Father refuses to die. He’s always been an unconventional man, but this is getting out of hand. It is unseemly for a man his age. Makes him look like a louche ingrate. What is the world coming to if it cannot rely on people buggering off to the grave [...]]]> 1.

Father refuses to die. He’s always been an unconventional man, but this is getting out of hand. It is unseemly for a man his age. Makes him look like a louche ingrate. What is the world coming to if it cannot rely on people buggering off to the grave one by one, following the proper sequence? The universe requires certainties. Ordinem naturae, that sort of thing. Order of nature, my balls. Show some respect for cosmic etiquette.

He had me late too. Now, he says he was near his six hundred and sixtieth year when I was born. This man, this grey-haired eminence swathed in luxurious tweeds from head to foot, this subscriber to the Lancet and the London Review of Books, this scrupulous donator of numerous benches to various churchyards claims he may not even be able to die, after all. This is what he avers, pan completely dead. “Avers” might be the wrong term. “Postulates” is better. He merely posits, surmises, suggests. He doesn’t know. So who knows?

He doesn’t look six hundred in photographs from around my birth; fifty at most. But who does look six hundred, apart from Keith Richards? And even if he was fifty then, he must be about a hundred now. That’s methuselah material as it is. He doesn’t look a hundred. But who can believe anything anymore? Is he some sort of subtle madman? Dementia can prey even on the young, and I should think he caught it early. His talk is often ruby tripe marinated in well-made sentences. We know the world is filled with high-functioning lunatics. But whatever his age, he’s as sprightly as a canary. It’s embarrassing. Some of his mannerisms I’ve always taken for comic garnish. He’d say things to me like, “Young sir, this is something very nearly intolerable,” when I’d done something wrong. At twelve. Or, “Must this, truly, be witnessed by me?”

Though I don’t believe a word he says, I do dread the finding out. There are things that give me pause. But who knows?

I will be forty-nine next summer. There are ailments and medicines. I haven’t pampered my body. It has taken a mangling in the tavern. Now I’d like to live a little. A man wants to ask his father, how much time is enough? How much is enough? Who was it asked that? Albert Camus? Maybe it was George Michael. At any rate, it was prescient and deep. What I know is I am done being toyed with. I wonder about my inheritance. And father knows all too well how to tickle my detonator. He sent me a postcard with the words, “Let us go to Venice. I haven’t been there since 1819.” I ripped it in about forty pieces. But Italy it is.

2.

We met in Campo Santa Margherita, the square that’s nothing of the sort. A shapeless thing, as if a trapeze knocked up a rhomboid. A grey day, spiritualised by a breeze aspiring toward a sirocco. Not a tourist in sight. The houses somehow seemed to be shrinking, very shabby, very agreeable too. I could imagine an impoverished aristocrat hiding from creditors up there behind the shutters, squatting by a mangy ottoman, its upholstery once green damask now shorn of most of its embroidered flourish, and in the dusty darkling a mute oriole shifts on its perch. I have my fantasies too.

We sat outside the café draped in blankets, sipping espressos, father’s hair tossed and tousled unpredictably. Mind you, he has more of it than I do. Dogs passed each other straining their leashes, keen to sniff and copulate.

“I do love this square,” father says, in his tempered tone. “You know, it has hardly changed at all. One evening, I remember, Byron came this way with an English friend of his, a short, quiet man. Byron was drunk and he limped. His shirtsleeves were wine-stained. Very pale and serious he was, but courteous. An exquisite politeness, really. I’d met him the night before at the house of. Well, I forget her name, a contessa she was. Anyway, he lingered a moment and then apologized, for he had to leave. Had to sort out a baker’s daughter, he said, and then they were off. People loved him here, I could tell, though I was only visiting. Some came to kiss his hand as he passed.”

“Lord Byron?”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Quite a nice young man too. Slandered, of course, back home. Dreadfully.”

“Of course, dad. How was Kublai Khan?”

“I never met him, you silly fool.”

“No? I’m surprised.”

“That was years before I was born. Years.”

“Indeed.”

When he fell ill that night, I thought, Oh, well. Even biblical patriarchs did give up the ghost at last. And let their children live.

3.

I took him to his house some fifteen miles from Florence. He seemed to vomit whole centuries of banquets. Cecilia, his housekeeper, hired a young woman to take care of his comprehensive incontinence. Matter was leaving his body. Would his ghost?

Cecilia speaks to me in Italian. I stutter in protest, but she goes on in her unwinding maunder and I always take it as best I can before she is satisfied and leaves me to ponder what she’d been saying. And he lay heavy as a bronze in the plump sofa, very weak, speaking in a drone. He made me think of hibernating animals, even when he did not sleep. The slow way he’d swallow his spit, each glug like a meditated decision. I think of all the tenses.

“I should like to die before you, son,” he says to me. “But I fear I shan’t.”

“Let’s hope you don’t,” I say.

A few years ago I asked to see his birth certificate. This is what he said to me: “Do you think they made those in the fourteenth century? I do have a very good forged one, if you would like?”

Unbelievable cheek.

He moved to Italy years ago. Or “back to Italy.” I am Francesco again, he said. Not Francis, as I’ve always known him. The surname fits, though we’d never had any Italian relatives. In fact I had no paternal relatives at all. Also, he’s always had inexplicable money. We used to have these ancient artefacts at the house. Then he moved it all to this pink palazzo in the country. There I once stumbled upon a room where a family of ravens had made their home. No one had been in there for years and they patiently waited for me to close the door. He’d never had any childhood friends, this I would have remembered. Few friends of any kind. I’ve never even seen photographs of him young. And only now do I realize how little I have seen of him since I was a boy. How little we have spoken since I moved to America two decades ago. Only now does he begin to reveal details of his fantasy.

“I was born in a village nearby,” he tells me, “but I grew up in Florence.”

“And I suppose you met Dante. Botticelli, surely?”

“No.”

“No?”

“You know, I realized, rather quickly, that I had to keep my feet moving. I tried to find out what had happened to me. What it is I had done differently. How I disrupted the protocol, as it were.”

“And?”

“I still don’t know. People were dying around me. Plagues and wars would come and linger, but I was fine. I was quite fine. I liked rosemary, and the smell of resins, and astrolabes. Perhaps that’s it. Who knows? I kept moving. Learned trades. Learned languages. Language is good. They who say it are wise. Then I lived in France some two hundred years.”

“When?”

“During all the horrid Louises.”

“Loo-eez, he’d said, squeezing his mouth like an accordion with those antagonized vowels.

“And you met Molière, and Voltaire, and?”

“Oh no, not at all. Rarely did I see writers. That wasn’t my domain at all. Of course not. I did meet that man Diderot once shortly before I left. Did I tell you that? Perhaps I should have, knowing you’ve studied literature and all that stuff. Now, you couldn’t talk to that man at all. He spoke like some sort of bird, or imp, all fleeting. Very skittish, skipping from thought to thought. I think he got drunk to excess every day.”

“Then you went to London.”

“Then I went to London.”

Before dozing off, he says, “Memory is a terrible cargo.” He seems to taste his lips, like a disappointed sommelier I once saw in Macon. “There is really only so much story a man, or a life, can bear.”

4.

He recovered, of course. But not before he’d told me a thousand anecdotes. How as a child he’d once stolen eggs and fled to a house and onto the rooftops, making faces all the while an obese woman, the aggrieved party, wearing some grotesque broach in her headscarf, followed him down in the street with her thuggish son. Florence, he’d said, was a small city, the best city, of course, but very small indeed, much like a village. He broke all the eggs in the escape. In Milan, “around the year 1500,” he once glimpsed what he maintains was a man flying some sort of wooden contraption. Of course he did. It was night, he said, and he was in an archway, kissing a girl “of easy virtue much like myself,” and he saw the thing pass in an uncertain arc. He could hear the grind of some sort of system of pedals and clockwork fluttering, buoyed clumsily through space. It was nothing but a glimpse, he maintained, but it has haunted him since. Must’ve read about Leonardo, memory wedging him in, a perfect tessera for my father’s expanding mosaic. Then in London in about 1870, an aristocratic woman he knew well asked him if he’d arrange the death of her husband. He wouldn’t. He adds lovely touches to his fictions. These were the ravings of not only a sick man, but of a cultivated man at the tail end of his dotage.

Then I had an idea. I asked about the names of his parents. He seemed to think about it, standing there under the barren vine canopy. That stoic, inscrutable face of his, squinting. He’d aged precipitously, I realized. I felt like weeping.

“Baldo was my father. Baldo. Very ambitious, you know. He was a notary, then by some nice stroke of fortune he became secretary to an old house. He’d come from Pisa and married your grandmother. Her name was Madolina. She died very young, of course. A beautiful woman. But everybody died very young. Even when they were, when they are, well advanced in age. This is what it feels like to me. And your poor mother too. Poor, poor soul. When my mother fell ill, I knelt at the foot of her bed and asked god for her to never die. I lost my faith the next day and I’ve never seen it since.”

“No?”

“You see, religion invents a universal disease and then claims the singular cure is in the faith itself. How very convenient. Very hermetic, and it is, above all, a safe gambit. If it isn’t too late for such things, may I offer you some paternal advice? Fear certainty like the plague, son. I know something about plagues.”

5.

We go to the small town of his alleged birth, a catatonic place on a hill, terminal. There is a church of San Sebastiano in the main square. At this point I just want him to acknowledge his error. My Italian is weak so I listen as my father speaks to the priest. I’d told him to ask for old records.

“How old?” the priest inquires, pinching his spectacles.

“Thirteen hundreds,” says my father.

“Eh,” the priest says, with a scholarly facial shrug, “that will be difficult. Impossibile! This church was built much later.”

“Oh,” says father, without much regret.

“But what exactly are you looking for?”

“Records of certain ancestors,” I say.

“Yes, yes. Well, I’m very sorry. You’re still welcome to look, of course.” And then, “Ah, there is, of course, an older church, you know? A much older church. San Barnaba, not very far from here.”

“San Barnaba!” father shouts. “Ma, certo! San Barnaba!”

On the way there, behind a high fence, I see the tiny roseate head and trailing torso of a girl, with attendant train of hair, probing into view and disappearing, at brief intervals. I’d always found the sight of children on trampolines impossibly stupid, with all that mindless undulation, and their clumsy little bodies that they have no idea how to control, to say nothing of the stupid skip, and above all: the stupid stare. But now, in the tawny afternoon, appearing and vanishing against the stainless sky, the girl, her total absorption in the act, even if in common time, is hypnotic. Though no more than seven or eight, her numinous gaze has a lapidary, hewn poise. The whole thing is not an emblem of youth, it is agelessness itself, suspended. A forever condensed into now. She is there like nothing is ever there. An uncommon time. As usual with this kind of earnest rumination, once I’ve become conscious of it, I regard myself with bored disdain.

The church is small and hidden well behind a clump of cypresses, its stones begrimed and harnessed in tarp and scaffolding. The evidently senile sacristan takes us down to the crypt where the books are kept.

“When do you think you were born?” I’d asked my father.

“In 1302, or 3, I should think.”

And so we look for a couple of hours, coughing at the opening of each goatskin-bound volume. The sacristan comes from time to time, peering with an impatient smile, each time surprised to find us there. And then a Siberian frost encrusts my skin when I see this entry:

Friday, 29 February 1304: baptism of Francesco, son of Baldo Pisano (a notary), and Madolina.

“So I’m younger than I thought,” my delighted father says.

I stare. And for the first time I feel something alien to me: Don’t ever die, dad. I’d rather go first. Don’t ever die.

But is it real or coincidence? Does it mean, pan absolutely dead, what it seems to mean?

Who knows?

Who knows.

from a three dime dinner days ago, when we couldn’t believe the things we would say. I rose with morning while you were still, possessed

by your eyeshadow [...]]]> After the feast, the water hadn’t touched us in ages, and we laid there
with only our bodies left, the broken bread and soured grapes

from a three dime dinner days ago, when we couldn’t believe
the things we would say. I rose with morning while you were still, possessed

by your eyeshadow and vanitas, barely breathing, as though I were
the wind held back from the earth, the sea, or any tree while you slept, angelic

as disaster. I busied myself with counting the number, and of your body I found
twelve tribes of twelve thousand, the unmared few. And of those

slender feet and gentle calves, there were but two, and of those
heartened hips and folded arms, there were but two, and of those

leaven breasts and clasping hands, there were but two, unmared, and I
hung from your lips while the whole world heard your last murmured words to me:

Noli Me Tangere. Later that day, after awakening, you left me
enraptured and cursing the day I met you, and I wept, and wept, and hung on

that guilt of a man who was damned before he’s even earned his purse:
His hands before him, red with the wine of what she asked him to do, his body

hanging from what he’ll lose, back stretched and broken from heaven to hell.

‘You’re drunk and repulsive.’

‘Don’t change the subject.’

‘I’m going home.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

Next to his big maleness his strong face.

Love has a body M. Eyes and lips legs and sex and stubble moving with easiness ahead of you his bristling crew cut shining in [...]]]> (1)

(2)

He’s going to hate himself tomorrow,
J. loves whiskey whiskey loves J.

He was comfortable, but he couldn’t walk a straight line or keep his balance.
The thought of having to go and search him out

at the one social institution that represented a haven.
All the faces strung down the bar like beads on a necklace.

Drinking your dinner, where had he heard that? From someone old but serviceable
better than some of us, maybe, but not above us.

There, he fell on the ground, whimpering, crying
her hand tight over his mouth to stop the groan.

‘I don’t know why you’re so good to me.’ Planting kisses in her hair.
On his back in the dark, his arms outflung, and waiting

for a moment aimless and lost. She just got quiet and thoughtful.
They waited alone, in gathering dark.

A man walked by and then a couple. They looked just like love.
They were embarrassed.

2. Everything Must Go

3. Man With a Suitcase

4. Monstertruck

5. Nightriff

6. Woodbourne

7. Hobbies of the Damned

8. Friends

9. Brokenlight

10. Grace

and pretends again to be orange. Daybreak: blood in the palm of morning, prison-soap pink spilling onto the horizon in the so-what of dawn.

I hate the sight of the human form casting shadows on the [...]]]> I hate the sound of the human voice
as it bursts from the radio
at sunrise, when yellow holds its breath

and pretends again to be orange.
Daybreak: blood in the palm of morning,
prison-soap pink spilling onto the horizon
in the so-what of dawn.

I hate the sight of the human form
casting shadows on the grass at midday,
when sky blue becomes handicap in the anti-
freeze of the green afternoon. The full sun
streaming caution tape in the what-difference-
does-it-make of day.

I hate the scent of the human body
as it sweats in the subway. The earwax
of the setting sun, sunlight shines
through a prescription bottle
in the whatever of evening.

I hate the touch of the human hand
as it bids farewell. The suffocation
blue of sunset, when the moon rises
like grease cooling in a cast iron skillet
in the never-mind of twilight.

I hate the taste of the human heart
rising bitterly in my throat. Dusk
like a spike of black
ice growing from a stovepipe,
darkness, the dead eye of the stove.

In the biting, wordless, get-on-with-it of night,
love me.

“We have to go to the hospital,” she said, “Dad’s [...]]]> _wpaudio.enc['wpaudio-5199cfd629de5'] = '\u002f\u0061\u0075\u0064\u0069\u006f\u002f\u0038\u005f\u0035\u002f\u004b\u0061\u0075\u0066\u006d\u0061\u006e\u002e\u006d\u0070\u0033';listen to this story

Dad started small, jumping off the roof of the warehouse where he worked. The principal called Max’s name over the PA and there was Mom, order pad stuck in the pocket of her apron, gnawing her lip bloody.

“We have to go to the hospital,” she said, “Dad’s in the hospital.”

“Is he dying?” Max asked.

“No, of course not,” she tried to laugh. It hurt her lip, the smile tugging on the broken skin.

Dad wasn’t dying, he was trying to stand up, heaving the cast that ran from his hip to his toes over the edge of the bed while a nurse in a white polyester skirt told him to lie down, dammit, lie down. He lit up when he saw his wife and son.

“I’ve got news,” he said, “fantastic news!”

“What happened?” asked Mom.

Dad followed her eyes to his cast, “Oh, I just need more practice.”

“Practice?”

“I’m going to be a stuntman.” Dad grinned at Max, “won’t that be cool? When your old dad’s a stuntman?”

Then Dad stepped in front of a bus. He broke two ribs and his wrist and the hard plaster of the cast on his leg was torn and speckled with grit because the bus had dragged him twenty feet.

“He’s lucky,” said the nurse. “If he didn’t have the cast he would have scraped all the skin off his leg.”

Mom said, “Why are you doing this?”

“I still need more practice,” said Dad, “that’s all.”

The shouting woke Max. Mom yelling, “How are we going to pay for this?”

“Do you know how much stuntmen make?” said Dad.

Max opened his bedroom window and stuck his head into the sharp air and the hush and hiss of traffic on the freeway behind his apartment complex, hidden by an ivy-hulled chain link fence. He couldn’t hear the shouting so well out there. He climbed up onto the sill, dangling his toes over the edge. Falls were supposed to hurt, but Dad seemed fine. Dad seemed better, happier. Scarier, with the casts and determination, but happier.

Max closed his eyes and jumped, stretching his body, and belly-flopped into the shrubs just outside the window of the ground-floor apartment. The branches scratched him and pitched him forward, dirt driving into his chin, jaw clacking shut, catching a bit of his tongue. It hurt, and Max started crying. After a few minutes he dragged himself up and back through the window, and he sneaked to the bathroom to wash away the sap and dust and blood as best he could so Mom and Dad wouldn’t see.

From the hallway he could see into the kitchen, where Mom pressed her face into Dad’s chest while he stroked her hair with his good hand. She said, “What would we do if you died? What were you thinking?”

Over the next few weeks Dad dislocated his shoulder jumping onto a moving train, sprained his ankle jumping down a flight of stairs, broke his nose trying to jump through a plate glass window that didn’t break, and got eighteen stitches and a smattering of bald spots trying to break a bottle over his head. When he burned both his hands all he would say about what happened was, “Plausible deniability,” and wink and touch his nose with a bandaged finger.

During career day at Max’s school the roaring of a motorcycle engine interrupted Mindy’s mother while she was telling the class about how they wouldn’t get to be orthodontists like her unless they stayed in school. Then the bang of a motorcycle crashing into a parked car, and the window burst inward, Dad sailing through, skidding over the top of the teacher’s desk and slamming into the blackboard.

Seven students had to go to the hospital with shards of glass in their hands or faces, two more were knocked down and stepped on in the panic that followed, and Mindy’s mother chipped a tooth when she tripped on the school’s front steps.

The police handcuffed Dad to his hospital bed and told Mom they would arrest him officially when he woke up. Even unconscious, even with a plastic tube pulling one corner of his mouth down, Dad was smiling.

Mom chopped all the vegetables in the fridge while an empty pan smoked on the stove. She listed things she didn’t know to Max, things like where Dad got this idea, what Dad was thinking, what they were going to do now, if they could still afford the apartment, how she could show her face at the school again, what was going to happen next, what was going to happen now, what was going to happen to them, what was going to happen. She chopped three onions, six carrots, a dozen celery stalks, a zucchini, a head of cabbage, and two bell peppers, and she cut her fingers, little cuts, little red drops, the pile of vegetable bits growing larger on the counter until it spilled onto the floor. Then she cried. Then she ordered a pizza.

That night Max opened his window and again perched on the ledge. He knew how much jumping hurt, even though it was so short a fall. He knew what Mom would say if she caught him jumping, what she always said when he broke a glass or a plate or when he fell and hurt himself. “What were you thinking?” It was a question he could never answer. He’d say, “I don’t know,” and Mom would scold him, then kiss him, then send him to his room.

Max tried to remember what he was thinking when he jumped, or when he hit the ground. Maybe it was the same thing Dad thought. But the more Max tried to remember, the surer he became there wasn’t anything in his head when he jumped. Maybe he should do it again, really try and pay attention to what he was thinking this time. Then there was a bang from the freeway, and squeals and screeches and shatterings, louder than Dad’s crash in the school parking lot but made of the same parts. Max climbed down from his window, pushed through the shrubs, and ran to the chain link fence at the bottom of the embankment.

Through the thick ivy Max could only see flashes of light, but he could hear horns honking, people shouting, then screaming. Clear and high, a woman screaming, gasping, screaming, on and on. And a second voice joined the first, another woman screaming, the start of some disharmonious wolf-pack expression of the loneliness of pain. The second woman was not on the freeway. Max turned and saw, through the window of his bedroom, Mom standing over his empty bed, clutching his empty sheets, eyes screwed tight shut and jaw unhinged as though the scream were a buffalo she could swallow whole.

Dad started a fight with the cop who read him his rights when he woke up, wound up with all his stitches busted wide and a chipped maxillary bone. The cop didn’t press charges.

“Damnedest thing,” said the cop, “I popped him in the face and he thanked me, said it would’ve been a great take. Don’t think he knew what he was doing.”

Mom and Max didn’t tell the cop that Dad knew exactly what he was doing.

Mom hammered a nail into the window frame in Max’s room so the window wouldn’t open more than an inch. Flowers showed up on the freeway, a pile of them big enough that at first Max could smell their perfume mixing with the exhaust that filtered through that open inch of window, then a smell like rotting vegetables as the pile went bad.

Max asked about the flowers and Mom said that some people had died in the accident. Max said it was too bad none of them had stuntmen and Mom slapped him, then made him promise he’d never do anything stupid like Dad, then held him and cried.

She did that more and more. Max would wake up in the middle of the night because Mom had come in and wrapped him up in her arms and started sobbing into his hair. Now Max was scared of her, too, and he couldn’t get out his window anymore.

During recess Max apologized to Mindy about her mother’s tooth. Mindy said it was okay, her mother could be such a bitch about teeth. Mindy’s mother didn’t have any fillings or crowns or anything. At least, she didn’t used to. Besides, her father was just a stupid accountant, Max’s dad was way cooler. All the kids who hadn’t been hurt agreed that stuntman was a cool job, and Max’s dad crashing through the window had been cool.

When Mindy said, “cool,” she tried to lean against the playground fence but she winced and straightened up.

“What’s wrong?’ Max asked.

Mindy said, “I fell.”

Max said, “Can I see?”

“You just want me to lift up my shirt,” said Mindy. “Pervert.” And she ran away.

But after school, while Max sat on the front steps waiting for Mom to get off work and come pick him up, Mindy marched up and turned and lifted her shirt so he could see the mottled purple and yellow bruises that covered her back.

Max said, “My dad’s got way worse.”

Mindy turned on, tugging her shirt back down. “Well I’m not a stuntman,” she shouted.

Mom stopped telling Max about what Dad was doing. His existence had fallen in with the ranks of things she didn’t know, though Max heard her on the phone one night when he was supposed to be doing homework.

She said, “I can’t afford to.” She said, “I’m not pawning anything.” She said, “Okay,” she said, “okay, I’ll bail you out if you promise you’re done. If you promise you’re done with this stuntman bullshit, I’ll bail you out.” Then she said, “Fine,” and she slammed the phone down.

For dinner she unpacked a paper bag of lukewarm burgers and fries from the diner and stared at Max and when he took his first, tentative bite she started crying. She started apologizing. He needed vegetables, he needed home-cooked meals, she just wasn’t up for it, she was sorry, so sorry, sorry, she’d start cooking again, she would.

She got down on her knees on the floor and draped herself around her son and said things would get better. Things would get better. But the next day and the next she brought home more grease-stained bags, and she watched Max sit himself at the table, and she watched him pick up the sandwich or soggy chicken-finger, and when he took his first bite she’d cry and apologize and tell him things would get better.

And Max was afraid, especially before his first bite of dinner, with Mom watching him. He thought so much. He couldn’t stop thinking. He got thinner.

“She just cries all the time,” he told Mindy, “and hugs me.”

Mindy said, “My mom cries. I wish she’d hug me.”

“How’s your bruise?” asked Max.

Mindy lifted up her shirt and Max saw it was still the same size and shape and color as it had been the week before. “Shouldn’t it be better?” he asked.

“I fell again,” said Mindy.

“Your house must be dangerous,” said Max.

Mindy said, “I should get a stuntman.”

“Yeah,” said Max, and then he had a thought.

At the end of the day Max and Mindy sat together on the steps, waiting for their parents.

“She really hugs you all the time?” asked Mindy, her fingers running a nervous route from her hair, cropped short to look like Max’s, over the neck of Max’s shirt at her throat, to the  buckle of Max’s belt at her waist, and back up, tracing the unfamiliar outlines of her disguise.

“But she also cries while she does it,” said Max, keeping his hands still in his lap so he wouldn’t disturb the clippings of her hair Mindy had stuck to his head, or scratch at the strap of the training bra, or tug at Mindy’s shoes, tight on his toes.

Mindy bit her lip. “This isn’t fair,” she said. “You’ll get hurt.”

“I’ve fallen down before,” said Max, “It’s not so bad. I didn’t think anything when I fell. It was nice.”

“This won’t work anyway, right?” said Mindy, “We look dumb. I’ll get in so much trouble.”

“We’re stuntmen,” said Max, “People only see who stuntmen are supposed to be.”

And a car pulled up to the curb.

“What did I do?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Is there someone else?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Then why?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “It just stopped.”

They sat quietly together, with the remains of their love cradled [...]]]> One day the husband told the wife he didn’t love her anymore.  She cried and cried.

“What did I do?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Is there someone else?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Then why?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “It just stopped.”

They sat quietly together, with the remains of their love cradled between them like a dead bird.

“Do you want me to go?” he said.

“No,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.  “Good.”  He rested his chin on her head and breathed the smell of her shampoo.  It was the same shampoo as his shampoo.  They had been sharing shampoo for years, because they were married.

“What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I want to love you again.”

“So try,” she said.

“I am,” he said.  They were young, and had married younger.  They had no children.

“Can I do anything?” she said.

He kissed the top of her head.  “I don’t think so,” he said.

She sighed a watery sigh: the moon reflected in a pool.

“Let me know,” she said.

“I will,” the husband said.  “I will.”

The wife began to notice when the husband made phone calls.

He made a lot of phone calls.  He took some of them to the other room.

One night at dinner, his phone rang.  He looked embarrassed, and shut it off.

“Who is it?” the wife asked.  The question had been hovering over the table, unasked, for weeks.

“Nobody,” the husband said.  “A friend.”

“A woman friend?” she asked.

“That’s very heteronormative,” he said.

“A friend you’re secretly in love with regardless of gender?” she said.

He paused.  In that pause, there was everything.

That night in bed she cried.  “I feel like you’ve been lying to me,” she said.

He shushed her, like she was a child.  “I haven’t,” he said.  “She’s just a friend.  I mean it.”

“I just miss you,” she whispered to her pillow.

He tried to pull her to him.  She let herself be pulled.  “I know,” he said.  “I’m sorry.”

The wife began to stare with envy at people in the grocery store.  Happy couples.  The family-sized tubs of sour cream.  She glared at anyone with flowers in their cart.

She tried to remember the last time the husband bought her flowers without secret guilt behind them.  She tried to remember the last time he bought anything without secret guilt behind it.  She imagined him everywhere, comparing prices, checking sodium.  Thinking, these beans are beans I will eat with my wife whom I secretly don’t love anymore.  Buying them at the checkout like they were normal beans.

The wife wanted to buy herself flowers, but it felt too trite.  Even if she was unloved, she wanted to think she was unloved in an original way.   She bought dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and fudgesicles.  The coupon dispenser gave her a coupon for children’s cereal.  The wife felt sick.  She gave the fudgesicles to a homeless man outside of the grocery store, and went home.

The house was empty.  Her husband was out.  The wife preheated the oven and imagined that he was with his friend-who-happened-to-be-a-woman, eating guilt-free beans.

She ate breaded stegosauruses and tyrannosaurus rexes and pretended that she was the meteor: the asteroid, the earthquake, the acid rain.  The event that wiped the planet clean of life 65.5 million years ago, left everything gray and barren.

She fell asleep without brushing her teeth and woke in the morning with Disaster scumming the backs of her molars.

The wife began to go to bed early and lie awake in the dark.  She felt like she couldn’t breathe until the husband came in, tripping over shoes, bumping into the night table.  She wondered if she should leave a lamp on for him, wondered if that kind of kindness would make it easier for him to love her again, or to leave her.

She blinked awake one night to feel him climbing into their bed.  He moved quietly.  There was a sweetness clinging to his skin: the smell of beer or coriander.  The clock on the dresser flashed 1:04.

The woman waited for him to settle under the sheets.  She said, “If you aren’t in love with me again by now, you can quit trying.”

The husband was quiet.  Finally he said, “Thanks for telling me how you really feel.”

“I can’t do it anymore,” she said into the dark.  “I’m fraying.”

He switched on the light.  They blinked against the sudden brightness.

“Do you want me to go now?” he said.

She looked at her hands.  They clenched for battle!  But her traitorous voice said, “No.”

“Okay,” he said.  There was less relief in it this time.  “I still care about you,” he said.

“I care about you too,” she said.  “But not in the same way as before.  I can’t, in the same way as before.”

“So, how?” he said.

“You’re still my best friend,” she said.

“You’re still my best friend,” he said.

“Then.  I guess we’re best friends,” she said.  “Who are married.”

“Okay,” he said.  “Can I still kiss you?”

“Yes!” she said.  It was an exclamation point to break the awkwardness of the question.  To smash its terrible sadness in the face.  “God, yes.”

They lay on their separate pillows.

“Maybe later?” he said.

“Of course,” she said.  “Any time.”

But he didn’t.  She didn’t, either.  In effect, they had already had their last kiss, though they didn’t know it.  He had been running late to work the Wednesday before.  He was wearing the aftershave she bought him for his birthday the previous year, as an attempt to love her again.  The wife hadn’t brushed her teeth yet.

The kiss was perfunctory and sloppy.  He kissed a bit above and to the left of her upper lip; she kissed a piece of his well-shaven chin.  They said, “Bye.”  She closed the door before he was off the porch; it was cold outside, and she didn’t want to let the heat out.

The wife began to walk around the house naked.  She liked the cool air on her skin, the way the air conditioning ran its hands over her when she passed by the vents.  She wanted the husband to see.  She never liked her body, but he always had.  Had said nice things about her breasts, which were a little too large, a little uneven.  “It gives them personality,” the husband had said.  She was embarrassed by the modern convention of pubic hair, had never known if she was supposed to shave it or trim it and if doing so would make her a slut and if not doing so would make her a hippie or a lesbian.  He used to run his fingers through it like beach sand, rumble that he loved it, that she should stop worrying, he loved it.

She wanted him to love it now.  She wanted him to stare.  She walked into the den where he was watching TV, in her bare skin, and began to straighten the pillows.

The husband stared.

“What?” the wife said.  Her voice was full of surprise bitterness.  She could not help the bitterness these days.  It grew up inside her like moss, coated her tongue.  “It doesn’t matter anymore, right?”

“Right,” the husband said.  He shifted in his chair, fiddled with the remote.  Then he went on watching the news while she cooked dinner naked, ignored her when she walked bare from the shower, hair steaming in a turban.  She hated the way he made her body nothing.  In bed that night, she wept for her body.  Her body shook with pity for itself.

I love my body, she thought.  It was fierce and embarrassed and strange.  She had never been someone who loved her body before.  She had always had a husband to do it.  Now, she reached down and cupped her breast, experimentally.  It was like shaking hands with a stranger.  The breast was warm and soft and poured into her hand as though it had been waiting.  She hefted it a little, squeezed it a little.  She wasn’t sure if she liked it.  She felt a little perverted.  But there was no one left to love her now but herself, and so she grimly cupped her own left breast, and woke up in the morning with a crick in her wrist, and the bed empty beside her.

The husband began to come home less and less.  The wife painted the dining room purple.  She had always hated purple, but she decided now to love it.  She was willing to make compromises.  Willing to try to be a new and loving person.

The husband came home on his lunch hour.  He’d forgotten his watch.

“The walls look nice,” he said.  “Kind of eggplant-y.”

“Thanks,” she said.  “I thought the place could use some color.”

He looked around the room.

“I thought you didn’t like purple,” he said.

“Are you coming home tonight?” she said.

The husband shifted.  This was uncomfortable.  They had settled into a pattern of her not asking things.

“Probably not,” he said.

“Are we still best friends?”

He set down his briefcase.  He sighed.

“Never mind,” she said.

He picked up his briefcase.  The sun, gliding through the window, imbued it with a rich violet glow.

“I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” he said.

“Speak for yourself,” said the wife.

She went to Home Depot and got more paint.  She got Purple Mountain’s Majesty and Blushing Orchid and Royal Edict and Plum In The Sun.  She got Dusky Vineyard and Ultraviolet.

She covered the furniture with her blouses and jeans and sweet summer dresses.  She painted the kitchen and the bathrooms and the den and the bedroom.  She filled every room in the house with a fierce and vindictive joy.

The husband left one day and did not come back.  The wife sat in her purple rooms and looked at his things, still mingled with her things.  From a distance, their things still looked like married people’s things.  She rearranged the dresser.  She scooted his towel over on the rack.  She couldn’t figure out how to erase him, which seemed unfair, since he had erased her.

The wife pulled on a paint-covered sweater and went to the drug store.

“Hello,” she said to the clerk.  “I need some tiki torches.”

The clerk was seventeen.  He had a slack jaw that he kept slack to show how stupid he thought other people were, or how little he cared.

“We only stock those in the summer,” he said.  “It’s all pumpkins now.”

The wife stood firm in her paint-dripped sweater.  Purple lines of plastic nubbled the knits and the purls.

“You don’t understand,” she said quietly.  “My husband left.  I need tiki torches.”

The clerk shifted.  He resented being told he couldn’t understand.

“Are you having an anti-husband party?” he asked.

“I’m torching the house.”

The clerk looked at the security cameras.

“I’ll check the back,” he said.

The woman looked around the store.  She watched the teenaged girls shoplifting makeup and the middle-aged women shoplifting eye cream.  She caught a glimpse of herself in the security screen and wondered, for a moment, who that stranger was who looked so small.

The clerk returned bearing an armload of tiki torches.  “My parents are divorced, too,” he said.

“Are there any more?” the woman asked.

“That’s it,” he said.

She considered.

“That will do,” she said.

The clerk rang her up.  It was $187.09 in tiki torches.

“Are you doing it tonight?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He hesitated.  “I get off work at seven,” he said.

“Come on by,” she said.  “Maybe there will still be something left.”

Vans began pulling up to the woman’s house at dusk.  The woman stepped outside.  She had spent the afternoon marking with Xs the things they had shared.  The shampoo, the television, condiments, the middle couch cushion.  The clerk and his friends descended, carrying torches.

“Jason said you were going to burn down this house,” said a girl.  Her hands were full of matches.

The woman looked up at the house.  The windows were empty and toothless, open to the evening chill.  Inside, the things irrelevant to her new and barren life sat in piles.

“No,” the woman said.  “I’m going to light it up.”

The young people watched in silence as she planted torches around the open house.  They shifted in the grass, smoking, as she ringed the lawn; filtered noiselessly in and out of rooms in her wake.  She stuck the torches out of windows.  She leaned them against the couch, the bed.  She stuck one in the toilet.  It poked out of the ceramic bowl like a very young tree, with no roots and no crown.

The clerk offered the woman a lighter.  She waved it off.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Don’t you want to do it?” he asked.

“I don’t need to,” she said.

She went outside and stood on the darkened lawn.  She listened to the whoops and cries of the young people.  She watched her house twinkle slowly to life.

The husband came and stood beside her.  Neither of them spoke for a long time.

“Did you forget something?” she said at last.

“No,” he said.  “I was just driving by.”

Their old house sparkled in front of them like ten thousand laughing stars.

“I was circling the block,” he admitted.  “I’ve been feeling nostalgic.”

They stood beside each other in the autumn dark.  Their bodies felt like nothing.  They spoke from places very far away.

“What’s she like?” the woman said.

“Different,” the man said.  “A lot like you used to be.”

Their old house dimpled with firefly light, the flesh of a midsummer night.  Inside, beautiful strangers were laughing and kissing.  They were taking pictures with their faces pressed to the purple walls.

“Good luck,” the woman said.

“You, too,” the man said.

He turned to go at the same time she did.  They walked down the sidewalk together for several blocks, close but not touching, sharing without comfort the space that comes after goodbye and before there is anything new to say.

*****

You’ve walked well ahead of me on the trail that ends at the highway, past the inlet flooded with spring. Next to the creek nailed to a beech tree is an inscription I always catch you [...]]]> Lake Country listen to this poem

My father married
a native. She looks
like clay. Like the land.
She looks
like a history he loves.

*****

You’ve walked well ahead of me on the trail
that ends at the highway, past the inlet
flooded with spring. Next to the creek nailed
to a beech tree is an inscription I always catch
you reading: There is no music like
a little river’s. You don’t know or care
who said this first, but you stare at the lake
like it is the beginning of something.

*****

A fever broke out in late June
after the storm left our yard
treeless. Do you remember?

Our mother still can’t look
at the upturned roots of the elm
tree. She thought its twisted limbs

were magic and something was blown
out of her the night it fell. She looks
like something limp made tight,

a hammock strung among our bodies.

*****

Dry wood splits clean
against a heavy blade. My father
heaves an axe over his shoulder.

I swear his feet leave
the ground for a moment before
he swings the steel head down
to crack the piece of oak.

He flies for me then, and he might be a god.

When I touch the edge
of the axe blade, it is like touching
the tooth of something
that has bitten me before.

*****

Dusk looks like grenadine
in Waushara County.
It’s my mother’s favorite time of day:
See how the lake lies
like hours and hours
of glass?

Loons call from the other side
of the island. She always loved
how they sound almost desperate
for death. She calls back
when she thinks we aren’t listening.
A whispered moan that holds no music.

*****

They say your voice sounds like smoke
or coal, but coal is cold
and you are warm
like wood. Like the space
between fingers. So plump
your wedding band gets stuck.
Your breathing is loud, a train in the night,
but beneath your chin I can still hear
a faint booming. The footfalls
of something migrating.

*****

I want to sleep
but behind the shed a pair
of radios whisper like brothers

and my teeth feel heavy. In the next room,
my mother prays to a God that answers.

I worry for her sometimes, when darkness is a mouth.

In church, she says I like
that the preacher
is a woman and The wine
is always good at this service.

A starling
builds a nest beneath
my window
and I dream my mother’s body
is made of birds:
       her face blackened by crows’ feathers,
       her breasts bound in swallows,
       her legs drowned in swans.

*****

Somewhere, deep in the veins of Lake Country is a fish
with my father’s first wedding ring sitting in its belly.
The gold band and heavy onyx stone drag the fish’s body
to the bottom, his scales chipping off one by one.

The Neighbors

i.

Every Monday night the summertime cowboy
shaves his head on the back porch

with a hand mirror and a carton of milk,

humming throaty songs my father knows.
His voice sounds like a hitch hiker’s, feathers stuck
in sap. I tie a bandana to the end of a broomstick,
fill it with rotting apples heavy with juice and worms,
sling it over my shoulder just to feel the weight
of it and it feels good—

day-and-night good,
earth-and-water good.
Like I have created something.

The air is heavy and hanging low and smells of sweaty
oak and clipped hairs and the cowboy hums and shaves
until his milk is warm and the trees are black
because they soak up the night and then he leaves
me on the other side of the fence my body fading
back into the tree line.

ii.

My mother calls the summertime cowboy
a lost soul, perhaps because his car is always broken
or because he doesn’t use fabric softener.

At dusk, he rinses dishes with the hose beside his back stoop,
his body some sort of soft machinery between
the slats in our shared fence, bending over the china,
using old, cut-up undershirts as washcloths.

The alley cats roll in later, lapping up the dishwater
in turns while the summertime cowboy drinks
beer I’ve never heard of.
       Sometimes I hear him
beckoning the cats, rubbing his fingers together,
calling them by name.

iii.

Out the window, I watch the summertime cowboy undress.

(page break & stanza break)
He takes his shirt off before
he unlaces his boots and places them
next to a dresser that used to be mine

before my parents put it on the curb
one night and, minutes later,
I watched the cowboy hitch it beneath
his arm and walk it back to his place.

iv.

After a snowstorm, I watch the summertime cowboy
shovel his driveway. He is alone and it is a Sunday,
but he wakes with the birds, too cold to sing,

only steam sliding out of their beaks as they sit heavy
and downy atop their children. He wakes to tap
the icicles hanging from his roof which is, my father says,

poorly insulated. By noon, his drive is ground again, shoveled
and salted, sanded for traction. Sitting on his stoop, I see
him take out a thermos and a flask but as he pours

he hides the flask in his jacket before he tilts it to his coffee.
As if he were hiding. As if he were not alone.

Swallowed up whole. 

Your [...]]]> The sinkhole gaped like a hollowed-out eye. Mudslides had coated it glossy. You could see it from the top of the hill if you squinted. Get down so I can see better, your sister said. We did so. She stood with one foot on each of our backs.

Swallowed up whole. 

Your sister knew the girl from Sunday school. Always late. Glasses askew. Hair like—see. Fingers moving away from her head like cursive.

What’s askew? You never knew when to feign knowledge—as when, years later, you marched up to the lunch table where the richest girls sat, their backs to us, laughing. What? you asked. What? 

A little off. 

What? 

We wondered how deep the girl had sunk before they found her. If there was mud in her mouth. If her mouth had been open. If the mud had made a perfect cast of tooth and ridge, like retainer molds, which had made every one of us gag.

And would she be entombed? We had seen the week before, in school, a black swallowtail emerging from its chrysalis. We expected it to soar gracefully away from the cocoon, but it clung to that old skin, dangling.

Look at it, someone said. Hanging on for dear life. 

And then it fell. We thought it had been born knowing otherwise.

Papilio polyxenes. Who would remember its real name?

But we could still climb upon one another to see the sinkhole—we could wash the soil off in the shower—we could report to our parents its size but not its pull, for we believed we had not yet gone under.

Cloudless skies, the haze off the blacktop. Man, what else? Wave and snap. Like five feet of latex tubing, and I’ll say we did it so many times I could see the tubes curl, ripple at the ends, the crack that sent those [...]]]> 1:Life of Jo-Jo (Suburbs 1988)
listen to this story

Cloudless skies, the haze off the blacktop. Man, what else? Wave and snap. Like five feet of latex tubing, and I’ll say we did it so many times I could see the tubes curl, ripple at the ends, the crack that sent those water balloons soaring above the tops of trees, out over the neighborhood for what could have been miles. Also those trees. About the fact of my childhood memory, always the same backdrop, that blurred wall of 20-foot pine. Drop-offs, right from the side of the road, deep into piles of ivy, trees with vines, with green fur that seemed to sweat all summer—and this is the suburbs, not like we live in a jungle. Virgil’s neighborhood was rolling slopes, blonde columns. Houses set back from the street. We were the fork, me and Virgil, we let Steve Branham do the balloon, because even back then, age nine, the guy was a linebacker, fucking monster, he’d ease it back until he was squatting on the ground, balloon between his legs, pulling, all three of us trembling, straining, sweating, and that’s gay as hell, I know, on three, until that whip, snap, me and Virgil, torque on the release, like throwing it, then right there in the street, mid-afternoon, laughing, crazy, falling over each other, and the magic was that it was open-ended. For all we knew that balloon smashed a window somewhere, or burst on the head of some asshole on a bible retreat. I’d imagine a picnic, or a carload of dudes we couldn’t stand, and if we could get three or four in the air right after the other, then it was a relentless Tokyo strafing run, death from the sky, a love letter for all those jerkoffs, with kids and their parents screaming, skidding through traffic, running aground on the shoulder, the whole neighborhood streaking for cover, and imagining it, just the fumes of that excitement was enough to get you through another week of dead, dull classes, long division in Mrs. Tarber’s class, of fifth grade, full effect . . .

The balloon launcher thing. Two, maybe three weeks, bounding around, of hysterical, baboon laughing, teachers glaring at us, then the table at lunch, interrupting each other to further go in on these wild balloon scenarios, also the golf ball, that one time, man, like a bullet, and think about that. This was the year where the big thing was running up behind girls, early bloomers, getting a good squeeze on their tits, out on the walkway between the gym and the arts building. And not that I hadn’t done it a couple of times. But it felt rapey, too savage. Also dodgeball, the new thing in gym class, which was a full-blown war. I was fast enough, but then it was the most I could do to keep from getting creamed. Those sadistic JV football team cats . . . School dances were a joke, one big cattle call, you always left feeling dejected. By then I played so much soccer year-round that my thighs, groin and ass muscles were always sore, which gave me a weird, limping walk that I tried to convert into a pimp sort of pigeon-toe thing, still kind of a bad look.

It was relative, that’s what I’d say. For me, it wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t about much of anything. Maybe the other roles all seemed taken, the surface of everything paved over and sealed. Or smooth, footfalls on carpet, main hall, 5pm, the cafeteria. Late for soccer practice. That was me, with Virgil, Steve Branham, also the new Indian kid, he had the three empty gallon jugs, that doomped and bumped against his legs as we ran. We circled behind the columns while the janitors worked, to finally slip through, to get two of the little drums of table salt, then out, under the archway, shushing each other, running close to the wall, and in my mind this was the way the world worked, we were the middle-men, the strugglers, but also smoke jumpers, covered in soot, the kids in Oliver Twist. Because no matter what, something had to happen. So why wait for it?

2:
listen to this story

Here’s what I’d been waiting for. There were now two Indian kids in our grade, and my main relief was with Bav that seemed to kill off the pressure, the jokes and whatnot, steering me in the direction of Reena Patel. I mean, I was the only black kid, and yeah, she was close, colorwise, I got that part, but she also had a weird, bloated upper body, skinny legs, also that curry-type smell to her, and what, was I supposed to marry that chick? That’s Bav, not Bob, Roja.  To the point where we were saying it too, like that, Bav, not Bob, Bav not Bob, because evidently it’d been a thing wherever he’d transferred from; India, or Warner Robbins and it was how he introduced himself, pitch perfect, without fail . . . All of a sudden Bav’s following us around, and you know, that’s the way. At recess, chopping it up, we’re talking, some new plan and there he is, a few steps back, staring at the ground. At the lunch table. Math class, sitting two seats over. At gym, and Steve Brahnam’s with the fifth graders, different period, so it’s me and Virgil, in line, there’s Bav sidling around beside us, and with things like that Virgil’s not interested, he doesn’t care, so it’s up to me to decide how to play it, tricky logic, because in my own mind I’m like a living legend, but then, like Bav, I’m also rail thin with glasses, big head, wardrobe slightly out of touch. And Bav, thin mustache, his polos pressed, always tucked in, always the tight-ass, acid-washed Levis, little guy, but that big-man, bowlegged walk I think is funny, that I guess I like for obvious reasons. Also to bend it back, for instance, the countless times Virgil must have fired that slingshot by himself in the driveway, holding the tubes, stamping the pouch part down and shooting it off with his own foot. First the one he got from Playland Toys, which was nothing, but messing around, taking that apart, to then build the real one with surgical tubing, plastic handles from the hardware store; this is Virgil, C-student, with things like this though, a ringer, a kind of unstoppable, sweaty Copernicus. Meanwhile by comparison, my own ideas felt lame, childish. Fragile’s a better word. Also different factors, the map of things you never mention, you don’t bring up, standing and smirking, unlikely as it might seem for two guys like me and Virgil, you’re there, you’re trapped after all, it’s either this or be swallowed up, and then, you’re pals, just don’t think too much about it.

Or forget topography! Or maybe not rich, not rich-rich, only that our North-side, upper-middle, semi-rich neighborhoods all seemed connected, across the river I can’t recall even a glimpse of, but rolling, descending and ascending, in station wagons, zooming, in Steve Branham’s dad’s suburban, curling over and through landscaped hills. Or better yet, the abandoned development in the cul-de-sac behind Steve Branham’s house. Like some ruined, unfinished, ancient site. Slab concrete. Thousands of square feet, crumbling, sunk into the hill, sectioned off with staves of rebar and surrounded by a maze of trenches we assumed were for pipes. I thought about that chapter from our history books on the Chinese Qin dynasty, those clay men, rows and rows, sculpted, buried there, posed and marching, like I remembered Mike Shaker, racing his bike off a plywood ramp, leaping to the ground as it went up, out, then down crashing into those pits. Most of the time though, you’d be skirting the edge, top of the dirt wall, fast as you could ride without falling. Or dueling in that maze, sticks for guns, Double Impact, diving sideways, or like idiots, running, throwing dirt clods, and not just me and Steve Branham, Shakes, also Waddell, Lee James, that crew, Matt Lawson, those guys were wack but they were there, they’d show up in cleats and practice jerseys—this was before, and way up on that hill, through the clearing, from the neighborhood over, every day, that darkskinned kid watching us through the fence. And yeah, that must have been Bav.

3:
listen to this story

Or I’ll tell you about Bav’s room. The too-tight, tightly made bed. The colors, all grays and beige. Mechanical pencils, desk pad with the calendar, and everything flat, not oppressed, not quite, but checked and counted. Vacuum-sealed, like the dried nectarines he always had for lunch . . . Bav’s Star Wars collection, still boxed, locked in the outside closet. I couldn’t say why, but I was obsessed, it meant something, and again to those terracotta Chinamen, marching to nowhere. The idea was that even in the afterlife people would still need to be ruled over, subjectified, right? So here was this ridiculous, perfect system, as described in our book, a necropolis, preserved under a dome, generals taller than the soldiers, soldiers taller than farmers and so forth, and when they switched off the lights what I imagined were thousands of eyes, from carved, empty sockets, in the dark, glowing.

I said it was relative, sliding scales, and that Friday, the usual, Steve Branham’s dad dropping us off, back of the mall parking lot, like, tell-em’ tight, go-squadron, down, over the hill, and through steam, walking, the four of us, but I can already tell bringing Bav was a mistake.

Blake McCarey. For instance. Blue eyes, he’s got blonde hair, the cute perm, but fat in the mid-section and face. Then he goes steady with a seventh-grader, Emily Ogburn, for like a week, not even, just those few days, and automatically the guy’s a legend. That’s what I was about.

Sliding, fixed fall, rails of an abacus. My secret life. My own room. My drawing table, giant pencils for legs. All that drawing, dead of night, bored, but also probing. Marching, I guess, also thinking, that word, Necropolis. We could be cooler, bigger, if I could somehow map it all out.          Down the hallway, Bav’s family’s apartment. The strange, Hindu knicknacks and baubles on shelves. Carpeted. The smell of curry, spiced food on the stove. Nobody mentions it but since he’s barefoot, I’m also padding around, shoes in my hand. We’re in his room, which is cleaner, bigger than mine, but with the too-quiet, walled-up feel of a holding cell. Some karate trophies, no dust, polished to shine. He’s got a Metroid ripoff character he draws called, Metrocop. Some pretty weak stuff. If anything, I’m more interested in those pencils, the way he draws everything on graph paper, which looks cool, which I’ve never tried, but he snaps shut the notebook, he goes to the shelf for the Star Wars speeder bike toy and the two figures. He takes down each thing, reverently, almost, but then it’s also as if he’s holding back. And a weird spot for me, I mean we’re all twelve or close enough, we all still have toys but you can feel it, that part’s almost over. Not only that but the Star Wars thing’s been played out for a while, and these all look brand new. He’s putting them on the desk in poses. I come in to pick up the speeder, and he’s nervous, I feel his eyes as I take the thing gliding, dipping, digging in because I can see he’s afraid, some reason, around the room, lamp in the corner, over the bed, and I’m doing the noise, but real serious, sputtering, buzzing.

Don’t get me wrong. If it was a Varnet T-shirt, getting my hair permed, I would’ve done that. I can even admit I’m sweet on Kate Simmons, but who isn’t. Nothing on McCarey, but that guy’s a tool, so I’m not deluded, there’s gotta be a way to play it.

Friday at the mall I want to call time out, pull Bav aside, but it’s a lost cause. He’s all over the place, trying to skip coins in the fountain. Or he’s by the yogurt stand in some type of Karate stance. Kate Simmons is there in the food court, alive, full-bloom, with like half the cheerleading squad. Meanwhile Virgil still wont say two words to Bav, instead he’s talking my ear off, whatever, the Coke machine thing, while Steve Branham’s hysterical, laughing, and it’s a fog, I barely notice because I’m trudging, eyes to the ground, gritting my teeth.

4: (Necropolitan Jump)
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Like my dad, Bav’s parents were both doctors. So I could imagine him pouring over workbooks, long division, some science maybe, but all summer, no TV, at the desk, or Karate, punching air, his dad thinking it was like basketball or soccer, or like the rest of us jumping around in those trenches, which it wasn’t, or riding his bike, and I’m guessing it was the yard, the back, the whole driveway, but never, never, not even a millimeter outside the fence, and that’s why at the mall Bav was an uncaged, wild moron and why to him girls like Kate Simmons still didn’t really exist . . . What my father wasn’t, was about five-four with a comb over. Wooden face. Hard. Those glasses that dark down in the sunlight. Stiff, polyester shirt. Here was the villian, if anything, to my dad’s Bruce Wayne and yet he’s clapping Bav’s dad on the back, easy charm, the usual, bowing, almost, to meet Bav’s mother, in fact compared to mine, Bav’s parents are both skeletal and tiny, my dad’s diplomatic mission, another dinner, and we’ve been to houses of most of the doctors in town. By this time though, me and Bav aren’t even friends. Nothing really, more like a fade out, so we’re just there, sunk into the couch, laughter drizzling all around, then later, his room, staring at nothing, then eventually, over and over, listening to the cassette maxi-single, Party All the Time, one of my favorites too. But I’m distracted. I’ve still got the cry-baby burn in my cheeks, and before I cleaned up to come to Bav’s house, I’d been on my ass, down in that trench. The beginning was cool. We’d found a burst soccer ball, plastic one, with the yellow insulation stuff inside and it was waterlogged, swollen up, we were punting it back and forth, and because I played soccer I was going for it, elbowing through, I remember I snatched it from Heath Lenington’s hands, and I was booming that shit, higher than anybody, we were shoving, chasing it, and out of nowhere, there’s Matt Lawson, he grabs me, throws me across the maze, up against the wall. Matt Lawson, he was only the muscle, but then—right—fucking Pink Persons, thin-lipped, white goblin, taking his time, and smiling, as always, picking his way, sliding down into the trench . . . Holding the star wars toy, going over and around Bav’s room, this is me in my head, replaying the details, and it’s like getting my ass kicked all over again. Bav with his storm trooper figure, moving the legs, it occurs to me, though I’m not gonna ask, how much of it he saw, if anything, from his spot up by the fence, but as I’m trying to gauge it the door swings wide, his dad, smirking, and by the sway in his shoulders, clearly drunk. Bav leaps up at attention. I’ve still got the speeder bike, and from there it’s these weird pauses, a surprise for us, big surprise, and he’s not gonna look my way, only at Bav, smiling, a ring of keys, like some kind of miniaturized pain device, we’re padding down the hallway and as I start to wonder if I should be getting scared, there’s a closet, he opens the padlock and it’s Cloud City, Ewok village, still boxed, brand new, Death Star playset with the carbonite freeze chamber, and vehicles, the B-wing, Millenium Falcon, the AT-AT walker, and stacks and stacks of figures on the shelves, and that’s just what I see over his shoulder. The Jawa crawler, I didn’t know they even made that thing. I can hear my father laughing from the living room. Bav’s dad, drunkenly scanning the shelves, he’s thinking, and it could be the fight from before because I’m dazed, one of those hanging, endless moments, me and Bav, and I’m guessing, his first time seeing it as well, or this much of it, floor to ceiling, card-packs, boxes, and inside, white plastic ships; just the big, Necropolitan idea of all that stuff with light waterfalling, hitting those windows and turrets, splashing around like the inside of a chandelier.

5:
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Hadley Davis. For what it’s worth, I can imagine that chick, hours on the phone, lounging on throw pillows in a wall-to-wall room papered in leopard print. She’s a cheerleader too, and it’s funny to watch her and Kate struggling, talking and laughing, trying to relate. They’re always sitting in front, so Blake McCarey’s up there too, soft-serving jokes, shooting in their direction . . . We’d only had the two things of salt, three gallon jugs so it maybe hadn’t been enough. Also we hadn’t mixed it too well, so there was that. The three coke machines in the cafeteria. To get that whole jug down the coin slot, like pumping gas, you had to stand there, listening for footsteps, sweating it out; me, Virgil, Steve Branham, Bav had been the lookout, so I’m waving, telling him, relax, but I’m also losing it a little, laughing, water splashing my feet, but that was weeks ago, and now Mrs. Luker’s yelling at everyone to sit down, she’s getting up to check, opening the door, the hallway buzzing with teachers, custodians, and Sursley, and Blake and John Boston perched up in their desks, craning their necks. Across the room Virgil’s nodding, grinning, his idea, because we’d almost even forgotten about it, and there’s the bell, lunchtime, we explode through the door, teachers trying to herd us in line, and not just me and Virgil, it’s Hadley and Kate Simmons, it’s Meg Lyle and Jenny, and David and Mark H. and Mark V., and Jim Terry, it’s the whole middle school, buzzing, peering around corners. That’s Mr. Lingley on the intercom, crackling, talking around it, but by now we all already know, we don’t have to see it, about the machines in the cafeteria going nuts, one of them dead, the other two coughing up drinks; that’s cans on the floor, free cokes, spinning, rolling around, those JV dudes falling into a dog pile, and that’s better than a snow day, or a bomb going off in math class, that’s all those terracotta soldiers climbing out of the trenches and stumbling around. That’s Hadley and Blake McCarey asking Virgil what happened. That’s me in a pack of cheerleaders laughing my head off, they’re sure Mr. Lingley’s gonna suspend everyone who took free cokes, and yeah, no doubt, I’m sure too, or whatever, and even though there’s no way for anyone to know, I still feel like I’m strutting around under a spotlight. Over with Mr. Neelin’s class. There’s Bav and his new pack of friends, all wearing their black coats. They seem to hang on his every word, which is funny but also, thinking about it, that’s kind of a twist. He’s got the collar on the coat flipped up. It takes a second but he sees me, and now it’s an easy, slow smile and I’m nodding, yeah man, but then again this is sixth grade, after all, week-to-week, so meanwhile there were already other mysteries . . .

Pinkney Henry Persons. Like the weight of those trees, settling, going to night. He gets a running start, shoves me back into the mud, scrambling, I’m soaked. He picks up the ball, spikes me with it, I’m biting down on my lip. Because the last thing I need is to start crying. That time in the trench and who knows, he could’ve killed me or something, if Steve Branham hadn’t jumped down behind me. Steve Branham, who’s a monster, who nobody fucks with, us against Pink and his douchebag team, they’re laughing, we’re faggots and so forth, but they’re not gonna make a move, so it’s a stand off, my first time seeing him up close, and for weeks after it’s his big, smirking head in my nightmares. Something else about that guy, but I can’t exactly say. It’s October, he’s still wearing shorts. Like some stilt-legged, silky bird, and wait, this guy plays football? Pink Persons. Like the two figures Bav’s dad gave us. Mine was that guy from the cantina scene with the tumor things in his mouth. Weird villains. Alien creeps. You can fight, that’s one way. Or you can try to just move through them, like levels.

Jaundiced Polaroids drift like leaves through thick-carpeted hallways—

everywhere, these people-echoes.

After it all what isn’t memory?

At midnight a desk clerk calls, saying “‘You’ stands for ‘I want myself back.’”

The ice machine mumbles its slurred Latin

and tonight I am the littlest [...]]]> City of Motels listen to this poem

In the neighboring room
is a reel to reel, looping
a recording from some SoHo party
circa 1968.

Jaundiced Polaroids drift like leaves
through thick-carpeted hallways—

everywhere, these
people-echoes.

After it all
what isn’t memory?

At midnight
a desk clerk calls, saying
“‘You’ stands for
‘I want myself back.’”

The ice machine
mumbles its slurred Latin

and tonight
I am the littlest prison.

I remember your hair smelled like milk.

I remember when it snowed
it snowed only on your face.

City of Motels

On a taupe chair
with no discernable edges

you watch clouds
clot into bruises

contemplate a 1992 lost
to rewinding VHS tapes.

All you ever wanted
was a box
big enough to hide in.

The soap is tiny
and shaped
like various waterfowl;

the telephone ringing
in the other room
will be your only remainder.

Cities of the Plain

Most every surface is pasted over
with curling wallpaper
sutured awkwardly by Scotch tape.

Each year, we tear a sheet
from the Yellow Pages
and whoever’s name’s longest
is president.

Our trees are made mostly
from Styrofoam
and wind whittles them
to pellets in days.

Cities of the Plain

Skeletons of birds
hang still in the sky.

The clouds have gone all moldy.

Someone forgot to change
the bulb in the moon

so it makes a clicking noise
that keeps you from sleep.

You speak your name
into a sheet of cellophane

and hold the ball of it
in the palm of the palm of your hand.

If no one answers I will leave this message:

A daughter runs down a pier, over a rail, into a shark’s jaws.  Suppose I am the shark.  Suppose I say, “Is there no life I would not save you from?”

I am asking the wrong question.

I should ask [...]]]> _wpaudio.enc['wpaudio-5199cfd670303'] = '\u002f\u0061\u0075\u0064\u0069\u006f\u002f\u0038\u005f\u0034\u002f\u0041\u006c\u0065\u0078\u0061\u006e\u0064\u0065\u0072\u002e\u006d\u0070\u0033';listen to this story

Step One:

If no one answers I will leave this message:

A daughter runs down a pier, over a rail, into a shark’s jaws.  Suppose I am the shark.  Suppose I say, “Is there no life I would not save you from?”

I am asking the wrong question.

I should ask rather: Have you seen my daughter?

I’m calling from a payphone on Coney Island.  Here are many daughters.  But none are mine.

“Hello,” says a man.

“Once upon a time,” I tell the man, “the number I dialed belonged to my daughter.  The recording said:  Hi.  You’ve reached Dee.  When clearly I had not.  Do you know my daughter, Dee?”  I ask him.

“No,” he says, “I don’t want any,” and hangs up.

On Coney Island they keep daughters on leashes.  Fathers flick their wrists and daughters come reeling back to them.

Step Two: 

If I had a word for flight, I might feel better.  Let’s try:  Father.  David Mike or Brian.

I told him, the daughter is feral.  Don’t try it.  We were kneeling by the bed.

“Come out,” he said and crushed a can against his forehead.

My daughter, crouching under the bed, tucked her beak into her feathered chest.  I watched, for hours, the whites of her eyes and teeth glint beside the beams of our flashlights.

“Are you my daughter?”  I said.

“No,” she whispered, “I don’t know you.”

Step Three:

Daughter, don’t let me feel shame.  It is not an island, but an archipelago, and the way home is by knowing what I called darling never was.

I’m looking for another quarter.  I want to call my daughter.

Step Four: 

Let’s suppose I was a shark on Coney Island.

I’d have eaten him.  I know what punishment is.  I am a mother.  What should I punish?

Step Five: 

I want my knees to be his broken ribs.

My daughter: all teeth and beak and wings beat.

David Mike or Brian slapped her mouth.  “Be still, now,” he said and stroked the feathers from her neck.

Step Six:

So, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered no daughter existed.

No one to swallow.  Nothing lost.

I will call again.

You think I’m behaving like a hysteric.   Well, let me ask you this: Do you think I’m behaving like a hysteric?

I will call again.

Step Seven:

It is not that David Mike or Brian pulled her fangs out with a wrench and sold them to the tourists, but this:  I am eating a candy apple.  The pulp is jagged and tastes of rust.  I discover, as I hurl the core over the boardwalk, I’ve cracked, gummed, and swallowed every tooth in my mouth.

Step Eight:

Daughter, you are only some lewd school girl with your arm slung over the back of your chair, and you won’t tell us where you’ve been, or why they call you what they do.

Do you imagine your behavior is original?

Meanwhile, under the shade of oak trees, on crowded trains, in passing cars, in the door-jambs of corner stores they go on calling.

Step Nine:

I am digging in my purse for a quarter.

It was not the daughter drug out from the bed by a fistful of feathers, but her push snapping my hands off at the wrist.

One minute my palm closed around a quarter, and the next my severed hand, like a fish, flopped from my purse to the boardwalk.

My wrist like stems of cut flowers.

Step Ten:

Once I was sure she was the shade, the breeze, the sun, a hand that held me everywhere.

Now my daughter, I know, is nothing I have ever felt.

Step Eleven:

I find my land and black berries and forget my daughter.

Until one day she is flicked, like a used matchstick, from a passing car.  My field will fill with a fire, which, it will occur to me, I’d never stopped waiting for.

I’ll remember my daughter then, who spent my life growing old without me.

Step Twelve:

Each night I prepare for my daughter’s arrival.

I’ve got a clamp in my mouth, and I crank it wider.  My lips, my gums, my jowls grow wolf-wide like half moons tipped to their sides.  Blood and saliva drip off my chin—it feels like eating my own face, or white light blighting her back to me.

“What are you doing?”  David Mike or Brian says.  The bathroom door creaks beneath his shoulder.  “Let me in.”

Somewhere my daughter is behaving like a lady, drinking tea, eating cookies, telling other ladies she tried it once, being a daughter.  But it did not, as ladies say, take.

David Mike or Brian will break this door down if I do not open it.

I cannot answer now, I tell him.  My lip is a leach feeding on my face.  I try and fix it to my mouth.  It simply unravels.

Out in the hall the wood is cracking.  Inside the bathroom a stench of blood and vomit spattered walls.

I am sure of two things:  what is coiled in the commode is a long lip or small intestine.  And I, crouched over the bowl, am in the path of what is coming.

We had a great run but everything got fucked up and flooded, and you know that. There wasn’t any place to go so we sailed, you and I. I said, I love you. Baby, we’re the last people on earth. I smiled a big, [...]]]> _wpaudio.enc['wpaudio-5199cfd675123'] = '\u002f\u0061\u0075\u0064\u0069\u006f\u002f\u0038\u005f\u0034\u002f\u004a\u0061\u0066\u0066\u0065\u002e\u006d\u0070\u0033';listen to this poem

after Cassandra Gillig

We had a great run but everything got fucked up and flooded, and you know that. There wasn’t any place to go so we sailed, you and I. I said, I love you. Baby, we’re the last people on earth. I smiled a big, unshaking hands smile and I said, I can really see us repopulating the earth. I am in love with you and we can go anywhere. Here we go to it now. I lowered a serious voice and eyebrows from thick hand over hand cables hanging like clothes from dresser drawers, loafing from our hoisted sail made from bags of chips that spent all day firing back light at the sun like they were both pretend outlaws who needed to go to bed soon, and said, we’re going to have to make all the doomsday TV shows we ever loved if we’re going to be entertained right. Our boat was like a couch facing the right direction. Baby, I said, I am so in love with you. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel the same way about you, you said. I struck the water with my palm. The gravity circled nodding around the little time we were spending on earth. Candy wrappers floated by. Books broke the surface like waking hands of the sickly, then spread like unwatered tan plants reaching for the sun out of reach in my old apartment when I lived somewhere. The water threw up colors. Dishwater milk white foam. Wooden kitchen counter cayenne pepper dust orange red. Black plastics from broken road tools from the shadow snuggles of unlit car trunks we emptied together. The colors of the water were just measures of ourselves we dumped into it. But when we aren’t together, don’t you get that feeling, I said, where there is a sinkhole inside your stomach and everything drops into it and you listen for a sound and don’t get one? People know people by hearing if they’re there. Don’t you feel like there’s this big no-zone and you can’t see into it and you can’t fill it? I do, you said, but I feel that way about someone else. Are you crazy? I yelled. Are you fucking stupid? The cables lowered again: it is so pathetic to hear you talk like this. What are you thinking? I was crying, then you were. We made more water to offer to the water. There was a very long pause that was many phases of the moon, and we weren’t the water, we were just on it, not invited, not given. I’m sorry, I said. I’m really sorry about that. It’s just that I really like you, and also that we’re the last people on earth.

  listen to this story

1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.

“Nothing works until it does,” the mechanic says, but my Mazda remains indifferent to such wisdom, stubborn on the side of the highway. It’s 6AM and I could use something sweet.

“Chetty D” rubs a rag over [...]]]>  

 
listen to this story

1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.

“Nothing works until it does,” the mechanic says, but my Mazda remains indifferent to such wisdom, stubborn on the side of the highway. It’s 6AM and I could use something sweet.

“Chetty D” rubs a rag over greased palms and gazes at the sedan, stumped. “Damn, that’s a real pickle.” Across the state, Nithya texts incessantly at me for not arriving or calling. I consider the distance between exits, always getting longer. Miles of nothingness. No matter where I am now, I should be able to get where I’m going, I think, if only because I am in love, but the Mazda overlooks this too.

Chet waddles along the dirt-worn shoulder to his battered tow truck. Does he think I’m Muslim? He probably thinks I’m Muslim. Chet grabs some flaccid rubber wand with one hand and a curved pole in another, then smiles, waving the obscure items at me as if both their disparate utilities and some logic connecting them should be obvious. He’s giddy, and I smile too, thinking: Chetty D’s clinched it, thank god, I will make it to the funeral after all.

Chet dives into the gears, then squirms wormlike and ever more snugly into the folds of metal. A hero. He enters the machine so thoroughly, in fact, that I wonder if his plan hinges merely on imbuing this engine with his whole pear-shaped body, finally sacrificing himself to my car in a merger of professional purity: The Perfect Mechanic. That I’ve approached my sex life in an analogous fashion dawns on me now and I am privately embarrassed. I hear a wrenching. Maturity comes, not gradually with experience, but in sudden bursts of rarified shame. A clinking. Nithya’s mother is dead, and I am drafting a plan to better disguise my perverse egoism as humanity. Scraping.  Examining my sleeves, I try to forget that I have lived not only this particular life but any life at all. It doesn’t work. Silence. Chet’s form slackens, save for a final tension deep in his shoulders. He emerges from the engine with a smirk as if grasping some clever joke’s elusive punchline, then pivots around the hood and into the driver’s seat. “So, are you a Muslim?” he asks. “No, Catholic,” I say. “My parents are from India.” Turning the key, he listens and waits. I too listen and wait.

The highway offers nothing but the twang of distant industry. The ground is damp. I envision the rubbery knob flopping into position along the curved pole, finally reviving the blanked engine via symmetry. I believe in an unknown narrative binding their purpose beneath the hood. Instead, a terrible wheezing begins from the engine. Will it ever stop? I don’t think Chet’s plan has worked.

Stuttering, the engine sounds as if it has learned miraculously to breathe, and as such, also to suffocate. I swear that one of us, either this mechanic or myself or the car, will cry. No tears drop, though, but a face does burst into flames. Undeniably, the hood of my Mazda is on fire. The hood of my Mazda is on fire. Chet scrambles away. My car has maybe exploded?

The phone rings. Nithya. I don’t answer. In a ball of fire, ‘maybe’ is consumed. I cannot drive a flaming car to a funeral, I think. Nor an explosion of any kind. Ill advised. A tire pops. Something shoots across the jersey barrier. To see it all before me, flames roaring into the sky, I cannot help but wonder at the awesome power of anything becoming something else. Is it always so miraculous? Chet manages, thank god, to put it out, then joins me to stare at the smoke.  “Maybe everything works until it doesn’t,” he says. I could use something sweet.

2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.

“What?” Nithya says on the phone. I steal anxious glances through Chet’s rear-view, half expecting the Mazda dragging behind us to implode, but it just bobs gently in rhythm with the road. My car will not be attending the funeral. It’s dead.

The situation provides ample room for optimism, I tell Nithya. With church services scheduled three hours off, there’s time still to rent a car and make the two hour drive. Calm and understanding, she agrees almost offhand. Grief is different for everyone. Her tone is bland to the point of absurdity in the face of her mother’s death, or any death. Nithya speaks as through a cloth around her mouth, a gauzy linen drawn about her life. She tells me about her knees, about the baked ziti, potpourri, some lamb shank, peas, children. Out of respect or empathy or social etiquette, I stuff that gauze in my mouth too. How can I tell you anything, I think, even car rentals. In a sea of barely real exchange, the actual always looks the clown, until – faced with the clown itself – our ostentation becomes ridiculous. Death’s balloon animals. I am in love, mothers die, cars explode and we speak quietly over the telephone. When the circus leaves town, there is no town. The truck jolts, my phone falls to the floor.

First it’s just bumpy, then more than that. The vehicle seizes up, violently retching. I am slammed against the window as Chet rams the hulk off the road into the dirt. The hood smokes. “Damn,” he says. “How about that.”

Yes, how about that. Is my car poisonous? Contagious? No matter, we are here, stranded. Chet laughs, makes a call. I laugh too. Nithya, when I tell her, reacts like I explained the weather, cares only that I’ll eventually arrive. Chet assures me, and I picture Nithya in the house, floating like dander or ghosts.

A larger truck arrives. Two unruly men hook it to Chet’s, pull theirs forward into the expanse. They spin wheels into the mud – so deep in fact that the large truck cannot drive or go or move. And neither can we, or the Mazda, or anything at all. Everything is here, by the highway, in the mud. We are stuck. Ha. Making it to the funeral, at least on time, is starting to seem unlikely. I laugh, sort of. Also, are we cursed?

Ten minutes later, another truck arrives. Impossibly, a bust. Then another. I am uneasy. In less than an hour, we’re four tow trucks deeper and no closer to movement. Just farther into the dirt.  I do not tell Nithya this, or that my car is a plague, always has been.

Chet, exasperated hero, calls his wife. She will drive me to the rental spot, but I feel guilty inviting another party into our improbable scenario – do we have a responsibility to warn them off? Careful, Don’t touch, Our lives are contaminated. The pattern of collapse cannot be contained. I can see a line of doom emanating from my vehicle, crossing the Cartesian plane of this town, saying: You will survive, but your car will not.

While I wait, numerous mechanics pace and loiter. Confederate flags abound. I make bets with myself about which portion of these men assumes I’m Mexican, as opposed to that which assumes I deserve this exploded car, or resents me for having caused so much havoc, now or ever. 90/50/10, maybe? One mechanic rests against his bumper, examining a notebook and gesticulating. He is young, peach-fuzzy. “There exists such a point T,” he says, “and there exists such a line L,” he jerks, “that line L intersects segment D and,” but he trails off. He starts again, waving at the sky. This is not merely late-semester cramming. Theater maybe? I assume he must be explaining ideas to a student via phone, because he keeps pausing mid-thought, as if interrupted, but there is no earpiece, and the thoughts themselves are not wholly correct or worthy of teaching, and not so much interrupted as incomplete: half-baked ramblings clawing at ideas that are not there. “Sorry if I’m driving you crazy,” he says, noting my interest, eyes like nails, “but I have to do this aloud…because nobody knows the shape of space. Not me. Not you.” Uh oh.

“No problem at all,” I say. He continues, diagramming the air. I’m afraid he’ll snare me into some pointless conversation. I can’t help but assume the words are merely decorative here, festooning the empty belief that a narrative ripples beneath the facts. Something about space, about shape, about us. He twitches, blinks, smacks his lips. Why is math so attractive to the vaguely schizophrenic? Why do we want so badly to dredge stories out of symmetries? To see correlations between people and things, often unfounded, and to wrap fiction around disparate bodies? Am I Muslim. The mere feeling of a pattern, the suggestion of one, can be as seductive as patterns themselves, I think, and note my complicity in this. Obviously, the rescue squads en route to our breakdown are not and have never been doomed from the start by a line drawn outward from my Mazda and its plight, and no underlying system of failure has threaded its way from my car to the tow trucks and beyond, nor is said line waiting patiently to embroil the nearest bystander. The pattern and its narrative is me, where it begins and ends, not the fire or the road.

Time bears this out. Soon, I am in Chet’s wife’s car, and I am waiving goodbye, and I am at the rental place, and I am filling out insurance forms, and I am driving off to a funeral, safe and steady, and to Nithya, and her mother, entirely uncursed, though I can’t shake the feeling that I have not escaped that pattern of breakdown and collapse, which does not exist, and that I have not broken off from that line of failure, which isn’t there, but that I am now simply dragging it along behind me, stretching it to capacity, hauling it straight to everyone I love.

3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.

Ha! Freedom! The open road! My arm out the window! The rental car smells fantastic: clean, fresh and safe. Like summer towels. Like fruit. Like home. Yes, this rental car is my house, I think, my bed. I gun down the highway, into the mouth of the future. It’s 9AM. I will be late, yes, but I will arrive at the funeral. I am alive and the road flies out behind me. See you in two hours, Nithya. I am in love and the earth turns around my rental car. It’s 9AM. Everything is in motion and fluid and responsive. I remember this feeling from when I was a kid, a smiling idiot imitating an action hero, swinging my arms and legs, making the weakest of sound effects: Fwoosh, wham, kathoosh. I am that motion, that sound, and so is the road.

Do I still suspect highway curses? Yes, but I’m dismissing that! It’s easy. Look: I press the gas, and I go. I press the brakes, I slow. I’m on my way – the world is as it should be. Crisis averted.

Now, though, I am tasked with the unfortunate responsibility of explaining to Nithya that I will be late. In my mind, Nithya is all hair, tossing, turning, coming to rest. A gentle breeze carries me away. I can’t conceive her body without also conceding her laugh, the best of all. And I must tell her I’ll be late. To her mother’s funeral. That I will not help prepare her, will not carry her safely from warm ambiguity to cold certainty, cannot provide a net of comfort as she falls into this world, but instead will walk in mid-service, alone, a stranger, the door creaking, the heads turning, the world ending.

But she will understand: circumstances beyond our control. What better time to invoke this reasoning than now, in that period surrounding death? Here, the impossible is revealed not only to be probable, but instead the only fact at all. Action, reaction. Death and/or Car Trouble. Imagine it: I turn the wheel, the car adjusts. I can do anything.

For example, I turn on the radio, and a pundit speaks. My body hurdles toward responsibility, mourning. I exit the highway, and the scenery changes. I am free. I stop the car, and the world stops with it. Real freedom must be measured, I think, only against that which we are expected to do. I look out of the car, and poof I see a diner among the pines. And it must be measured by the degree to which we can deviate from that expectation without incurring costs, either financial or spiritual. I enter this diner, and bam I am greeted. My body fills with lust and sadness. I sit down, fwoosh, I eat pie. Only when we commit wrongs are we free. More coffee please. I don’t cry, though I could, and a weight is lowered on a string from my throat to my bowels. I am a coward. It’s 10AM, Nithya, I say, trembling in the booth with my flaky crust, and you will not believe the situation with my car, incredible.

But of course she believes it. How could she not. Who would lie about this. About any of this. How can I tell you anything, I think, even car rentals. I do not go to the funeral, and kathoosh, I do not go to the funeral. Nothing happens. Wham. Nothing happens. Not even a breeze.

4. All right angles are congruent.

By now, services are in full swing, and I’ve already eaten pie. What else is there. Frankly, I feel like an asshole (fuck oh fuck, what have I done, Nithya shit shit, your mother, etc, etc), but I’ve already crossed the line of indecency. Time is irrevocable. In this, I recognize my transgression’s implication that I have fun, that to have anything less than The Most Fun, in tandem with the funeral I’m missing, would be a desecration. We are so rarely afforded time in our lives. To waste it is an insult. I must act. Now more than ever.

Waitress, clear my plate.

Outside, I soak up the town. A strip mall parking lot. The sun glints, wind rustles. Something is half off. Something is buy-one-get-one. Where is my adventure? The dollar store? Shoe Mania?

I enter the arcade. I play games. I waste quarters, dollars. I defeat the sea monster, the robot encampment. Hymnals ring throughout the chamber. I strut about the supermarket. I stalk the pharmacy. Somewhere, Nithya’s mother is paraded along pews, onlookers tethered to her inertia. I feel the weight of this fact on my heart and body, yet I rack up reward points via my CVS Club Card. I stand on the corner of two streets and don’t move. I consider a bench but don’t sit.

I inquire with a store manager about mountain bikes. I enter a scam contest offering two week cruises in the Caribbean, sponsored by a bogus home security outfit. Nithya must be inconsolable, which I both sense and cannot shake, while I see a movie with exorbitant CGI. I am at the center of the Earth, deep under rock. Outside in the parking lot, a family lopes across the asphalt. I balance on one leg. Nithya texts me that her own mother is really gone, is in the ground.

I have not only missed the services and burial, but I’m also not headed home for the reception, for the potpourri or baked ziti. I know too that I won’t return for the whole evening, at least until morning, that I have found this balance between choosing to do something and allowing my choices to happen to me.

I am decided, though I can’t say why. Because I entered a hollow of this earth where I feel safe and alone? No: in a gas station bathroom, I burst into tears. Only briefly. Then I giggle, kind of wildly, kind of forced. I shake my hips and smush my face. Someone knocks on the bathroom door, and I am afraid. I feel as if I’ve been discovered at the scene of the crime, that I am the body and the knife, and that it’s all so mundane. Ha! What am I doing? I’m not drunk or gambling, and I am not with another woman or engaged in any crime, I’m just quietly walking around this town, but I am here, doing this, this thing that cannot be good, which is nothing in particular.  “Just a minute.” I say. What will happen in a minute? Nothing. There can be no positive course of action. Every decision, even the most banal, is a travesty. I flush nothing. I have the feeling that I’ve woken up in this moment without ever having lived before, that my whole life has appeared suddenly before and around me in a bathroom stall, like a burst of light at the edge of a field. Like a sound.

After buying a donut, I hover in a half-wooded area behind the gas station, and Nithya says she has so much hurt that she cannot contain it. Her voice wobbles like a fawn. I place my head against the bark of a wet tree, smell the sap, and I tell her I want nothing more than to be there, to hold her, and this is true, or not at all, but still true, and I stand in a patch of pines and I do not move, though I can, and I tell Nithya I’ll have to spend the night here, though I needn’t, because the rental car, because the insurance claims, because the backlog, because whatever. I pull that gauze from my mouth and weep but there is only more gauze, my whole mouth and throat and body.

She understands.

In a motel, I watch Law and Order and sleep.

Early in the morning I return to Nithya in my rental car.

When we embrace on the lawn it’s 9:30AM, and I wait to feel terrible, to really feel it, but it doesn’t come. I anticipate Nithya’s despair at my actions, but she only holds me a little longer, because yesterday has not actually happened, is nothing, because there are no elements that can evidence its occurrence, because it is a fiction beneath the facts, (but what facts), a narrative that cannot be diffused across symmetries (but what symmetries), an unreachable conclusion on the other side of a graph (but what graph), and Nithya even if you suspect me (of what), you will say nothing, because you can point me out to yourself or to others at the risk of sounding absurd or indelicate, because there exists a set of numbers that cannot be pronounced or counted, that has no sums.

Nithya, I am impossible and you are a hick that grasps at me in a field.  Yes, I am getting closer to knowing what it means when I say I am in love.

5. If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough. This is analogous to what is known as The Parallel Postulate.

I think I’ll get another drink from the lower deck bar – can I get you anything?

No, no, thanks – I’m alright. Had enough.

Good on you, darling! Don’t wanna get seasick I take it – er?

Ha, I’m Nithya. So nice to meet you, again. A pleasure. I love your bathing suit.

Likewise, I’m Erica, but don’t hesitate to ask again, Nithya. And that’s your, uh, your husband there?

Yes, the little booby.

Is he sleeping?

Ha! I’d say so. Honey? Honey? What a little boob.

It must be all this sun, it’s exhausting.

I know! And honestly, I mean, we’re pretty emotionally drained, too. My mother passed just a few weeks ago, and so this vacation is both exactly what we need right now and sort of too much to handle, you know all at the same time, Jesus, and oh wow wow – that was maybe, maybe too much? I’m sorry, er, Erica. You’re on vacation.

No, no, it’s – it’s okay. I’m so sorry to hear that, Nithya. Really. My husband’s father died just last year. Indescribable. So sorry.

Yeah, I’m, ha, I’m, you know I can’t say I’m really used to it, but all this sun is nothing to scoff at right? And the ocean? And this guy, this lug, my husband, the poor thing, little boob, he couldn’t make the funeral, he got into a car accident, if you can believe it, and the darn insurance wouldn’t cover it at first, the jerks, and he was stuck in some town in the sticks, with some real characters, and oh it was just a mess, we all felt so bad for him.

Oh lord, yeah.

But then, you know, we won this cruise, out of the blue, just like that, which is maybe bad timing, or not, and anyway it’s, I mean it’s so surreal to be here and all, with this weight and you know all this space and uh heaviness, but good too, really really good. I don’t know. I mean, sometimes nice things happen. Nice things can be painful. The ocean is really sobering.

Yeah. Do you swim?

Do I swim? Sure, I love it. Try to get – hey look at that.

What?

There, out there, you see?

Oh wow, yeah, yeah, that’s what? Like, another ship?

I think so.

So strange to see it here. There. So sudden. Where’d it come from?

I know, I’d gotten used to all this water and sky and emptiness, just floating out here alone. Or, not alone, ha what, there’s got to be a few thousand people on here, more maybe, but you know, like out in the ocean. That kind of alone, just this cruiseliner in the water in the dark, miles of nothingness all around us.

And now this new thing, out there, so close, yeah.

What’s it doing there? Is it, wait, is it real?

I feel like I’m looking at a whale or something, but it’s just people.

Is that fire?

No, that’s like fun or excitement, I think. Lights.

Where did it come from? Is it getting closer?

What do you think is happening over there?

Drinking? Gambling? Screwing? Same things we’re doing.

Yeah, but maybe it’s a different kind of ship.

Is there another kind of ship?

What do you mean, ‘is there another kind of ship’?

That’s it. Is there another kind of ship. Is there another kind of ship.

Wait, what, like what, like besides a cruiseliner?

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Just, is there another kind of ship. Or anything really. You know? Does that make sense? Is there another kind of ship, or anything. God, wait, hahaha, jesus, what’s wrong with me, Erica? Brain fart. I mean: is it going where we’re going? That ship, will it stay there like that in the water with us the whole time? I mean, where else can it be going now that it’s here? Where else can you go from this spot in the ocean once you’re here? Are you awake honey, look at the ship.

Illustration by Forsyth Harmon