhang into the interior, where the young girl is brushing her hair. Immediately she turns around and smiles.

“I’ve been waiting for you all night!” she says.

“I had to make a call,” Zhang says.

She stops brushing her hair, walks over to where Zhang is sitting, and starts playing with his title hat, flicking the rabbit ears back and forth. “There isn’t one thing to do in this forsaken place!” she says. “Not one man between fourteen and forty.” She sighs. She is kneeling on the floor next to where Zhang is sitting, looking up at him as if she were his daughter. “So where are you taking me tonight?”

“Nowhere,” Zhang says. “I’m here to tell you that the emperor’s going to want you tonight.”

“Oh, curse the emperor! He’s so hairy, and he stinks. Tell me again about this cousin Pei of yours. Tell me again how handsome he is.”

Zhang looks down at the girl sitting at his feet, and wonders how she is ever supposed to represent an entire province. How could she ever symbolize fifty million people? She is naïve and immature, just like everyone else in Henan. Maybe that’s it, he thinks, maybe it takes someone who is naïve to represent those who are also naïve.

“I can’t wait until he comes,” she continues. “These maids are so boring! They look at you as if you had knives for eyes. I don’t have any friends here.” She looks down.

“What about the other concubines?” Zhang says. “Lady Xiu lives down the hall. Have you tried making her acquaintance yet?”

The girl shakes her head. “I spoke to her once,” she says. “She’s very secretive. Why are all educated people so secretive?  Sometimes she goes out in the middle of the night.”

Lady Xiu is the only concubine who has a college degree. At twenty-four, she is also the oldest. She represents Beijing, which the emperor considers a province all to itself. He met her after his siege of the city, when he declared himself emperor and told the Chinese people about his plans for the sexual senate. He saw her at a suburb along the outskirts of the city, where he ordered the town to line up its available girls so he could choose. Right away he knew he wanted Xiu. She wasn’t the most beautiful, but she was the most adamant, speaking confidently and clinging to his arm.

“Nobody knows what she does,” Lady Jing continues. “The maids think she has a lover.”

“She better hope the emperor doesn’t find out.” Zhang walks to the door.

“At least she has something to be excited about. I have nothing.”

“I’ll see to it that my cousin is here within the month,” Zhang says, passing through the silk veil.

As he walks back through the palace halls and into the courtyard, he thinks about Pei Pei. “I am doing him a favor,” he tells himself. But he doesn’t recognize his own voice anymore. “I am fortunate,” he says. “Millions of people would love to be in my position.” He walks in small, mincing steps—the only way he is able to walk after the operation. He feels useless whenever he walks. “Anyway I can’t take it back now.” The only thing he can improve now is his status in the palace. First he must gain the emperor’s full confidence, then surround the emperor with his own allies. If his power continues to grow, he will soon have enough people around him to do anything he wants, perhaps overthrow the emperor, and his traditions. Do to him what he has done to me. Smiling, he opens the door to his room, and claps his hands twice.

“You have to go,” Pei Pei’s father says. “Zhang tells us it’s an order from the emperor. If you don’t go they can have us beheaded.”

“Please don’t tell Song,” Pei Pei says. “I told her that I might be going to the city. She thinks I have a job prospect.”

“You are thinking about this situation the wrong way,” his father says. “Song will be proud to learn that her husband has achieved a high rank.”

His mother nods. “There are many paths that lead to a girl’s heart,” she says.

“Just don’t say a word,” Pei Pei says again, and shuts the door.

When he gets home, he sees fabric lying around the floor and on the bed and on top of the furnace. Song has an old magazine on her lap and has needles in her mouth.

“What’s all this?” Pei Pei asks.

“I went to the store today,” she says. “You have to look good for the interview. Come and look at this magazine. Tell me which shirt you want.”

“It’s not glamorous,” Pei Pei says. “I’ll just be working for a bicycle route.”

“If you get it,” she corrects him.

“How did you get money for these things?”

“I’ve been saving up the allowances you gave me,” she says. “And I borrowed the rest from my parents.”

“You shouldn’t have.” He walks over and takes the needle and half-sewn fabric out of her hands and puts them on top of the furnace. He puts his hands on her shoulders and moves them slowly down to her breasts and then down to her hips. He kisses her hair. Then he leans over and whispers into her ear, “Come to bed. You can do this in the morning.”

She shrugs him off. She reaches over his shoulder and grabs the needle and fabric. “Not tonight,” she says. “We have more important things to think about.”

He stops touching her. As he walks to the bed, he mumbles, “What’s more important than a woman’s duty to her husband?” He snuggles onto the hard bed and covers his face with his blanket.

“Pei Pei,” Song says, “you shouldn’t act like this. We can do it any time you want. Right now there are more important things. You have to think about your duties as well. A man needs to take care of his family.”

He doesn’t lift the covers. He whispers, and this time soft enough so she can’t hear, “What family?”

The imperial palace is surrounded by three rings of walls. A shallow moat surrounds the outer wall. Poorer citizens use its waters to wash their clothes. Three drawbridges, each guarded by a pair of tanks, connect the city to the palace. The emperor understands that the moat and walls are not of any practical use. Rather, they are a symbol of power, rooted in tradition, something to make the Chinese people believe that he has obtained the Mandate of Heaven. 

“I’ve never once seen those drawbridges up before,” Zhang says to Pei Pei. They are sitting in his limo. Crowds of people swarm the car, holding signs. They are yelling profanities, demanding change. The driver gets out, shoves his way over to the tanks, and then maneuvers back to the car. A tank comes over and clears a path. They follow it through the outermost wall.

“Who are those people?” Pei Pei asks.

“Young reformers,” Zhang says. “They’ve been protesting since the palace was built. Don’t mind them. The emperor is thinking about cleaning them out.”

“What do they want?”

“Democracy mostly. They’re not satisfied with the concubine system. They don’t see that the concubine system is democracy. Instead of asking for more, they should embrace what they have, and make grievances to their provincial concubine.”

“Would that give them what they want?” Pei Pei asks.

“Not if they want the impossible,” Zhang says.

They pass through the outer rings and enter the palace courtyard. Winter turns to spring. Pei Pei starts seeing everything as if through a curtain of green silk. Willows and peach trees fill the yard. Women wearing traditional Chinese dresses walk past them holding umbrellas. Pink and orange petals fall from the dome.

They drive up to Zhang’s mansion. His chambermaids stand by the door to greet them. A girl takes Zhang’s hand and the other one carries Pei Pei’s bag.

“You’ve arrived just when the emperor has departed for the outskirts of Inner Mongolia,” Zhang explains. “The emperor is serving double-duty on this trip, both to check up on the situation of his forces at the front and also to find an Inner Mongolian concubine.”

“What do I do now?” Pei Pei asks, looking around Zhang’s mansion. Antiques litter the room beneath giant fans. Unraveled paintings and coiled calligraphy cover the walls. Large decorated vases and tangled ginseng roots sit in the corners.

“Don’t worry,” Zhang says. “There are still other people to see. But first we have to get you out of those clothes.”

Pei Pei looks down at the shirt Song has made him: a cleverly designed shirt with alternating strips of blue and yellow fabric to make it look like a striped sweater. He thinks about the time it took Song to make it, the time wasted, the time he could have helped her conceive. This shirt might have cost me a son, he thinks. And then he blames himself. If he hadn’t been such a coward she wouldn’t have wasted that time on something so useless.

That entire night, he can’t sleep for thinking about Song. Around two in the morning a chambermaid walks in and sees his naked body. Pei Pei quickly covers himself. “Tea?” the girl asks, and he suspects she might have forgotten someone was in the guest room. “No, thank you,” he says, and she leaves, smiling coyly. He lies back down, feeling pleased that he had such an effect. It’s obvious that she hasn’t seen a real man for months. If he becomes a eunuch, he will no longer have this effect on any woman. No amount of handsomeness or cleverness can save a man who doesn’t have it where it counts.

“When you see Lady Jing,” Zhang says, “immediately go to your knees and kowtow three times. Also, always stand a meter or more away, and don’t ever touch her. Understand?”

Pei Pei nods. Zhang knocks on the red door, and the chambermaid opens it, taking his hand. Pei Pei follows them inside, almost tripping on his robe, which swings from side to side, trailing the ground. When they pass a silk veil Pei Pei kneels and starts kowtowing.

“Is this him?” Lady Jing asks. “Stand up. Please, stand up.”

Pei Pei gets up, looks at the girl’s face for a second, and then looks down again, his chin touching his neck. The girl is beautiful. She smells of bananas and lavender. She wears a large floppy headdress with flickering rubies and sapphires.

“I’d like to be alone with him,” she says. She waves her hands and Zhang and the chambermaids exit through the silk veil.

She bounces next to Pei Pei and takes his arm. They sit on the bed for a few minutes not saying anything. Then the girl grabs a bunch of letters off her table and flips through them carelessly.

“Do you know anything about laws?” she asks.

Pei Pei shakes his head.

“Can you read?” 

He nods.

“I’ve been getting these letters incessantly,” she says, handing him one. “Read it to me.”

He flips it open. “I’m not a very good reader,” Pei Pei confesses. “I stopped going to school when I was fifteen.”

“You have a beautiful voice. The emperor reads these letters to me, but he has a thick accent. I fall asleep before he finishes. Go on, read it to me.”

Pei Pei holds the letter over the light and squints to make out the handwriting. “Dear Lady Jing,” he reads, “we hope you are happy in your new home in Tibet. We wish you a thousand smiles. Our school is located in Xinchun Village. We haven’t had a teacher for a while now. Our last teacher, Mr. Bai, became a gong-gong. We know that he is needed elsewhere, that by serving the emperor, he is also serving us. 

“We understand that the emperor can’t afford to send great men, those who graduated from the universities, to come and teach a peasant village. But if someone who is literate can be sent over, we would be grateful. We, the parents, donated our savings and hired a man from the city to help us write our words down in—”

“You can stop now.” She yawns. “I’m going to fall asleep. Maybe it wasn’t the emperor’s accent that made the letters boring.”

“There’s more,” Pei Pei says.

“Never mind,” the girl says. “Come here and sit next to me. Zhang tells me you have a wife. Is she pretty? Do you have a picture? Has she given you any children yet?”

Pei Pei puts the letter back on the girl’s desk and sits down next to her. He talks, but doesn’t know what he’s saying. He describes what Song looks like, but he can no longer picture her in his head. Children? He doesn’t even know if he wants children anymore. How many children does a man need anyway? How many children can the world support? The girl listens with enthusiasm. She likes him. She’ll treat his family well here. Song will not need to worry anymore. He will not need to worry anymore.

Over the next few days, Pei Pei begins to accept his fate. He spends a great deal of time with Lady Jing, learning the trade. In the afternoon, he accompanies her to the Discussion Room where all the concubines meet with their provincial lobbyists. Lady Jing finds these events boring and always falls asleep. “When you officially become my gong-gong,” she says to Pei Pei, “I can stay at home and you can take my place.” 

There are very few concubines who attend these meetings, and the ones who do tend to be indifferent. Their gong-gongs speak with the lobbyists for them. Having been to only a few of these meetings, Pei Pei has already noticed the grin on their faces when the lobbyists hand them envelopes, which he suspects are stuffed with money. When he becomes a gong-gong, Pei Pei thinks, he will not be so easily corrupted. He will act on behalf of the people and use his position for the benefit of New China.

The only concubine who seems enthusiastic at these meetings is Lady Xiu of Beijing. Her gong-gong is never present. She argues with the lobbyists in a refined manner. Instead of allocating money to the big businesses, she distributes the money to schools and orphanages. She has also started a program that helps underprivileged young people in the countryside find jobs in the city. The lobbyists hate her. Watching her argue, Pei Pei finds her a remarkable woman. He would like to join her cause as soon as he comes to power. 

A few hours before a meeting, Lady Jing complains of a headache, and tells Pei Pei to attend in her place. During the meeting, the Henan lobbyists talk amongst themselves, seeing that Pei Pei is not officially anything yet, and hand him envelopes, telling him to deliver them to Lady Jing. After the meeting, taking advantage of Lady Jing’s absence, Pei Pei walks over to Lady Xiu and introduces himself.

“I admire what you’re doing,” he says. “New China needs more concubines like you.”

Lady Xiu looks him up and down, and Pei Pei realizes that he has forgotten his place, that he is not officially anything yet. He kneels and begins to kowtow. 

“You still have your testicles?” she asks.

Pei Pei nods. He looks up and sees that she is smiling. Her eyes are surprisingly gentle. 

She leans in. “Let me give you some advice,” she whispers. “Keep your testicles. Leave this place.”

“What does the Lady mean?” he asks.

“Come to my chambers and I’ll explain.”

He follows her down the palace hallway and into her private chambers. Her maids stand guard by the door. Inside, the room is almost identical to Lady Jing’s room. The bed, desk, chairs, lamp, and vases are all placed in the same locations. Stacks of books and papers litter the floor. On her desk is a large typewriter with a half-written letter inside. 

She sits down and puts on a pair of spectacles. “The emperor doesn’t allow us to have televisions or computers,” she says, typing the letter. “I had to have my chambermaids steal this typewriter from outside the palace walls.”

He looks around and realizes that something is missing. “Why doesn’t the Lady have a gong-gong?” he asks.

“He sleeps in his room all day. It’s what I tell him to do. You can never trust eunuchs. They’re always out for themselves. Useless in more than one way.”

Pei Pei keeps quiet. With her spectacles on, Lady Xiu doesn’t look like a concubine at all; she looks like a young girl in a pretty dress, like a college student hard at work.

“You are from the countryside?” she asks.

“I am,” he says. He feels almost ashamed.

She laughs. “You walk in giant steps, like you’re standing in a sorghum field.”

He looks down. “Is that why Lady Xiu thinks I am not fit to become a gong-gong?”

She slides over and takes his hand. “No one is fit to become a gong-gong,” she says. “Why would you want to give up what you have for this? Some of us are here not because we want to be, but because we have to.”

“My village is poor,” he says. “We have no food. My family is counting on me.”

“Your family needs you to be where you are.”

Pei Pei nods, and then looks down. “Lady Jing will be wondering why I’m not back yet.”

Lady Xiu smiles. She leans in and kisses him on the cheek.

Busy commanding his armies in Mongolia, the emperor has left Zhang in charge of the palace. Before he left, he told Zhang to be especially weary of Lady Xiu. The emperor complained that she had been more interested in politics than in sex during her nights with him. Zhang told the emperor that he was suspicious of her himself. One night, while taking a walk on the outermost walls, he saw her talking with some strange men. She was disguised, but dropped her hood for a moment and Zhang could tell she was a concubine. Her headdress also indicated that she was from Beijing. “If anything else of the slightest suspicion occurs,” the emperor said to Zhang, “do not hesitate to take action.”

Zhang is pleased that the emperor has given him such powers. He wants to take full advantage of them, and appoint Pei Pei before the emperor returns. Secretly, Zhang calls Pei Pei’s parents. He tells them to pack their bags and prepare to leave for Tibet. He also tells them to inform Song that her husband will become a high official. Pei Pei has been in Tibet for a week now, and Zhang suspects that he is beginning to get used to the daily baths, meaty meals, and soft beds of palace life.

“It’s time to set a date for the operation,” he says. “I’ve spoken to the surgeons. How does next Tuesday sound?”

“Can’t we wait until the emperor returns?” Pei Pei asks.

“The emperor has already accepted you,” Zhang says. “Anyway, it’s better to have the operation before he arrives, in case for some reason he really doesn’t want you.”

Pei Pei nods. To try and relieve some of his anxieties, Zhang takes him to the room where he is to have the operation. The room, with its stone walls and small windows, reminds Pei Pei of a dungeon. A wooden bed is located at the center, leather straps hanging off the sides. The surgeons who greet them don’t look like doctors at all. They are all eunuchs, dressed in yellow and red half-moon jerseys, with strange grins on their faces.

The night before the operation, it snows. Overhead, a sheet of white covers the green panels, barely allowing light to escape through. At noon, the courtyard already has its streetlamps turned on. Pei Pei sits on the steps outside of Zhang’s mansion, thinking about tomorrow. He turns around and looks through the window at Zhang, who is laughing and talking on his cell phone. That is what I will become, Pei Pei thinks. He imagines Zhang speaking in his high voice. “I am Zhang Mei,” he tries to mimic, but he can’t imagine his own voice ever changing into that.

Zhang opens the window. “Your parents want to talk to you!”

Pei Pei gets up and walks into the mansion. “Here he comes,” Zhang says, and hands him the phone.

“We’re so happy you have made your decision,” Pei Pei’s mother says. 

“Congratulations!” his father says. “But you have to speak with Song. She is hysterical.”

Pei Pei looks at Zhang, who smiles back. He carries the phone outside and takes a seat on the steps again.

No one is on the other side of the line anymore. He hears a lot of noise in the background. His parents are having a party. Among the drunken shouts, he hears someone sobbing. 

He has never heard Song’s voice through a receiver, and he is surprised that he even recognizes it.

“Is this what you want?” she says. 

He doesn’t say anything.

“How could I have known you were unsatisfied with me? You don’t yell at me. You don’t hit me. You tell me I’m a good wife. How could I have known?”

Suddenly everything becomes clear. His parents must have tricked her. He can see their faces. They stare at the fabric and needles and magazines lying around Song’s room. “Look at all the stuff you buy,” they say. “It’s no wonder he feels so much pressure. You’re a spendthrift.” He can see them going to the furnace and looking through the pot of rice and the stew cooking on top. They take a ladle and have a sip of the stew. Their faces turn sour. “And how can he eat this every day?” they say. “It’s really no wonder.”

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Pei Pei says. “I’m coming home.”

“We used to be so happy,” Song says. “I remember the summertimes when we used to find spots in the wheat fields and we’d hide ourselves from the other workers. I remember the times when we were kids, when you sneaked up to my window and took me to the watermelon fields. We pretended we were husband and wife and the watermelon halves were bowls of rice. You told me you wanted three sons to help you in the fields, and you promised me a daughter.”

He can hear her stifled tears. Sitting on the steps, he puts his head in his hands and rubs his face. He looks up at the green panels of glass where the sky is supposed to be and suddenly everything around the courtyard seems dark. Petals fall on his legs and shoulders and face, but because of the layer of snow covering the panels, the petals lose their color, and look more like flakes of charcoal on his skin.

The snow falls heavier and the palace grows darker. Later that evening, Zhang’s spies follow Lady Xiu as she makes her way through the three walls and past the moat. She’s wearing a black sweater with a black hood. They see her conferring with several people outside the palace and then giving them a letter. Immediately Zhang’s men try to arrest her. The men around her retaliate against the spies, one of whom is severely wounded. The guards sound the alarm, and because of the flatness of the desert and the footprints on the snow, Lady Xiu and her accomplices are easily captured. 

Upon reading the letter, Zhang determines that Lady Xiu has been part of the rebellion all along. She has coordinated plans with the college students to take advantage of the emperor’s absence and conspired to storm the palace. In order to demonstrate that treason will not be tolerated, Zhang has decided on the immediate execution of the former Lady. 

Tuesday morning, as the snow outside accumulates to over thirty centimeters—a Tibetan record—Zhang stands on top of the innermost palace wall and looks upon the execution. The greenhouse is still dark from the accumulated snow, but the heavy-duty lamps have been turned on and the courtyard looks as if the sun is out. He feels that Lady Xiu’s execution is happening at a most opportune time. Pei Pei stands next to him, wearing the striped shirt his wife made for him, his bags packed. He would have left this morning if it hadn’t been for the snow.

“What did she do?” Pei Pei asks.

“She was very dumb,” Zhang whispers. “If she wanted to overthrow the emperor, she should have waited. Gain his confidence in full, and then take action. What did she think she could have accomplished? The emperor still has his armies.”

On the square below, soldiers with ceremonial spears grab Lady Xiu by the arms and drag her through the petal-covered grass. They pull her onto a platform. Her hair is wild with a few jasmine petals stuck in it, hanging underneath her torn title hat. The two soldiers bring Lady Xiu to the far side of the platform and tie her to a pole. Below the platform, her chambermaids are also tied up. Next to them a fire burns the former Lady’s letters and typewriter. One of the soldiers underneath walks up to a chambermaid, takes out his pistol, and shoots her in the head. Then he walks up to the other one and shoots her in the same way.

“Your parents told me about Song’s disapproval,” Zhang says. “I understand that you are leaving for her sake. It’s very noble of you.”

The soldiers drop their spears and pick up bolt-action rifles. They march to the other side of the platform and look up at Zhang, waiting for a signal. Lady Xiu moves her head around. Strands of hair hide her forehead. Her head is hunched over, weighed down by the torn headdress. She tries to keep it up by pressing it against the pole, but it keeps falling down. Eventually she gives up and her head falls almost to her shoulders.

“After all, what is a man without a woman?” Zhang says. Once Pei Pei crosses over he will understand. He only needs a push in the right direction. He is still my cousin, Zhang thinks, someone who needs my help. “Except,” Zhang continues, “a better, more independent, and clearer-thinking man.”

“You should wait until the emperor comes back before you take any action,” Pei Pei says.

“Pei Pei,” Zhang says. “You misunderstand what New China is about. The emperor is not New China. His time is limited. We are its future.”

“Zhang, you can’t do this. She is a good woman. She cares about China.”

Zhang nods to the soldiers below. They count down from ten. On five, the soldiers shoulder their rifles. On two, they take aim. On one, Lady Xiu’s headdress falls to the ground and rolls to the other side of the platform, by the feet of the soldiers.

“Do you understand?” Zhang continues, his long rabbit ears quivering. “We are its future. We will be the ones in power once the emperor loses control. These concubines—they’re nothing. They’re puppets. It’s going to be men like us, eunuchs, the most intelligent and most ruthless and most loyal to each other, who will be at the top.”

Pei Pei feels dizzy, listening to Zhang’s voice. It slides into his ears like a rusted knife. He can see the future of New China: thousands of men in his likeness.

“Becoming a gong-gong,” Zhang says, “is the only path there is.”

Pei Pei sees children smiling and clapping their hands twice, sees men of his likeness taking care of them. New China doesn’t need more people; it needs to take care of what it already has. It doesn’t want him back in the countryside, creating more problems. The country folks watch him. They are counting on him. They chant his name and stare at him with awe. He walks near them, striding like someone in a sorghum field, but they don’t seem to recognize him anymore. As he approaches, they draw back. They ask him: Who are you?

The young emperor returns from Inner Mongolia triumphantly. His armies have now pushed back the Communists to upper Mongolia and are laying siege to Ulaanbaatar. It should be a matter of weeks before the communist leaders surrender. To celebrate the thorough defeat of his enemy, the emperor has decreed that he will double the number of concubines in his court. In order to represent the people of New China thoroughly, he will need two concubines for every province: just like how it is in America!

Some of his eunuchs, including Zhang, advise the emperor against having more concubines. While it’s true the incident with Lady Xiu has shaken the emperor, he believes that the quick and thorough actions of Zhang have proven the court can handle more. From now on, he will no longer accept any girl with a college education. Whereas gong-gongs must be intelligent, concubines serve only as a median between the emperor and the people. Any girl with a college education, the emperor reasons, has already separated herself from the general masses, and therefore cannot represent the people accurately. He will choose more girls like Lady Jing, who everyone in the court considers a model concubine.

In order to support these additional concubines, the emperor has to recruit additional gong-gongs. There will be a new entrance exam. It will look for intelligence above all else. College graduates are preferable. The emperor instructs his current line of eunuchs to begin development of this exam. Sitting high up on his throne, he claps his hands twice. His eunuchs walk in mincing steps, and stand hunched before him. He scans them one by one, nodding his head, inhaling and exhaling like a meditating Buddha. He takes pride in all of his gong-gongs, who consider their current station in New China to be most fortunate.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE CHAIR KICKERS’ TALE

There was once a bored and powerful king who proclaimed that any man who could tell a story without an end would be granted riches and glory. For weeks, no one dared attempt the task, but then a farm boy climbed the steps to the palace. He was introduced to the king, and right away he started into the story: “A farmer had a stockpile of corn. A locust came and took a grain of corn. Another locust came and took a grain of corn. Then another locust came and took a grain of corn. Then another locust came and took a grain of corn…” and on and on for eleven days, until finally the king grew tired and awarded the peasant a bag of gold and a spot on his royal military council. When war struck a few seasons later, the king sent the peasant to the front line to die, and the kingdom inherited his meager earnings.   

 

I. How It Begins

In the morning, Boss Cline carves day from air. The gatekeep of the Goldsboro Coliseum and Event Complex punches buttons and twists dials to gear up the supermouth cabled on high—five arrays of five jumbo speakers each.

And there are five of us from Event Prep. We huddle with crews from other departments as part of our usual routine, in which we squint our eyes against sleep and await the terrible thunderclap above, in which we slouch under steel-rafter sky as the third shift crew flies loose and weary (those scraps of the night who rub their sockets and drag their spent bodies from the white-green light where they’ve newly unbuilt a basketball court built the first shift previous).

And we envy these brothers as they pass from us oblivious. Then Boss Cline’s word cannons from speakers into the hollowed arena, and we wonder how it came to be that it’s 4:30 a.m. and we still got no coffee.

Boss Cline says: “Let Housekeeping re-clean the clean concrete floors but east to west this time, not north to south, and fill the walkbehinds with low-foam solution. Cloudy streaks are quite apparent from the view above, my little water-blind fish.

“And let Maintenance do something, anything worthwhile, but goddammit if I catch asses in chairs and eyes fixed on the TV, I’ll break every goddamn seat in this arena and give you an eternity of broken to fix.”

And Maintenance, our fearless and shadowy kin, sits in the break room and sips the last of that goddamned coffee while Boss Cline continues: “Let Event Prep set the stage and chairs to their normal standards, which is to say the best, though in half the time, as union techs will need the floor for a bit after it’s cleaned. Many thanks in advance to the hard workers of Event Prep for rising to the challenge.”

And then, an auspicious announcement: “Today, the hiring committee will stand with me in the sponsor suite to watch the work of your venerable crew leader Pops O’Donald. Yes, the rumors are true, we’re considering his promotion to Operations Manager.”

And we recite: Let Pops leave us in his blessed dust; let him have an office with a Chinese rug.

 

II. The Crew

Within the curved walls of the arena, our circular world of false-forward and false-forever, we become Event Prep, known also as the Chair Kickers.

We are Pops, Mr. C, Phil, Jeb, and Benny.

And all the years of service from Pops are thirty and two, which puts him three years from retirement. Pops suffers sleepless nights and blinks too often, and we know him as the waking dreamer, and also as Brazilian, though he’ll never remember that faraway world, his birth name, the language of the parents that couldn’t keep him.

So every day we recite: Let Pops sleep and dream of strange long agos.

And all the years of service from Mr. C are twenty and one. He worked on F-4 Phantoms that flew to Vietnam and views freedom as light that bends at walls. He continues to live and spend by cards, gin, and pussy, in that order, from Friday to Sunday.

So every day we recite: Let Mr. C have a longer weekend.

And all the years of service from Phil are nine. He runs a hip-hop label that can claim only Cham B. LaRone, who also happens to be his cousin, though we pretend not to know this. Phil graduated from the local university’s prestigious music production program.

So every day we recite: Let Phil’s credentials be honored.

And all the years of service from Jeb are seven. He has a history in oil fields, eastern Texas, sick Ma, dead Dad, then dead Ma. There also may have been a failed marriage, or a marriage that never was. The only book Jeb has read is the Holy Bible, and he writes in his notebook before and after the shift, and during breaks. Many call him queer, though soon Benny will inherit the name.

So every day we recite: Let Jeb walk with God, else he walk alone.

And all the years of service from Benny are less than one, as today is his first day. He’s come on part time with the hope of working his way up to full. When he told Phil that he’d failed too many classes and that his boyfriend of five years left him for a doctoral student, Phil didn’t call him a fuck-ass like some, but instead apologized for Benny’s current situation: “I should have warned you: this coliseum is steel, and we magnetic as fuck.”

 

III. Headway

As the Housekeepers re-clean the clean floors, we gather in front of the elephant door and await orders from our noble leader.

“Fucking ____,” Pops says. Fucking teeth, fucking wives, fucking winter, fucking June. And when Boss Cline mentions a possible promotion, Pops says, “Fucking carrots.”

“OpMan is yours,” says Phil. “You’ll have a desk by Monday. We better gaze upon your cherubim cheeks while we can.”

But those cheeks melt like wax when Pops frowns. “They’ll always dangle something.” He moves his shoulder out from under Phil’s hand. “I’d have eighty percent of my pension if I retired today. Eighty is plenty.”

Pops presses a red button, and the great-wide vinyl wall zips open to heavy wet spring.

“These years,” says Pops. “I have so goddamn many.”

And Jeb says, “The glory of young men is their strength, and the beauty of old men is the gray head.”

“Shut up you idiot.”

We file behind as Pops marches up the ramp to the loading dock. “We’ll gather equipment from the warehouse and then build the stage as the floor on the north end dries.”

We know our Pops will surely impress the hiring committee, no matter the time crunch. They have chosen to judge our chair set for the Globex Sales Convention, which calls for only a few thousand chairs and a mid-sized stage. Pops knows this stuff—it pumps through each of his throbbing organs.

After we leave our shift at night, we each eat dinner and watch our programs, and then most of us wrap blankets tight around our bodies and sleep infant-like the entire night through. But Pops—he closes his eyes and swims half-awake through boundless seas of green-padded chairs; he scales aluminum crags of stage all the way up to the stratosphere. Then his alarm clock sounds at 4 a.m., and he reports to the coliseum to tell us what he’s seen.

 

IV. Holding Pattern

After the stage is built, the clang of metal on metal begins to rattle from the rafters above us. The union riggers maneuver tools as they swing from our sky.

“Hold tight!” shouts a belay-man as he loosens some rope so his partner can climb higher. Across the floor, sound techs swarm our stage and shout coded commands between the uproar of amplified feedback. Two twenty-foot towers of speakers stand in each corner downstage.

“Fucking shit-Christ,” says Pops. “This ain’t Elton John.”

The Globex Convention has never before required special lighting and sound, much less union guys. Industry rules prohibit us from setting chairs or other equipment while they have the floor.

Pops lifts his radio to ask the airwaves how long we’ll have to wait. A long pause, and then only Gladys from Housekeeping responds: “Hell if we know. It’s your job to know.”

Pops blinks in time with the long hand of the clock. He works some figures on his clipboard. “If we start in half an hour, that’ll be three hours to doors. 3,000 chairs divided by three sections divided by 180 minutes. 171 minutes. Something like six chairs a minute with no breaks.”

“Possible,” says Mr. C. “We won’t have room for mistakes.”

And Jeb says, “Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.” And Pops curses Jeb and the Lord and the Lord’s mercy. We follow him to the break room to wait for our turn to take the floor.

It’s nearly lunchtime, though no one’s in the mood to eat. Instead, we gather around as Pops gives our first-timer, Benny, the Chair Talk: “With a standard event chair, you have the male and the female parts of the lock. I call the knob-tipped shaft the dick. The slender, ever-waiting hole is the pussy. You have the dick on the right side of the frame and the pussy on the left. So to help our inanimate lovers achieve carnal relations, we must lift the frame and ease the knob into the hole. Then we simply let go—the shaft slides into place, and our lovers remain in union till death do they part. God is a wise and horny bastard.

“Now, consider a damaged chair. Say a knob is bent a little to the left from rough handling by someone who tried to force an ill fit. When I get these poor little chairs, I have to wiggle and jam the dick into the pussy. It’s heartbreaking. You see?” Benny grimaces, and Pops shrugs.

Knowing we still got plenty of time to kill, we head to the break room, where Mr. C steps in and asks Pops to tell us again about The Sole Recorded Account of a Sighting of Boss Cline.

“When was it, Mr. C—ten years ago? It was one of those long days. I think we were babysitting a blood drive in the exhibit hall, just the two of us. We were reading the papers in the break room when in walks some crony in a suit and tie. Said his name was Luddy or something.

“Well, we’d been on our asses for a while and were thinking we’d been caught—maybe secret cameras. But this Luddy guy wasn’t concerned about our asses. He asked if we’d be willing to do a favor for Boss Cline, and of course we’re not idiots so we said we would. We followed him from the basement tile up to the carpet on the first floor and then to the first of several doors that required punch codes.

“So we walked through ten or so hallways, past all these code-locked rooms—and then there we were, standing at the double doors of Boss Cline’s office. They were solid cherry oak, those doors—I swear it—with intricate carvings of tropical flowers, and also these criss-cross lattices, like it was the entrance to an Arabian palace or something. Back me up, Mr. C.”

“That’s right,” Mr. C says, without looking away from the game on the TV.

“Well, Luddy walked us right through those doors, and I expected to find Jesus himself floating above a pool of sparkling water. In all my twenty-some years I had never seen this man whose voice I heard every morning. I felt like the goddamn Scarecrow who come to beg for brains.

“But here’s what was: this man—Boss Cline—had no motherfucking hair on his flesh. None. His skin looked soft and springy, like he was some inflated newborn. So Luddy introduced us, and Mr. C and me were all bumbling and curtsying before this giant, all-seeing infant. Boss Cline didn’t seem to care or even notice us. He just squinted and squinted and I thought maybe he couldn’t see or even hear, maybe he still thought he was alone in his office. But then he told Luddy to tell us to sing him a Christmas carol. So Luddy told us. Mr. C and I side-glanced. I think I even laughed a bit. Sure, the holidays were upon us and whatnot, but who’d guess that Boss Cline would want a couple of old goons to do a tone-deaf song and dance. What kind of entertainment is that? But this was no joke. Boss Cline squinted and squinted and waited in his baby skin, and Luddy crossed his arms, scowled, and motioned for us to begin. I looked to Mr. C and he looked to me. I said, ‘Jingle Bells?’ and Mr. C nodded and we sang the first few words of that holiday favorite before Boss Cline’s eyes flared open and beamed into us with an unnatural force that clenched our nuts to command we sing something more tender.

“Keep in mind we understood this truth without a word spoken. We just knew ‘Jingle Bells’ was finished and jumped right into the correct song—‘Silent Night’—and when our voices unified Boss Cline grinned and rubbed his smooth hand back and forth across his immaculate head, and Mr. C and I sang that carol low and pretty to the end, then three times more until Boss Cline said, ‘Good, that was nice,’ and we knew it was time to go. We were all confused and dream-walking as Luddy led us back through those carved doors and secret hallways, back to our chairs in the break room. He told us to take an extra thirty minutes for our services. Then he was gone. I wouldn’t believe it myself if Mr. C hadn’t been there.”

As usual, we ask Mr. C if it really went like that. “Sure, yes. Like that,” he says.

And then suddenly our radios beep to announce a caller. Boss Cline’s calf-leather voice graces our humble airwaves: “Pops. Come in, Pops.”

We turn down our volume while Pops turns up his.

“Go ahead.”

“May I ask why you’re not on the floor setting chairs with only three hours until show time?”

“It’s the union guys, sir. They haven’t left the floor.”

“You could have started half an hour ago. I made a deal with Harold since these changes came last minute. Didn’t you read the email this morning? You should always read your emails.”

“My apologies, Boss Cline,” says Pops. “I’ll have the floor ready by show time.”

“You have two hours.”

Pops checks his watch. “Pardon, but I think you mean two hours and forty-three minutes.”

A stretch of white noise, then, “I said two hours. You have to finish by the time the show pros arrive so they can do a full security assessment before doors open.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me a ten-four.”

“Ten-four, sir.”

Our leader latches his radio to his belt loop and rubs his overworked eyelids. He figures more quick math on his clipboard. We need to set about nine chairs per person per minute. “Impossible,” he mutters.

Phil grabs the clipboard from Pops’s limp hand and confirms the calculations. “We’ll do it,” he says.

 

V. The Chorus

This is when the important work begins, when we live up to our nickname—the Chair Kickers. Not everyone kicks, however—it’s a sensitive art handled by the more adept men—Pops, Mr. C, and Phil.

First, they spend a couple seconds positioning the starter chair so it’s perfectly parallel to the front of the stage. They always set from right to left and front to back, as so: drag, slide and lock, toe-tap the legs into perfect alignment—Skreeek! Kachung. Tungtungtung. At the end of a row they land one final kick at the outer frame of the last chair to shift their work into perfect alignment.

Simpler, but just as important, is the carrier’s job. One: bring folded chairs four at a time from rack to setter. Two: with three chairs balanced against one leg, beat green padding of one chair’s seat until it opens. Three: use one hand to feed chair to setter while using other hand to open another chair. Four: repeat steps one through three until rack is emptied.

And thus we gear as machine.

We split into teams of two, except for Pops, who handles the work of three people. Mr. C struggles with Benny and his cloddish technique.

“Gimme a chair, fool!” he shouts, but Benny only trips over a chair rack when he attempts to speed up. Still, they are quick enough.

And so it passes that after twenty-some minutes, we break into a steady sweat. Green upon green springs from our work, and to Boss Cline up above, it must seem as if we paint lines in fluid strokes.

We become the empty everything as the rhythmic clamor of the chairs washes clean our minds: Skreeek! Kachung. Tungtungtung.

Phil notices our problem after the first hour. Pops is always compulsively precise, but the air in the arena suddenly feels off-balance. Jeb and he are flying ahead, building rows even faster than Pops, so he takes a couple seconds to quadruple check the numbers. Jeb takes over when Phil sprints to the center section.

“I hate to say it, Pops, but we’re at least two racks short. I counted.”

Pops keeps kicking. Skreeek! Kachung. Tungtungtung.

“Do you want me to take care of it?” Phil asks.

Again Jeb speaks from afar: “If any provide not for his own, he is worse than an infidel.”

“Shut up you fatheaded sommabitch!” Pops shouts across the room, though we know he regrets his choice of words in light of Jeb’s recently dead mother. But the chairs—what of them? He counted those racks in the basement four times yesterday. He never miscounts, and certainly not four times.

Boss Cline, in his omniscience, finds just the right moment to radio down and ask Pops what the hell is going on.

Pops sighs and lowers his chair to the ground. He lifts his radio. “I’m sorry, sir. I must have miscounted the racks. I’m sending Phil for more.”

“Is that so?” says Boss Cline.

Phil lifts his own radio. “It was my fault, sir. I took two of the racks Pops had counted and used them for the flea market yesterday. I should have said something.”

“I see,” says Boss Cline. “As you were.”

“Ten-four,” says Phil. He clips the radio back to his belt and turns to meet the expected scowl of our leader.

“You didn’t take those chairs,” says Pops.

“No.”

“Why’d you lie?”

Phil shrugs. “I want you to get that Chinese rug.” He presses on. “The forklift won’t fit behind the stage at this point. I’ll have to roll the racks over by hand.”

Pops nods. “Go.”

 

VI. An Exception to the Rule

Phil opens the glass door and lets the lumpy wheels of the additional carts fall silent over soft linoleum. Two suit-men with gelled hair stop him before the hallway’s bend. “Are you Phil from Event Prep?”

“Maybe.”

“Boss Cline has requested your presence.”

“But these.” Phil motions toward the racks.

The suit-man with gray hair nods to the blond, who promptly pushes Phil aside and assumes his position between the racks. He starts around the bend in clumsy three-point maneuvers, but before Phil can help, the other suit-man has him by the arm and is pulling him toward the elevator.

“The name’s Lonny,” he says once they begin their ascent.

Phil accepts the handshake. “Lonny? You mean the Lonny?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nevermind, that was Luddy. Have I done something wrong?”

“I don’t know. Boss Cline doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Do you have a guess?”

“It’s useless to guess at Boss Cline’s intentions. Just this morning he told me to move two racks of chairs somewhere no one would find them.”

Phil gloves his hands with his pockets to soak up all the sweat.

Instead of taking him to a fifth-floor sponsor suite, Lonny steps out at the second floor. Phil follows him into a carpeted area, past phone-locked secretaries to a code-locked door.

He punches numbers and leads Phil through one hallway to another coded door, then through two more coded doors. Sooner than Phil expects, they reach the cherry oak doors of legend. Upon them: a carven lattice, but no ornate flowers.

Lonny knocks three times. A muffled voice grants them entrance. At this point, Phil nearly expects a man with a full head of hair to greet them from behind a modest executive desk—he knows Pops’s memories come in strange shapes, when they come at all.

Phil steps into the warm yellow light of the office. The walls are lined in bookcases and leather furniture, and before him, corralled by an expansive U-shaped desk, sits Boss Cline. And to Phil’s horror—the man is exactly as Pops described him: a newborn wrapped in a wool suit, squinting into all creation.

“Come, boy. Stand closer to me.”

The rounded cheeks; the chinless jawbone; the protruding, suckling upper lip of a babe. Phil clasps his trembling hands behind his back.

“Ease up—this is not the principal’s office,” says Boss Cline in his liquid baritone. “You’re here because you impress me.”

“I am?”

“My men have been watching you. You’re a smart man, Phil. You know how to play your surroundings. You know how to speak to people to make them feel at ease. You’re too good to work down on the concrete.” He says all this still squinting. “How would you feel about moving up to the carpet?”

“But Pops . . .” he says.

“Pops is a builder and a family guy. We all love him. He’s perfectly suited for what he does, and I’d be an idiot to move him elsewhere. Besides, he’s three years from retirement. He’s aged out.”

“So there’s no position? There are no board members?”

“I am all judges,” says Boss Cline. “I’ve seen his performance.”

Phil huffs and stands broad-chested before this almighty child-man. “I’m sorry, Boss Cline, but I can’t be the OpMan. I can’t take the job you shammed over Pops.”

“OpMan? No, you have it wrong.” Boss Cline lifts a pair of tweezers from a desk drawer and holds them idly between his thumb and forefinger. “I can hire practically any numbskull for that job, so long as they can answer calls and keep the labor in check. You’re more of a thinking man. I want to put you in a suit and tie. I want you to be an executive assistant, like Larry here, only you’ll be the number one guy, the one with all the secrets.”

Phil doesn’t answer right away. He watches as Boss Cline plucks imperceptible hairs from his forearm.

“Listen, Phil, I know you have loyalties. I know those men are your brothers. But at some point, the bigger cat has to catch bigger mice if he doesn’t want to starve. Don’t sacrifice your potential.”

Boss Cline pauses for a response that Phil doesn’t give, then continues. “You are the architect of your own reality.” He plucks. He smiles. “Look at my skin—it’s vernal and soft because I fight imperfection with my little dagger.” He slashes the tweezers across a tiny swath of air.

“But I like the freedom of part-time labor,” says Phil. “I manage a record label.”

“Don’t kid yourself.” Boss Cline drops the tweezers back into the drawer. He motions for Phil to take a seat in the leather armchair to the right of his desk. He punches something into his computer’s keyboard and turns the monitor around to show Phil.

It’s a high-definition video feed of the arena floor. He zooms in on Pops, whose sagging cheeks drip with sweat. Boss Cline lifts his radio. “Pops. Come in, Pops . . . I need you to have the chairs ready in the next ten minutes. The show pros are waiting in the locker room.”

Pops glances at his watch, and Phil does the same from the office on high. Another ten minutes shaved from the prep time. On screen, Pops lowers his radio and mouths several obscenities. He raises it again.

“Ten-four.”

Back down on the floor, the rest of us hear Pops shouting new orders. The team revs into a blue-streak rhythm. We will finish, it has never happened any other way. Benny and Mr. C sprint from rack to row; Jeb wastes no movement—he’s done impressive work to keep up without Phil. And Pops leads the way.

They inhale the same breath. Phil hears the song of chairs in the deepest canal of his ears: Skreeek-kachung-tungtungtung. Skreeek-kachung-tungtungtung.

“Tell me, Phil,” says Boss Cline, “is that what freedom looks like?”

Our hero fixes his eyes on his brothers at work. He can practically hear Jeb’s rally cry: They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and will not be faint! He watches as they whoop and holler and fly into their last few rows.

Boss Cline turns the screen away. “They will succeed. You know this. Pops always succeeds.”

He hands Phil a sheet of paper that lists the starting salary. Phil has never made half as much.

“Plus VIP access to every club in town,” says Boss Cline. “And a lifetime supply of coupons for free oil changes, among other perks.”

Phil stares at the paper in his hands.

“You need time to think. Get back to me before the weekend.”

Phil nods.

“Do you have any questions?”

Phil folds the paper and tucks it into his shirt pocket. “No.”

 

VII. Cooldown on the Catwalk

After our valiant and legendary set, we pile into the elevators for a ride up to the catwalk. Mr. C stays behind, since he is afraid of heights.

After Pops rehashes the tale of the crew’s feat, we press Phil to explain his secret absence.

“The suits wanted help moving boxes.”

We scoff.

Benny takes a few trembling steps onto the metal webbing. The rest of us walk fearlessly and watch the scurry of show pros some hundred feet below.

Boss Cline radios for Pops. We gather around in anticipation.

“Great job today, my faithful man. You really impressed the committee.”

“So I have an official interview?”

“I’ll let you know before the weekend.”

Pops lowers the walkie, then raises it again. “Ten-four.”

Phil turns to the railing as we congratulate Pops on this promising news.

“Hey Phil,” says Jeb. “Aren’t you for our man?”

Phil looks over his shoulder. “Yeah, of course. Great job today.” He turns back to the arena. The show pros have readied their stances at each entrance.

“Melancholy shithead,” says Pops. He walks up behind his friend and lands a jolly slap on his back. We all stand at the rail, even Benny, who has finally made it across the webbing.

A sugary jazz blasts over the speakers. Below, a few choice audience members trickle onto the floor, escorted by ushers to their front-row seats. Then the show pros pick up their radios simultaneously, lower them simultaneously, and widen their stances.

“Here come the crazies,” whispers Phil. We lean deep into the metal at our hips.

The head show pro raises both hands in alert to his coworkers. Mere seconds pass, and then the northeast and northwest entrances spew a chaotic mob of Globex sales trainees. They rush for the front row, and while the show pros corral some, more make it past. Several people unhook chairs and bring them closer to the stage. A woman shoves a man to the ground for the last front-row seat. The 3,000 chairs fill quickly. Several people are forced to stand.

The show pros reach a state of near control, and the unhooked chairs are returned to their rows.

A hypnotic contralto, like Boss Cline’s but dipped in corn syrup, booms over the speakers and cuts the raucous chatter of the crowd, “Test, test. Okay, everybody settle down.”

The room obediently falls silent. A man in a lustrous gold jacket enters stage left and walks to the center. “Wait a second. Who are we kidding?” He sweeps his palm out over the troops who would follow him anywhere. “Ladies and gentlemen of Globex, sales-gods-in-training, who’s ready to climb to the top?”

IF THERE WERE BEES

Lacey and Otto took to the coast and rented a motel room for the weekend, right on the water. Workers in white hazmat suits had descended upon their house, cutting holes into the walls because the bees had filled their home.

Lacey first saw the bees while pruning back the bougainvillea two weeks before: a small cluster near the kitchen window, a nest the size of her fist tucked up beneath the overhang. Otto told her they would be gone in three days.

“They do that. You can’t just kill them,” Otto said and leaned against the kitchen counter. The nighttime light in the house looked staged for a play—dramatic, expensive.

When Otto spoke, he touched his beard, pressed his index finger to his hidden jawline, a glass of wine in his other hand. He liked animal facts.

“In the spring there are bees. Three days and they move on. Everyone knows that,” he said and left the kitchen.

Lacey stood at the counter spiralizing summer squash and listening to the bees as they bounced against the kitchen window in the dark. She wanted Otto to lean his face into the back of her neck and speak so she could feel the heat of his breath. What she wanted him to say was, It’s okay. I’ll fix it.

Within a week, the small nest became a horde, and in two it was an invasion, the buzz like a chorus in the walls. The house seemed to pulsate, bee wings busy inside light fixtures on the ceilings, against candelabras affixed near the fireplace.

When the men came, they wandered through the house, writing down numbers and knocking on the hollow spaces of the walls, using a heat sensor to find the hive. One of the men told her, “They’ve been here for months. There are honeycombs in the walls. You’ll have to leave for a few days so we can take care of it.”

Lacey woke in the motel room hearing the noise in her sleep. She lay still and imagined the men in suits cutting human-sized holes in her dining room walls, stepping into them and scooping out the honeycomb as if there were rooms between her rooms, ones she hadn’t thought to fill with anything until now. She listened to the early sounds of the motel waking up—the clatter of silverware on the lanai below, an ice machine running. She rested her hands on her stomach at the space between her hip bones, an enclave.

It was the sort of motel that was nice because it was on the ocean and not nice because it was on the ocean, everything sick and wet with salt water, sun-bleached and painted over so it peeled. It sat on a wave break at Mussel Shoals, public beaches in either direction that in the summer were littered with children and Popsicle-colored umbrellas. But now, in early spring, there were only morning surfers like seals, and a thick marine layer socked in the coast.

Otto rolled over to face her. A few gray hairs had grown in near his temples and the cowlick at the crown of his skull. They made her want to climb inside him and offer up apologies from the inside out. His bright blue eyes were more clouded now. She’d stirred the silt.

A few days before the bees, she’d come home from the doctor’s office in a taxi, and he’d said, “You can’t unring a bell.”

Otto was hurt by her decision in ways she didn’t know he was able to be hurt. And still he took care of her: glass of
watered-down ginger ale and crackers on a plate with her painkillers. She slept in their bedroom, drops of blood like Rorschach tests on the white sheets, and he slept on the couch until their stay at the motel.

The line of light at the bottom of the blinds was gray and slim, waiting to be uncovered. She wove her boney knees between his warm legs and pressed her torso against his.

“Wake up,” she whispered and waited for him to say, touch this.

“Coffee,” he said instead.

She licked his neck, stubble against her tongue like concrete.

Otto got up from the bed, leaving Lacey naked on the starched sheets. He opened the blinds. The dull morning came in and made everything feel wet and cold, the lilac bedspread strange. Lacey decided that the brain must process pain in singular ways, that the absence of touch can hurt as much as a burn.

On the lanai, they ate sliced cantaloupe and Cheerios from paper bowls, drank coffee that tasted like tin. Otto read the newspaper while Lacey sifted through brochures she’d collected at the front desk, Xeroxed paper in pinks and greens: local history about a sinkhole that opened on the PCH in the ’70s, Italian restaurants in Carpentaria, shopping in Santa Barbara. One was made by the woman who worked the front desk, a handwritten list: 50 Ways to Spend Your Days. Xeroxed so many times the letters were faded in certain places.

She’d pressed it into Lacey’s hands. “I made it myself. Done almost all of them too. You know my husband and I used to come here for vacation.” She wore seashell earrings. Her hands were thick and tan.

“I bet he loves that you work here.”

“Only started after he died. Suppose he does though.”

Lacey was going to say that she was sorry, but she only stood there, her hands filled with colored papers.

“Let me know how far you two get,” the woman said, and then offered her a plate of frosted pink seahorse-shaped cookies.

Otto cut his already cut cantaloupe with a plastic fork and knife.

“Let’s try and do all of them,” Lacey said and pushed the list to him across the table.

“Learn a new language? Start a seashell collection? Please.”

“Walk on the beach. Drink a bottle of wine. Make love,” she said.

“This is silly,” he said, and went back to his newspaper and cantaloupe.

“No, Otto. This. Is silly.” She left the table, locked herself in the motel room and turned on Jenny Jones so no one could hear her cry into the lilac pillow case. She cried about the list and she cried about the bees and she cried about how far away people get, even, or especially, when they are in the same room.

It was hours before Otto came to check on her, but when he did he had the list in his hand, had crossed out all of the things they’d inadvertently accomplished, and held a bottle of wine. It was an olive branch, a gesture, the first one he’d made in weeks.

“Number thirty-one,” she said.

By three in the afternoon the marine layer was gone, as was their wine. A weak spring sun made the water on the rocks glow like they’d been painted, and the tide dropped so waves crashed rather than rolled on the deep green sea. Lacey followed Otto down the beach, walking in his footprints, tossing glittering shells into a champagne bucket. Small birds with razor-like beaks ate crabs from beneath the wet sand. Otto ate a pomegranate, spitting the seeds on the ground, his lips dyed burgundy.

“Find a sand dollar,” Lacey said, “number nineteen.” She rubbed wet sand from between its grooves, so thin she wanted to crush it. It was an urge she’d had since childhood: break something delicate, crush the mandolin cookies between her fingertips, smear the perfectly finished painting. She tossed the sand dollar in the bucket, hooked her arm around Otto’s, and buried her face in his shoulder to hide from the ocean wind.

A few yards ahead, a small lump sat on the beach, just out of reach of the water. A bird. It moved its head left and right but as they got closer it didn’t leave. Lacey could see the rise and fall of its feathers, its breathing rapid, like it was confused how it ended up on a cold beach in California.

“It’s a loon,” Otto said.

“No. Those don’t live here,” she said.

“It is, look at its red eyes.”

“The feathers, though. They’re sad.”

Otto said, “They’re gray. They turn gray when they fly south. And they don’t make noises. And their bones are solid so they can dive for fish. And their legs aren’t strong enough to hold them so they never leave the water.” Otto was pressing his index finger into his beard. “It’s beached.”

“It’s cute. Kind of,” she said.

“It’s beached,” he repeated.

“It’s fine. It’s a bird.”

“We can’t just leave it. It’ll die,” Otto said, hands on his hips and eyes on the ground.

The word bounced around inside the empty parts of Lacey like the bees stuck between their bedroom walls.

“Okay,” she said, “take off your jacket.”

The bees were the first thing to come along that Lacey and Otto had to talk about, a problem they could wrap themselves around, a part of the new world they were living in. She was even thankful for the bees because of this.

Otto laid his jacket in the sand next to the beached loon. “Scoop it up and I’ll wrap it,” he said.

She hesitated, afraid it would bite her or fall apart or that she’d want to crush it between her hands.

“You can do it.”

Her hands shook, vein-lined and white. She slid them under the downy feathers of the loon, felt it twitch and try to wriggle from her grasp. She pressed her fingers through the layers of gray to where she could feel its body—a heartbeat so fast she could hardly feel the spaces between, a vibration.

“Okay, ready?” Otto said.

She lifted the bird and Otto wrapped his canvas jacket around it, tied the sleeves so it couldn’t escape, and cradled it against his chest. The bird bit at the air, reaching for something that wasn’t there, and then lay perfectly still and rested its head against the jacket. The three of them headed back toward the motel.

“Oh, he’s definitely a loon,” said the woman at the front desk. Her seashell earrings swung as she shook her head. “It’s been happening.”

“This has been happening?” Otto asked.

“Oh yes. It’s the algae bloom. The fish eat so much of it, and the loons eat the fish. It makes them go mental. They lose their way, attack surfers, beach themselves. We find a few dead every morning. Poor guy,” she said and pet the loon’s feathers.

Lacey ate one of the frosted pink cookies, still a bit buzzed from the bottle of wine.

“Okay, so does someone take it back out into the ocean?” she asked.

“No, I’m sorry, dear. It’s a whole process. Plus, it’s the weekend. He won’t survive here, so you’ve got to take him to the Loon Lady.”

Lacey started to laugh. “Of course we do, number forty-seven. We can’t.”

“You’re the one who wanted to do all of this,” said Otto, “and now I’m standing here holding a loon.” He cradled the bird against his chest. His words were supposed to be sharp she knew, but Lacey only heard softness. The room smelled of wet sea air and sweet, burnt popcorn. For the very first time, all the way down into the empty space, she let herself grieve what she had done. She allowed herself for just an instant to imagine a different narrative entirely.

Lacey came closer and rested her head on Otto’s shoulder. She pet the loon, its feathers so soft she could barely feel them. It closed its eyes. It seemed smaller now that they were inside.

“Where can we find her?” she asked.

“I’ll draw you a map,” said the woman. And on the back of the list she drew a map.

They drove in silence, Lacey in the passenger seat with the loon in her lap, Otto with one hand on the wheel and the other on her thigh. Paul Simon played on the radio: hearts and bones, hearts and bones. The ocean stretched out behind them as they climbed into the hills, following the map with a shared attention.

When they pulled up to the house, there was a man outside filling pails of water with a hose, carrying them from one end of the yard to the other, to a fenced-in area with pink and blue kiddie pools. They parked in the dirt driveway and climbed from the car.

“She’s inside,” the man shouted across the yard. “Just knock. She’ll come.”

The metal screen door rattled and the Loon Lady appeared in the doorway, bottle-feeding a loon that looked like the one Otto held.

“Gracious,” she said through the mesh of the screen. “He doesn’t look so good. A moment please.”

She disappeared in the house and came back with a box filled with alfalfa, like the kind you stuff in a class pet’s cage. Otto carefully unwrapped the jacket and the woman scooped up the loon and set it inside the box. They followed her around the side of the house.

“Do you work for the state?” Otto asked.

“I don’t work for anyone anymore. I was a vet when I was young. When the birds started dying, I don’t know why, people started showing up here with them. Like someone told them who told someone else I could do something.”

“And you help them?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I help them die. Depends on what they want. How far gone they are. Usually make up their minds to live or die before they even get here.”

Nearly twenty loons littered the yard, some floating in baby pools, others cradled in alfalfa. Otto went to one of the pools and softly pet the birds one by one. He told the woman all the same facts he’d told Lacey earlier about the birds. They both listened carefully. Otto pressed his finger into his beard.

They stood in the yard for some time, neither touching nor speaking, just watching the Loon Lady circle the kiddie pools. It was motherly, the way she tended to the birds, touched the tepid water, and refilled feed dishes. The ocean air made its way up the hills and into the yard, smelling of salt and sage brush.

“And what about the ones who die?” Lacey asked.

“What about them?” said the Loon Lady.

A loon flapped around in a pool, disturbing the eerie calm of the yard.

“I bury them at the edge of the property. Everything goes back to where it came from,” she said.

Lacey wanted to ask if she could bury one. Instead, she looked for their loon, the one they had found, but the birds were all the same. All gray in the feathers and red in the eyes, silent like they’d never once made a sound.

“Is it going to be okay?” Lacey asked.

Neither the Loon Lady nor Otto answered her.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE DYBBUK

The first are those souls of the wicked who, after their death, do not merit to enter Gehinnom. They enter living people’s bodies due to our numerous transgressions, speaking and telling all that happens to them there, as is known, may the Merciful save us.
                                                                                                                                                 —Sha’ar HaGilgulim

Dina’s eating breakfast the Monday after Trav’s death when she hears a buzzing noise. She worries another yellow jacket has made its way inside through the tears in the kitchen window screens, then she asks her dad, Ronnie, if she’s adopted. She’s told him Trav was just some boy she never spoke to, the same way she doesn’t speak to any of her classmates, pretty much ever.

“I saw you come out of your mother,” says Ronnie. “So no, you’re not adopted. Sorry.”

“Dad, that’s disgusting.” She fixes her scowl on him for a moment, then looks at the table, her own hands. She cracks her knuckles one by one and rubs her eyes, which are bruised from lack of sleep.

Ronnie hands her a plate of French toast made from stale Whole Foods challah, and she drenches the stuff in agave nectar. He reminds her he’s out late tonight to teach the elder yoga class at Beth Achim. But Ronnie’s not just a yoga instructor; he also runs the synagogue’s adult ed programs and the Sunday Hebrew school. He soothes the Hebrew school kids’ tantrums, tutors the occasional nervous convert, and runs a weekly kollel for twentysomethings. Dina likes to sit on the couch in his synagogue office and observe his effect on people, the way they lean in when he talks.

“I have a thing this morning,” she says, just as Ronnie adds oil to the pan in which he’s making their breakfast. It smokes and sizzles and drowns out her voice.

So Dina gnaws at her rubbery toast, her head still buzzing. Strange, but in that buzzing she could swear she hears Trav, the groaning noises he used to make when they fooled around in his Aerostar. She can’t see a yellow jacket anywhere. Maybe it’s trapped between a screen and a closed windowpane.

She knows she’s not adopted. Why did she ask that?

When they’re done with breakfast, she and Ronnie go to the living room for sun salutations. There is no buzzing here. Side by side, Dina and her father stand with feet planted on the carpet, backs arched and hands taut toward the ceiling, like the elastic limb of a bow. They fold forward and touch their feet. Work back one foot then another in order to stretch their legs. Return to the standing position.

Ronnie prepares for a second salutation, the next step in a routine they’ve carried out faithfully since he started working on his teaching license at East Side Hatha seven years ago. But Dina’s running late. “I have to leave. There’s a special assembly,” she says.

“Have a good day, sweetheart.” He frowns for a moment before easing back into his beatific sun-saluting face. As he lifts his arms to the ceiling again, Dina puts on her backpack and sandals, and ducks out the front door.

On her walk to school, she wonders again why she brought up the adoption thing. How weird of her.

The special assembly in Kathleen Williams Collegiate Academy’s gym is about Trav. Principal Anders leads the Pledge of Allegiance, then Counselor Lewis gets up and invites everybody to discuss it: how they miss their classmate, how disturbing it is when a young person chooses to end his life. Only when Counselor Lewis holds out the mic and asks, “Who wants to speak first?” all anybody can think to do is rock their fold-out chairs back and forth, or tighten, then loosen, the straps of the backpacks in their laps, or squeak their shoes on the wooden floor.

The gym windows are open. A dog yips in the distance, and the buzzing returns to Dina, as if the giant fluorescent bulbs overhead are preparing to burn out again. But didn’t the janitor replace one of the bulbs last Friday? Dina remembers him dragging his rickety ladder out of storage and marching it through the long halls of Kathleen Williams.

She finds herself standing. “It’s cool,” she says, loud enough to cut through the buzzing, though she doesn’t mean to talk in the first place. “He doesn’t miss any of you pussies either.”

The shoe-squeaking stops; a hundred curious teenage faces turn her way. Mortified, Dina claps a hand over her mouth and makes for the double doors that lead out into her school’s hallway, except Counselor Lewis is too fast. He hands the mic to Principal Anders, hops off the stage, and grabs Dina’s arm.

“I know you and Travis were close,” he says, which is his way of acknowledging that Dina dated the dead guy, the suicide. “You shouldn’t lash out.”

Dina opens her mouth to apologize. She wants to tell the truth, that she and Trav had stopped being close when she broke up with him two weeks ago, that a part of her is relieved he’s offed himself with his father’s Glock. Instead, she yells out in a voice deeper than her own: “White power!”

Counselor Lewis drags her into the office and tells her he’s worried about the white power thing because of what he calls “your heritage.” He says Trav was a troubled boy, which Dina understands is another euphemism, a way of referring to all those Confederate battle flag stickers on the bumper of Trav’s van. Then he says it would be a shame for Dina to hate herself, because everybody knows the proponents of white power aren’t too fond of what he calls “your people.” It’s uncomfortable how this man struggles to avoid the words Jew and Jewish, the way Ronnie can never call anybody black or Mexican. And speaking of Ronnie, he’s been contacted. He’s on his way.

Dina feels a headache coming on, hears the bell ring for the end of assembly. She says, “Don’t tell her what to think. You want to talk about her heritage, the camps weren’t even real.” Dina concentrates on her mouth, on not saying anything else terrible, but it happens anyway, pours out in a jumble, the words she intends and the ones she doesn’t: “Sorry, I don’t believe this stuff, and I don’t know why I’m saying it. FEMA’s building real concentration camps all over the country, and they’ve got my mom.”

“Dina, we both know that’s not what happened to your mom. Right?”

“Is my dad here yet?” she asks.

Counselor Lewis tells Dina she can’t come back to school until she finds a good therapist, because she’s clearly struggling with Trav’s death in ways her teachers are not equipped to handle.

This at least Dina agrees with. Every night after the breakup, Trav would call her cell phone and stay silent, just listen to her say, “Who’s there? Stop it Trav, this is creepy.” This past Wednesday, he walked up to her desk as everybody was sitting down for precalc and he grinned, sheepish, and she thought maybe things would be okay, maybe he’d decided to be her friend.

Then he put his hands on her desk, held himself up that way, so close she could taste his breath. “I want to die because of you, Dina. If I die, it’s your fault.” He said it quietly, so no one else could hear. Then the bell rang one last time, and the teacher urged Trav to find a seat. He turned on his heels and went to a desk in the opposite corner.

So now she wonders if it really is her fault. Not just that her ex-boyfriend shot himself, but the other thing. That he’s in her somehow, speaking through her, making her mouth off. Dina should be scared of ghosts, scared of possession, but instead she’s overwhelmed with guilt. If some piece of Trav’s soul is lodged in her, if his spirit is that stuck on her, then what did she do wrong? How did she hook him?

If she were anyone else, she’d have friends to tell her she’s not responsible for a boy’s decisions. But Dina’s a pariah. In third grade the other students would sit next to her at lunch and draw swastikas on the table—Ronnie said it wasn’t their fault, they probably picked it up from their parents. In fourth and fifth grades she won the class spelling bees, and both times everybody booed. In middle school, as if being one of the handful of Jews were not enough, she was the first to grow breasts. Boys and girls took to cornering her in hallways, snapping her bra straps so hard they left red welts on both shoulders. If Ronnie asked, Dina would blame the welts on bug bites, claim some mysterious insect got her when she wasn’t paying attention, and then Ronnie would go buy her Benadryl cream.

When her class moved up to Kathleen Williams, the bullying tapered off. Now nobody bothers her, but nobody talks to her either, unless it’s for a group project or they’re playing in Strategic Games Club, which is where she met Trav. He showed up in a mist of Axe body spray, sat at her table, and beat her at chess. He and his dad had just moved to town from Abilene.

“My mom ran out on us,” he said, “so it’s just me and him.”

“Me too,” Dina said. “I live with my dad. My mom died.” She turned up the corners of her mouth in a strained smile, so he knew she was okay with her dead parent. That she was fine.

But Trav seemed not to see her smile. “Sorry. Shit,” he said. “Now I feel stupid.” He hadn’t been around long enough, Dina guessed, to know who she was, to know she wasn’t worth his feeling sorry or stupid or anything at all.

“It’s really okay,” she told him. “I was a baby. My dad talks about her like she just stepped out.” She smiled again, and this time he nodded.

They played four games that day, and Trav won them all. He was gracious about it too, apologizing after each victory. He asked Dina about her life, and she found herself talking about how she was going to UT Austin in the fall, having been turned down cold by Harvard, early decision, her long shot.

“That’s so far away,” Trav said. “Would you’ve really gone? My dad says I can hit up Cedar Valley in a couple years, but first I have to apprentice him. He’s a plumber.”

Dina wasn’t sure why Trav, who looked like he might already be eighteen, would need his father’s permission to go to community college, but she made some listening noises, and he kept talking. The other Strategic Games people went home, and the janitor came by because it was time to shut down the building. Dina picked up her backpack and told Trav she’d see him tomorrow.

“Don’t walk home in the dark,” he said. “I can give you a ride. My mom left her van. It’s mine now.” So Dina got into his Aerostar and had him leave her on the corner. She didn’t want Ronnie to see the stickers on his rear bumper, the battle flags.

When he dropped her off, Trav looked into her eyes and said, “Dina, you’re a good listener. Can I tell you something?”

“Well, sure.” She chewed the inside of her cheek.

“We think my mom was taken. Because the feds don’t like some stuff my dad believes. She left a note and all, but we think it’s fake.” He was blinking rapidly now, like maybe he wanted to cry but he wasn’t going to let himself.

Dina was skeptical. But she wanted Trav to feel listened to, the way he’d been making her feel listened to all afternoon. She did her best to look attentive while he talked about all the places his mother could be—labor camps, secret prisons, a mental hospital where she’d be force-fed LSD every morning—then he stopped short, kissed Dina’s cheek, and drove off.

Within the week he’d kissed her on the mouth. He’d asked permission to put a hand under her shirt, and she’d been charmed because nobody ever asked before, and then he’d invited her to be his girlfriend and she’d said yes. He told her things that couldn’t be true, like the president was a secret Kenyan or the Israelis blew up the World Trade Center. And Dina’s no idiot. She knew the very first time Trav went off on the Israelis he meant Jews, meant her, but then he brushed her cheek with the tips of his fingers and said maybe she wasn’t even Jewish. Maybe her dad stole her from a Christian family. Then he smirked like he wasn’t serious and she felt the urge to bite his neck, to eat that Axe spray off his skin, and the whole conversation slid off the rails as they fumblingly removed each other’s pants in the back seat of the Aerostar.

It was the first time she’d ever seen a boy’s private parts. She slid Trav’s intact foreskin up and down with her fingers, sucked experimentally, and came home to Ronnie with a lie about losing track of time during a game of Risk. She knew she was making a catastrophically bad call, but she liked Trav’s company, the stream of conversation directed at her and nobody else.

Ronnie’s at Kathleen Williams in fifteen minutes. In the car they talk about Trav. “Principal Anders says you’re upset about the death,” Ronnie says. “You told me you didn’t know that boy.”

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

They stop at a red light. “Was he a friend, or . . . ?” Ronnie arches an eyebrow, but Dina won’t respond. “I am, in fact, worried about you. You don’t really think FEMA’s got concentration camps?”

“No, I keep blurting stuff out.”

“You sure scared your principal. Just know I love you no matter what.” He takes one hand off the wheel and squeezes Dina’s shoulder.

“You ever miss someone who was terrible?” she asks.

He says something back that sounds like “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,” only that can’t be right because his lips are moving. That’s when she loses control again.

“Trav wasn’t terrible, I was terrible,” Dina says. “No I wasn’t. Yes I was. I shouldn’t have led him on.”

Ronnie eyes her as he drives. She hopes to show him she’s fine, so she says, “Not really, I know I wasn’t leading anybody on,” but then she adds, “Wrong, I’m a huge bitch, Dad. The hugest.”

“Oh, honey.” By now Ronnie’s turning into the synagogue parking lot. “I can tell you feel conflicted, but it’s got nothing to do with you. I can promise that much.” He squeezes her shoulder again. “There’s no knowing how some boys get so unhappy.”

A week after they started dating, Trav drove the Aerostar up 71, pulled onto a dirt road, and stopped in a field by a barbed-wire fence short enough to step over. He swore his dad knew the guy who owned the place, and then he opened up his trunk, where he kept two guns in a plastic bin.

Dina froze, and Trav explained these were Ruger Mark IIs. His dad took him out for target practice every weekend so they’d be prepared if the UN sent in troops to conquer Texas. There was a place along the back end of the barbed-wire fence where his dad’s friend had strung up a straight line of targets made to look like the president, and now Trav wanted to show Dina how to shoot those targets in the center of mass, the chest.

“There are rapists crawling across the border every day,” he said. “I just want my girl to know how to protect herself.” He raised his arm to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Dina could see the edge of his farmer’s tan poking out from inside the sleeve of his T-shirt, the stringy muscles of his arms drawn taut.

It took her a minute to unfreeze because she felt so horrible for the president, but Dina followed Trav out into the field and shot at a target, so far off the mark she couldn’t tell where the bullet went. Trav said to just forget about it, and then he came up behind her in a bear hug and moved her body around so her form was better. “Exhale,” he said. “Pull.” This time she got the president in the hip.

Trav said she was a natural. They started going to the field each day instead of Strategic Games Club, kept it up the rest of the time they were dating, except the one Friday after the dog. On the way home from target practice, she’d rub baby wipes on her hands to get rid of the ammonia smell of spent gunpowder. Ronnie would ask about her day, and she’d talk about a Spanish test, how fue sounded nothing like the past tense of es, or she’d tell him she’d run a nine-minute mile in gym, and the whole time, in her mind’s eye, she’d replay the impact of bullet on paper, the meditation of aim, the satisfaction of her accurate shot.

The day she and Trav broke up Dina figured target practice was over for good, so she walked home from Kathleen Williams alone, went into Ronnie’s study, and used his new widescreen computer to download a bootleg copy of Call of Duty. The bright explosion of the Russian broadband jammer over Wall Street filled the whole display, Ronnie’s fancy speakers playing back the intricate death cries of Russian infantrymen. She’d finished the first three missions when Ronnie poked his head in and said, “Isn’t that violent?”

Dina paused the game. “Yeah, but it’s a skill. It’s soothing. I have to concentrate to get it right.”

Ronnie sniffed. “Well,” he said. But he didn’t make her stop.

The day she gets sent home from Kathleen Williams, Ronnie takes Dina to his office at Beth Achim and pulls out his laptop. “You can use the big computer.” He points to the boxy Mac that sits on his desk. “Are you really into those shooting games? You can play one if you want. Just keep the volume down.” The rabbi, a too-thin, too-serious man who Ronnie likes to joke is barely older than Dina, works in his own office down the hall. The rabbi wouldn’t appreciate Call of Duty or anything like it.

So Dina promises to be quiet, and Ronnie lets her borrow his credit card to buy the latest Tomb Raider. Then he gets on the laptop to design fliers for the Purim picnic. It’s one of those rare moments when Dina’s sincerely frustrated about her family situation, being raised by a chronically relaxed man. He shouldn’t be pawning her off on a computer game, getting back to his own work. He should notice her crisis.

She goes to say something along the lines of “It’s possible I’m being controlled by my dead ex-boyfriend,” but then a painful force slams her teeth together, her jaw sprung like a mousetrap. An invisible leash pulls her face to the Mac’s screen, her fingers to the keyboard and mouse, which she uses to fire up the game. Lara Croft becomes curious about Kitezh and sets out for Syria. An hour after that, she’s in Siberia, stranded by an avalanche.

Dina as Lara is shooting her way toward an abandoned Soviet mine when Ronnie taps her on the shoulder. “How’s it going?”

At that exact moment the building’s ancient central air kicks into gear. The vents make a sound like someone playing kazoo one room over. Is it just Dina, or is the room vibrating? “This is some penny-pinching Rothschild shit,” says a voice that Dina can’t, at first, identify as her own. “Cheap fucking building. It has to be some sort of disguise, like you people keep gold bricks in the basement, right? Or did you Texas kikes do something to piss off the Elders?”

“Sweetheart, you’re scaring me,” says Ronnie. His expression is level as ever, but the skin of his cheeks is pale and a quiver has snuck into his bottom lip. He’s finally noticed something wrong. “Why are you talking like this? What’s happened to you?”

Dina can hear the voice that is and isn’t hers, is and isn’t Trav’s. “I loved your daughter like you would not believe. She didn’t judge. I loved to kiss her and I loved her tits and everything. Did you make her break things off, you old shit? You tell her she has to marry one of your Christ-Killer buddies to propagate the race? The kids would only be half-breeds. I know she’s not really yours. You should have let her go, half-dick. I’m here to haunt you, you kosher fuck.”

The worst day, the dog day, they went out shooting and Trav said they should get the president in the dick, or about where his dick would be, low on the middle of the torso. Dina thought he was just being an idiot, just being Trav, but at the same time she was tired of always aiming dead center. Shooting the president in his gonads was a way to mix things up. She shot, and a hole appeared in the crotch of the president’s black suit.

“Let me try to get his foot.” She shot again, low to the ground, and missed. Another hole, this one at the bottom edge of the target paper where it was blank and white, equidistant from each of the president’s dress shoes. That’s when she heard a shriek on the other side of the fence. She dropped the Ruger and ran toward the noise. It was a chocolate Lab, chained tight behind the targets to the other side of the barbed-wire fence, and the poor thing was foaming around the corners of its mouth, each rib jutting from a too-narrow chest, but with a swollen belly. At first Dina thought it must be pregnant, a girl dog, but then she saw where its hot pink dog penis was sticking out.

The Lab looked Dina in the eye and stopped shrieking. There was thick blood oozing out from its back, but more distressingly, there were masses of earlier cuts and scrapes all along its legs and up its sides. Flies buzzed around the open wounds.

“Trav,” Dina said.

“Yeah.” He was already standing next to her. She hadn’t noticed.

“Trav, this is just beyond . . . We should call someone.” She took her phone out, but Trav grabbed it and put it in his own pocket.

“I’m sorry, Dina, but we’re not really allowed to be here, not like I told you. My dad’s friend would be pissed,” Trav said.

“You mean we’ve been trespassing all along?” She recognized that her voice sounded whiny, uncool, even babyish. She thought, for the first time, about all the reasons someone might own a field in the middle of nowhere. “Is that—does this dog belong to your dad’s friend? Did you know it was here?”

“I didn’t know, but . . . ” Trav stared at the ground, at the unmown grass that swished around their feet. “I can’t say I’m surprised. You just head back.”

Dina still can’t say why she turned and walked toward the road, but she did. A few seconds later she heard a gunshot. She knows even now that was the right thing for Trav to do, a mercy killing, not unlike what a veterinarian would do in the same situation. She knows her single shot meant the dog had to die, and it was her fault for aiming at the president’s foot, Trav’s fault for taking her out there, her fault for enjoying herself. Both their faults. But she mostly blames him.

Trav caught up to her back at the car. “I apologize,” he said. “This is complicated. My dad’s friend—he doesn’t spend a lot of time here, but he wouldn’t like it if he knew I was coming without my dad. And I’m not allowed to talk about it. Not with you, not with anybody.” He handed her phone over.

“Then why bring me out here, Trav?”

“I apologized, Dina. It’s all I can do.” He opened the door for her to jump in the Aerostar, then he drove her to the corner near her house. Neither of them spoke for the whole drive. She walked inside and told Ronnie she was sick and skipped dinner.

The next day at Kathleen Williams, Trav smiled at her during assembly, and they sat together at lunch, and he picked her up after school in his Aerostar like she’d only imagined the last twenty-four hours. Only she knew she hadn’t, because they didn’t go back to the field. He bought her enchiladas at Torchy’s, and it turned out he had a pack of cold Dr Peppers and a checkered blanket in the trunk. They picnicked at the Arboretum, watched a Little League football team practice tackles on the grass.

And then it was the weekend. Not just any weekend, but her mother’s yahrzeit, which she hadn’t told Trav about, because what could he do? He couldn’t roll the Aerostar, flags and all, into Beth Achim’s parking lot. He couldn’t make conversation with Ronnie’s friends: people like Rich and Cindy Kirbaum, a dentist and divorce lawyer respectively. Or grouchy Mr. Kaplan’s granddaughter Julie, who was a medievalist, a postdoc at UT. Sometimes Julie would carpool with her professor friend, who studied illuminated manuscripts. Rather than kiss the torah, the professor would put down his siddur and bring his face close, scanning the polished handles, the velveteen mantle for some clue.

Dina struggled at times to talk to these eccentric grownups, could barely answer their yes and no questions, and Trav? Trav would be lost. So she did him the favor, when they were together, of pretending Beth Achim didn’t exist.

That Saturday she rose with Ronnie for the Mourner’s Kaddish, and everybody looked at them—Ronnie’s friends and the stern young rabbi and the hyper children and their parents and the old folks who made up the bulk of Saturday worshippers, the ones who came into the office after yoga to pinch Dina’s cheeks—and all of them knew Ronnie, and therefore knew her, and swathed them both in pity.

She knew when she went back to the field on Monday, the dog would be gone. Trav would handle it. What she’s most ashamed of is how she played along, let him pretend things were normal.

Trav taught Dina to like herself—only then she understood how liking herself meant she should stop dating him. He might not be all bad, but something bad was in his life, leaking into hers. So after three months of skipping Strategic Games Club to cruise around in the Aerostar, of letting Trav lick her breasts in secluded parking lots, of lying to Ronnie, she managed a separation. When he sat down next to her at lunch, she handed him a typed note, got up, and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face.

She didn’t know how to bring up the dog, so Dina settled on college as her excuse for hurting Trav’s feelings. College, which was just around the corner. Any day now, she wrote, she’d be into biochem or polisci or computers, pre-med or pre-law. She’d live in the dorms at UT, only a short drive away but at the same time another universe, a cocoon of young adulthood, a place where he couldn’t follow and would never be at home.

So I know this is the best thing for both of us, she wrote. Please don’t get the wrong impression. I’m really glad I met you, Trav. I really want you to be happy and have a good life. I really want us to stay in touch, if that’s okay.

After her outburst in Ronnie’s office, Dina faints. When she comes to, she’s supine on the couch with one of Ronnie’s thick Kosher Sutra books tucked under her head. Ronnie crouches over her, holding a mug of water. Dina gulps the whole thing down, spilling some on her face.

“Sorry,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. “I feel strange today.” She sits up.

Ronnie opens his mouth, inhales, closes his mouth. Opens again and starts to say something. Gives up. Opens one last time and closes. Dina knows they’re in a serious situation here, but can’t help thinking her father looks like a fish, gulping.

“Let’s go to the studio,” Ronnie says. “My class won’t start for hours.” What he calls his yoga studio is just a converted attic. It used to be accessible only via trapdoor, but when he started training at East Side Hatha, when he started talking about yoga classes on the synagogue property, Beth Achim’s board agreed to install stairs.

He reaches out a hand and pulls Dina so she’s standing, so she’s hugging him. Her father smells like peppermint Dr. Bronner’s. “Thanks, Dad,” she says, then she hears a noise like gears grinding. “I hate you.”

He sucks in his breath with a hiss but does not stop hugging her. “I know this isn’t you,” Ronnie tells her, which Dina appreciates. She knows this isn’t her either. He gives her one last squeeze and takes his arms away. “So, upstairs.”

They march past the rabbi’s office, and as luck would have it, the rabbi does not poke his head out into the hall. They go upstairs, and on the way up Dina keeps talking, or rather, Trav does. “Where is your Jew gold?” he asks. “Where are your horns? Dad, I’m so sorry. Don’t you hear that whining? It’s like someone brought a Chihuahua in here.”

Ronnie’s face is stony, like he’s girding himself for battle, and he says nothing. They get to the top of the steps and enter the empty attic room with its sloped walls. He motions her over to the mats. They unroll two, facing each other, and he tells her to lie down with limbs loose. Eyes shut. The sound is so loud now, like a running chainsaw inches from her nose.

“The FEMA camps,” Dina says as she gets into position, “are totally real. I think my mom got sent there.”

“Feel your spine straightening out against the floor,” Ronnie says, and then he sniffs like he’s crying, only his eyes are still and unblinking, and a person can’t cry that way. “Feel it stretch and release tension, savasana. Breathe deeply. Feel your energy rise and fall with that breath.”

Dina breathes deeply. The windows of this studio are open, and car brakes squeal in the street below. Her energy rises and falls. The brakes squeal and squeal. She says, “Sitting congressmen have spoken about the camps. Glenn Beck on his show. Those places are where they take the dissidents and the true Patriots. And the true Patriots’ mothers.”

Ronnie talks over Trav. “Raise your right knee and bring it to your chest,” he says. She stays there for several moments, releases, does the same with her left knee. “Feel your legs relaxing. Feel how they’re longer now.” The cars stop squealing their brakes and start honking. Someone pounds on a horn for ten seconds, twenty.

“It’s for the New World Order,” Dina continues. “They have to crush the Patriots to keep the American population compliant when the UN reveals itself as the one-world government.” In her head, in the part of her brain that’s still her own, Dina enjoys the poses. They stretch out the achy place where her back meets her hips. Only she can’t relax too much, because a fire alarm is going off somewhere, or is that a chorus of baying wolves? “When they’ve cleared out all the dissenters it’ll be time for population control. Random executions, only not really random. They want to destroy the white race. They’ll start by killing Aryan babies.”

Ronnie’s jaw is clenched tighter than Dina thought possible, but to hear him, you’d think he was unfazed. “Sit up on the center of your mat with your legs straight in front of you. Support yourself by placing your hands behind your back on each side. Now raise your hips and lean your head backwards. Try to form a straight line with your body.”

Dina does what he says, and the blood rushes to her brain, blotting out the noises, blotting out Trav. A whelming. “This is working?” she says. “It’s working, I think, Dad.” She stays in the pose for a long time, for minutes, until she’s shaking.

“Back to asana,” Ronnie says.

There’s a pause while Dina moves to a sitting position. She’s trying to hold on to that whelming feeling, the head rush. She’s trying to make Trav pliable, make him shut up.

Ronnie stands. He does the fish thing again with his mouth: open and shut, open and shut. He asks, “Let’s say, in theory, the person I’m speaking to right now is Travis. What does Travis want?”

And the piece of Trav that cleaves to Dina says something almost reasonable: “I’d be happy with an apology.”

“Trav, I’m truly sorry,” Dina says. “I liked you, I did, but I was so lonely, maybe I would have liked anyone.”

It must not be what he wanted to hear, because he reaches out from inside her, curls her fingers into a ball against her will. Next thing Dina knows she’s punched herself in the eye. She sees blotches like she’s just had her picture taken, like she’s been staring into the sun, and her lips form the words: “I don’t accept her apology.” The blotches take over her field of vision, and the head rush comes back full force.

“Take it easy, Travis,” Ronnie says.

Dina gets up. She’s aware of dust motes floating in the studio, the humming fluorescent lights above her head, the creaking noises a building makes as it settles, and she’s still saying it, “I’m sorry,” over and over like a chant. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

But it’s not helping. There is an anvil on her forehead, a hammer pounding away at her hairline. Her legs are on fire, and she’s kicking her yoga mat to the side, arms extended, fingers reaching out, twitching, for Ronnie. He doesn’t move, even when she wraps her hands around his neck and tightens her grip.

“I’m going to kill this hippie cliptip,” she says. “Trav, don’t.”

Ronnie doesn’t try to escape. Dina’s thumbs are bearing down on the space just above his Adam’s apple. “Stop me please,” she says.

“Dina, you have to stop. You,” Ronnie sputters. He’s turning red, but his arms hang by his sides even as Trav, as Dina, tries to throttle him. “If Travis is in your head, kick him out.”

Dina turns inward, examines the topography of her brain. There is blackness and a keening that might be her own voice. She’s still in the studio, still assaulting her father, but she’s also chained tight to a barbed-wire fence. She’s trapped in a body that won’t do what she tells it. Ronnie’s wheezing under her thumbs.

“I can’t,” she says, so her father says, “Forgive me,” and that’s when he slaps Dina across her cheek, not as hard as he can but hard enough.

Her head snaps to the side and bounces back in a jerky, lightning-fast motion, and she relinquishes Ronnie. She feels the painful rip of two souls separating, for real this time, as Trav flees. Then she crumples onto the floor. She hears cars honking as her consciousness contracts, the central air whirring and her classmates reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. She hears the cries of Patriots in FEMA camps, the savage howls of UN Peacekeeping troops as they land on the beaches of Galveston in the dead of night. Every dog on the planet whining for release. Shots fired, the low chant of a Mourner’s Kaddish, and on top of it all the known universe roaring apart, flipping inside out for her benefit.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story DON’T KNOW TOUGH

Still feel the burn on my neck. Told Coach it was a ringworm this morning when he pick me up, but it ain’t. It a cigarette, or at least what a lit cigarette do when it stuck in your neck. Just stared at Him when He did it. No way I was gonna let Him see me hurt, no way. Bit a hole through the side of my cheek, swallowed blood, and just stared at Him. Tasted blood all day.

Tasted it while I sat in Ms. Miller’s class, woke up in algebra tasting it. Drank milk from a cardboard box at lunch and still, I tasted it. But now it eighth period football. Coach already got the boys lined up on either side of the fifty, a crease in between, a small space for running and tackling, for pain.

This my favorite drill.

I just been standing back here, watching the other boys go at it. The sound of pads popping like sheet metal flapping in a storm.

“Who want next?” holler Coach.

I tongue the hole in my cheek, finger the cigarette burn on my neck, and step into the crease. Coach hand me the ball and smile. He know what kind of power I got. Senior year, too. They got that sophomore linebacker lined up cross from me. The one they hoping can make the starting team. He thick in the neck and thighs, but he don’t know.

Coach blow his whistle.

I can see Him smiling as He stuck the hot tip in my neck, smiling when He put Little Brother out in the pen. I grip the ball tight, duck my head, and run at sophomore linebacker, hoping to kill him.

When we hit, there real lightning, thunder explode ’cross the field. The back of sophomore linebacker head the first thing to hit the ground, arms out like Jesus on the cross. I step on his neck as I run past him.

The other boys cheer. Coach blow his whistle and already the linebacker getting up, like I ain’t nothing. He shaking his head, laughing, and standing again. Disrespecting me?

Disrespecting me?

This time I spear him with the top of my helmet. I dive and go head to head with him. There’s a cracking sound—not thunder, not lightning, and damn sure not sheet metal—this the sound of my heart breaking, the sound of violence pouring out.

Coach blow his whistle like somebody drowning. Sophomore linebacker scream because he don’t know what’s on him. This boy a poser. He don’t know tough. Don’t know nothing. Bet his momma woke him up this morning with goddamn milk and cookies. I try to bite his cheek off, but the facemask, the mouthpiece. I see only red, then black—a cigarette, a dog pen.

I’m sitting outside Principal office, still got my pads on, when Coach call me in.

“Billy,” he say, “What got into you?”

I look straight at him, nod.

“You realize the kind of shit you in?” say Principal.

Cuss for me, old man. Make me feel at home. I raise my chin to him.

“Boy, I swear,” say Principal.

“What got into you out there, Bill?” say Coach.

I feel my jaw flexing, feel like, if I could, I’d just grind my teeth down to the gum, spit blood and teeth in Principal face. Not Coach though. Coach alright.

“You hear us talking, boy?” say Principal.

I nod and raise one eyebrow, slow.

“Swear to God,” say Principal. “Tell you what I ought to do. What I ought to do is call the Sheriff. How about that? Let him charge you little ass with battery.”

I keep nodding, knowing bullshit when I hear it. We was on the field, old man. It called football.

“But he ain’t gonna do that,” say Coach.

“You lucky you got Coach,” say Principal. “Damn lucky.”

“Listen, Bill. I’m gonna sit you for the first game. Principal think that best. Okay?”

I hear Coach but don’t. My ears ringing. The burn on my neck turn to fire. “Call the cops then,” I say.

Principal laugh. Coach don’t. He know I’m serious.

“Come on, Bill, it’s just the first game,” say Coach. “Lutherville bad this year too. We’ll beat ‘em a hundred.”

“Senior year,” I say.

Coach breathe in deep through his nose. Look at Principal, who already turned back to his computer. “Billy, I know, but damn son,” say Coach, “Austin got a concussion. Was out cold for ten minutes.”

I nod, waiting for Principal to say something, at least turn from his computer and see what he just took from me. But he don’t. Whatever on that screen bigger than Billy Lowe. I’m out the door before he ever turn back, running with blood in my mouth. I swallow.

“Aw, hell nah,” say Momma.

Little Brother dangle from her arm like a monkey. I see tiny fingers, white at the knuckles, holding onto her shirt like he know how it feel to be dropped. And Coach wonder why I ain’t never fumbled, not once.

“First game senior year? And Coach sittin’ you? For what, Billy? What’d you do?”

“Nothin’.”

“Don’t lie.”

“Just a drill, at practice. Hit a boy hard, real hard. Just kept hittin’ him.”

“Football practice?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Nah, hell nah,” say Momma.

She already got the phone out, already dialing Coach when He walk in, smelling like beer sweat and gouch.

“Who she talking to?” He say to me.

I don’t say nothing back.

“Boy.”

“Coach.”

He make a jab for the phone in Momma hand. Momma jerk away. Little Brother hold strong.

“Calling Coach,” say Momma. “Done kicked Billy off the team.”

“He ain’t kicked me off. Just—”

“Nah,” He say, grabbing Momma by the shirt now, pawing for the phone, “no goddamn fuckin’ way.”

“Yes, hello,” say Momma, but it ain’t her voice. It the voice she use when she talk to the light company, DHS, teachers, and Coach. She talking fancy, slow. Don’t sound nothing like her. “This Billy’s Momma.”

The man who live in our trailer but ain’t my daddy start pacing. He got a bottle of Nyquil in his hand. Probably all He could find. He pull from it and wipe His mouth with His sleeve.

“Billy say he ain’t gonna play the first game?” say Momma. “That right?” She stop rocking Little Brother. Look at me. “Austin in the hospital?”

He start to laugh. “Shit yeah, that my boy.”

“Alright,” say Momma. “I understand, Coach.”

She still got the phone to her ear when He take it. “Billy the only fuckin’ chance you got. You hear me? Either let him play or we take his ass down the road to Chillerton. How ‘bout that?”

He pause. Chugs the Nyquil.   

“Yeah. That right, Coach. See you at the game tomorrow, and if Billy don’t play—Billy don’t play.” He jab the phone screen three time with his thumb then throw it at Momma. Momma lunge for it. Little Brother hold tight but the phone corner hit him in the back, a sad, hollow sound. Little Brother don’t cry, though. He know.

Coach let me go through everything but say he still ain’t gonna let me play. Gave me my jersey to wear at school. Even let me dress out. I ain’t said one word all day, not one. Didn’t say nothing to Him on my way to the bus. Didn’t have to. The Nyquil bottle empty. Everything empty when I left the house.

Now it game time and Coach still letting me run out through the tunnel and the paper the cheerleaders spent all day coloring. I stay in the back. The band blow they horns, but they ain’t blowing them for me. Used to blow them loud and sing the alma mater when Billy Lowe run cross the goal line. Not tonight though.

Sophomore linebacker here. In a wheelchair, God, a fuckin’ wheelchair. Ain’t nothing wrong with his legs. Wearing sunglasses too. I walk up behind that wheelchair three time, just stand there, while our team beat the hell out of Lutherville. Lutherville sorry as shit. Coach knew. And as I’m standing there behind that wheelchair, smelling sophomore linebacker hair—smell like girl hair—I hear Him start hollering from the stands.

“Ain’t got shit without Billy Lowe!”

I start gnawing at my cheek because He so stupid. It a stupid thing to yell when we beating Lutherville by three touchdown already.

“Bes’ play my Billy!”

And now Momma too. I can tell by her slur, she gone. I look back quick to the bleachers, time enough to see Little Brother dangling from her arm, Billy Lowe jersey on: number thirty-five.

“Fuck this shit.”

“Yeah. Fuuuuck this shit.”

Ain’t no telling them apart now.

Coach a true believer, though. He out near the twenty, fighting for a holding call. Don’t matter we up three touchdown. He know what it mean to fight. He still ain’t heard them yelling, either. Got his headset on, talking to them other coaches, talking about that holding call. Don’t see Principal wading through the stands like a linebacker on a backside blitz.

“Nah, hell nah. Don’t touch me.”

It Momma. She know Principal coming for her.

“Swear to God,” He say, like He the kind a man do something ‘bout it. He ain’t. He all talk and shit and empty bottles. “Swear to God, you touch her, old man—”

Little Brother crying now. Get it out, boy. Get it out because you cain’t cry much after this. Got a year left for crying, maybe less.

“Sue this place for every fuckin’ penny,” shout Momma over Little Brother cries. “Have you ass on channel seven news, tomorrow.”

I ain’t looking. Not no more. Got my back to them, watching Coach fight for that holding call even though we up so big. He laying into the ref, calling the man by name.

“Steve, that boy had a fistful of my nose-tackle’s jersey. Damn near ripped it off.”

Sophomore linebacker stand from his wheelchair. He got the sunglasses pushed up in his shampoo hair. He ain’t hurt.

“Don’t touch her, don’t you touch her.”

Principal must really be getting at Momma.

“Boy, you listen,” yell Principal at Him. “You touch me and I’ll have the Sheriff up here faster than greased lightning. You hear me?”

Sophomore linebacker eyes go wide, but I ain’t got to turn to know He won’t do shit. He’ll bark some. “Ought to whoop you ass, old man.” Something like that. But He won’t do nothing, ‘cause Principal a grown-ass man. Principal ain’t a kid like Little Brother. Principal ain’t living in the trailer hungry. And He know Principal would get the Sheriff up there, and the Sheriff got Tasers and clubs, and He don’t want no part of that. He ain’t tough.

“We going, alright? We gone,” I hear Him say.

“Don’t you touch me,” say Momma, and I ain’t looking but I can just see her jerking free of Principal. Little Brother hanging on, not even crying no more ‘cause at some point you ain’t got the tears.

Coach finally see. Lutherville got to punt so he turn to the sideline, hollering for the offense, and he see. I still got my back to them, but I know it ugly, embarrassing too. Feel them hot on my neck. I look to Coach to save me. Just put me in the game, send me to the locker room, take me by the facemask and beat the fuck out of me, anything, but don’t leave me standing here on this sideline.

“Come on, Billy.”

It Momma.

“Fuck this place. We take his ass down the road,” she scream. “We take Billy Lowe to run the ball at Chillerton.”

But I don’t want to run the ball at Chillerton.

I roll my neck. The burn crack open. Hot blood on my back. My mouth an open wound. I think about spitting on sophomore linebacker, covering his face with my crazy. But I’m watching him watch my people in the stands. Watching Momma. Watching Him. Little Brother holding on. I look one more time to Coach. But it third and six and he got to call a play. Sophomore linebacker still watching Momma holler for me. Watching Him too. Now it obvious He drunk and it embarrassing, fuckin’ embarrassing.

And then sophomore linebacker save me. He elbow another sophomore in the ribs, kinda point up in the stands, point right over me like I ain’t nothing. And now he laughing and pointing at my Momma, at Little Brother.

“Come on, son, fuck this place,” He yell. But He ain’t my daddy, and that does it.

This time there more blood. My blood. His blood. Little Brother blood. The blood that connect us. I feel Coach tugging my pads. I seen a cop try and pull a pit bull off a lab once. I’m headbuttin’ the boy now. Got his arms nailed down, headbuttin’ him when they get the Taser in me.

Principal won’t even touch me on account of the blood. Ambulance light go red and blue as they drag me away. I ain’t fighting, though. Let them do what they got to do. Coach over there, kneeling beside sophomore linebacker. Look like he whispering something in his ear. Bet he’s saying, “Billy didn’t mean it. Billy a good kid, heck of a running back too. Billy just got it tough. And his momma crazy and won’t stop fucking. And yesterday he got a cigarette stuck in his neck, and he took it like a man, and that was after his momma boyfriend put his little brother out in a dog pen, and he had to take that baby boy scraps for lunch and dinner, then breakfast the next day. Billy didn’t mean nothing by it, but he was embarrassed, stuck on that sideline, right there close to them, close enough to feel the heat. Can you imagine? You imagine that, sophomore linebacker?”

No. You cain’t.

LAST WALTZ

6.

“Nobody buys vinyl anymore,” I tell Mom when she starts threatening to sell yours. And even as I say it, I’m thinking they’re worth a fortune.

I’m stooped over The Last Waltz, Record 2, Side II, a strip of felt in one hand, a bottle of cleaning solution in the other. “The Shape I’m In.” Get it? Danger, the bottle tells me, Avoid contact with eyes.

I check the amp, the receiver. I stare at the needle. Behind the record player I find, coiled like a snake, a tangle of wire you never bothered explaining.

 

5.

Mom finds you. She will decide later on that she sensed something. She will claim the dog growled, that the wind rustled the trees. I know what she means: she means we all saw it coming. I couldn’t tell you why I never mentioned the dream to her: sound, noise, vibration, bright lights, heaven. Being born must feel like this, or else giving birth. Here is this thing, finished and begun. Here I am. Here we are. Toward the end, I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with you. I clung to details instead, doctor visits and lawyer visits. One day I organized your record collection.

Now I ask, “Who are we supposed to call first? The ambulance, or do we go straight to the funeral home?”

 

4.

Heaven will look like a spaceship: a blur of lights, four notes like a torch song to the Wyoming sky: “Life is a Carnival.” Take a load off. Toward the end, Dylan will show up. They’ll play all the hits. The crowd will go nuts.

 

3.

I wish it brought out the best in us, but it has brought out more than that. While Mom sleeps on the couch, I walk out to the garage, to the bookshelf where you keep them lined up, pristine and priceless.

The White Album. Exile on Main St. Skull and Roses.

Dylan. Dead. Doors.

I hate what’s going through my head. Blonde on Blonde. Cash or credit.

 

2.

The night before the day before you die, they run Close Encounters on Channel 7. The movie is one of your favorites: aliens land in Wyoming and give a free concert. Mom and I watch, with commercial interruptions, until she falls asleep. Around midnight, I tug on her arm and wave toward the bedroom where your breath—even I notice it—comes slower.

“I can’t,” she says.

She can’t?

She says, “The respirator.”

 

1.

Lungs. Liver. Brain. Kidneys. Lungs.

Your ears don’t work like they used to, either: side effects, I guess. I’m almost sure you can’t hear Levon Helm thumping in the next room. And yet:

“You hear that?” you ask.

“Hear what?”

I am already trying to forget your finger cocked at me, your eye stabbing from its socket. “Again. Hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Scratch in it.”

“I don’t hear it,” I tell you, knowing you’re right, knowing I do.

That’s how things like this go. Oscar Wilde’s last words were, “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”

Your last words are, “Listen better.”

 

0.

Hear that sudden cutting out, this ending-before-the-end. Hear the dog growling. Hear the wind in the trees. Hear me talking in my sleep. Do you hear that? Here’s what I’m trying to tell you.  Listen. Better.

ROSEATE’S BOOK OF PENMANSHIP

If we write it in the book, it comes true. That’s an indisputable fact. Everything else is up for debate, but we know the book controls the turning of the universe.

For instance, in a fit of anger, I once wrote: All socks should be rainbow over-the-knee socks!!!!! This was after I’d received a bunch of crappy white athletic socks for Christmas instead of the oversized rainbow pair I’d asked for. No other kinds of socks exist now, and that’s why—because I decided to jot it down, as if the book were a journal that could absorb my hurt feelings. As a direct result, people only wear rainbow over-the-knee socks: ROYGBIV tights pulled over the bony kneecaps of grandfathers and stodgy bank clerks and graying, ancient schoolteachers. They only know rainbow over-the-knee socks. They’ve always worn rainbow over-the-knee socks and they always will. Only Samuel and I remember the way things were before the book. 

There are other things that are probably true:

1. We’ve had the book for nearly two years, found in the attic crawlspace of the Genoma Baptist Church in Blanch City, Florida. Genoma Baptist is no longer a church, but it was then. Now it’s Samuel’s dog kennel. Over fifty breeds are lodged inside its wide, white walls. Huskies, Chihuahuas, and pit bulls swim freely in the Olympic-sized pool. They bite wildly at hundreds of chew toys, sleeping in red kennels shaped like Snoopy’s doghouse. Canines frolic under the church’s domed cathedral ceiling and stained glass windows, sun painting the wood floors in bright watercolors. Now when we say we’re going to church, we mean we’re going to play at the puppy sanctuary, all because Pastor James once told Samuel dogs didn’t have souls and couldn’t go to heaven. 

2. The book belongs to Samuel Wilkie and Shawna Freeman. That’s a fact, though I wish it weren’t. Samuel and I have our names written on the front cover, and they won’t come off—not with erasers or whiteout or even black Sharpie. Samuel and I take turns with the book. We pass it back and forth, handing it over like an unwanted child shuffled between divorced parents. Samuel usually wants to hang out afterward, but I haven’t forgiven him for the long blue hair that sprouts from my head like the anime girl in the poster on his bedroom wall. I keep finding knots of it bunched in my shower drain. Wads of the stuff clogged there, like radioactive Smurf hair.

3. Roseate’s Book of Penmanship cannot be destroyed. Though it appears to be a simple how-to manual, the book can’t be burned, cut, or scorched with acid. It can’t be drowned or buried in a deep pit. You can’t throw it down a well. We’ve tried all these things and more. Once Samuel tossed the book into a trash compactor after he’d gotten drunk and written that fried chicken should fly like regular birds and maybe rain from the sky on Wednesday mornings. On those days, grease pelts our hair and clothes, making everything smell like the inside of a particularly rank KFC. Despite its time in the compactor, the book showed up the next morning on his kitchen table in pristine condition. We no longer write things about food.

But what we really know is that everything comes from the book, and we can’t trust anything that came before. We know that to be the case because we were raised to trust in books. The Good Book, specifically. I don’t know how God deals with having so much power, but I’d give it all back in a second just to have regular grocery stores again. Ours only carry Little Debbie snack cakes and pizza rolls.

      

Samuel and I were ditching service when we found the book. We had four packs of Red Hots and a bottle of lukewarm Coke to split between us. We were bored and wanted to nap in the crawlspace over the choir loft because I’d heard it had pillows. 

I wasn’t sure how to get in, but Samuel hefted himself up onto a stool and dragged himself through the hole, grunting and scratching his overlarge belly on the lip of the opening. He pulled me up behind him. The space was small and frighteningly hot, maybe the driest air I’d ever felt in Florida. Alongside us were boxes that held costumes for the Christmas Nativity and for the Easter musical; mostly fabric that resembled twisted-up bed sheets.

“Half for me,” I said when we finally got situated. If I didn’t tell Samuel how much I wanted up front, he’d try to give me all of it. We were best friends and sixteen, but he wanted to be my boyfriend. I was gay and wanted my first time to be with a girl who looked like Ellen Page.

“You give me the Coke then,” he said, watching me sip. I purposefully backwashed into the bottle, spit bubbling up the carbonation. “Never mind, keep it.” He licked candy stains from his fingertips. “Sometimes you’re really disgusting.”

Spilled out on Baby Jesus’ white manger cloths, the Red Hots looked like sticky red braille. We took turns placing them on our tongues like communion wafers, seeing how many we could hold there before our tongues burned to crisps. After the candy was gone, we got restless and crawled farther into the attic space. 

Music floated up through the cracks in the wooden floor. I could hear my mother singing “The Old Rugged Cross” during the benediction and knew that the service was winding down, but Samuel urged me to keep going, making wild claims of discovering church secrets and hidden caches of tithes. We crawled deeper, past myriad Tupperware bins full of Vacation Bible School teaching materials, an artificial Christmas tree fully decorated, outdated office equipment, old hymnals, pew cushions bitten open by animals, and a fabricated sheep with wool glued to it that looked like pieces of ceiling insulation. Near the stained glass window at the very back was a cardboard box so old that the sides were splitting and rotten. One touch and it broke, spilling out yellow papers and mimeographed sheets. Roach shit rolled around on the floor and a few crispy dead bodies were laid out like sacrifices. I stayed on my hands and knees so I wouldn’t accidentally sit on a live one. 

At the top of the pile was the book, though it didn’t look like much of anything. It was an old pulp paperback, robin’s-egg blue, gilt embossed on the cover: Roseate’s Book of Penmanship. “Check it out,” I said, picking it up and leafing through the pages. “Look at this cute little thing. Super retro.”

“So what, who even uses cursive anymore? They don’t even teach it in school.” Samuel dug through the mimeograph papers, crunching them into balls and tossing them at the open boxes behind us. He missed every shot.

“Bet you can’t even sign your own name, idiot.”

That’s when he took the book from me and started writing every nasty swear he could think of. He did it all in perfect cursive: swoops, flourishes, loops. I laughed and watched him write, thinking of our oblivious parents downstairs. They were listening to Pastor James drone on and on about the Israelites in Egypt while we gorged ourselves on candy and scribbled SHIT CUNT and DICK STAIN and QUEEF JUICE in its pristine pages. Sweat dripped down our hands and dampened the paper. Some soaked through the underarms of my gray polo dress, making dark half-moons that smelled like my baby powder deodorant and stifling body odor. Then I scrawled our names on the front cover, directly under the block print that said This Book Belongs To. All the air pressing down on us in the crawlspace was sucked from the room, as if someone had turned on an industrial fan.

Underfoot, the organ brayed like an angry donkey as the congregation passed the collection plate to the tune of “Blessed Assurance.” My mother’s voice rang out over all the others, loud enough to call attention to the notes she missed. Samuel frowned and turned his bulk toward me, grunting as he heaved over onto his left side. He had a doughy face, sweet and pretty, with almost-black eyes and long blond eyelashes that matched his shaggy hair. His lips were always bright red and wet, like he’d just licked them, which he usually did because they were always chapped. He licked them then, his tongue slowly tracing the rim of his mouth as he wrote: All church music sucks, organs should be banned. Real church music = death metal.

From below came the grating whine of an electric guitar. The drone was deep and throaty. Vibrations ratcheted up through the floorboards, stunning dust off boxes and jangling loose bits of fiberglass. Drums thumped, viscerally loud, from what had to be a double bass kit. We sat with our heads cocked like springer spaniels, unsure of what we were hearing. Then a tortured human voice screamed like a murder victim, a prelude to the hideous screeching that followed. 

Samuel’s eyes went wide in his chalk-pale face. “They’re listening to Obituary,” he said, spit flying out and dotting my cheeks. “I can’t fucking believe it.”

We crawled back along the dusty floorboards, falling out through the crawlspace entrance and into the choir room. The music was so loud it was like standing inside of a speaker box, the noise a drill digging down into my skull. We ran along the back hall: me in front, holding my shoes, Samuel close behind, wheezing. Peering through the glass panes set in the sanctuary doors, we beheld an unholy sight. 

“Holy shit,” Samuel yelped, and I didn’t bother telling him to shut up. No one could have heard him over the howling in the church.

Behind the pulpit, the band thrashed around in near-epileptic fits. Livid red lights strobed spastically overhead. The guy behind the drum kit wore a neon green skull mask and an open leather vest over a burly chest full of hair. The safety pins in the lead singer’s pants flashed silver. When he turned to the side, I could see his junk hanging out through a ragged hole in the black pleather. A disfigured baby doll dangled naked from his outthrust hand.

Our families sat in the pews, nodding along to the music. Mrs. Jebson, a seventy-six-year-old widow in charge of the Awana club, clapped her gnarled, arthritic hands to the beat, head bobbing back and forth on her wrinkled neck. Little kids who’d skipped children’s church were dancing around in the aisles, running back and forth like Satan’s imps. When the lead singer grunted out a particularly noxious swear, the kids all howled it back at him, shrieking with laughter.

Samuel and I went outside, huddling together on the front steps of the church as the sun beat down on our heads and cooked the oil from my hair until it smelled like fried food.

“Let me try something,” I said, taking back the book from Samuel’s slack hands. I opened to a fresh page and jotted down the first outrageous thing that came to mind: Grass is sparkly purple and tastes like mint jelly.

Under my bare feet, the lawn turned the color of a bruise, lavender and purpling. Every place the sun touched brought spangles of light that broke and flashed, turning the world into a shimmering gem. Samuel snapped off a stray blade from a clump near the steps and brought it to his face. Up close, it was even more vibrant, deeply hued as an amethyst. He set the blade between his front teeth, pressed his wet red lips against the flat of it and bit down. Smiling, he opened his mouth and chewed hard, grabbing up a handful and shoving it between his molars. The smell that issued from his tongue was sweet as Doublemint gum.

We took the book home and waited a few days before trying anything else. It sat on my bookshelf, the powdery blue a beacon that called to me. We asked it for small things at first. Samuel wanted a never-ending supply of frozen chimichangas. I asked for a forty-five-foot Slip’N Slide that wrapped around my condo complex. We sat behind the rusted-out shed in his backyard and took turns jotting down nonsense in the book’s blank pages, laughing when the changes were instantaneous—howling at the fall leaves that sloughed off pine trees in the middle of a Florida summer, marveling at the gushing fountains of polar water that sprung up in the middle of a neighbor’s Chrysler convertible.

They were funny requests, stuff that seemed inconsequential. We asked for better skin, nicer clothes, and shinier hair. I wanted to always smell like a fresh piece of bubblegum. Samuel wanted to only wear new clothes, never the same thing twice. Endless stacks of T-shirts and jeans and khakis flooded his room and the rest of his house. Deliveries from Amazon arrived daily after we both asked for open-ended Prime accounts with never-ending balances.

Our families noticed nothing. My father kept going to work at the post office like he always did, accepting whatever eccentricities the book heaped on our small condo. My mother smiled and worked around the stacks of things piled in my room, putting away my laundry after I’d written that she should do all my chores. Samuel’s parents had died in a car accident when he was four. He’d gone to live with his grandmother, a quiet woman who barely left the house and valued her cats over her grandson. Aside from sleeping on piles of his clothes instead of a mattress, there was no difference in her behavior. Our teachers kept teaching, the kids at school and church walked and talked and ate. People drove their cars and stared past the oddities we’d added to the world. Nobody knew things had changed except for us.

“No more Trigonometry in school,” I said, writing it down on the sixteenth sheet of blank paper. “No more Geometry.”

“What happens when the book finally runs out of pages?” Samuel smoothed a hand down his newly slender body. He had six-pack abs and well-defined muscles in his pecs and upper arms. My body was thin, too, but now I had the boobs I’d always wanted. My chest pushed out the front of my T-shirt obscenely, like I was smuggling cantaloupes. 

“I don’t think it will,” I said, and that appeared to be true. For every page we used, scribbling down the rules of our new world, there were five more fresh sheets to replace it.

We were careless. We asked for silly things just to make the world more interesting. I hated the dark and asked for permanent twilight, and the sky turned a constant sherbet azure. Samuel wanted the beach close enough to go every day, and suddenly sand dunes and ocean waves sprouted up in his backyard, right alongside the weedy patches of grass the guys from the baseball team came over to mow.

After I willed complete compliance, girls at school who were mean to me, girls who’d called me “Shawna Clit-Lick” and “Monster Dyke” began to text me nonstop, telling me how smart I was, how pretty I looked. Before, they’d stuck rotten, pulpy oranges in my locker and claimed the smell was from my pussy. Now they left me fresh-baked cookies and new tubes of baby pink lip gloss. They followed me everywhere, did anything I asked, no matter how dangerous or disgusting.

“Eat this broken piece of glass,” I told a blond, leggy girl who’d put chocolate on my seat in seventh grade to make it look like I’d shit my pants. She popped the fragment on her tongue and chewed, smiling gummily as blood dripped from either side of her mouth.

Samuel had fifteen girlfriends, rotating women who swarmed in and out of his grandmother’s house. After the Pastor had condemned dogs to soulless limbo, the girls came to the dog sanctuary and Pastor James moved to Boca Raton. 

“I’m going to open dog sanctuaries all across central Florida,” Pastor James said as he climbed onto the Greyhound bus wearing only his underwear. “God bless these precious animals.”

I stayed most nights in the old church, lodged in a lacy canopy bed between two dog kennels. Samuel and I sat up with the book, passing it between us until the clocks told us we had to rest. Our eyes turned bloodshot and our skin jaundiced, hearts racing from infusions of caffeine. I didn’t know where my parents were. I’d wished my father away on a permanent business trip after he’d yelled at me for staining the rug with the bubbly pink champagne I was now allowed to drink. My mother ran errands for me—my permanent slave. Sometimes I’d see her darting around town, poking in and out of shops and groceries, preparing meals, never stopping to talk.

It was exhausting to live the lives we’d engineered. We got tired of the things we asked for. The smell of bubblegum nauseated me, wafting fresh and sugary all day and night, no matter how much I bathed. Samuel avoided the girls who’d once visited, claiming they bored him. Still they came in droves, scratching at the windows of the church in the middle of the night, calling Samuel’s name until the dogs howled and pawed the bars of their kennels.

“Let’s get rid of some of these requests,” Samuel said, holding up the book. “Just a few. Make it more manageable.” 

We crossed out commands, but nothing changed. Whatever was written in the book stayed permanent. We tried contradicting earlier entries, which created strange, muddled mixtures that horrified us. After writing grass is inedible at the bottom of a fresh page, Samuel took a big bite of spangly grass and promptly threw up minty smelling puke all over my shoes. We stopped trying opposite requests, worried we’d accidentally kill ourselves.

The world remained forever purpling, always just on the cusp of breaking. No more would either of us see a sunrise, rising sharp and orange over the horizon. Samuel and I watched the ocean lap at the chainlink fence that bordered his grandmother’s yard and held each other, scared of what we’d done.

“I’m so glad I have you,” Samuel whispered one night as we huddled together in the dark of the sanctuary, dogs piled up on either side of the canopy bed as we avoided the windows and the girls who cried and cooed outside. He stroked a hand down my cheek, played with a strand of my long blue hair. “You’re the only thing I have left.”

But I didn’t want this Samuel. I wanted my old life back. I wanted my mother and father; I wanted the promise of dawn in the morning and school books and dreading church on Sunday mornings.

“I want to go to college,” I told him as we floated in the infinity pool out back of the church. “I want to find a girlfriend. I want to have my first kiss.”

Samuel followed me from house to house, from space to space. He refused to leave my side. I began avoiding him, trying to find nooks to myself, but it didn’t matter. I’d find him waiting for me outside closets and bathrooms, lurking in the back seat of cars and in empty classrooms that now served as themed party rooms. Hula girls in the luau celebration, a roast pig perpetually cooking on a spit where I used to have English classes. Later when he slept, I found a small, hastily scrawled entry on an early page: No matter where Shawna goes, Samuel always finds her.

We fought incessantly. I stopped bathing, wore the same ratty clothes every day, filthy from food and spilled coffee and grease from the fried chicken that still flew and rained every Wednesday morning.

Samuel has to take a twenty-minute nap, once every hour, I wrote, hoping to get some alone time. He’d fall asleep, frowning viciously through his yawn as he grabbed for me, passing out mid-swear.

Shawna will never leave Blanch City, Samuel scribbled down beside it one night as I attempted to hide from him, and when I saw it, I howled with rage.

I gave him webbed toes. He wrote that I could only wear stiletto heels. I hobbled after him, vowing he’d only ever taste pumpkin spice, before tossing the book at his face. After one particularly rough night where I wrote that Samuel could only see the color blue, he grabbed the book from me and ripped out the page. We both stared at it, the rip as jagged as saw teeth. Then we both yanked at it, tearing out pages, paper tumbling around our heads like confetti. When we were finally done, the binding was a husk broken open on the floor. Our beach chairs on the back patio were peppered with white, survivors of a Florida snowstorm. Exhausted, we fell asleep in the sultry purple-dusk. The plastic of the chair etched lines into my sweaty skin.

I woke to Samuel’s screams. The book was whole again, the pages pristine. Everything we’d written was still there. Our names, our wishes. The mistakes we’d put on ourselves and everyone else. 

“I can’t stand it,” I said, my head pressed into my hands. I ripped out a handful of blue hair and let it fly off in the mild sea breeze. “I don’t wanna be alone anymore.”

“We aren’t alone. We’ll never be alone.”

Samuel tried to put his arm around me and I turned away, digging my face into the plastic chair. I fell asleep to the siren song of the cicada, the sound bouncing off the waves and the manufactured sand.

The next day I couldn’t find him. I searched for Samuel everywhere; he wasn’t with the dogs at the church building, flopping around with them in the giant pool and tossing plastic Frisbees. He wasn’t over at the school in our old classroom, lazing around, drinking giant margaritas. I wandered the purple-spangled grass of what had been the high school football field and climbed onto the merry-go-round set perfectly along the fifty-yard line. A girl sat down beside me, straddling a white unicorn with pale jade eyes and a solid gold saddle.

“Is this what you wanted?” she asked from Samuel’s spitty red mouth. Her nose was tiny, her eyes were dark. She looked a lot like Ellen Page.

“You know it’s not.”

The girl shrugged a tiny shoulder; my Samuel’s twin, same pale, doughy skin, now with high breasts and a small waist tucked under his clothes. She drowned in a giant red polo shirt. Her khaki cargo shorts were supported by a braided leather belt, wrapped twice around her torso. Her legs swung from the emerald stirrups, one sneaker falling from a pale, dainty foot.

“I did what you wanted,” she said. “Be nice.” She tucked a long curl of dark hair behind a small pink ear as delicate as a kitten’s. “This is what we’ve got now.”

We slept curled in the back seat of the pearly white hearse I’d once thought would be so interesting to own. I parked in the back of the dog sanctuary, Samuel’s girlfriends pressing their faces to every window until their makeup left cakey smears like dirt. Our heads touching, legs entwined, we stared at each other’s faces. Two strangers forever attached, always knowing that things should have been very different.

“Let’s write ourselves into the past.” I pressed my cheek to Samuel’s downy softness, breathing in the girl-scent of gardenia and lemon verbena. We listened to the power ballads streaming from the stereo, turned up high to drown out the girls and their moaning. Eighties glam rock was the only music that played on any radio station after Samuel had banned everything else. “It’s gotta be better than this,” I said, dipping my thumb into the dimple of her cheek.

Samuel kissed me, sucking in the pink bubblegum smell of my breath. I could taste the pumpkin spice on her little cat tongue. “In the morning. Let’s have one more night before we really fuck ourselves up.” She wove her fingers into my thick, false hair and fell asleep at twenty after eleven. 

Now it’s closing in on three in the morning, but the sky looks the same as it did at 2:00 pm and there’ll never be a sunrise to make it any different. I sit up in the back seat and stretch out my kinked back, which has curled into a hump. Samuel snores lightly at my side, her face as precious and breakable as a china doll. Down the road, fried chicken parts fall from the sky. I count four breasts, eight thighs, and dozens of drumsticks. Digging out a pen from the back pocket of the car seat, I open to a bare page at the heart of the book and write us back to the crawlspace where it all started.

She and I are in the attic, breathing in the same dry heat and dusty particles, but we’re not alone. Our former selves are here, too, and I’m picking up the book from the wrecked box. There’s the old Samuel, plump and honey-blond, curled up next to me and my skinny calves and ironing-board chest, hair greasy from an excess of hormones in an already rocky puberty. I want to tell myself to put it down, that it’s not worth it, but I’m distracted by the sounds coming from below. The boards at my feet, cracked and warped, let through slips of music. My mother’s singing. Lilting strains of “Blessed Assurance” float up from the crowded sanctuary and seep into my ears. Her voice is sweet and familiar, pitched full of vibrato.

Wind blasts through the scorched air and I know it’s too late; we’ve already signed our names into purgatory.

“Don’t worry,” Samuel says, lacing her fingers through mine. She squeezes, tight enough that I can feel the pressure all the way through my joints. “We can try again tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.”