Eavesdropping, Part 3

Evening dropped. They settled down in their stations. Evans was in front, twiddling knobs on the sound inputs, filtering the channel and maintaining the connection, while Wilkins sat the back, headphones wrapped around his ears, log book open to today’s date. He began to write in the space for hour eleven, in careful, cramped handwriting. “Building quiet. No movement to speak of.”

He turned on the monitor, and it winked on. The picture was subdivided into four parts. He was familiar with two of them: cameras set on top of the van and trained on the building. He toggled between the two, zooming in and out. Most of the windows had the blinds drawn, and regardless, the lights were out. There wasn’t anything to see. But the other two, poorly lit stationary shots showing stairwells, and in one the edge of a doorway; what were they?

“What are we seeing here?” he asked Evans.

“Remote feed on the security cameras,” Evans replied. “New thing. Part of the new code.”

“Strange,” Wilkins said, half to himself.

“God bless America,” Evans said, and giggled.

No one moved in front of the stationary cameras. The one trained on the doorway – Wilkins assumed it was the lobby, the entryway, some kind of entrance – showed a poor potted plant and a trash can. The other one showed bare walls. The emergency stairwell. They had all the exits covered.

Evans kept fiddling with the connection, muttering under his breath. They had only taken one trip to the convenience store, but already the van was beginning to smell like sunflower oil and coffee. Evans lit a cigarette and scratched his nose, seemingly thinking. He pressed a button on the interface and dialed two knobs counterclockwise. Nothing changed.

The mix in the headphones, full of gentle static, made Wilkins feel calm and sure of himself. Soon enough, he hoped, voices would begin to break through and make themselves known. But for now the channel was one big soothing murmur. He looked into the inner monitor, checking the camera view from the top of the van. No movement.

He took his eyes off the monitor and looked at his hands. The nails were all bitten down, the knuckles were knobby. There were burns on his fingers from where he had let a cigarette burn too far down, falling asleep on the job. In the dim overhead light his skin looked thin and yellow. He was almost thirty-six years old. His birthday was in three weeks. For all he knew, he would still be in the van when it came.

Like a cloudy sky opening, the static broke. The crackle, so high he had almost forgotten it, vanished, and the trailing echo of the whispering voices on the other end of the line subsided, leaving nothing but the sibilance of air passing between nearly closed lips. He leaned over the log book.

“Not tonight,” he thought he could hear, though it was low. “I’m just so tired.”

And soft, as if from another, further room: “The baby’s sleeping.”

For a while partial silence, except for the various night noises: different rhythms of snores, a cat meowing softly. And then, very quietly, and strangely unclear, a voice clouded with some interference intoning what seemed like nonsense.

“Wheat simple, bone dry, tango delta tango tango. Bird in the bush. Kettle boiling. Hull breach. Fifty yards.”

Wilkins took off the headphones and cleared his ears with a Q-tip. By the time he put them back on, the night noises were all that was left in the mix. I must have misheard, he told himself. The channel’s not perfect. He shook his head, cracking his neck, and looked back at the monitor. Still no movement. I don’t like it, he thought. Mishearing made him nervous.

“Midnight,” Evans said, stretching out in the front seat. “Lights out time.”

“Indeed.”

“How’s the connection?”

“Just fine,” Wilkins said. “I just have to get my ears used to it.”

“I’ll tweak it tomorrow.”

Without any more talk, Evans reached up and switched off the light. All that was left in the van was the glow of the monitor, the unmoving window onto the apartment building, standing silent, looking oddly vacant in the moonlight.

“I’ll take the first shift,” Wilkins said.

Evans grunted.

“See you in six hours,” Wilkins said, reaching for the headphones.

Evans nodded, reaching down to pull the lever, sending his headrest back towards the floor of the cab. His giant body nestled into the crook of the seat, his chin settling on his chest. Wilkins knew he would be asleep within minutes. He waited for the sound of his snoring, one ear trained on the headphone mix. Crickets were whirring all around, merging with the low static. Finally the low buzzsaw started up from the front seat, and Wilkins knew the big man was asleep.

He took the headphones off and opened the door of the van as quietly as he could. Evans was a heavy sleeper, but still he preferred to be cautious. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and left the rest in the van. He only allowed himself one.

It was a perfect night for smoking: a light breeze, air just cool enough to be felt. He turned around to look at the buildings across the lot. None of them had any lights on, but he thought he could see a few people sitting on the stoop, talking with their hands waving in the air. Someone was shimmying into a basement window, blocking for a second the distant lights from across the field. Or had he imagined it? It was only a short blink from a lamppost, miles away.

He forced himself to focus and turned back to the building. He scanned from right to left, through the trees. All the windows were still out. It seemed like nothing had changed.

Just as he was about to butt out his cigarette and go back into the van, he noticed a figure standing at the far edge of the security light in the back courtyard. He was looking up at windows. Wilkins made a mental profile: male, five eleven, dark jacket, dark skin. He pressed himself against the van and watched.

The man kept himself away from the light. He dropped a coal onto the ground; no, a lit cigarette. His leg twitched, crushing it. He was going to leave, but then hesitated, looked up at one of the middle windows, a floor up. He ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head.

Wilkins ran some options through his mind. An operative? No, too nervous, too emotional. His mission was more personal. A thief? That seemed unlikely. What was there to stake out in the back of the building? And why risk being seen by the residents, in the back courtyard? If he was a thief, then he was a bad one.

Maybe he was in love. Maybe he had been walking the streets, caught up in some restless spring feeling, and his unconscious route had taken him to this apartment building. That would explain the nervous motions he went through, how he looked up at one window with a strange look in his eyes. Wilkins had done the same thing himself. That was years ago, but he remembered.

He remembered the song he had heard, earlier in the day. Was that the same window, the window where the woman was hanging up her wash and singing softly to herself? He tried to remember. Maybe he wasn’t the first one to overhear her. Maybe suitors came every night to her window in the hopes of hearing her sing, waiting quietly and patiently in the shadow of the trees to catch a verse or a chorus from the balcony.

He remembered his cigarette, and took a last puff before letting it fall to the ground. The man under the floodlights shook his head and looked to his left, towards the street. For whatever reason – someone waiting at home, the promise of sleep, the disappointment of no song – he turned away from the floodlight and disappeared.

Wilkins crept back into the van and rolled the door closed behind him. The monitor was blank again, and when he put the headphones back on everything was even quieter than before.

“First movement,” he wrote in the log book. “Suspicious character, appearing briefly and then leaving. Observing a window.”

He closed the book and set it by his feet.

The various sounds of sleep, together with the low rumble of Evans snoring, made him tired. He set his alarm for twenty minute intervals, in case he fell asleep.

So he passed the next five hours. Sometimes he drifted into a dream. He thought he heard two deer circle the van; he could hear them scratching the paint with their hooves, talking to him in low voices, giving advice. He felt the dirt and leaves scattered beneath the trees under his feet, and the feeling of someone’s arms encircling him. Despite it all, the cool chime of the alarm kept bringing him back.

Eavesdropping, Part 2

On a clear Sunday, pale blue and speckled with innocent wisps of cloud, Wilkins and Evans parked the van in a lot full of white vehicles. Some of them were vans, some of them were company cars, and they all had a thin coat of dust on them that made Wilkins suspect that most of them hadn’t been moved in a long time. Maybe it was some sort of front for the department. He wondered at the cost of buying so many cars, just to leave them unused. The dollars they spent trying to confuse people, he marveled, not for the first time. Evans wrenched the parking brake and let forth a loud belch. His hands twitched, looking for something to fiddle with. Their van was full of fancy new equipment from the department, and Wilkins knew Evens was aching to try all of it.

Wilkins got out of the car to stretch his legs. It was going to be a long job. He had put an away message on his answering machine, although he fully expected that no one would call. He gave his cat to the old woman down the hall, saying he had to go away on business and he wasn’t sure when he would be back. She seemed uninterested in that; she loved the cat and would probably keep it forever, if he wanted.

On the other side of the parking lot he could see a long vacant space, muddy from a recent rain, and beyond that some abandoned houses that were clearly crumbling from the inside. He thought he could see a kid sitting on one of the stoops, but he couldn’t hear or see anything clearly from so far away. The figure got up; it wasn’t a kid at all, a stooped person, maybe an old man. The man went back into the shadows, leaving the buildings brooding and silent.

But on the other side of the fence, a row away from their van, there was nothing but a stand of trees. He ran his eyes along the chain-link. There was a break a few rows down, a doorway. It looked like it wasn’t locked.

He walked over and tried the door. It creaked open. Up above him a seagull cried. Were they that close to the water? he wondered. He hadn’t been paying attention as they rode up, half asleep. He tried to check the air for salt but came up with nothing, just a smell of rotting leaves.

“I’m taking a piss,” he called back to Wilkins. There was no response from the van.

He passed under the shadows of the grove. Light filtered in and out of the branches, and he could see the layer of leaves and dead plants, mingling with trash and some blown-in newspapers. For a second he was deep enough in the little wood to pretend it was larger than it actually was, that there was more to it than a pathway between two places. But that was only for a second. Soon he saw pavement ahead of him.

For the sake of covert operations, I ought to turn back, he thought. Someone might see me, and suspect something. But he lingered for a second in the wood, reaching up to touch some leaves, listening to the sound of the wind through the leaves like mingled whispers and static. And then, as he listened, he heard someone singing softly to themselves, farther down the path.

“You don’t love me at all,” she sang, in a murmuring sort of way that suggested her hands were busy with something, that her mind wasn’t with the words. “I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice, you don’t love me anymore.”

Wilkins froze, trying to be as silent as he could, aware of the sound of his own breathing. The path was dirt, but there were stray leaves all over he needed to avoid if he wanted to move quietly. He took a few more steps towards the far exit, placing his feet carefully. He only had a few seconds before he had to get back, he had to hurry.

He saw her between two thin trees, standing by a clothesline on her back balcony, a floor up. She was putting some clothes on the line. Her hair had come loose and waved a little in the light wind. Inside he could see the glow of a television. Her eyes were concentrating on the laundry, but her lips wrapped lightly around the words of the song, a little sad and sarcastic now and again, but mostly letting the tune drift out into the air without comment, accompanying her hands across the line.

“You can say what you will, when you call my name, but I hear more in your voice. I know when you speak, all the secrets you keep, that you don’t love me anymore.”

She wore a green cotton dress, modest around the shoulders, and her skin was pale and freckled. Her hair was straight, reddish, cut straight along her jawline. She looked purposeful and competent, as if she knew the things she did had some hard, simple use. Wilkins could think of so many questions. Was she married? There was no ring on her finger. Did she smoke cigarettes on the back balcony in the night and look at the moon? Her voice wasn’t raspy, it was smooth and comfortable. What was the song she was singing, he had never heard it before.

He could imagine her, sitting on a folding chair on the balcony, in front of the bare clothesline, smoking a single cigarette before going to bed. The song she was singing could be louder, spreading out into the trees. He could listen to her from the parking lot, sitting on the roof of the van in the open air.

She put her palm to her forehead and pulled her hair back. She sighed, shrugged her shoulders, and then pulled the sliding door back and disappeared inside.

He stood still for a second and took a deep breath. He felt strangely cold in the shade. Turning around, he went back towards the van.

Evans was sitting in the front seat, studying the new receiver, his fingers running all over the dials and readouts.

“Long piss,” he said.

Wilkins didn’t respond. He opened the side door and climbed inside. The whole van was full of a terrible smell.

“Something die in here?” Wilkins asked.

“Ripped one,” Evans said.

Wilkins shook his head and took a seat. He put his headphones on and started to calibrate the machines, searching for signals. He didn’t know this equipment yet, and occasionally he got confused. A burst of noise drilled into his ears, and he yanked the headphones off with a groan.

“Problem?” asked Evans.

“Overload,” he said.

The other man nodded, taking a sip of the jumbo soda he always kept next to him in the cupholder. Wilkins turned his eyes away and began to twist the dials, trying to separate the inputs and filter out the background, to focus in on voices and conversations.

The sun went down, and lights came on through the trees. They couldn’t be more than a hundred feet away. Wilkins could see shadows in the windows of the building, and music, even when he took off his headphones. Someone was having a barbecue, though Wilkins thought it seemed a little cold, still, for that sort of thing. And then, at nine, the murmuring voices and popping coals died down to silence again. He took off the headphones and listened to the general sounds of the night. Car doors shutting, the occasional shout, an old vacuum cleaner whirring and rattling towards its last days.

I know when you speak,” Wilkins sang, in a weak, uncertain voice. “All the secrets you keep, that you don’t love me anymore.”

“What song’s that?” Evans asked him.

“I don’t know,” Wilkins said. “I heard it somewhere.”

Evans grunted and went back to his equipment. One by one the people in the building turned off their radios, and the lights beyond the trees began to wink out. Over the headphones, the voices of the residents sounded like so much whispering. Soon Evans’ snores were louder than the mix in his ears, and he turned off the board and rolled over to sleep.

Eavesdropping, Part 1

Mr. Wilkins was a surveillance operative by trade, and as a result his work was conducted in extreme secrecy. He operated out of a blue car with an innocuous logo on the side: a W inside of a circle and the words “Watson Restorers” in blocky white type. He was not a secretive person by nature. He was truthful and honest with everyone as best he could. But the job had instilled in him certain habits. He often looked over his shoulder, and whenever he walked past parked cars or was himself passed by a suspicious vehicle, on a lonely side street in the dark, he would think: where are they going?

He usually worked in tandem with a slightly older fellow named Mr. Graves. Graves was enormously fat, a quiet sort of guy. He had little blue eyes that were so pale they looked watery, which often made Wilkins worry that the other man was going to cry for no discernible reason. Graves was the telephone expert. Wilkins wasn’t quite sure, but he had heard once that Graves used to be the guy who dressed like a repairman and installed wiretaps. It was hard for Wilkins to imagine Graves wrestling his bulk around a stranger’s house. He would bob and weave, break lamps in half, and blow the whole operation.

But if Graves’ body was a lumbering mess, Graves’ hands were marvels. Once their board board broke down in the middle of a stakeout, and Wilkins watched him tinker around with tiny tools until the whole thing was operational again, clicking and whirring and emitting warm beeps as if nothing had happened. During down periods, when Wilkins was busy listening and jotting down notes, Graves often had a pack of cards open, working silently on tricks. He shuffled so quickly and cleanly that the deck was just a blur and a light buzz, like some subtle insect trapped between his fingers.

* * * * * * * * * * *

In his first days on the job everyone had been very cautious. A series of public gaffes, some of them involving the highest echelons of the government, had made the Bureau nervous about disclosure. Wilkins was instructed to listen only at night, and to park the van farther than he though necessary from the target. The sound was foggy and the notes he got were fragmented.

Those early days were the worst. He started the job in winter, and although the van was heated the system was half-broken, so he had to write and type with fingerless gloves. The stakeout was outside a run-down apartment building, close to the Manhattan Bridge, and along with the trouble of distance he had to contend with the rattlings and screeching tires of cars on the highway. And from where he was parked, in the shadows, he could see stray cats and dogs fighting each other among piles of dirty plywood.

He lived in fear of being unmasked as a total incompetent. Someday, some grim day that he assumed was close at hand, someone would ask for his notes, or his input. There was a detective assigned to the case, Detective Saunders, but when he called all he ever seemed to ask were conversational questions. “How you holdin’ out, Wilkins?” he’d ask, or “think this guy’ll make a move?” Wilkins never had any answers. He didn’t even know who Saunders was referring to. He had a series of apartment numbers; No one gave him any information on the case, no names, no scenarios. The less he knew, the better.

And on the rare occasions when he had the courage to complain about the set-up, or the paucity of useful observation, Saunders would pause, sigh, and comment wearily that there was “sure a lot of red tape in this world, no doubt about it.” He always inquired after Wilkins’ family, and Wilkins always inquired after his. Both, it seemed, were fine.

But as the months went on, and no one besides Saunders seemed to have any interest in what he was doing, Wilkins began to relax. He continued to take notes, but he stopped worrying that they didn’t provide enough information to help anyone’s case. He found, too, that he half-enjoyed the murmur of voices, the occasional clear sentences that held little to no real meaning. “Don’t wake the cat.” “Burble burble burble, my dear.” “Welcome to the living room, but watch the chairs.” He especially loved his transcriptions, copying the notes onto a file and then batching it on his computer. There were unexpected jokes and poetry stuck in odd corners of everything he transcribed, and in some strange way he was proud of having brought these parts to life.

One day, when he was fighting sleep, he got a call. Graves was snoring in the front seat, but when the phone rang he jumped out of his seat and tried to look busy. Someone was dragging a garbage bag out from behind the apartment building, but they didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss.

“We want your notes, Wilkins,” the voice on the telephone said. “Please batch them and send them to Processing.”

A small wave of fear whirled through his bowels.

“Will do,” he said, almost whispering.

“Your job’s done,” the voice said. “Please report to your superior officer and return the van to Vehicles for general repairs.”

“Can do,” Wilkins said.

“Thank you.”

The line went dead.

Graves nodded at him and narrowed his eyebrows. He scratched his nose and flexed the fingers of his right hand. Wilkins guessed that all the shuffling was giving him carpal tunnel.

“We’re going in,” Wilkins said. “Job’s finished.”

“Oh,” Graves said. He continued to nod, dumbly. He looked through the windshield at the apartment complex. Wilkins thought he could see a little sadness in his eyes. But then Graves shook his head and put all his cards back in the deck.

“I’ll drive,” he said.

Wilkins began to put everything back in its proper place.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Wilkins spent the next month in almost constant fear over the reception of his notes. Just because Detective Saunders didn’t care, that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone higher up in the department who did. He imagined three of them in a back room, lit by a hanging lamp, pondering the notes. “Is he lazy or stupid?” they might be asking. He lay awake at night, pondering their theoretical conversations, their deliberations and decisions about his fate. The men in the back room were patient and thorough. Nothing would persuade them once they had come to their final decision. He was convinced of this.

But again, no one ever spoke to him about it. After a month’s paperwork, they gave him a week of vacation, in anticipation of another job. Clearly, whatever decision had been made, Wilkins had been spared. He had passed the test.

Spring arrived, all the riverside parks of the city were in bloom. He walked up and down the river, stopping on park benches. Women in tight running outfits surrounded him. Children veered off the walks and hid in the bushes. And farther away, in the shadows of trees by the banks of the Sargessa, lovers carried on private conversations. He drank soda and ate ices under the bright sun. He pricked up his ears.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

They did a number of jobs together in the next few months. Graves grew more and silent. Someone had told him that Graves had a wife, and in the beginning he would sometimes allude to his homelife in a way that suggested there was someone waiting for him, outside of the cramped world of their van, someone he wanted to get out and see. But as the months went on, Graves stopped mentioning it to him. There were rumors of a divorce.

The procedures changed. Either the bureau had gotten less worried, or the laws had gotten looser. Either way, their van parked closer and closer to targets, and the sound levels Wilkins got were much clearer. Now he could monitor whole conversations clearly; his notes became cleaner and better articulated.

It was fall, and they were weathering the first cold snap of the year, parked twenty feet from a driveway in the suburbs, the first time he ever got a whole scene down on paper. Even as it was happening, he thought to himself: this is something I will remember for the rest of my life. An old woman knocked on the bathroom door; her husband was inside.

“Do you have to take such a long time in there?” she asked, her voice sharp and accusatory.

“Whaddayawant?” he said. “I’m on the toilet. I like to take my time.”

“Are you smoking in there?” the old woman asked.

“No,” he said. “When do I smoke in the bathroom? What do I need to smoke in the bathroom for?”

Of course, Wilkins knew this was a lie. There was a fine line of cigarette smoke rising from their bathroom window.

“If you smoke in there I’ll know it,” the wife said. “I always know, you know.”

“Oh, let it go,” the old man said.

Wilkins saw the cloud of smoke float away like a balloon with a clipped string. He rushed over to his notepad and scribbled everything down. In some ways it was like the dreams he had tried to keep when he was a kid, writing as quickly as possible to save whatever he could before he forgot everything.

He stopped, exhausted, and admired his handiwork. Then he put the headphones back on and went back to listening.

He knew for himself that his quality was improving. But still there was no word from Central Bureau, no sign that anyone was noticing any difference. Virtue is its own reward, he reminded himself, and it usually was.

The young couple next door to the elderly couple fought, split apart, came back together again. When they split up the woman left the man, and some nights he could hear the man muttering to himself, singing sad songs, even crying softly, though he wasn’t sure he could tell, there was still some static in the transmission. He was rooting for them, and when the woman did return he was glued to the set, listening.

“I missed you,” she said. “I’ve missed you terribly. I’ve been such a shit and I don’t know to explain it.”

That’s not true, Wilkins thought, although he was glad to hear her say it.

“Welcome home,” the man said. “It wasn’t home without you.”

There was a light sound, like hands crossing across fabric.

Wilkins was deeply moved. If Graves hadn’t been in the car, he might have started crying.

He didn’t know if Graves felt the same as he did about the things he heard. But Graves stayed on the telephone detail, maybe he didn’t hear those kinds of things. He sat there, shuffling cards, seemingly uninterested in what happened on the line. Sometimes he penciled some notes. But mostly he worked on card tricks, which Wilkins could never see, hidden behind his massive back.

Sometimes, when Graves had the receiver cradled against his shoulder, Wilkins thought he could detect a twitch, a start, some suggestion of emotion. Not enough to convince him he hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Winter came with a three-day swipe of bitter cold. Wilkins watched the first snowfall from the windows of his one-bedroom apartment in Long Island City. His heating was always on too high, and he wore next to nothing in the apartment most nights. It had been a week since he had heard from the Bureau. He sat in the boiling apartment and waited.

Finally, after a few anxious days, the call came. He and Graves were to be given a very serious assignment, so serious that they were told to report to Central. Wilkins put on some sensible clothes. Next door a woman was arguing with her son. If he listened hard he could catch the gist, but he was in a hurry.

They sat in two uncomfortable chairs in a windowless room, where they were briefed by a man in sunglasses.

“This is a very secret operation. You will be on call for a number of days, maybe more than a week, without telephone contact. You will be given a strict schedule. All trips to stores, etc., will be tightly scheduled. There will be a public toilet near your outpost. Around-the-clock surveillance will be absolutely essential.”

“Will we receive extra members for our team?” Wilkins asked.

The man grimaced and rolled up his sleeves. He seemed like he needed to go to the bathroom.

“Two man teams will be station around the target,” the man in the sunglasses said, speaking very quickly. “But you and Graves will proceed as usual. One of you will take the day shift, the other the night. I cannot impress upon you enough the importance of this mission. But I can provide no other details.”

Graves and Wilkins nodded. The man shuffled from foot to foot.

“I’ll have a secretary bring you the necessary forms,” the man said, and rushed out the door.

They signed a tall stack of forms about confidentiality, which confused Wilkins, since they didn’t know much anyway. Afterwards they sat in a couple of chairs next to the coffee machine and drank lukewarm coffee in silence. The office was full of men in well-starched shirts. Everybody had their hair combed precisely, and the whole place smelled of ink.

“Is this your first time at Central?” Wilkins asked Graves.

Graves nodded.

“Mine too,” Wilkins said.

Shoes clacked all over the building. Occasionally someone would laugh, and it would shake across the tile, echoing in an eerie fashion. Wilkins listened carefully. He thought he could make out a few conversations, behind the constant static of keyboards, rattling away.

The start of something

I’m much better at starting things than I am at finishing them, so this is just a start. Please tell me how to make it better.

——————————————–

Muriel got down under the front porch and tried to drag the dog out. Her behind stuck up like a hillock and I sat back in the lawn chair enjoying her behind and the sunset, in that order, with my beer a distant third.

“I can’t believe he hasn’t gotten used to thunderstorms yet,” she said, muffled, from under the porch. “Thirteen years, Christ.”

“He got killed by lightning in a past life,” I told her. “What?” she said. Lebo was whimpering more loudly than I would’ve imagined an animal could whimper, if I hadn’t been hearing it regularly for the past thirteen years. She started scooting back, yanking the dog with her.

“Lebo got killed by lightning in a past life,” I said again. She looked up and pushed a flip of graying hair out of her face. “He used to be the world’s tallest man. But he led a life of sin. He was struck down by the hand of the Lord in the middle of a beach in Florida, and when the crabs came out at night he was already toasty. Nature’s microwave.”

“You’re a nitwit,” she told me, and heaved Lebo, that trembling bag of bones, into my lap. My lawn chair flipped. I spilled my beer all over the dog.

***

By eleven the power was out. We made a cave out of our forty-acre quilt and used flashlights to read each other’s palms while Leboshivered under the bed and outside it rained.

Muriel’s left palm was almost completely smooth, with one tiny cross of inch-long lines, just in the middle.

“I used to have stigmata in high school, did I tell you that?” she said. “That’s where it healed.”

“Bullshit.”

“Do you really think that God would have chosen me if I were the kind of person who would lie to you about having stigmata?”

There was something wrong with that but I was too tired to figure it out.

“I…” A gargantuan yawn shut me up for a minute. “I can’t believe that in twenty-two years of marriage you never told me that you had stigmata.”

“Idiot,” she giggled. Then: “Actually it was self-inflicted. I used to stab myself with scissors so that people would think I had stigmata.” There was something wrong with that, too, but my ears were full of cottony thunder and I was underwater with Muriel in our quilt cave. There was no fighting sleep; I shut my eyes and went away.

***

Saturday we patched pants; Sunday we snapped beans. Monday night Janet called.

“I’m thinking about coming up for a visit,” she said. I was down in the kitchen, Muriel had the upstairs line.

“That’d be sweet of you,” said Muriel. “Would you be bringing that Gus?”

“We would like it if you brought that Gus,” I said.

“I haven’t been with Gus for eight months,” said Janet. “It’s Bob now. You met him at Christmas. He gave you those art prints.” I remembered. He had been wearing a shirt and tie at Christmas.

“We would like it if you brought that Gus,” I told her again.

“I just remembered, sweetie,” said Muriel. “All the roads are actually flooded right now. No one can get in or out of town. If you try to come now, you’re liable to get capsized.”

“It’s been raining,” I put in.

“Your roads aren’t flooded,” said Janet. I heard something start beeping in the background. “Shoot, I have to go. I really have to go.”

“Your father had to build a raft out of spare tires just to get the groceries,” said Muriel.

“I really have to go,” said Janet. She went.

Muriel came downstairs and we sat on the couch together and wished that our daughter had the good sense to recognize a damn fine man, by which we meant Gus, when he was staring her right in the face.

***

I hauled myself out of bed the next bright morning and went outside to get my feet dewy when I noticed that the car had been spraypainted overnight. I went back up and gave Muriel a nudge. She came slowly and beautifully awake.

“Did you write Fuck You Mr Patterson on our car?” I said.

“No,” she said. Light cast through the netted curtains and made a shrine of her nose. “Did you?”

“It must have been Ted,” I said. Ted was our neighbor who twitched.

“It wasn’t Ted,” she told me. “Ted’s in Lancaster County on a healing retreat.”

She had to be dreaming. “No he isn’t, that’s crazy. Wake up.” I gave her another nudge. She opened one eye and looked annoyed.

“I am awake. Ted’s learning to use meditation and the earth’s natural healing power to center his energies and achieve levitation. He told me about it last Tuesday.”

“Levitation?” I said, but she had already closed her eye. “Well who was it, then?” I asked the bedside table. There was no answer. “Nobody calls me Mr Patterson,” I said.

***

Muriel was still asleep when I finished breakfast and went back outside. The car was still painted. I rolled up my pajama pants and crossed the wet grass. The welcome tree sighed and licked at my cheeks with its red leaves. Barks echoed from the field across the road as Lebo came rushing up to shove his nose deep into my crotch. I gave him a scratch and he hopped back, yipped at me once with his ears up and his black eyes fixed on me, and then sprang away to water the feet of the welcome tree.

“John?” Muriel called in a soft voice from the door. I turned around. Her nightgown clung to her like a kid. I ambled back over.

“You got up!” I told her. “That’s wonderful.”

“You weren’t making up the car,” she said.

“Would God have chosen me to have my car vandalized if I were the kind of person who’d lie about it?” I smartassed.

“Would God have reincarnated the world’s tallest man as a tree-pisser-onner?” she smartassed back. She had me there. Lebo looked up at us and grinned, leg raised. “Come on, don’t let him do that.”

“What are you worried about?” The tree was doing fine. “It isn’t going to shrivel up. Hearts of oak, ma’am.”

“How many times does he need to mark it, though? It’s your tree, Lebo! Who else pees on this tree?” She turned to me. “Do you pee on this tree, John?”

“My secret is out. I’m competing for territory with our dog.”

“Is that so,” she said. “You’d better make sure he doesn’t get me too, in that case.”

“Come over here and I’ll mark you,” I said. I would’ve, too, if the mailman hadn’t come.

Missed connections 4

humboldt craigslist > missed connections > Thin mints

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Thin mints

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Reply to: pers-292029517@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-11, 12:07AM PST

It is girl scout season and the world is full of girl scouts. Mainly they seem to be stationed at the entrance to the grocery store, where their mission is to twist around on one foot while tugging at their hats and blurting out “Hellowouldyouliketobuysomegirlscoutcookies!” at me every time I try to go buy vegetables. So far I have kept my wits about me, surviving by means of my tried-and-true defense against aggressive New York panhandlers (“Sorry, I’m not carrying cash”), but I know it’s only a matter of time before they get to me. Lately my strategy has been to attach myself to another shopper as they enter the store, matching their stride and walking a pace or two behind them, only to quickly disengage myself and slip unmolested through the door at the moment that my human shield is getting snared into buying cookies.

Today was different. Things seemed to be going off without a hitch; I locked up my bike and surreptitiously fell in step behind a shortish woman in a big woolly hat. As we moved within range of the door’s eight-year-old sentry, I tensed for the breakaway. “Hellowouldyou-” came the pitch, and then the woman in front of me stopped in her tracks. I had to skip to the side to avoid a collision.”I’m going to lay it out for you, one point at a time,” said the woman in the woolly hat. “A, your cookies are made with hydrogenated oils. No living being has any business ingesting these oils. These oils will give you coronary heart disease.” Her words were quick and sharp. I had forgotten about my groceries and was standing still, staring at her hat, which was still hiding her face. The girl scout and the girl scout’s mother also stared.

“B, there is milk chocolate, eggs, or another animal product in almost all varieties of your cookies. I happen to be a vegan. Do you know what that means?” She paused even though it was obvious that none of us was going to answer. “It means that your troop, your friends, and you are all directly responsible for the commercially-motivated torture of animals and the buildup of the greenhouse gas methane. Whereas I have chosen a better path.”

I was trying to crane my neck to get a glimpse of her face, but that hat was still in the way. This was clearly all somewhat beyond the girl’s comprehension, but she was getting the gist. Her bottom lip started sticking out and trembling.

“C, your cookies cost nearly six dollars a box. Ask me whether I would rather buy a box of your immoral and deadly cookies, or pay one and a half percent of my rent this month. Go ahead, ask me.” She made another one of those pointless pauses. “I didn’t think so. Ciao.” And she swept past, like a compact steam engine absolutely sure of where it was going.

Now, we all three kind of stood there for a minute or two, and I’m pretty sure that at some point the kid started crying, and her mom may have given me a dirty look – did she assume the woman in the hat was with me? Or did she just want me to have stepped in, somehow? – and bundled her daughter away to their car. I wandered around for the rest of the day like I’d been clobbered. This is a weird thing for me to accept, since it comes completely out of the blue, but here it is: I have never in my life been so aroused as I was during those thirty seconds in front of the doors to the grocery store. If you’re reading this, and you gave a third grader absolute hell today while wearing a big woolly hat, please write back. I am ready to be abused.

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Missed connections 3

humboldt craigslist > missed connections > Bluebird

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Bluebird

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Reply to: pers-291512605@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-09, 10:48PM PST

Hiking in the Arcata Community Forest two days ago, I ran into you on loop trail B. Your flannel shirt was blue and mine was brown, and you said we looked like the mismatched eyes of a three-legged dog you had when you were four. I showed you what I’d been carving, and you sang me half a verse of a song you’d written about orioles before stopping with embarrassed laughter. We passed three barking dogs, I got on my bike to leave, turned to say goodbye and saw you slipping back down the trail. I wanted to follow you, but took just two steps before I saw you stop, cock your head, then leap into the air and just keep heading up. You flew off into the redwoods. I swear I had not eaten one single drug in weeks.

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Missed connections 2

humboldt craigslist > missed connections > Olly olly oxen free

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Olly olly oxen free

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Reply to: pers-288876406@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-05, 12:32PM PST

You: early 20s, short red hair, sneaky expression, skirt over jeans, playing hide & seek with three friends in Shay Park

Me: the guy you didn’t realize was playing, who you couldn’t find

Coffee some time?

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Missed connections 1

humboldt craigslist > missed connections > During the last rainstorm

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During the last rainstorm

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Reply to: pers-287587062@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-03-02, 11:27PM PSTI felt my back tire pop and squeezed the brakes. Moments later, the first big raindrop whapped into the back of my hand. I looked up and the second, third, and fourth drops described a beautiful equilateral triangle on each cheekbone and directly between my eyes.

I scrambled for my poncho, already realizing that I’d left it at home. A half-hour walk in the rain, then. Worse things have happened. Raindrops peppered my scalp like hail. In less than a minute my shirt was soaked through.

The rivers were already high, and this was all it took to push them over the top. Under the cement overpass, I passed a little tributary, swollen like a tick and moving faster than I was. Colorful debris dotted the churned water: floral lampshades, a basketball, bright red sneakers with the laces snagged to a broken branch. I leaned my whole wet back against the chilly cement and laid back my head, staring up into the graffiti and birds’ nests.

When I looked back at the water, this is what I saw rushing along in the current: one purple inflatable armchair, bobbing like a happy duck, cradling between its big arms a woman, maybe 23, with black hair all rainy and tangled and an open-faced joy for the entire world. You stared me straight in the face for half a second and laughed out loud and then you disappeared around a bend in the river.

Where are you now? I want so very badly to meet you. Please write back.

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Under the Netting

There is a tactic for repelling locusts and other troublesome insects from fields, whereby you stretch a net taut across the rows of stalks, anchored at the edges by white posts. The net is usually made of some micro-fiber that absorbs insect-repelling liquid. The net is soaked in this liquid before being attached to the white posts, and every week a new net replaces the old one. During this replacement process, the posts themselves are recalibrated to accommodate the growth of the crops. The net itself is quite fine, and shines in the sun. In some light it looks like a giant spiderweb, and in certain sunsets it looks like a big white trampoline. It’s not as effective, farmers say, as spraying. But people worry about pesticides running into the groundwater, and you don’t have to do any expensive tests to prove their safety. Not yet, anyway.

Sometime, around when I was sixteen, they started putting these nets up all over town. There had been a pesticide scare the year before, and everybody scrambled. It helped, too, that the nets looked very space-age in an old-fashioned sense, that there was something of the whiff of progress about them, and that they were actually pretty in a creepy way. Remove the idea of a pesticide, of poison raining down on the green earth, and you put up a beautiful white web in its place, a second sheltering atmosphere for the crops. People couldn’t stop talking about them.

The inspectors came and the inspectors went. Safety was pronounced generally, through word of mouth. I guess our town was some sort of experiment. Biology gawkers came to look at our wide, beautiful nets. A cafe opened up in town to cater to the new visitors, but it closed down soon after, and the son of a prominent lawyer got lost in a field and almost caught in a net. You might have seen it on the news. You’d be surprised at the kinds of things that happen in a small town such as mine. A great number of interesting episodes happened in the years I was there, and I often have to fight off the nostalgia when I think of it.

As the summer went on and the corn got higher, it became easier to see the nets themselves, rising inches above the tops of the stalks. But people had gotten used to them and so they didn’t comment on them as much anymore.

Jeanine and I were still on good terms that summer, and we rode around our little town on bikes most afternoons. She had a fantastically fast little road bike that she had gotten when her father died. We had two primary roads, the ones we favored time and time again. One of them led around the marsh and took us to the two main marinas, of which the first was doing fine, because of a well-managed restaurant. We sat on the docks and threw our crab-traps in the water, and the manager, who was a nice enough guy, sometimes waved at us from the window of the restaurant lobby.

The other marina had fallen on hard times. The bait shop was nothing but a room full of stolid air and dusty packages of fishhooks and reels. Old hulks of boats decomposed in the yard. We biked on past it, back towards home.

I don’t remember the other road, except that we only took it in fall, when the leaves were changing.

My recollection of the weather on the day when we went to sit under the nets is fuzzy. As far as I can remember, there are two possibilities, which go as follows.

The day started off thin and hot, the sun striking your face as you rode but with almost no wind to speak of. Jeanine and I went down the extension of the main road, which cut past the middle school and on through a succession of corn fields. We went in single file, so that we couldn’t talk to each other. It had been that way for weeks, with the two of us getting more and more silent with each other, but still we went on riding. A big brigade of fat storm clouds started to move in from the northwest, and the air was stiffening up by the time we got to the field by the Bateman’s, which had a big white net over it. It cast no shadow, which was eerie and essential to the whole process. As I got off my bike I heard a peal of thunder. She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked at me.

Or else the day started out stormy. There had been a light rain in the morning, so that I worried I’d have to spend the day inside and not go under the netting like we’d planned. But the clouds broke and the sun warmed up the humid air. The rain caught Jeanie as she biked up to my house, and when she rang the doorbell I could tell her hair was damp. We rode down the main street extension side-by-side, telling each other jokes. We had started to talk more on our rides, as the summer went on. It was a sign of something I didn’t quite understand. But we quieted down once we got to the cornfield by the Bateman’s place. We got off our bikes and walked to one of the white posts, where Jeanie jumped up and touched one of the tiny threads, already dry from the sun. She tucked her hair behind her ear.

Wordlessly, she took my hand and led me under the netting, in between the rows. Immediately I got the feeling you get in a big bunch of corn, of being no place in particular. It put me in an extreme state of nervous excitement. And I didn’t know, why she had touched my hand, why she wanted me to come to the field, and what the trip meant, in the slightest.

Do you know, I’ve forgotten lots of things about J. I remember a series of significant details. The way the sun hit her face one Thursday when she turned to tell me that she would have loved me if there hadn’t been a number of things in the way of our hearts. The cutoff shorts she always wore, scissored from last year’s pants. Her nervous laugh, that went up exactly an octave after two or three beats. But I don’t remember how tall she was, or what color her eyes were. What is it that makes a person real to you? I do remember the way the muscles in her throat tightened, if that means anything to anybody.

When I looked up at that netting, it was only barely there. That was the point, of course. You weren’t supposed to notice it at all, or if you did you had to marvel at the intricacy of its design. You saw it when you looked directly at the sun and then moved a step to the right or the left. It manifested as a shift in the light, as a series of sparking points that took your breath away. It was one thing to see it from the road, or have someone describe it to you. It was ten times better when it had you in its grip, like another sheltering sky. Only every once in a while you could see a bug, paralyzed, trapped in the netting.

We sat down in the furrows in silence. It took a lot more time than it should have for me to kiss the girl. But love is, as everyone knows, indescribable. Insects hummed, children came home from school. A high pressure front interacted with low pressure from the south, and storms came in over the Northeastern United States. Some of our clothes came off. A car crash probably occurred in the tri-county area.

This was the last time we went to see the nets. This wasn’t because me and the girl had a fight, or because we fell out of love. Though of course, we did. It took a long time and ended with us both in different cities, and involved an incredibly high long-distance phone bill. No, we were half in love all summer long. But we never went to the nets again. My bike broke, we were too busy in each other’s bedrooms, we didn’t have the time.

And then, sometime later, I heard there had been a terrible accident. A thunderstorm the likes of which no one had ever seen ravaged our old town. Lightning struck all the nets, and the fields went up in flames. The devastation, they say, was terrifying. When it was over, there was little to nothing left of the town I once knew.

No one uses these sorts of nets anymore. Hardly anyone remembers them. The same goes for my old town. With the fields gone it withered away, moved off, disappeared. I’ve learned to avoid bringing it up in conversation, so as to avoid awkwardness, to avoid having to explain. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, most of the time. So my town, like the girl, becomes a hidden part of the world, resting inside me. Who else would need to know about it, unless there was some secret value in the rustle of the marsh grass, the big white nets unmoving in the wind, or the colorful characters of main street who have all vanished?

Which is, of course, why I’m telling you now.

Five Other Lives for Adam Gifford

#1

In the first other life, Adam Gifford lives in a corner apartment in a residential section of the south part of town, near the railroad tracks. It is some kind of polar clime, and there’s snow falling most days, but the trains power through it. Adam can hear the engines moaning during the night as he tries to sleep, along with the metallic jumble of the heater. His wife is always wrapped up in layers upon layers of clothing. Sometimes, on the coldest nights, he tries to get his hands through the many layers of cloth and get to the feeling of skin on skin, but he always ends up against some thin plastic kind of material and it won’t come off. His wife, for her part, is eager enough, but she can’t seem to get the stuff off either. They collapse on the bed, exhausted and confused.

Their apartment is a bedroom, a kitchen, and a large living room with windows that open out on the corner and the intersection, and with the snow almost always falling the windows are cast with a soft, white curtain that catches the streetlamps. Nothing goes on in their part of town, so the corner is empty except for the occasional buzz of headlights.

Sometimes, when Adam is feeling particularly adventurous, he puts on a few extra layers of clothing – the apartment is poorly heated – and walks the floor of the living room, watching the snow fall. With all the layers of clothing and the world behind the glass of the windows, he feels like a space explorer, confronted with the surface of some alien planet. His wife snores, beckons him back to bed. And then, from somewhere past the streets, he hears the call of the train singing far away, foretelling some distant life, away in some other place left unvisited.

#2

In the second other life, Adam Gifford works in a train station. His duties include updating an incredibly complex timetable, for every train that enters and exits the station. The station itself is gigantic, occupying tens of city blocks, and underground its rails and tunnels extend outwards into the darkness, like the roots of a tooth turning into innumerable veins. Adam tries his best to juggle the complicated schedules and delays and departures, but inevitably he loses track of something. Luckily, he had a personal computer that emits a soft beeping when ever something obvious has gone missing. It sounds like an incredibly simple music box encased in cotton. A brief message flashes, and he thinks: the train on track 41 is ten minutes late today.

The foot traffic around the station is always heavy, except for in the very early morning. From where he works on the seventh floor the people are still half-recognizable. Sometimes he thinks he sees someone from his past, from schooldays or past jobs. Not that he could call from this height; the person would get lost among the crowd, they’d never have the time to look up and recognize him. They get driven along with the rest of the moving people.

The desks in the station are arranged in rows, with small dividers between them. Everyone is conscious of what an important job they have, and the controllers, as they’re called, are always shouting to each other. “Train on track 421 is heading south to the beltway, right?” “Check on number 97, heading east toward Greenwood, I thought I heard ice on the tracks caused delays.” Lunch breaks are staggered, so that the lines of communication are always open.

Sometimes, as Adam is watching the busy office scene, he imagines a small break in the movement of the people, a brief readjustment of the office plan that lets him look for a minute or two at the desk of Samantha Winters, who has worked at the station for as long as Adam can remember. She often wears a light green shirt with her black business slacks, and a handkerchief in a pastel color he can never quite identify. She is always typing with a wry smile on her face. And then the office starts moving again and someone is always in his way.

They’ve spoken to each other once or twice. She once complimented him on his gold tie. He knows she likes to ride her bike down to the giant reservoir Central Authority built two years ago and watch the sun set. Some day, he thinks, he’ll ask her to come with him out the Border Forest and lie in the grass. Maybe when spring comes.

#3

In the third life Adam Gifford lives at the edge of a vast desert. He runs a small canteen, a watering hole where people come to rest up in preparation for the massive journey ahead. The sun setting over the desert is a forbidding sight; it isn’t the rolling sort of dune-laden desert one imagines from books and movies. It’s scrubby and rocky and full of stunted plants with thorns and tough skin. But Adam tells travelers it isn’t as bad as it seems, to cheer their spirits.

The canteen, of which he is the sole owner and operator, is famous for a certain sort of liquor that is brewed from a mind of cactus that Adam grows and harvests. It has a sharp, medicinal taste, but with a hint of licorice flavor that Adam says is from the ground spines, although he knows this is probably a lie. Before anyone sets out across the desert Adam sits down with them, discusses the logistics of their journey – do they have enough water, enough food, mental fortitude, etc. – advises them where to look for on the other side, and then brings out a bottle of the famous liquor, which he pours into small blue-tinted glasses and serves neat.

Whenever anyone asks the recipe, Adam smiles and says, “family secret”.

Every night, after he has put the travelers up in the extra bedroom and set everything up for a quick breakfast in the morning, Adam walks from the bar back to his home, a little two-room shack a hundred feet removed from the bar. This is where he and his son live.

His son is a quiet sort of boy, tall and thin and dark-eyed, who is employed by the highway commission to ride through the desert and make sure all the roadside distress stands are fully operational, that their emergency water spouts are flowing and that their telegraph posts are in working order. He has a small motorcycle that he rides through the desert. He is always up before the sun and home before evening. Their time together is spent before they both go to bed, a couple of hours at most.

They rarely say too much to each other. The desert is a beautiful thing in the setting sun, and the cool is welcome after the stifling heat of most days and before the freezing night. They take lawn chairs out to the edge of the desert, where the scrub grass stops, and take in the setting sun. They drink the famous liquor, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily. And Adam wonders, for the thousandth time, what his son is still doing on this side of the desert, when every day there are obvious examples of travelers moving to the other side, close to the sea, where the famous things happen.

Maybe it’s a sort of legacy, Adam thinks, as they sit and watch the sunset. Lizards begin to scurry on the surface of the sand. It’s a sort of bad inheritance. The wind talks, even if they don’t.

#4

In his fourth other life, Adam Gifford is a piano player. He plays at three clubs in a seaside community where tourists come, to sit on the beaches and listen to sentimental songs. Though he was a hell-raising carouser in his younger days, Adam has calmed down. His left hand is gripped with some sort of mild palsy, which prevents him from playing stride and boogie-woogie like he used to. Mostly he plays ballads, and relies on the soothing rush of the pedal turning the notes into washes of echo.

The clubs he plays in couldn’t be more different from one another. In the first, called Cocoa, old couples play shuffleboard and talk about medical plans. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” is a favorite tune. There can be no jumps or rushes of dissonant notes. His playing is all control and well-toned harmonies. And the customers repay his restraint and deft touch with well-placed tips and compliments in low, mournful voices. When he takes a break he goes outside and takes in some air, so as to avoid the obvious consequence of lives long lived and mostly forgotten.

The second club, Aquamarine, is full of middle-aged single men who like to hob-knob with the local girls. Adam much prefers to play at the two other clubs, but the men at Aquamarine often get drunk and when they do they make up for their general poor tipping with extravagant hundreds hidden in handshakes and scribbled checks that probably represent withheld child support. They love old rock and roll records translated to the piano. Once drunk, they like to slowdance to “Endless Love” and “Ebb Tide”. Sometimes they cry if he plays “Only the Lonely.” At the Aquamarine he plays only one two-hour set and takes no breaks, and he refuses to play on weekends.

The third club is the strangest, a half-failing business called Paradise run by an island woman named Miha, who looks about forty and serves heavy drinks to a rotating crew of patrons who seem down on their luck and often vent their problems to her. She is the only tender and lives above the bar. When there are only a few patrons Miha sometimes comes over to the piano, which is full of dead keys and generally out of tune, and asks him difficult questions.

“How come you don’t know any island songs, Mr. Gifford?” she asks him.

“I’m not from around here,” he says. “No one taught me any.”

“You should learn some, just for Paradise.”

“I’ll do my best,” he says, and always means it. But no one he knows well enough will teach him. He plays quietly and as well as he can at Paradise to make up for it, puts in flourishes and graceful chord turns, fighting against the terrible piano. He knows no one notices. But he likes playing at Paradise best of all.

#5

In the fifth other life of Adam Gifford, he lives on a boat that travels from port to port checking buoys. He has a log book and he charts the drift and the state of degeneration of each round object bobbing in the sea. If the weather is fine he takes his daughter Miranda with him, but if the weather is choppy he leaves her with one of the caretakers he has found in the places he docks.

There is Rachel, an ex-lover who runs a bait shop and keeps the child busy with various sewing projects. “She’ll turn into a well-respected woman if she goes on like this,” she tells him, which he assumes is a joke at her own expense.

Bobby, a marina owner who he used to work the docks with, unloading freight, throws the football around with Miranda and explains the strategy of the game to her. They watch games on his fuzzy black and white television. Miranda is well schooled on the various uses of the tight end.

When the weather turns back in Gilford, sometimes Adam wonders if he shouldn’t leave Miranda with Jeanine, if maybe it’s a bad experience for her. But there’s no one else to leave her with, he doesn’t know many people in Gilford, which is really nothing but a cluster of houses around an old refinery that went south years ago, so he leaves her with Jeanine, in her shabby house by the beach.

At Jeanine’s house Miranda plays interminable hands of rummy and listens to Jeanine. Miranda tells him the stories Jeanine tells, and Adam assumes she must be a liar; she has been to California, dated movie stars, wandered through the wilds of Borneo. But now she’s stranded in Gilford, in retirement from life and love, because her heart was broken by a Spanish artist. “Never marry for love,” she tells Miranda. “Marry for money.”

Adam’s boat is just a skiff, really, small and vulnerable to the waves. He checks the weather report constantly and scans the sky at sunset. One large wave could send him overboard. He runs into large boats sometimes, and they wave. “Are you all right, man?” they call. He flashes them the thumb and finger circle, the okay sign. They go on their way.

He stalls by a buoy and looks at the sun setting on the western horizon. The sky is crimson, edged with vermilion spilling into purple. Miranda is sitting with Billy, watching the television, waiting for him to come home. The ocean is too wide to ride across. So he sits there, staring off into the distance, pondering other lives he might have lived if he had the time to imagine them.