Come a Little Closer So I Can See Your Face

The summer afternoon has made the Northeast Ohio air heavy, so we draw the curtains and drape dark blue sheets over the windows. The bedroom is submerged deep in the ocean. We crank the air conditioning.

“Twenty thousand leagues,” she says to me.

“Slumberland,” I say.

We are playing the connection game. Sometimes it goes on for hours, but because of the heat the play gets slack and ends up in silence. The old and inefficient air conditioner clunks and mumbles through the long pause. She parts my legs softly with her smooth thigh, so we fit together. She could do this motion a thousand times and never repeat herself.

“Blue’s no good,” she tells me. “I’ll fall asleep.”

I stand up on the windowsill and pull down the sheet, exchanging blue for deep red, the color of a closed eyelid.

“Are you ready yet?” she asks.

In the brief moment between the two colors, the street opens up beyond the window. Rain has been here and gone. Who wants to watch water just sitting there, hidden in the atmosphere, uselessly hanging? The only thing moving is a cat, stalking the sidewalk, sniffing for food or sex or shelter.

“Take your place,” she says, spreading her arms out on either side. A stripe of sunlight on her chest shows the thin blue veins around her nipples which I love to kiss.

I put on the red sheet and everything softens to a warm, crimson glow.

 

We go out to shop one at a time. Each week we take turns. Go down our street – a cul-de-sac – and then down a brief bend, and you find the shopping center. The sidewalk stops at the busy intersection, so you have to walk on the dewy grass until you hit the pavement, littered with cigarette butts. No one ever stands and smokes, but you can see evidence of their presence, lingering. Sometimes I make the whole walk and never see a single soul.

Inside the grocery store is often empty except for the clerk. It’s a different teenager every week, so I can never seem to get a handle on their names. I buy the usual assortment of vegetables, keeping an eye on the sales. We don’t want our money to run out.

“Hot, hot, hot,” I say, at the checkout.

The boy behind the counter only nods and hands me my change. He’s short, and his hair hangs greasy over his forehead; his eyebrow is pierced. He counts the bills slowly, his mind somewhere else, and I imagine what kind of dreams keep him from making conversation. All at once I realize he has earplugs in; I can hear the diminished echo of the loud music slipping from inside his eardrums. He can only see my lips moving.

Outside the sky starts to drip rain. Clouds have settled in above us. Cars pass, their wipers stirring to life.

 

She pushes me down on the bed and puts her knees on either side of me.

“I’m going to run my finger down your backbone,” she says. “Better get ready.”

I nod and wait, but she does no such thing. I shake a little, waiting for the contact. Finally, the phone rings.

“Shit,” she says, and rolls off of me.

“Are you going to answer it?” I ask, after the second ring.

“I’d prefer not to,” she says, her head balanced on her hand, looking at me.

So I stand up and walk over to the phone.

It’s an old friend of ours.

“How’s the West Coast?” I ask.

“It’s a funny thing,” he tells me. “They say the honeybees are dying, but yesterday one stung me. You can still get plenty of fruit at the market.”

“Fearmongers,” I say.

“Do you think about moving?” he asks. “Do you intend to stand still for the rest of your life? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“The summer sinks in, it stops you from getting out much,” I say, offhandedly.

“You’re going to stay there until the money runs out,” he says.

I don’t say anything. The line gets interrupted by a sudden crunching noise.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The highway,” he tells me. “They’re tearing up all of downtown. It’ll take years to put it back together, if ever.”

“I sympathize with your loss,” I say.

The crunching noise makes it difficult to hear, and eventually we give up.

“Give her my love,” he says, and the line goes dead.

I am sitting in front of the telephone table, considering how skinny I’ve gotten, when she walks behind me and threads her arms through mine. I look down at her hands in place of my own.

“I’m going to do something I should have done a long time ago,” she says, and reaches down to unplug the phone.

 

 

She used to be a model when she was younger. She was carried on the shoulders of linebackers down the promenade of Federal Boulevard. Her face crowned the glossy pages of supermarket advertisements. They put her on floats and sent her circling around town.

“Do you know what I thought?” she asked. “I would look out at all the people looking at me, and I’d feel like I had this unspeakable secret. I knew that eventually I was going to give them all up. I had a smaller life in my head, and I knew I was going to go there someday and leave them all behind, that I’d never stare into another camera for as long as I lived.”

I thought of her waving in that scripted way women have on floats. Her eyes would be elsewhere, avoiding the flashes in the crowd, drifting away from the clumsy pounding of the high school marching band.

“That seems sad,” I said, though I didn’t really know what there was to feel about it. It was a story that opened up a lot of ground, like sitting in the middle of an endless, unmarked field stretching out in all directions. I would wait for some wind to pick up before I started walking.

“Sometimes it made me feel sad,” she said. She peeled an orange at our kitchen table. It was night in middle summer, and the crickets were at their highest, going on and in with their fevered chanting. “Other times it made me feel powerful.”

“Powerful?” I asked.

“No matter what disaster happened,” she told me, uncurling the skin into a long, winding strip. “I always had a place to go.”

 

I go out one afternoon to pick up some batteries, and there, on the side of the main arterial, stands a brigade of older people. They are carrying signs full of irregular capitals. “Stop the Violence.” “Not in our Town.” “Never Too late.”

One of the older men notices me and hurries over. He puts a hand on my shoulder.

“How are you, brother?” he asks me. He smells of tobacco and chewed-up vitamins.

“Fine,” I say.

“Brother, do you ever get the feeling that you’re being lied to, that someone’s not telling you the whole truth?” He points a thin finger at my chest and sticks me in the ribs. “Do you ever get the sinking feeling that something is very WRONG?”

“I’m not the right person to ask about this,” I say. “I keep to myself, mostly.”

The man looks me up and down and nods, as if he can sense it on me. He has the upright, skinny look of a good stoic, and his white beard is neatly trimmed. The woman next to him, his wife, is the spry kind of older person who does stretches every morning. She smiles at me, she wants me to understand.

“If you’re interested,” he says, “if you start to get this feeling I’m speaking of, I want you to know you’re welcome here. We’re here every week.”

I nod and shake his hand. His grip is very firm and comforting. It takes me a hundred steps or more towards the grocery before it occurs to me that I have never seen them before in all my life. When I get inside the store, the price of vegetables seems unnaturally high.

 

“The pet supply store closed down,” she tells me one afternoon, after she comes back with food. “They’ve cleared the place out since I last saw it.”

“I saw some warning sign last week,” I told her. “It said something about a going-out-of-business sale. I guess I didn’t give it much attention.”

“Stores come and go.”

“We don’t have any pets,” I say. “It’s not too inconvenient.”

She waits until we’ve sat down to dinner to tell me the other part of the story. I pick at the ends of my kale, the kettle starts to whistle. Chopped ginger glistens on the cutting board.

“I think some man followed me a bit on my way back,” she says, slowly and in a quiet voice.

“A man?” I ask. “Are you sure he wasn’t just walking in the same direction?”

“No,” she says. “I don’t really know. I haven’t been followed before.”

“Describe him,” I say, although part of me doesn’t want to hear.

“Black sweatshirt, dark glasses, skinny blue jeans,” she says. “Swayed when he walked. Maybe our age. Very pale.”

“That could be anyone I know,” I say. “Give me more information.”

“I couldn’t quite see,” she protests. “He was giving me some distance.”

“But you still think he was following you?” I say.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

I stack all the dishes in the dishwasher. Our neighbors are watching television. The blue square is shimmering in the twilight. When I look through their window I see a human face, forehead furrowed with worry. It’s a newscaster. I wish I could read lips, read minds, hear through walls.

 

One day, while she’s going to the store, I sneak over to the phone and plug it back in. I go to the kitchen and put on the kettle, and sure enough I hear it ring, right away.

It’s an old friend of mine. The connection is bad.

“I’m so glad I got through to you,” he says. “I’ve been trying to call.”

“Telephone trouble,” I say. “What’s going on?”

“There’s something,” he starts to say, but then his voice wavers in and out.

“Speak up,” I say. “You’re fading.”

Suddenly he comes rumbling back into focus.

“I’m in a lot of trouble, listen, I’m in a lot of trouble here. I don’t quite know where I am, and I was hoping you’d be able to…”

And then, sure as anything, the line goes dead.

I put the receiver back on the cradle and look at it. My heart is going a little fast, the way it used to when I would wake up with a hangover: irregular, sometimes wrong. I walk all over the living room, feel the carpet between my toes. I turn the lights on and off, and look for a long time into the print we bought three months ago, an O’Keefe print of a long, blue vista and a strong cross. The horizon suggests the presence of things behind it. I lie down on the couch and make myself very still.

I hear her coming up the walk. She doesn’t talk, doesn’t whistle, as she makes her way to the door. I get up and pull the line out of the wall and make like I was doing nothing in particular.

 

That night we pull back the blinds, but the sky is dark anyway on account of the lack of moon. Some of the houses have lights, but most of them are so blank they might as well be empty. She throws me down, I throw her down. The bed bounces with our combined weight. We wrestle with each other, stopping and starting in sudden lunges. When it’s over we’re both quiet for a while, stunned.

“I wish there was something I could do,” she tells me, “beyond that. I want to do something to you that goes above and beyond.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, though I have a number of ideas.

“It’s not worth talking about,” she says. “It’s not worth talking about things that’ll never happen.”

“I suppose not,” I say, running my nose up the ridge of her upper neck, where the spine pushes outward between her shoulder blades. Every curve of her body suddenly seems unaccountably precious to me.

“And if it does happen, it’ll happen all of a sudden,” she tells me. “It’ll happen of its own accord.”

“You sound so certain,” I say.

“I don’t feel certain. I feel tired.”

I turn on the radio. It seems like ages since I’ve done it. I remember a time when I was younger when late-night radio was a series of soft, whispering songs that murmured into one another like waves. I would press my ear to the speaker and let the gentle transmission vibrate the insides of my skull.

But now, on the airwaves, someone is playing a trick on someone, a prank call.

“What do you do at home when no one’s looking?” the jock asks, his voice high and nasally. Somebody snickers.

“Why did you turn that on?” she asks me, shocked. She has the covers pulled above her breasts, high on her neck.

“I remembered something,” I tell her, and reach over to turn it off again.

 

 

We try to sleep, but sometime in the night she reaches for me and shakes me awake.

“Someone’s walking on the lawn,” she says.

“I think he’s looking in the first floor windows.”

“He is, he is, he’s walking from window to window. I think I’ve seen him before.”

“Don’t move, don’t go anywhere. Stay here with me. Don’t you dare leave, he’s down there.”

“He’s stopped. He’s just standing there, looking in. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“He’s taking a cigarette from his pocket. Now he’s lighting it. Oh, wait, he’s holding up the lighter at the edge of the window. Why’s he doing that? He should know he’s only going to see his own reflection.”

Every autumn the crickets die away. In the spring they begin chattering around the sunset, and by July they’re practically screaming. Then, as the days get a little shorter, you stop hearing them at night, when you can’t sleep. You stay up and listen to the absence of crickets.

 

The next day is clear. It makes me think maybe the autumn is finally coming, but the leaves are still on the trees as surely as if they were glued there. I put on my shoes, stand outside on our porch. The road is free of cars for a minute, then another. I pray for one to come by, telling myself that I won’t move until one does. Nothing comes along. Finally I get sick of waiting and go on my way.

I don’t see anyone on the way to the store. I take a look at the newspaper box. At first glance it looks empty, but when I reach in I pull out a paper from weeks gone by. July is gone. Did nobody replace it?

The store seems sparser than usual, and when I finish my shopping I wait in line for what seems like minutes, whistling. Nobody comes out from the back to assist me.

“Hello?” I call. “Little help? Customer on Aisle Three!”

I laugh at my own joke, but it seems hollow and forced against the shelves. Finally I give in and carry my groceries out the door, feeling someone’s hidden, watchful eyes.

 

We shower together when I get home. I run the soap over her body, her muscular back.

“What does this come from?” I ask.

“Good posture,” she says.

I am getting skinnier, I can tell, but nothing seems to diminish her: the rise of her thighs, the little belly that never disappears. She puts shampoo in my hair.

“Are you such a delicate boy?” she asks.

“Sometimes I think so,” I say. “Sometimes I’m clumsy, and I don’t know my own strength.”

“I’m not afraid of that,” she says, washing the soap from her body.

Afterwards we camp out in the living room. Owls are calling, short barking notes, every couple minutes in the trees. We grab a sleeping bag from the closet, lay it out on the floor. It’s finally cool enough to turn off the air conditioning. When I go to open the windows, she stops me.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. I leave them closed.

We flip the switch off and burn candles. I feel like I’ve never seen such warm light. We place them in a ring around our sleeping bag, loose and irregular, a series of tiny flames.

“I feel like someone’s died,” she says.

“How do you know?”

“I can feel it.”

I don’t bother to object. I’ve gotten used to relying on her magical premonitions.

We hear the footfalls on the grass. At first I dare to hope that it’s a faraway animal, but as it gets louder and closer my stomach starts to knot, I stiffen up. He mounts the porch.

There are three steady knocks on the door.

I would think she would scream, but neither of us makes any loud noise. The combined sound of our breathing is enough to cut through the silence. Muffled tread, moving from window to window, our ears fastening on the sound. Both of us are shaking inside the sleeping bag. Because of the candles we can’t see past the glass and out into the night. All that’s visible are the round stains and specks on the pane, on the dark, blank square.

“The basement,” she says.

She gets up quickly, dragging me through the kitchen before I even know what’s happening, towards the cellar stairs. I look behind me and I think I see a quick flash of movement out of the north window, a face moving behind the glass, a hood over the hair and one eye blinking.

The stairs rattle on the way down. She pulls the string on the one naked bulb, exposing the glowing filament. At the edges of the floor small insects race for the shadows; we’ve been flooded, there are puddles on the floor.

“We’ll stay here,” she says, whispering in my ear. I don’t say a word.

The recessed windows open onto the backyard. Her throat tightens, trying to swallow, the muscles sticking out from her neck. The sound of someone pacing across the empty gravel driveway, where no car sits, past the unlit windows of our neighbors, under the low-hanging branches of the trees bearing no fruit, finds its way in.

I think maybe we’ve been left alone.

Then I see a pair of shoes outside the western window, a pair of dark shoes right next to the glass. It’s no trick of the light; I can see the thick laces.

“Don’t go,” she tells me, grabbing me from behind. “Don’t look. Don’t go and look.”

The feet reposition, the knees begin to bend. Like a mechanical toy, certain in its movements, someone is stooping to look inside.

Slowly, without really thinking, I pull against her arms. Something makes me want to move forward. I’ve been waiting so long, I think, for you to show. How long have you been waiting? The cool air of the basement seeps into my skin and runs through me like a hollow reed.

She pulls harder, but I pull hardest. I’m almost free of her grip. She flails with one of her hands, leaving pink scratches down the length of my arm. It only hurts a little.

“Get back,” she says, louder.

“What?” I ask.

“Get back!”

I work loose, hearing her let out a great gasp of air as her arms recoil, leaving me free to walk over to the west window, reaching out a hand toward the brick, trying to resist closing my eyes, looking at the slow bend of his body towards me. I think to myself that it ought to be smaller, like a keyhole, or wider, like a great oak door. He’s down on his knees now. I can see his strong, pale fingers gripping the dirt.

“Come on,” I say, under my breath. “Come a little closer so I can see your face.”

I get nothing but silence in response.

“No,” she says, collapsing. “Don’t say anything. Don’t make a sound.”

I turn my ear to the glass. I ought to hear breathing: short, shallow breaths. And then I can hear it, almost too low to notice, like a long prayer: something murmuring on the other side. The voice is resonant, with an echo, like the lungs are a vast, empty chamber. What are those words I can almost hear? I take air in and hold it, waiting. Soon I’ll see what it is that’s come for us.

 

 

 

A Whole Season of Falling Down

They drove three hours toward the city. The highway was thick with trucks, and as they went in and out of tunnels Will held his breath, trapped between the crushing power of the rigs and the smooth, silent walls. Emily was driving, her eyes stuck on the road. Leaving the mountains, the trees thinned out. Ghosts of factories, cell-phone towers crowning the banks of the Schuylkill River. Through the thin stands of oak, scattered glimpses of the city skyline, and then a whole rush of it at once, around the final country bend of the road, before the trees dropped away and they entered the arterial system. Emily reached a hand across and put it on his thigh, as if to reassure him.

When they went to the company office to sign the lease, Will was surprised at the building, a looming brownstone in an upscale section of town. The apartment they were signing for was shifty; when you stuck the key in the front lock the glass door rattled in its frame.

“Which button do you think it is?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe the first floor.”

“Which one is that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, wincing. “Just pick one.”

His knees felt cramped. The company name was mounted next to the front door in an authoritative fashion. It seemed like an endless amount of time passed before someone opened the door, enough time for people to look out their doors and notice them, just standing there.

Once inside, the office was full of chattering keys and the occasional rocking of a file cabinet, fingers casing documents for information. A couple of people were sitting on a long wooden bench, looking at their hands. The lighting was cool. All the bulbs were behind frosted glass.

“Address of the property?” a man asked them.

“4325 Crestwood, Apt 12C,” Emily said, reading it off of a card.

They put their names down. No one said anything for a while; Will was sure that someone would raise an objection, like at a wedding. Someone cleared their throat.

“Congratulations on your new apartment,” the man said. Will realized he was waiting for them to leave.

“Thanks,” Emily said, her voice strained, like she hadn’t spoken in a long time. They shuffled out the door, and when they got into the open air Will didn’t know what to say.

“Let’s celebrate,” he said, putting his arm around her.

“I don’t know,” she said, gritting her teeth in a smile. “Let’s not get too carried away. We have a long drive back home.”

“You’re right,” he said, pulling his arm back and putting it in his pocket.

“Let me call my mom and tell her the good news,” she said.

She leaned against a tree and dialed, while the wind blew her hair around her face. It was a warm day, but she was wearing a long, heavy jean skirt and a sweater. She was never one to bare too much. Even in summer she wore her shorts and short skirts begrudgingly, always tugging them down. The sun was direct; the streets were crowded with people in sunglasses, aggressively thin women in black, smoking cigarettes, walking their dogs.

“Hi, Mom,” he heard Emily say, cupping her hand around her mouth. “Yes, we’re safe.”

 

* * * * * *

By the time they got back to the house it was getting dark. They pulled off the highway, cutting back into the woods and slowly down a series of twilight roads. He knew these roads from years of driving for no real reason, a little drunk, going no place in particular. A mourning dove was calling from the roadside.

They pulled up at her parents’ house. Her mother met them, kissed Emily, wrapped him up in a hug.

“Success,” she said, and they both nodded.

“I’m tired,” Emily said, and walked on inside, leaving the two of them on the pavement to follow.

They had already eaten, but there was some food still warm on the stove, and they gave in. Emily’s father, thin and accommodating, retreated to the corner seat of the table as her mother put plates down in front of them.

“How’d it seem?” she asked.

“We didn’t see the apartment again, just signed the lease,” Emily explained, in a forced, patient voice. “We won’t move in for another week.”

“In a week you can move in?” her father asked, leaning in towards the conversation.

“Yes, in a week,” she told him.

Her mother leaned against the stove and lit a cigarette. Emily turned away from her. Will could see her eyelid twitch.

“But how’d it seem in general?” her mother asked.

“It’s a big city, Mom,” Emily said. “It’s all sorts of different things.”

Her mother nodded and blew out a large cloud of smoke.

“We won’t need the car tonight,” her mother said. “If you want to go out to Orville’s and celebrate.”

Orville’s was the only bar in town, doubling as a family restaurant. It was full in the evenings, but by the drinking hours it was sleepy, with regulars slumped all across the bar, handing trembling dollar bills to the girl behind the bar.

“I’m too exhausted,” Emily said. “I was thinking I’d just lie down.”

“Suit yourself,” her mother said. “We’ll just sit and chat with Will.”

She turned to him and smiled, and he felt a sudden urge to ask for a cigarette. He had quit months ago, but sometimes the craving came back unexpectedly.

“Well,” Emily said. “You all have fun.”

She disappeared into the hallway. After she was gone her parents both stretched their arms and legs.

“Let me grab you a beer,” her father said, and trotted over to the fridge. He put one down in front of Will. He sat down in the chair next to his, and they tapped their bottles together.

“You’re such a help, Will,” her mother said, beginning to put things away. “We’d worry more, you know.”

“We would,” her father said, peeling the label of off his beer. “It’s a real weight off of our minds.”

“It’s a nice apartment,” he told them. “It really is a nice little place. We were lucky to find it.”

“Sure sounds like it,” her father said. “Sure does.”

They sat for a while. Every few minutes Emily’s mother would finger the top of her pack of Marlboros. Years ago she would have offered one to him, but they both knew this wasn’t something he would risk, now. Though the desire to ask for one kept coming up, in waves.

“Thunderstorms expected, tomorrow,” her father said.

“Possible,” he said. “I checked the weather.”

“So you’ll be moving in a week?” her mother said, the sentence trailing up to the question.

He nodded.

“Sure enough,” she said, and began to put everything away. Will watched her do it, more carefully than he might have otherwise. Everything, all the closing of cabinets, had a hushed, final air. It was probably in deference to Emily, trying to sleep.

After a while he excused himself and went down the hall to the guest room. He opened the door with great care. The room was packed with boxes, belongings strewn everywhere. He picked through it all toward the bed.

She was lying on her back, looking up at the ceiling. She had gotten herself halfway prepared for bed, in a long, loose shirt, but her socks were still on, like she had fallen down by accident. He lay down beside her.

“Okay?” he asked.

She nodded and let out a deep breath.

“Every time I worry about anything,” she said, “I think about this bed. I don’t want to spend another second in this bed for the rest of my life.”

“We’ll be gone soon,” he told her, craning his neck to kiss her forehead. She kept her eyes trained on the ceiling.

From outside the door he could hear the mild tremors of her mother and father getting ready for bed, the water in their bathroom running in short spurts. Someone heaved a sigh. There was a clattering of pans.

“Do you know what I used to do, in the morning?” she said, pulling herself up against the headboard. “When my parents got the internet, I’d look at videos, videos of cities all over the world, before school.”

“Cities?”

“London, Chicago, New York. You can find them all if you look hard enough. Just five minutes before I had to go. And all you see is weather cameras, pointed at the sky.”

He was quiet, but he was mumbling in his mind. His fingers wanted to move across to her, but the best he could do was fidget a little. He gained ground across the bed and then lost it again, his fingers trembling.

She stiffened. He could feel it in the springs of the bed.

“I know what they say about me when I leave the room.”

“What do you mean?”

She put her hands over her eyes.

“I’m running away, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ll be back.”

“That’s not it,” he said. The silence lingered. He didn’t know what else to say. There was too much possible treason.

“That I’m lucky to have you,” she said, and turned away, towards the wall.

He waited for her to turn back to him. Minutes went by. Was she asleep? With her face turned away, he was able to notice other things. The room began lighten as his eyes adjusted. There were the brown boxes, and shapeless sweaters cast over them; that was the first layer. Under that, beneath the obvious, were piles of papers, old diaries, even some stuffed animals left over from years past. Once he had been snooping around and found a ninth grade test, the perfect score circled in red pen. Everything pressed in on him, a gentle pressure that he eventually recognized as sleep, coming on.

Then she had her arms around him, she was apologizing, tears in her eyes.

“Will, I’m sorry, I am lucky, I know it. I’m sorry I’m like this, I’m sorry. I’m so unfair to you. You’re good, you’re good.”

He was groggy, half asleep. He put his arms around her, trying to understand what she was saying. She didn’t say anything else. They rocked back and forth like docked ships in the breeze.

City to City, Part 2

On those first couple rides to the Capitol, visions of my old life came up now and again, when I got bored by the rhythm of tires on the highway. Sometimes, when I was able to sleep, they were more like dreams; I flew around the city with the sun shining, I was gifted, nobody was going to make me travel far away to earn a living. But more often than not I was only exactly what I used to be: a grown-up paperboy. Thinking about it bummed me out, but I couldn’t stop. It had been a happy life in a small kind of way.

I would wake up at two o’clock in the morning, make myself some coffee, and climb into my dull red ‘98 Civic as the light was just beginning to bleed into the sky. As I’ve said before, Elliston is a cruddy-looking city most of the time, but when mornings were clear and still I loved cruising through the northwestern city to the newspaper offices, by the Wiskasset Park and the old Botanical Gardens, thick with mourning doves and similar birds. The air was full of warbling, cautious calls. I went to the offices of the Examiner, traded the Civic for a company truck, and got on my way. Sometimes the papers were late printing, and I had to stand around waiting. All the delivery men would stand around and make clipped conversation, like kids locked out of school.

For the first year it took me nine hours to finish my run, although they only paid me for seven and a half. I made wrong turns and ended up doubling back on my own route, seeing the same mailboxes and lawn ornaments, the Christmas lights left up through January and the men with their knit caps and bathrobes waiting for the paper. All the obvious signs of Northwest Elliston. I didn’t get home until noon and barely caught my wife leaving for the second shift.

But I got better at it. I built a mental framework for the poorly planned residential streets of our Northwest, until I became the foremost authority on directions, addresses, and one-way intersections. Even now, when all those places I knew have changed or disappeared, I can still tell you the precise locations of a lot of dead monuments: the Ukranian beer hall that stood on the corner of Ferry and Tulip streets, the musty typewriter shop that managed to stay alive on Grand Street, halfway between two Irish bars with clover-leaf signs. I could slip through those old neighborhoods like a boy genius tracing his way through a Highlights maze, until I felt I had mental and physical possession of the entire Northwest. I measured my progress by the sky lightening, I checked off the streets in quick succession, I caught my wife in bed before she had a chance to get dressed. I could do the whole run in six hours.

My wife is a psychiatric nurse, and we’ve had times where we’ve hobnobbed with doctors and gone to fancy homes for parties. People asked me what I did for a living, and I’d tell them, I work for the Examiner.

“Are you a staff writer?”I had a doctor ask me once.

It was in a pre-fab home in the suburbs, in a planned community full of winding, unshaded streets with trees that need another ten years to grow. A gatekeeper had to let us in.

“No,” I said. “I do the deliveries.”

And the guy nodded to himself, trying to reconcile his own idea of how newspapers get delivered with the man standing in front of him, fully grown, drinking bourbon at a party. He probably thought newspapers appeared magically at his doorstep, like stork-brought babies. Or else he believed in the paperboy.

I watched him sizing me up. He gave me the look people of obvious substance, like doctors, lawyers, and college professors, sometimes gave me in social settings, the look that said they hadn’t figured me for an expendable person, somebody whose hold on life depended on getting up in the early morning, on puttering around parts of the city they’d never visited and didn’t care to know about. It was a peculiar mix of respect and pity, and to keep myself from being ashamed I called up the parts of my life I thought were private and sacred, things I assumed a man of his advanced standing would never have had the privilege of knowing. Who cares about the money he makes? I’d tell myself. He hasn’t seen the city winding up on a spring morning, watching joggers circle the empty streets, and the solitary porch-sitters sending up smoke signals from their cigarettes as they wait for the day to finally show up.

“How are the hours?” he asked me, putting his arm around his wife, who was tall and almost entirely silent, dourly considering the room and all its contents, pursing her lips at everyone.

“I can’t complain,” I said.

His wife led him away, toward a knot of people at the center of the party. I put my bourbon on the glass coffee table and looked towards the kitchen, just in time to catch my wife sneaking a glance in my direction.

Let’s get out, she mouthed. I nodded and pointed to my drink. We considered each other. She looked magnificently bored in her floral dress, sipping a whiskey and ginger. What were two exceptional people such as us doing at a boring party like this one? There was a great deal of secret information we needed to share with each other back home.

It was only later, after the Examiner changed hands and the new owners slashed and burned, after I lost my job and found myself sitting at the dining room table of our newly bought house, watching the blades of our ceiling fan twirl, that I understood there was probably some genuine concern in that doctor’s look. I bet he thought it was a shame for someone to live their life on such a thin string. I could stew and gnash my teeth, I could sit and watch the fan all day, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. My old life was over. For every day I sat on the stoop and watched our lazy neighborhood revolve around me, the less my wife was talking to me and the more she muttered about me under her breath. My powers were suddenly useless. He was right, it was a shame. My string got cut.

City to City, Part 1

The tide of progress was unstoppable. They built a high-speed rail line to the Capitol and everybody was encouraged to ride it; I saw so many lush advertisements with handsome men clutching briefcases and studying laptops, as train cars cruised past landscapes I had never seen in my lifetime: fields of green graced by tranquil cows, blessedly free of human habitation. I can’t tell you what the train was really like; I didn’t have enough money to ride it. When I went to the Capitol looking for work, I rode the bus.

The Koreans ran the bus lines. They bought old tour rigs, ripped out the lighting and cooling systems to save gas, and ran them in irregular cycles between all the metropolitan centers of the eastern seaboard. But the busiest routes were to and from the Capitol; the few times I went further out than my hometown I saw the bus empty of people, until I was the only being dropped off in Comstock, Delone, and several other dissipated points further south. I passed bus stations that sulked under the shadows of empty apartment buildings, main streets shuttered and hostile to life in general.

In those days every outlying city had a plan to attach itself to the Capitol, to position itself as a junior partner willing to share the burden of unending prosperity. That was the super-fast rail line theory of progress, where our cheap rents would lure people from the Capitol into the commuter life, and where those of us with moxy and gumption could ride the train bound for glory and success.

A lot of people staked their futures on this theory. There was a time when I couldn’t take my morning walk without noticing a new for-sale sign going up, or a house being rehabbed out of total decrepitude. Curious, I asked around.

“It’s a Capitol developer,” the men told me. “They’re converting it into a couple of apartments, they’re gonna charge a bunch of rent.”

Every time I asked it was the same story. Condominiums went up on the west side of the river. They tore up the weeds along the waterfront and put in an asphalt path for the joggers everyone was sure were coming. The landscape as I knew it was changing fast.

When I remember Elliston, my city, I remember a certain kind of summer day that seemed to happen at least once a week during the hot months. Elliston is in a swamp, and the summer is thick with insects and a dull humidity that makes you dumb and slow. During those afternoons the only people moving were the kids double-dutching on the sidewalks to the tune of tinny boomboxes. Everyone else just watched.

And over those still city scenes there was a gray cloud hanging low in the sky in all directions, full of light and dark gradations, never giving a break for rain. Everyone smoked cheap cigarettes on their stoops, and the plumes all rose up to the meet the low-hanging atmosphere, so that I sometimes imagined the sky itself was clustered with second-hand smoke, like the study of some decrepit old professor.

There was nothing pretty about Elliston in the summer, except for the occasional flowering tree breaking out of the sidewalk, but the laziness that gripped us had a friendly character. No one was embarrassed to sit in the afternoon and drink beer with a sleepy eye cocked at the street. No one expected you to shape up.

Of course things were terrible all over. People got shot every day to the north and west of where I lived. My wife wouldn’t walk to the nearest subway stop out of fear for having her life taken away from her. A fifteen-year-old kid robbed me on the el platform one spring evening. All our politicians were unapologetic crooks who sprung resurrected out of coffins every election cycle. I wasn’t so blinded by love that I didn’t notice those things.

And maybe, if no one had ever noticed us or made plans for our future, we would have ended up dying a slow death at the hands of all those creeping factors I have previously mentioned. Have you ever stood in the middle of Fordam, that gutted example of industrial dreams crowning the upper midwest? We could have looked like that, with wig shops and corner stores rising forlorn out of the otherwise dead landscape, with other people rooting for our sports teams out of pity. And then I wouldn’t be so starry-eyed concerning our past, and what it meant to me.

After all, I lost my job. The situation was not good. I had a new house, a pregnant wife, and the unemployment rate was on the rise. So one day, on advice from an old friend, I decided to try my luck with a job prospect in the Capitol. I was sick of unloading trucks and painting houses, I didn’t want to carry and gun and guard things, and I had a mortgage to pay. I got on the bus.

Like I said, Koreans managed the line. It ran from a fuzzy sort of stop, halfway between a nail salon and an Indonesian grocery in the south of town, and sometimes it would stop a block or so away, by a shaded public park that no one ever visited. The drivers were almost exclusively old men who wore khaki baseball caps and took frequent cigarette breaks. They stood next to the bus and clamped cigarettes between their lips, manically puffing and studying the highway with a pitiless gaze. They never spoke unless it was to shout out prohibitions. “No smoke!” they would say, when someone tried to light up, and “No noise!” when someone made the mistake of turning their headphones up too loud. It was always hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but a round-trip ticket was only twenty dollars and the buses were always full. People mumbled in all sorts of languages, and there were sometimes babies crying about the bad air.

The Koreans, as you may well know, have taken over much of the mafia turf the Italians used to handle, and some people will tell you that the bus lines are just a front for other illegal activity. I can’t say whether this is true or not, but I will tell you the buses I rode made strange and unexpected stops, at the sides of highways next to closed roadside restaurants without a soul in sight, other than a dark figure, boarding in silence.

Once, on a night bus back to Elliston from the Capitol, I laid my head on my jacket and tried to sleep. I heard a baby start to cry. No bus I ever rode had working lights, so all we had to see by were brief flashes of streetlamp. I couldn’t tell where the baby was sitting. Its crying got louder and I started to get frustrated, banging my forehead lightly against the glass. Why did I subject myself to four hours on the highway, every day? Why was my life such a trap?

And then, out of a sudden gap in the baby’s wailing, I heard a voice come rising up. I guess it was the baby’s mother, trying to quiet the kid. The mother was some kind of Korean soprano, and I didn’t understand a word she said. The notes were unfamiliar, twisting together into a weird, beautiful lullaby. I haven’t heard that kind of song, before or since. The bus ate up the road at an even sixty miles per hour, and the song went on and on until I felt like I was sleeping, although I was wide awake. There wasn’t any other sound, or so it seemed.

It Snowed Like It Never Snows Anymore

The winter Claire and I spent in New York City, it was so cold that when you spit your saliva left a trail of ice behind it, like a comet. Dead frozen pigeons littered Central Park. You don’t believe me, with our memories of snow fading fast, but when I went to New York the Manhattan atmosphere was one big brick of cold. The streets were clean and sharp; someone had burned an image of the city onto a pane of glass, but the original heat was long gone. There wasn’t one errant playbill, homeless man, or ferret in any of the five boroughs. The mayor had banned them all. Early Sunday morning was like the surface of the moon.

Claire and I rented a cramped efficiency and gave up our old habits. We labored daily, spackling and painting and dragging cumbersome bargain furniture across the threshold. The apartment fought back; strange holes appeared in walls, the floors whispered threats. Every kettle we bought refused to whistle.

All this left Claire demoralized, and by the third week I was the one hammering and bustling around the apartment, while she did her best to entertain me. She told stories. She did the old song and dance, complete with card tricks. But when she was tired, which was often, she lay on the couch and tried to sleep.

I got a job and kept out of trouble. I started smoking; smoke breaks cut my day into manageable chunks. There were men like me in offices across the county, men with store-smelling shirts in cornflower blue, newly cut hair and dodgy eyes. I kept my hands steady and my lies white. I drank four hundred and twenty-five cups of coffee an hour.

Claire tried smoking, too, but it gave her a terrible cough and stained her teeth. She would stand in front of the mirror and lean towards the glass, pulling her lips away from her gums. She was a waitress, a secretary, and then a nursery assistant, where the children loved her nervous smile. But even that didn’t last for long.

 

I’m afraid I’ll forget who she was, or worse, consign her to a supporting role in the drama of my life. But what can you do when the parts you give to someone else get ripped away? You can’t walk around town in December asking bystanders to pay attention to your lack of arms. You cobble together an artificial limb from magazine pin-ups and cups of lukewarm coffee. You pay the heating bill, every month.

For a while we were good complements to each other. I was an animated drinker. I liked to make things and fix them, like tables and chairs, when drunk. Claire liked to sit in one place and talk, and let the action whirl around her. We spent the early days of our relationship in various kitchens, with me hammering and whistling and brewing cups of coffee while she told stories. She had wonderful stories. She had the one about a killer tanker truck and a ukulele, set in Buffalo. She told a few New Orleans stories that all revolved around graveyards.

But the best one by far was the one she told about the raining frogs, the one she always told when someone brought up railroad crossings. Someone would mention the clanging of the divider coming down in front of the rails and her ears and eyebrows would perk up.

“I was living in South Jersey,” she would always start, “with this guy named Jerry. He was a weird guy. I met him when I was out of school for a few years, after leaving Philly. He worked in a glass factory, he worked the swing shift. He was kind of a frustrated kid, didn’t really know what he was doing with himself. And neither did I.

“His number one favorite thing to do was to cruise around town, this tiny little town, in search of Indian burial grounds. It was all old Lenape territory, there were supposed to be six or seven of them, maybe. So on Friday nights, if he didn’t have to work, he would pick me up at this Mexican place I was working at, and he would carry me to these so-called graveyards. And you know, we’d do what we’d come to do, on top of what people thought was this sinister place.

“And I would have been okay with that. I mean, I like those spooky kinds of places, too. But then he would want to just fall asleep, “under the stars”, he’d say. And he would, you know? Right off. But not me. I kept imagining the ground, and what might have been under it. It gave me the creeps.

“So one night I just got up, left him there, and went walking along the road where the gravesite had been. The roads in that part of the state are always long and go in and out of the woods, and I followed it for a little while, just thinking. It was fall, getting cold, I remember. I thought: winter’s coming. I walked until I got to a railroad crossing.

“And there, right next to the railroad crossing, was this white sedan. All its lights were off, and it was parked, right there next to the tracks. I walked up to it, slowly, because it sort of freaked me out, y’know?

“But there was no one in the car. It was completely empty. There were a couple of cigarette butts in the ashtray. Where’d they go? I wondered. There wasn’t a house around for a mile in either direction.

And then, all of a sudden, the lights of a train lit up on me. I backed away a little, and the cars went by me, roaring really loud. And that’s when I felt this weird thing hit me in the stomach. The train passed by, and I looked down at it. It was a frog, almost dead. One of its legs had been half ripped off.

And that’s the way it was, all down the road. A crowd of frogs, on the road at night, all wriggling.”

And she would sit and smile and sip her drink. At times like this she would change from an awkwardly beautiful girl with an underbite and a drinking problem into a mysterious woman of the world. She would sit on her stool and be totally invincible.

“Where did the frogs come from?” someone would invariably ask.

“Maybe the train?” someone might suggest.

“Maybe frogs on the train,” she would say, shrugging. “But what kind of train carries frogs? I don’t know. Maybe they fell from the sky.”

She would let the silence settle on that one.

“Whatever it was, it seemed like a sign, and I got out of that town. So those frogs got me out of Jersey when a shitty job and a violent boyfriend couldn’t, and for that,” she would say, raising the glass, “I’m thankful.”

It was always like that. She would let those strange details, the cigarette butts and the motion of the frogs on the pavement, linger in the air, while the last desperate sentences never seemed to register in anyone’s mind.

I wanted those stories all the time that winter, but she was always too tired to tell them. I hammered away in silence.

She tried her best to stay in that apartment, but soon she started disappearing. I don’t blame her for losing track of our mission. That January was the most miserable winter imaginable. People went around in plastic parkas covered with snow and ice, like malformed polar animals. Dark advertisements leered down at us on all sides, and she went back to the bars.

The journey was always different, but it ended up the same. Our former friends would leave her stranded, or pack her into a cab she couldn’t escape from. It would pull up at our doorstep and the driver would call to me, three floors up.

“Hey, buddy, get this girl out of my cab, she don’t have any money.”

So I carried her up and laid her out on the bed, while she whispered to herself, singing snatches of songs. I undressed her carefully, and she whispered the names of the clothes as they came off, like a goodbye. “Pants,” she would say, and “sweater”, her voice wistful and sad. She was tiny with her clothes off.

And then I would start to cry, because I could imagine her doing the same to the parts of her body I loved, the same solemn and resigned sadness as she unscrewed her graceful forearm and let it fall to the floor, as she bid farewell to the curve of her slight belly that led down to her stiff black hair. “Eyes,” she might whisper, “thighs”, and “lips”. Soft words to absolve them of all blame and let them go.

 

One night, years later, I went out walking and ended up at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, sitting unfinished on Amsterdam Avenue. I was alone and freezing. I went inside.

For a moment everything was vague and shining, and behind the shimmer the sound of young voices wavering around each other.

There were boys singing. They wore white, and sang in voices so clear they were almost piercing. They must have been trained for the comforting kind of songs that are sung for congregations of grandmothers.

But the choirmaster had other designs. He was a skinny man with narrow eyes and great bushy eyebrows. His hands were angry and led into eerie territory. The boys were uncertain, but they followed.

Outside the temperature dropped, freezing bums to the sidewalk. Snow came down all over Manhattan.

When I see snow fall, as it almost never does these days, I remember those weeks in Manhattan before I was gainfully employed, when Claire and I were staying in a friend’s vacant apartment in Greenwich Village. I would wander the streets and look up at people’s windows. All my life I had been staring up at other people’s apartments, but during those frigid days, when I went along walking through my newly discovered streets, I felt like a purposeful man. I wasn’t some sad transient, looming at the edge of other people’s lives. I had a place to go.

And then, when I came home, Claire and I would watch the snow that never seemed to stop falling, flurrying across the light of the streetlamps. Tell me a story, I’d say, and then she would. “We were in a car on the highway,” she’d intone, arms wrapped around me under the blankets, lain out on the rickety, fold-out bed. “We were heading west for Bakersfield.” I smelled her hair, the scent of days spent inside, of never having to leave for anywhere else.

In the church, where I had ended up, the boys went on singing with nervous faces. I imagined the lighted windows of the city, where an endless procession of mouths were opening and closing, fingers grasping and tightening, as the heated air enveloped their bodies and kept the cold from knitting their bones together with ice. The boys sang along with all of it.

The choirmaster dropped his hands and everyone fell silent. The boys looked at each other and smiled sheepishly. Some of them gaped up at the towering ceilings. Something had happened to them and they knew it was over. But the choirmaster looked down at the ground.

And that night I left the church and went out drinking, where I met a woman who had hopped trains for a while. She had a lip ring, and was years younger. I was drunk, the bar was warm. Everything was glazed over with happiness.

“Let me tell you a train story,” I said. “It happened to a friend of mine.”

And so I went on, playing around with bones.

I often think about those boys in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I think about singing other people’s songs. And I think of the choirmaster, and his sad eyes on the floor.

Something beyond you moves through your mouth, and then it leaves. These things make me terrified. To think that love is someone else‘s story you keep on trying to retell, over and over again.

July, at the Riverfront

The city bulldozed the riverbank and put up a walkway running all the way down its length, from the Financial District to Wallack Park, where the ducks all marched in circles and lovers went to tell each other their open secrets. In the first week of summer the whole city came to try it out. There were joggers in spandex leggings, college students trading movie quotes, and businessmen laying in the sun, talking to each other about mortgages and basketball. The weather blessed the Riverside Planning Commission and gave sunshine to everyone.

Andrew and Carol went down to the riverside. It was her lunch break; he worked the evening shift and slept until twelve; his eyes were still narrow in the sunlight, and he hadn’t showered. She was dressed for business, but her hair was still cut at odd angles and she looked younger than the other office women, out for the weather with their salads and sandwiches.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It looks pretty enough.”

They walked together down the path, until the asphalt drifted into the shadow of the Lincoln Bridge. Carol looked over at Andrew, the long path of his neck, the place where he had missed a spot shaving. There were some small wrinkles patterning the place where his jawline began. She lifted a hand and ran it through the hair above his ear.

“I remember what this place used to be like,” she said. “There wasn’t anything but weeds, when we used to come down.”

“The railroad still goes over there,” he said, motioning to the tracks that ran to the east of the path.

“Is that why we came down?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said, smiling.

People gave them strange looks as they walked past. A few elderly women whispered to each other. They hopped off of the bank and onto the bridge pilings. It was cool and comfortable under the bridge.

“Look,” she said, pointing down at the water. “Look at the bubbles.”

He looked. There were strange bubbles, varying in size, trembling up to the surface of the water.

“What do you think’s down there?” he asked her. They could hear the vague rumble of cars overhead.

“Mafia,” she said. “They throw people in the river. They dress like normal people, like joggers, and then they sneak off to the side and throw people in.”

“Amazing,” he said, smiling. “What about those elderly women?”

“Mafia,” she said. “Mobsters in deep cover.”

He grinned. They sat down together on the pilings, and she took a stick from her pocket and poked at the flowing water.

“I remember when we used to come down here,” he said. “We used to do it on Thursday nights, after I had my late classes. We would jump over the fence and cross across the railroad tracks. I used to be scared.”

“You were scared?” she asked.

“Yeah. I never told you, but I was always afraid someone would jump up out of the grass and kill us.”

“Bums did hang out down here,” she said. “So why were we there? I can’t remember.”

“You wanted to watch the trains,” he said. “This was supposed to be the spot where you could hop them, the Citrus Line, going to Florida. Don’t you remember? That was all you ever talked about.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said, quietly. She put the stick back in her pocket.

“I remember what you used to say,” he told her. “You used to say, really seriously: one of these days I’m going to get on that train. It was funny, you were really matter-of-fact about it.”

“That is funny,” she said, not smiling.
“And I would always say that I would go with you,” he said, “if you decided to go.”

They sat together and watched the river for a minute. Someone went by on rollerblades, carrying an enormous boombox, blasting some old disco hit. Everybody has to dance, it went, in perfect endless rhythm.

“You never asked me to come,” he said. “It was always sort of a sad thing for me.”

“You wouldn’t have come along,” she said.

“I probably wouldn’t have,” he said. “I would have been terrified, of breaking my arm or getting arrested.”

“I figured that,” she said.

He clasped his hands together and nodded his head.

“Anyway,” she said, “I probably wouldn’t have gone either.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It was so long ago. I’m amazed you even remember.”

“Some things stick with you, I guess,” he said, standing up with her, getting ready to hop across to the bank. He took a quick look out to the bay. Somewhere hazy and far-off, a big cargo boat was listing in the water, waiting to drift out to sea.

They went back to the stairs, and she took both of his hands in hers and gave him a quick kiss.

“Back to work,” she said, rising up to the street. He watch her go, quick and confident in her stylish, yet sensible shoes.

He had nowhere to go for an hour or more, so he sat on a bench by the river and looked out over the factories that lined the far bank. The lunchtime crowd began to thin out, so that after twenty minutes there was no one else close by him. He thought back. It was almost possible to remember everything covered in weeds, the dirt and sand of the unused bank, and the moon overhead. He had been too terrified to notice the world as well as he should have, but there were a few thing he could recall: the sound of her Doc Martens crushing the sand, the toughness of her worker’s jeans coming off, how much his hands shook. And, of course, what she said about the trains, when they heard them start up on the other side of the tall grass, rumbling toward Florida. She’d be on them, someday.

Two men sat down close to him.

“No, no, Liberty is fine,” one of them said, “if you want your money managed by geriatrics.”

“Well,” the other one said, eating a tuna fish sandwich. “That’s your opinion.”

He lay down on the bench in the early afternoon light.  All over the city people were rendered unable to think by the blooming sun. It was too hot to remember or to worry. Everyone sat on benches, chattered on keyboards, waited and dreamed of the evening, opening up with possibility.

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.