“They won’t be able to do anything away,” he said. She went to fill out the paperwork at the desk and he sat down beside me. I looked down at his hands to see that one of them seemed tangled, broken all over.

“Does that not hurt?” I asked him.

“You ought to see the other rhino,” he said and smiled. We could hear his gal arguing with the front desk nurse.

“She okay?” I asked. He shrugged.

“The only reason we’re here is because I thought we were coming for her.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

He gestured his eyes up to her and smiled again. He had to be one of the best looking men that I’d ever seen. That smile was self-destructive, sarcastic, and humble all at the same time.

“Well at least she’s pretty,” I said.

“Pretty? Who cares about pretty? Pretty girls ain’t got no soul. They’re about as interesting as a pretty painting.”

“Well at least pretty gets you to the hospital when you need it.”

“What you in for?” he asked.

“Nothing really. Therapy. I sometimes come here with a pint of tequila and just watch. It makes me feel better about my life,” I said.

“Hey can I have a swig of that?”

I screwed off the top for him. He took a third of the bottle.

“Does it hurt?” I asked him again.

“I guess just about as much as it hurts you.”

His pretty gal came back and dragged him down the hall with a nurse in lead. The nurse was also pretty, and she seemed to know Luke like the way one knows who a thief in a crowd is.

I saw the girlfriend leaving a few minutes later. She shot me a look of pity.

“Don’t worry, he’ll like you a whole bunch. If there’s one goddamn thing he likes, it’s ugly, especially ugly women.”

I thought she was just trying to be mean, but it turns out she was being honest. After a gunshot victim, a girl with a broken ankle, and a couple that seemed to be dealing with a sexually perverse medical problem, Luke came out with his hand bandaged up.

“You want to get something to eat?” he asked. “I’m starving.”

We walked to the only open diner in town. “If you had three days to live, what would you do with it?” I asked and then answered, “I would just walk, just walk for three days without eating, just walk until I fell dead.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I would. What about you?”

“I always have three days to live.”

Luke was an only child. His father ran off when he was younger because he was tired of being the pawn in his wife’s family business. His mother committed suicide not too long after that. I guess his father was a heartbreaker like Luke. So Luke inherited a bunch of money.

“Sometimes I win just because I’m trying to lose. That’s how gambling works I guess. I see all the other saps with their life savings dwindling in front of their fingers. Sad as hell, but so goes life.”

He seemed to rebel against all the advantages that were given to him. He had a fortune that he tried to gamble away. He had a brilliant mind that he tried to dull with drugs and booze. He had a beautiful face that he tried to get bashed in bar fights.

“This is going to put me under for awhile,” Luke said about his broken hand. I was eating fries and a banana split. He was drinking a beer and a strawberry milkshake. It was a ninety-degree night out. And he had charm and looks that could strip the clothes off a supermodel, yet he sat in a diner with the likes of a broken down woman that drank tequila in hospital emergency rooms.

Later on, after his hand had healed, after we had become friends, and after he had fucked me several dozen times, I tried to understand why he would be with someone like me. I very possibly could have been the ugliest woman under 30 in Nevada. I had acne scars, misshaped small breasts, an un-proportionate lower body, flat curves, and plain brown hair and eyes, yet he looked at me like I was some kind of beauty queen.

He told me to drop the subject. He told me, “I like the way you forget to use coffee filters. Isn’t that enough?” Luke was sober and peaceful, so I dropped it. There wouldn’t be many moments like that, moments when he was sober and peaceful, and moments when I was secure about my worth.

One of these rare moments came on a brilliantly sunny morning at the end of summer.

“If you could do anything today, what would it be?” he asked me.

“Take a drive in a convertible. Go to a restaurant on the ocean or lake, and get a room with a balcony overlooking the water.” This wasn’t a wish that I just made up. It had always been a thought in the back of my perfect daydream. My dreams fell short of imagination, but it was what I wanted, like if I did this then I could go on peacefully drinking in emergency rooms the rest of my life.

“Okay,” is all Luke said. He finished smoking his cigarette and left without explaining.

Two hours later he showed up in a convertible Volkswagen Beetle.

“Where did you get this?”

“Bought it off this man in the street.”

“What?”

“Saw the car, so I made him an offer. It took awhile to convince him I was serious. He kept gibbering on about paperwork and such, and I just kept handing him money. All I need is the keys, I told him, and he finally handed them to me.”

Luke didn’t even have a license. He had three DUIs and wasn’t supposed to drive for another twelve years. But it didn’t matter, he was trying to make my dream come true.
We hit the road, making our way through the desert and the Sierra Mountains until getting to Lake Tahoe. We found a restaurant right on the south shore and had the best meal I’d ever had. Luke told the waiter to just bring out everything the chef recommended. He ordered the most expensive wine and then every dessert on the menu.

After the restaurant we took a suite with a balcony overlooking the crystal blue Tahoe water. I stood against the railing with a glass of champagne.

“I’ll be right back,” Luke told me as if he was asking permission. He didn’t have to ask me for anything. He had my heart in his pocket.

The sun slowly disappeared, the moon slowly appeared as a reflection on the water, and then the bottle of champagne slowly disappeared. Luke was still gone. I went to the bathroom where I thought he went, and there he was lying on the white tile floor. He had wide animated eyes and a needle stuck in his arm. I pulled the syringe out and a stream of blood shot across my face. Luke laughed hysterically. I pulled him in the bathtub and turned cold water on him. He kept laughing the whole time as if I wasn’t there, and as if it wasn’t his blood over my face.

Almost nothing could have ruined that day, almost nothing… The next morning, after I had slept off all the wine, something felt missing. It was Luke. He was gone. I looked around the South Tahoe casinos, bars, and streets, but he had disappeared with the reflection of the moon. I drove the car back home and tried to forget him. A couple weeks later he showed up at my door. It was after midnight and he had grown a beard. I let him in despite these things, despite all things. He basically moved in after that. I had a suspicion that he couldn’t go to his own home for some horrible reason, but I never asked.

Life went on and everything was great except for that constant lingering of my insecurities.

“Give me something,” I told him one night after a few shots of tequila. “Why don’t you just go find that beautiful woman that you’re eventually going to be with?”

“Most so-called beautiful women don’t have anything interesting in their minds and in their face. The face is such a weird piece of flesh, a receptor for all our senses, yet all we do is look at the colors, shades, shapes, textures, symmetry, and size of these organs that are so much more important than what they look like.”

“I guess it’s all we have to go by. I’m sure if a certain shape of a nose represented a higher sense of smell then it could mean something of attraction also,” I told him. “We just don’t know that shape so we maybe go with symmetry instead.”

“I think they do have a particular shape. You know how the blind have a higher sense of smell and hearing? I think the uglier a person’s face may be the more perceptive they are, that is if they don’t fall into the beauty trap. If they ever wish for a makeover or if they’ve ever stared too long at a magazine cover then they have fallen. Whoever said that we need to look like them!”

“Easy for you to say, someone born with good looks.”

Then he took out his pocketknife and slit off the very tip of his nose. Blood went everywhere while he laughed. He always laughed at blood. “Is that better? Do you still think I’m a prince?”

There we were again in the emergency room with the same pretty nurse at the reception desk. But this time roles had changed, and I was the ridiculous girlfriend. I felt her send me a look of warning, telling me that my pockets were being picked. There was my pint of tequila in one pocket, and there was definitely something missing in the other. I didn’t have the easiness of not caring about any of the passing tragedies. I was in love for the first time in my 29 years. My heart hurt so bad I couldn’t drink it away. I didn’t want this. I couldn’t go through this. I knew what was going to happen, and at the very bottom of my miserable life before Luke, at least my heart was mine, at least that couldn’t be taken from me. Then just like the last time when his ex-gal walked out of the emergency room, so did I.

I left town soon after that, taking a temporary job transfer to New Mexico.
When I came back to town several months later I couldn’t help but go back to the emergency room. I sat in the back corner with my tequila, half-tanked, half-wishing he would stumble through the door with a broken leg, with a slash across his face, but he didn’t. The same pretty nurse was there. She kept looking up from her clipboard toward me. Then as if she felt it was her duty, she came over to me. I hid my pint away under my leg and tried to think up a good excuse for being there.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?”

“For Luke. I guess we all should have expected it, but… it’s never easy.”

She didn’t have to say anything else. She walked back to her post. I reached into my pockets to find the tequila, forgetting where I had put it. They were all empty.

Austin woke up next. He came in carrying the new stuffed elephant that had been poking out of his stocking, holding it by the ear. He sat on the edge of the couch and looked at the tree. His eyes were full of sleep. Tim poured pancake batter into small circles in the greased skillet.

“Hey, bub,” he said.

The little boy rubbed his nose. He asked, “When do we have to take it down?”

“No special time.We usually wait until the first of the year and make a bonfire out back. You remember last year?”

The little boy shook his head and looked for the first time at his father. His brown hair was disheveled and his mouth drooped like his mother’s.

“That’s all right,” Tim said. “You weren’t even three yet. You’ll like it. We can roast marshmallows.”

“Like summertime at the lake?”

“Exactly. Go snuggle your mom. Breakfast’s about ready.”

He padded off in his flannel pajamas. Tim turned the radio on low. The weather report said that more heavy snow was expected throughout the day across the Inland Northwest. He flipped pancakes with the spatula, then slid them with the rest onto the plate he was keeping warm in the oven. He poured more batter into the skillet and looked outside again. He watched the snow fall in big flakes over the rusted storage shed out back and breathed as slowly as he could. The snow had almost covered the truck tire rims that he’d left leaning against the shed.

His wife came down the hall holding Austin’s hand. She was a big woman who’d kept getting bigger after giving birth. She was wearing a plaid bathrobe and her strawberry-blonde hair was tied up in a short ponytail up high on the back of her head. They both sat on stools at the counter where Tim had already set places. He and his wife looked at each other.

She said, “To what do we owe this honor?”

Tim was holding the spatula like a baton. “Can’t I make breakfast for my family?”

“Sure,” she nodded. “Sure you can. Absolutely.”

It was the same tone she’d begun using with him shortly after he’d gotten laid off at the mill in August. She’d used it especially after they’d begun to rely on her meager weekday lunch shift over at Bishop’s Marina on the lake. She looked outside and said,

“See you got your woolies on. Going for a hike?”

“Buddy I was in the service with called yesterday from Spokane. He’s coming up to go snowmobiling. Asked if I might want to go along. I told him I thought it would be all right.”

She was still looking outside. “Called while I was at work yesterday?”

“That’s right.”

“But you didn’t think to tell me about it until now.”

“Right again.”

She shook her head slowly. Without looking at him, she reached across the counter for her cigarettes and lit one. Then she pushed off the stool and said, “I’m going to take a shower. Please call if you’re going to be late for dinner.”

He watched the back of her go down the hall. Then he brought over the pancakes, and he and his son ate in silence.

Tim was supposed to meet Danny at the Coolin turnoff on Route 57. Tim had the truck parked back under some trees. But Danny was late, so Tim ran the heater every now and then to try to stay warm but not waste gas. No other cars were in the turnoff; very few vehicles went by at all. It was just too nasty out. Tim wished he’d brought a thermos of coffee, but in the end, he’d just wanted to get out away from home as quickly as possible.

Danny didn’t show up until almost ten o’clock. He was pulling the snowmobile on a trailer behind his truck. Tim walked out of the trees and Danny pushed the passenger door open for him. The heat from inside hit Tim, and so did the smell of reefer.

“Man,” Danny said, “I’m sorry. This damn weather. I sat behind three wrecks, and I left Spokane before seven.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tim said.

“Well,” Danny asked, “you jacked or what? Could we have picked a better day than this?”

Tim shook his head. Danny had an old Tom Petty tape playing in the dashboard. He nodded his head, Tim thought, to the music. They’d spent some time together at Camp Pendleton, then later at Paris Island, but to say he knew Danny well would have been a stretch.

“All right,” Tim said. “If we’re going to do this, let’s go.”

They drove without talking towards Coolin. It seemed funny to Tim that they should find nothing to say after so long apart and given what they were planning. Danny drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel. They rounded the big curve at the Dickensheet, crossed over the Priest River, passed the landfill, and turned right at Wood’s service station and tavern, which was shut up tight and dark. They passed no one on that leg, or on the one to the “Y” up above Cavanaugh Bay where they parked up a little dead-end road that Tim knew about from riding motorbikes as a boy.

They still said nothing as they unhitched the snowmobile and slid it off the trailer. Danny took a Flexible Flyer sled with wooden slat sides out from the under the shell of his truck and hooked it to the back of the snowmobile. He put a flashlight, a tire iron, a small fishing tackle box of tools, and an empty meal-sized Tupperware container into a burlap sack, wrapped that in a green garbage sack, and bungee-corded the whole thing inside the sled.

“That’s it?” Tim asked.

“Yep,” Danny nodded. “That’s it.”

He took two helmets out of the back of the truck and handed one to Tim. They pulled them over their knit caps and pulled their ski gloves tight. In a muffled voice, Danny said, “Ready, Red Rider?”

He climbed onto the snowmobile and tried three times to start it with the choke engaged until it finally caught, coughing. Tim got on behind him, and they started on new snow down the unplowed road that passed behind the back of the airstrip to the lake.

Danny couldn’t go very fast because of the swirling snow, but he went faster than was safe anyway. Tim kept his head turned to the side and watched for the lake. For a while, there were only the trees and bushes fleeing by below Sundance Peak. Then they passed Cougar Creek, and the lake sat, as always, long and still on the left, gray-blue, with the Selkirk Mountains behind it along the western shore.

After they passed the tip of the peninsula at Four Mile, Baretow Island emerged, then the gumdrop shape of Kalispell Island, and beyond it the gray-green foothills that lightened in shades like octaves into the tall distance where they eventually stretched snow-tipped along the Canadian border. A kind of wave passed over him, as it always did, watching it unfold. They passed the little incline where he and his father first put in their little fishing boat when he wasn’t much older than Austin. Then they crossed Roaring Creek and he shivered again for a different reason because he saw the first line of cabins along the little horseshoe bay that fronted Eastshore Road as it straightened towards the upper lake. He looked for smoke from any of the chimneys, but saw none, and he realized suddenly how badly he’d hoped to see some.

Danny slowed the snowmobile to a stop and turned his head back. Tim couldn’t see his eyes through the cloudy shield, but his mustache was crusted with ice and his mouth was smiling.

Danny said, “This smooth, or what?”

“It’s pretty smooth.”

“We could take a damn chandelier out and not break a crystal, it’s so smooth. Jesus H. Did we pick a perfect day, or what?”

Tim just nodded.

“So, where do we start?”

“Up past that next creek. There’s a logging road to the right that goes up to Hunt Lake and a long drive to the left that leads down to all these cabins.”

Danny grinned and whistled. Tim followed his gaze along the shoreline.

“Nice places,” Danny said. “What are there, twenty or so along here?”

“About.”

“And you’re sure that Captain-guy lives far enough up the road?”

“The Colonel. And yes.” He pointed. “See that island? That’s Eight Mile. He lives way the hell up there.”

Tim had worked summers for the Colonel as a pile driver on the lake before getting the mill job a few years back. He knew that only the Colonel wintered along this stretch of shore and that his cabin was well past Indian Creek campground more than a mile away. Plus, he’d never be out on a day like that.

Danny gunned the engine, shifted, and they climbed the rise, rounded the bend across the creek, and turned down the frontage lane between the cabins and the road. Tim tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to a woodshed down the first drive. Danny pulled under the corrugated tin roof next to a neatly stacked pile of tamarack and turned off the engine. They climbed off the snowmobile and took off their helmets.

Danny looked at Tim and shook his head. “Hell, we don’t even need the damn tarp. Hell, if we looked a little harder we could probably find a damn garage with a space heater. This is too damn easy. Even if somebody wanted to follow us, was intent on it, the snow would cover our tracks like that.” He snapped his gloved fingers.

Tim shrugged. “So far, so good, I guess.”

“Jesus H.,” Danny said and unhooked the sled.

They started down between the trees to the first cabin, which was like a small log lodge with dark green shutters. At the back door, Danny didn’t hesitate. He just took out the tire iron, shoved it in the door jam, and pulled hard back and forth until the wood splintered and the lock gave way.

Watching him, Tim thought of that muggy evening on a bluff near Beaufort, South Carolina, where they’d first talked about this. It was late after a day of daring one another with girls on the beach. They were drinking beer and looking at the stars over the ocean. Danny had told Tim about how he and a buddy had broken into some places at a resort lake in Minnesota just before they’d graduated from high school and Danny’s dad had moved the family west. Seven little cabins in a row, Danny said, maybe an hour total; they’d only been interested in cash. Tim had told Danny about Priest Lake, which Danny had never visited even though he’d lived in Spokane for two years before enlisting and it was only ninety miles away. As they drank more beer, the idea evolved into a winter scheme and Danny said he knew some guys in Portland who’d pay well for jewelry, silverware, credit cards, things like that.

They got sent different places after Paris Island and lost touch. Tim forgot about their talk, or at least rarely thought about it again, until the day before when, out of the blue and after four years, he answered the telephone and heard Danny’s voice. Tim had been out of work going on five months with nothing in sight. And his wife had her attitude. He could dole the money out a bit at a time. And if she asked, he could say he’d won it playing poker with his old pal Danny and some of his cronies after snowmobiling.

So, with his heart hammering, he followed Danny into that empty, cold cabin with its pine walls and its still-new smell and looked through the bathrooms and living room while Danny searched the bedrooms. He found an old Rolex watch with a chip in the face and Danny found three travelers’ checks for fifty dollars each under some socks. They put both in the Tupperware container and Tim followed Danny through the snow to the next cabin pulling the sled behind him.

After that, it was pretty easy to keep going. Since noise and stealth were not factors, they used the crowbar with regard to neither. Although the electricity was turned off in most of the cabins, there was plenty of natural light from outside to search by. And it was too cold not to wear gloves, so leaving fingerprints was of no concern.

They moved through the first few cabins quickly and with some urgency, but gradually slowed their pace and made each search an almost languid excursion. In one, Tim came upon Danny in a bedroom with his face buried in a pair of woman’s underwear; in another, he came downstairs to find him sitting tipped back in a recliner smoking a roach and reading a movie magazine. Tim began to linger over photographs: families on docks, at bar-b-ques, out on boats, couples in embrace at sunset, children growing older on dim hallway walls from one picture to another. He recognized a number of people vaguely from his days working on the pile driver. He came across one snapshot in a standing frame of an older man he’d helped change a tire on the side of the road one early fall evening outside Priest River. He was almost certain the woman in another had been the valedictorian in his older brother’s high school class.

They did better than they’d hoped finding things of value: several checkbooks and credit cards, a set of antique silver in the original cherry wood box, a laptop computer, and over five hundred dollars in cash, which Danny kept adding to a roll in the zippered pocket of his ski pants. The Tupperware container was better than half-full of jewelry.

They came upon two things at the end that Tim would later regret. The first was a Husquvarna chainsaw sitting next to the backdoor of the last cabin. It looked as if it had never been used, but when Tim squatted next to it, he could see that it had just been extremely well-cared for: cleaned and oiled, and the teeth individually sharpened.

“Boy,” he said, “that’s something.”

“What?” Danny asked.

“The chainsaw. Mine’s busted to hell. Shot.”

“You want it? We got room. Take it.”

“Nah.”

“Hell, man,” Danny said. He lifted the chainsaw himself and slid it into the burlap sack. He crisscrossed the bungee cords over the load, strapped them tight, and they started back up the path on fresh snow, the flurries now blowing into their faces.

Tim heard the scratching at the back of the woodshed after they’d reattached the sled to the snowmobile and were about the leave. That was the second thing. They stepped around a box of cedar kindling and saw the ground squirrel caught in the trap by its right hind leg. It lay on its side pawing weakly in the sawdust, its mouth yawning slowly, a trickle of blood coming from its ear. Tim’s eyes and the small, marble-like, black eyes of the ground squirrel met. He knelt down next to it.
“Let’s go,” Danny said, “Damn thing probably has rabies.” He pulled on his helmet, climbed on the snowmobile, started it the first time, and backed it out of the shed. “Come on, cowboy. Let’s hit the trail.”

Tim stood up and pulled on his own helmet. He looked back at the ground squirrel, then at Danny. “Maybe we should put it out of its misery. Bury it somewhere.”

“Not in this life,” Danny told him and throttled the engine. “Come on.”

It couldn’t have been past two o’clock and already the light was falling. The snowmobile idled two-stroke oil exhaust into the white snow darkening it. The wind had lessened, but the dizzy canopy of fat, slow flakes still tumbled everywhere. Tim glanced back at the squirrel a last time, got on, and they left.

Back at the truck, Danny first started the engine and heater. They secured the snowmobile on the trailer and put the sled with its load in the back under the shell. When they got into the cab, it was already warm. Danny took off his coat, gloves, and hat, cranked up the music, and sang with it while they drove back to where Tim had left his own truck. Danny pulled in behind it, then put the truck in park, leaving the engine to idle. He put his right arm over the back of the seat and turned to Tim.

“Well,” he said nodding, “that was sweet.”

Tim nodded back, he hoped, without apparent reluctance.

Danny asked, “So, how do you want to play this?”

Tim shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re the expert.”

“Well, we could do it several ways. Seems to me fifty-fifty’s pretty fair. You found the gig, but it’s my old man’s snowmobile. You’re taking a bigger chance living up here, but I’ve got the contacts to run this stuff.”

“That’s fine,” Tim said.

“All right. I guess we’re on the same page so far. So we can just split the cash and I can send you a money order or something for half of whatever I get in Portland. Unless you want to drive over with me tomorrow.”

“No,” Tim shook his head. “I’m not interested in making that trip.”

“Course you could just take the cash we got and I could sell the rest for whatever I can get. Course I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say it’ll probably be more than five hundred smacks. Maybe considerably more.”

“That sounds all right,” Tim said. “That’d be fine by me.”

“And of course the chainsaw’s yours. I’m thinking of heading down to Palm Springs for a while, get out of this weather. Not much use for a chainsaw there.”

“That’s true.”

Danny grinned and stuck out his hand. Tim shook it. Danny took the roll of cash out of his pocket and handed it to Tim. Then they climbed out of the cab and walked to the back of the truck. Tim wrapped the chainsaw in the green garbage sack, and Danny followed him to his truck. Tim slid the chainsaw behind the seat, climbed up into the cab, and started his own engine and heater. Danny stood in his plaid workshirt and dark ski pants in the falling snow holding the open door.

He said, “Well, I’ll call you after Portland. Tell you how things turned out.”

Tim shook his head. “You’d better not. My wife might get suspicious.”

“O.K.” Danny nodded his head. “And I guess we’d better not think about pulling another stunt like this around here anytime soon.”

“No.”

“So, you know how to get in touch with me in Spokane.”

“Sure.”

“Give me a call, we’ll go get a beer.”

“O.K.”

Danny was still nodding his head. He looked up the road, then slowly back. “You ever hear from Drexel or Bannister?”

“Nah.” Tim shook his head.

“Me neither. Peterson get married?”

“I guess. Last I heard, that was the plan.”

“He still in?”

“As far as I know.”

“Those were good times,” Danny said.

“Yes, they were,” Tim lied.

“Damn straight.” Danny slapped Tim on the thigh. “Listen, you take care.” He stepped back and started to shut the door. “Drive safe in this mess.”

“You, too.”

Danny closed the door and Tim watched him walk back through the snow to his truck. They both backed out. Danny went south towards Priest River, and Tim turned up Route 57 towards home. He flipped the headlights on. He wished he had a radio, but it was broken.

At Nordham, he stopped at the mini-mart for gas. He chose a family comedy to rent from the video rack and bought a frozen pound cake, a package of microwave popcorn, and two sixteen ounce cans of beer. He talked with the cashier, a guy he’d played junior varsity basketball with in high school, about the snow and logging permits for a few minutes, then walked back outside into the twilight that was wild again with blowing snow.

He drove slowly watching the snowflakes dance in his headlights and finished both beers before he reached the trailer. He sat a moment and looked at his wife and son through the front window. They were taking down ornaments from the tree. He could see the television on behind them. He thought he’d wait until she was at work on Monday to move the chainsaw into the shed. He tried not to think about the man who had owned and cared for it. The beers helped a little in that regard. He thought he’d keep the cash in the shoebox with his military memorabilia. He thought that would be a safe place, but he felt lousy about keeping it there and he hadn’t had enough beer to dull that; he had more in the trailer.

He was sorry to see the Christmas decorations come down. In fact, he felt close to tears. Tim climbed out of the truck and walked inside.

He was able to convince his wife to leave the lights up on the tree. But shortly thereafter, they got in another fight. He hadn’t realized the movie he’d rented was one they’d already seen. And he’d forgotten to get a can of pork and beans.

They’d watched the movie anyway, and Tim had a few more beers. For a while, he could forget about things and focus on the movie. Afterwards, he gave Austin a bath and tucked him in. That reminded him of his father and then he was in trouble. Because his father had cared for his tools. And then there was the fact that his father had also been a fly fisherman who would only catch and release. And there was the time that cutthroat had swallowed the hook and got itself tangled in some submerged tree roots and by the time his father was able to unsnag it, the fish had fought the life out of itself. And how grim and quiet his father had become afterwards.

If not for those things, Tim might have gotten away with it within himself. But instead he’d known as he was toweling off his son from his bath, as he noticed for the first time that his son’s ears were his own and those of his father’s, at that moment, he was certain that he would try to undo things. He didn’t know how, but he there was no question in his mind that he would try.

Tim tucked his son into bed laid down next to him. He listened to the small boy’s breathing slow into sleep. Later, he heard his wife turn off the TV, heard her come down the hallway, heard their mattress sag, heard her begin to snore softly herself. In spite of the alcohol, in spite of the things he did to calm himself and the perfect stillness, sleep was a long time coming for him.

The next morning before dawn, he rose, dressed, put the cash in his pocket, took an apple from the kitchen, and went out to the shed. The snow had lightened, but was still falling. It was dark and very quiet. He found an old pair of cross country skis and a knapsack, stored them in the truck, and drove out to where Danny had parked at the Y above Cavanaugh Bay the day before. He ate the apple while he strapped on the skis and put the chainsaw into the knapsack. He fit the knapsack over his shoulders; the weight was awkward but manageable.

It had been years since Tim had used the skis and he knew they weren’t properly waxed. He took a couple of tentative slides on and could do little more than lurch and scoot a bit. But it was better than walking. He figured it was two or three miles to the cabins. The sky above Sundance was just beginning to lighten, like a tiny splash of cream in black coffee. A little snow was falling. Tim started down the road behind the airstrip.

It was slow going and he was badly out of shape. He grew hot inside the jacket, but kept it buttoned. A few times, one of his skis sunk into a drift and he found himself crotch deep in snow. It was a production to free himself and his breath came in heaves, but none of that really mattered. He plodded on.

At Cougar Creek, he stopped for a drink of water and the first glimpse of the lake, gray and still, the islands to the north just visible in the softening light. He upset a flock of quail a little past Roaring Creek, near the old logging road that headed up to the falls, but that was all. Otherwise, it was just his forced breaths, the stillness, the delicately falling snow, and the gathering light of morning until he reached the long drive to the cabins.

Tim skied down to the last cabin first. He replaced the chain saw carefully where he’d found it. Then he just divided the money up and set a portion inside each doorway where they’d been the day before, working his way back hastily to the first log cabin with the green shutters. He didn’t try to figure out what had been taken where; he simply divided the money as evenly as he could. He didn’t even get out of the skis. He didn’t study the damage they’d caused. He just wanted to be done with the whole thing as quickly as possible.

On his way out, he paused at the woodshed where they’d parked the snow machine. Snow had drifted over all but the squirrel’s head. It was dead now, stiff on the dirt, its black eye still open, the trickle of blood dried and darkened. He brushed away the snow and released its leg from the trap, then brought it behind the wood shed under the eaves and scooped out a shallow grave in the pine needles there with his gloves. He covered the squirrel with needles and rocks.

He stood for a moment and looked over the tops of the cabins over the lake. He said, “That’s it, then.”

They were the first words he’d spoken that day. He couldn’t tell if he felt better or not. He felt numb, but he always felt similarly when he hadn’t slept. He wished he could do something about the ruined doorways and the other things they had taken, but he couldn’t. And if somehow, Danny got caught, he could only hope it wouldn’t lead to him. A chill passed down his neck. He thought, the hell with it. He thought that’s all I can do. He blew out a cloud of breath and started back up the frontage road.

He skied steadily, getting into a kind of rhythm without the weight of the chainsaw. He was most of the way down road behind the airstrip when he first heard what sounded like a motorcycle approaching. Blood rose up through his chest, up the sides of his neck, behind his ears. He stopped and turned around. He listened to his own breath slow as a headlight neared and Tim recognized the Colonel on his four-wheeler spraying two feathers of snow behind him. He swallowed.

The Colonel was wearing one of those fleece-lined jumpsuits the old timers wore at the mill in the winter and a fleece-lined, flop-eared cap. He stopped the four-wheeler next to Tim and pushed his goggles up over the front of the cap.

He squinted and said, “That you, Timmy?”

Tim nodded.

“What the hell you doing? Out exercising?”

“Getting some fresh air, you know. How are you, Colonel?”

The old man just nodded, then said, “Drive all the way over here to ski? That’s a lot of trouble, isn’t it?”

Tim gestured the way he’d come with a ski pole. “Pretty over here. Quiet.”

“It’s that,” the Colonel said.

“My old man and I used to come over here sometimes to do this when I was little.”

The Colonel nodded some more. Tim looked back up the road. He couldn’t tell to what extent the falling snow had covered his tracks. It was impossible to tell at what point the Colonel had noticed them. He wished it was snowing like the day before, but it wasn’t.

“How is your dad? How’s he feeling?” the Colonel asked.

“Fine. Better.”

“I haven’t seen him for a while. I’m glad he’s doing better. He’s a fine man, your dad.”

Tim nodded and said, “Yes, he is.”

“And you used to ski together back in the day?”

“Not far. Maybe down to the put-in by the creek.”

“That’s a pretty good fishing spot,” the Colonel said. “You can still catch some there, but too many people know about it now.”

“I suppose,” Tim said.

“Good memories, though,” the old man said. “All right, then. I saw the tracks back there and wondered, what the hell?”

Tim didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded and stamped snow from his skis. He knew that later on, the whole thing might still blow up, but there was nothing he could do about that. He looked at the Colonel again and thought about the time they had spent together on the pile driver when he was just an ornery kid that didn’t know squat. The Colonel looked the same as he had then, grizzled and sharp. The snow was beginning to lighten and there were streaks of blue to the west. The Colonel asked, “Where you parked?”

”Up at the Y.”

The old man grinned. “You almost got her licked.”

Tim waited for the Colonel to ask how far he’d gone, but he didn’t.

Instead he asked, “Any word about the mill rehiring?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“Maybe down to Priest River?”

Tim shrugged and said, “Maybe. Have to wait till spring, I guess.”

The Colonel nodded and looked him over. Standing there, and with the snow lessening, it had grown colder.

The Colonel asked, “Don’t suppose you want a ride the rest of the way.”
Tim shook his head. “Nah, I’m fine.”

The Colonel nodded and throttled the engine a little. “Okay, say hello to your dad for me.”

Tim nodded, lifted a pole in farewell. It seemed to him a meager gesture. He watched the old man go off up the road. He watched him grow small and listened to the motor die away until he saw the four-wheeler turn left and disappear at the Y.

Maybe the Colonel was going into Coolin for breakfast. Maybe he was just out for a ride. Tim didn’t know. All he knew was that it didn’t matter. What was done was done. You broke a glass on the floor, then you swept it up, but it was still broken. That was the thing. Even if he never got caught, that was the thing. Even if he found a way to save some money and get it back to the people in those cabins, even if it was enough to pay for repairs and the other stolen goods and he was never caught and he never heard from Danny again and he went home and hugged his family, even if they went over to his parents’ for Sunday dinner and his dad and he talked about fishing and his dad seemed stronger and then the mill called and he got his job back and things got better with his wife, it wouldn’t matter. As far as what he’d done went. As far as what he’d chosen to do. That wouldn’t go away. He could never precisely be the same. Even if he became better somehow, if his character improved, the exact person he’d been when he’d awakened the morning before was irretrievable.

He said quietly, “You’d better be careful.”

When I was a child, we lived inside the war.  Our parents went away sometime during the last year, leaving me and my sister, Olly, to fend for ourselves amidst the rubble.  Our house was old and solid, made of stone, and the shelling had mostly been to the other side of town, so all the walls of the house were still intact and there were only a few holes in the roof.  Most of the windows had shattered, but we covered our bedroom’s windows with trash bags taped to the frames, and that mostly kept the wind and rain out, except for the windiest, rainiest nights, but those were few and far between.  It was awfully dry that year, in fact, which created its own problems — after the well ran out, we got our water from the river, but the river water was full of bacteria and we didn’t always have enough fire to boil it.  We were often sick.

The day J.C. died, we were healthy, though, because there had been some rain recently, but not enough to bring out lots of mold and mildew, and that day itself was one of the sunniest of the spring.  Because of the good weather, Olly and I decided to go into town and see if the war had ended.  It hadn’t, but we discovered Mrs. Carter had died in the night and we were able to take some of the onions and carrots she had stored up.  We felt guilty about stealing food, and so we were always grateful to find people who had recently died.  We took our snacks out to the town common and sat down for a picnic.  Before the war, the common had had a bandstand and a grove of trees, but people had taken the bandstand apart for firewood and the trees had been shattered during a bombing raid, so there wasn’t much to separate the common from the street except for occasional tufts of grass, but we remembered the bandstand and we remembered the trees and so it was still the common to us.

It’s impossible to know if J.C. recognized it as the common, too, but it was the place where he came to die.  He had arrived in town soon after our parents went away, and he lived in a little cottage less than a mile down the road from our house.  The old man who had lived there (and whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it) left right after the war began.  J.C. occasionally talked to us, but mostly he kept to himself.  He was tall and skinny, with a head that was too big for his body.  He wore clothes he seemed to have made himself, and he didn’t have any skill as a tailor.  He said his name was Jesu Cristo, but we could call him J.C.  He said he was God incarnate.  He said he was the savior.  He said he would bring peace on Earth.  He asked us if we believed in him, and Olly said he was standing right there in front of us so we didn’t need to believe in him.  This seemed to make him sad, and he went back to his cottage, and we didn’t talk to him again for a little while, though now and then we would see him out staring at the sky and we would wave to him, but he didn’t wave back.  “Maybe,” Olly said, “he doesn’t believe in us.”  I told her not to be silly, but I didn’t really think she was silly, it was just something to say.

Later, we saw J.C. carrying things into the cottage in big blue bags from the post office.

“Is the mail working again?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.  “I’m building a temple.”

“What for?”

“Contemplation,” he said.  “Prayer.  Don’t you know what a temple is?”

“Sure,” I said.  “But I thought they had to be old.”

“No,” J.C. said.  “Anybody can make a temple.  It takes a lot of work, though.”

He went into his cottage and I heard the door lock.  I went back to our house and found Olly working on the mud castle she was building on the dining room table.  She spent a lot of time on this castle, bringing dirt in from a hole she had dug in the front yard.  She spent a lot of time trying to get the crenellations at the top of the walls to be perfectly even.

“That’s not a castle,” I said.

“Yes it is,” Olly said.

“No,” I said.  “It’s a temple.”

“No, it’s a castle.  I don’t want to build a temple.  I’m building a castle.”

“No you’re not,” I said.

Olly, her face streaming tears, threw a handful of mud at me, screamed, and ran out of the room.

We tended to fight when we got hungry, since we were most irritable when we were most hungry, but we didn’t fight very often, because we always had plenty of space to wander around in alone when we wanted it, so we rarely felt like the other person got in our way.  We had our own little worlds, really.  Olly, for instance, never went up to the third floor of the house, but I spent a lot of time up there, in the places our mother had called “the servant’s quarters”, though we never had any servants.  I brought our stuffed animals up there, because after our parents left, Olly had grown scared of all the teddy bears.  (The only things she seemed attached to were a few little rocks she had given names to and carried around in her pockets.)  I arranged the animals to sit in rows and pretended I was their teacher, telling them all the truths of the world.  I told them about the giant man who held the Earth up in space so that we wouldn’t all die, and I told them about the dinosaurs that ate the cavemen, and I told them that all the stars in the sky were lights from rocketships that were flying through the ten bazillion miles of space to come get us and bring us to Heaven, and I told them that humans are the only animals that can speak English and this is why we are the rulers of everything.

Olly and I spent much of our time together, though, because Olly liked to hear the stories I told her.  At first, I told her stories about the things our parents were doing out in the world — fighting evil witches and dastardly kings, working as spies for the government, flying in warplanes and bombing remote regions of the Earth.  Olly didn’t seem to understand these stories, but she liked them.  As she got older, though, she asked for stories about other people.  I told her about Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman.  She especially liked the story of how Wonder Woman discovered that Superman was insane and used her powers to tie him up and then smash his head in with a boulder.  “She had to hit him again and again, didn’t she?” Olly asked.  “Yes,” I said.  “He was very strong, and she had to smash his head in over and over and over again to kill him.”  We laughed a lot at that, and then Olly began to sing, and soon I joined her:

She smashed his head in

over and over and over again

and over and over and over again

and over and over and over again!

Eventually, I began to tell Olly stories about J.C.  In my stories, he was a wandering wizard who had lost his powers, but he didn’t know why, and so he was making his way through the world to find out what had turned him into a mortal man.  I couldn’t seem to bring the story to a conclusion, I couldn’t figure out why J.C. had lost his powers or how he could get them back, and Olly asked me to stop telling her stories about him because they made her sad, so we went back to Wonder Woman and Batman.  I even brought Superman back from the dead so Wonder Woman could smash his head in again.

As we had our picnic on the common, I heard movement behind me and turned around and at first I didn’t recognize J.C.  He was naked and purple.  He had found some paint of some sort and covered every inch of his body with it.  He stood on a big rock at the other end of the common from us and held his arms out to his side.  He couldn’t close his eyes because he had covered them with paint.  The paint had sunk deep into his pores and clogged them.  His skin couldn’t breathe.  He stood there for a long time — it felt like hours, but I doubt it was much more than a minute or two — and then he fell over, flat onto his face.  I didn’t do anything, just stared, but Olly ran to him.

“Get up, J.C.,” she said.

He didn’t move.

“I like purple,” she said.  And then, more quietly: “Why won’t you get up?”

I went to him and stuck my ear down next to his mouth to see if I could hear him breathing.  I couldn’t.  I moved my head down to his chest to listen for his heart, but I didn’t hear that either.  I took Olly’s hand.  “Come on,” I said.  “Maybe he has some food and stuff in his cottage.”

“Why did he die?” Olly asked me as we walked down the road.

“I don’t know,” I said.   “Or, I mean, I know the paint, the purple stuff on his skin, that could have done it.  Probably.  But I don’t know why he painted himself purple or if he knew what would happen.  I guess he did know what would happen, though.  At the end.  It seemed that way.  Don’t you think?”

“Sure,” Olly said.

The cottage was built from cinderblocks and stones and mud.  It had a rusty tin roof.  From outside it didn’t look like much, but inside it was cozy.  It wasn’t as small as it seemed from outside — there was one main room, but it was at least as big as our dining room, the largest room I’ve ever been in, and there was a little bedroom at the back, beside the kitchen nook.  I immediately began to think about moving in.  The single fireplace would probably be enough to keep the cottage warm through the winter, unlike our house, where even if we had been able to light a fire in every fireplace, the house never would have gotten very warm, given the tall ceilings and all the broken windows.  Some of the windows in the cottage were still whole, and the ones that were broken had been carefully covered with thick boards.

We didn’t find any food, though, or any evidence of food having been eaten there.  What had J.C. lived on?  I imagined him foraging in the woods, chewing on berries and grass, gobbling dirt.

Then Olly found a trap door in the bedroom that led down into an apparently deep and very dark cellar.

“I don’t want to go down there,” Olly said.

“Me neither,” I said.  “But there could be food.  It looks like a good place for storage.”  I started to look for a candle in the kitchen when Olly called me back to the bedroom — she’d found a flashlight under the bed.

“It’ll never work,” I said, but I was wrong.  “Those’ve got to be the most powerful batteries in the history of batteries.”

Olly handed me the flashlight and I pointed it down into the cellar.  A wooden ladder led down at least ten feet to a stone floor.  I began the descent.

There was food — shelves of it, in cans and jars and bottles.  The metal shelves ran from the floor to the ceiling on three sides of the ladder.  The cellar was larger than the cottage, at least twice its size.  I shined the light ahead — the shelves continued on and on, filled not only with food but with artifacts from the old world: books and newspapers, computers, dolls, tools, pens and pencils, cups, bowls, framed photographs, portable music players, sheets, towels, clothing of every imaginable sort…

I finally reached the end of the shelves and discovered there a little bed and desk.  The chair at the desk was small, like Olly’s chair in the bedroom at our house.  The floor was sticky with something, and I shined the light down.  At first I thought it was a pool of blood, but then I realized it was the purple paint.  Cans of spray paint lay scattered in a corner, covered with purple fingerprints.

On the desk, I found a battery-powered lamp and turned it on.  The desk was covered with bits of paper with strange drawings on them — stick figures, mostly, in abstract landscapes, or what I took to be landscapes.  Only one of the pieces of paper had any writing on it, but I’ve kept it with me ever since.  It took me days to decipher it all, the handwriting was so tiny, the letters so indistinct from each other.  As far as I can tell, this is what was written on the paper:

THE REVALASHUNS OF JESU CRISTO

I have been alive 100000 years now LORD my GOD and you have in those 100000 years tormented me always with your ABSENSE! and I want to no only what I am sposed to no but you will not even let me have that.  You are DEATH!  That is all I no.  I AM LIFE – I LORD AM LIFE!  This is my revalashun.  This is the only truth you have reveeled to me.  This is the only thing I bleve and becuz I bleve it I no it is the TRUTH.  This is the war this is the true war this.  You are death.  I am life.  I am life.  I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM!!!!!!

Looking at this now, typed, free of its yellowed paper and red ink and strange, minuscule handwriting, the words seem ridiculous.  I am tempted to laugh.  But when I first read them down in the darkness of the cellar, the shadows kept barely at bay by the low-powered lamp, the effect was a mix of absolute terror and profound sadness.  I stared at the paper, puzzling out the words — LORD GOD ABSENSE DEATH I AM LIFE I LORD AM LIFE TRUTH I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM — and my hands shook and my legs felt like their bones had softened and my heart sped up so that I could feel every drop of blood shooting through my veins.

I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM I AM!!!!!!

I grabbed the paper and ran past the shelves and back to the ladder and burst up into the afternoon sunlight.

Olly lay asleep on the blue and white quilt that covered the bed, but she woke when I looked at her.

“What did you find?”

“A lot,” I said.

“A lot good or a lot bad?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Food.  Things.  All sorts of things.  I think J.C. was collecting them.  Hoarding, collecting, I don’t know.  Something.  The temple.  I think he brought all this here from somewhere else.  If this was all here when the old man was here, why would he have left?”

“That all sounds good.”

“Yes,” I said.  I put the paper down on the quilt.  Olly looked at it.

“I can’t read it,” she said.  “Or not most of it.  What is it?”

“Something J.C. wrote.  I don’t know what it is.”

“That’s okay,” Olly said.  “It’s nice to have something from him.  We can remember him this way and tell stories about him and tell people what he was like.  Later.  Don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said.

The war lasted another two years.  We moved into the cottage and lived there until the end.  Our parents never came back, but we didn’t expect them to.  Nobody really came back, but new people arrived.  Serious people, people with empty eyes.  Some of them wanted our cottage, but we had found guns in the cellar and ammunition and we had used them to hunt squirrels and rabbits and deer, so we knew how to use them to protect ourselves.  But we didn’t have to protect ourselves for too long.  People mostly left us alone once things got more settled.  I began to be able to sleep through the nights again.  Olly got her stories from the books she found in the cellar, and I read them too, though not as many and not as often.

And then Olly went away to get married, and I was alone in the cottage, and have been alone for some time now.  I tried to tell people about J.C., but nobody wanted to hear stories about anything from before the war.

A few days ago, the food finally ran out.  The last things I ate were some pickled beets.  I’d never much liked beets.  I should have saved something I liked for the end.

It didn’t have to be the end, I suppose.  I could have planted a garden, I could have even gone shopping at the new grocery store in town, but it felt somehow like a betrayal, and so I never did.  I just ate what was in the cellar, until now there is nothing left to eat.

I wrote Olly a letter, telling her all about the changes, about how the common has been paved over so there will be, they say, fewer traffic jams.  I told her the food was mostly gone.  I told her she should come visit, and that I’d save some food for her.  (But I didn’t.  I’ve lied about so many things, why not lie about that?  She wouldn’t expect anything else.)  She’ll laugh when she reads the letter, if she reads the letter.  She’s only written to me once, quite some time ago.  “I used to love your stories,” she said.  ”We lived on stories, didn’t we?  Stories aren’t truth, though, and after everything that’s happened, I just want some truth.”

I should have written her another letter.  I should have apologized for not coming up with a good ending for the stories about J.C.  I wish I had thought of some way for the wizard to regain his powers.  I hadn’t meant to upset her, I just wanted to pass some time.

I know when she saw him all covered in purple, Olly thought J.C. had become a wizard again — and then, when he fell, that whatever forces had taken his powers had done something even worse.

I’m sorry, Olly.  He was just a crazy man.  There were a lot of them in those days, don’t you remember?  (There still are, I suppose, but they are more hidden now.)  I shouldn’t have given him meaning for you.  That’s the only thing I regret.

Her handwriting was remarkably neat and clear.  That is what I remember thinking as I let the letter fall into the fire.

I wake up in the darkness every night.  I reach for the flashlight, but the batteries have long since died.

I am hungry.  If you were here now, Olly, that is what I would tell you.  I am hungry.

A little German boy in town told me that in his language they do not say, “I am hungry,” but rather, “I have hunger.”  It is not who you are.  It is a possession that can be shed.

(She smashed his head in over and over and over again, and over and over and over again, and over and over and over again.)

The beets were a deep, rich shade of purple.  Almost the deepest purple I have ever seen.  They stained my hands and mouth, and when I saw my palms covered with the purple juice, I cried for the first time since we were children one hundred thousand years ago.

The Community Choir of the Community

BY TIM KREIDER

The news spread quickly that he was gone. And while nobody could deny that a vast emptiness now laid claim to some part of the world, some later would suggest that he had been disappearing for a long time.

Now this needs to be qualified. Nobody really noticed this gradual and subtle disappearance until after he had died. Only then did a contingent led by Hank Mortibund, Old Man Mortibund’s youngest, put forth the claim that he had been gradually disappearing over a length of time, as if to prepare the rest us for the time when he would no longer be with us. Little Ginny Peepholtz, bless her heart, wondered if we don’t start dying the day we are born.

If Hank meant that Jimmy had been such a part of the Community that he had become almost invisible to us most of the time, then maybe they were onto something. Nowadays, it is pretty much consensus throughout the Community that he was the bedrock. That’s much easier to say in hindsight. The fact of the matter is, he was just one of those things that was always there but without special notice, which I guess you could argue is what a bedrock really is.

The Task Force assigned to uncover and report what it was about Jimmy that had such an effect on the Community produced only insignificant data and eventually succumbed to internal squabbling and disbanded. Perhaps Gwen Wolfington, a former colleague of Jimmy’s, put it best in her interview for the Documentary. “When we were around Jimmy, he somehow just made us more than we otherwise could’ve been. But it’s only now that he’s gone that we realize it.” Nobody could really explain exactly what Gwen was talking about, especially in light of her severe stutter, but we all had an idea of what she meant.

A few members of the Community- Mr. and Mrs. Pianissimo, Reverend Hodges’ mother, Old Man Mortibund, remembered the time before he was there. But most of us didn’t know life without Jimmy until now. This is what caused Junior the most trouble.

You see, one of the lobes of Junior’s brain had been measured as abnormally large. It was put forth by some that this oversized lobe housed Junior’s extraordinary imaginative capacity. Junior used his imagination to prepare himself for any and all possibilities that could beset us. Junior had imagined numerous scenarios prior to Jimmy’s passing. He had pictured every possible scene of life with Jimmy in it. Junior could just as easily envision Jimmy’s smile as he gazed upon his future grandchild, Junior’s little niece or nephew, now just a newly fertilized egg in Junior’s sister’s womb, as he could remember the glint in Jimmy’s eyes when Junior ran off the field after catching his very first Little League fly ball. He could just as easily smell the new seats of Jimmy’s next car as he could recollect the fresh mint of Jimmy’s breath as he tucked him into bed each night. He could just as easily hear Jimmy’s voice going over retirement figures as he could recall the advice he had been given concerning any of a number of miscellany- how to tie a Windsor knot, whether to sacrifice the knight or the rook, what type of weather a “flock of sheep” cloud formation preceded. All of these scenarios Junior had foreseen. But what Junior had failed to imagine was a life without Jimmy.

This caused major problems for Junior. Like most people, Junior only thought of the future he imagined for himself, and that future always contained Jimmy right where he always was. There was no other way to think about it. Junior could’ve prepared himself, could’ve envisioned a future without Jimmy just once during his daily musings, just once. But why would he? A future without Jimmy certainly wouldn’t make for pleasant daily musing. Junior was accustomed to only experiencing what he had first imagined. This allowed Junior to react to anything in what Dr. Jenkins referred to as a “staid” manner. But when Junior was informed that Jimmy was gone, his lack of imaginative preparation for the situation caused this staid manner to be thrown out the window, along with the telephone, the Brahms record, the spider plant, and anything else he could get his hands on before being restrained by his companion. Much later, in a journal article that was largely ignored by most in his field due to its redundancy, Dr. Jenkins wrote that Junior was dead until this moment, in which he became alive for the first time. And nothing would prepare Junior for what was to follow.

Junior left the Community (voluntarily) long before Jimmy passed. He needed to find his own community, or have a community find him, or find that he didn’t need any community, or have all communities find they didn’t need him. He wasn’t quite sure.

Of course Junior remembered his lessons at the Center about Emily Dickinson, and how she lived her whole adult life without leaving the grounds of her childhood home. And of course he didn’t get the lesson at the time, but sometime later he realized the merits of this- the heightened attentiveness to one’s immediate surroundings, the intimate knowledge of detail, and how this could benefit the imagery of his own poetry. But Junior didn’t write poetry.

He returned to our Community periodically, feeling at home in the way he felt at home as a child but also feeling alienated in the way an adult visiting a community not his own might feel. His visits were brief, stopping by on his way to or from some other place. But a community needs time to really penetrate an individual. Junior showed up from time to time but never really stayed long enough to remember the muted sound of the pine forest covered in fresh snow, or how Mrs. Danticoat would wave to the children at the bus stop from the end of her lane every morning as she picked up the paper, or how the bark of the trees turned a magical red in the fading sun, the brownness momentarily transformed into some brand new color amidst the orange glow of everything else, or where the twists in a conversation with Mr. Sauers might end up by the time Mrs. Sauers called him back to the house. The Community is an embroidered quilt. The complexity and substance are in the details, and Junior had ceased to look very closely since he had moved on.

So Junior wouldn’t necessarily know what was going on with Cher Atlas. He wouldn’t necessarily know that Cher was feeling the loss of Jimmy more strongly than some. Cher felt an actual physical emptiness inside of her. She felt incomplete, like a part of her was now missing as well. She went to the Clinic, underwent a battery of tests- MRI, CAT scan, and the like, but the experts couldn’t find anything missing. It all seemed to be there, right where it should.

With the medical assurance, Cher began not to notice the emptiness as much. But as this sensation dissipated, it was replaced by an unbelievable burden. Cher soon felt a tremendous responsibility, for whom or for what she could not quite identify (nor could the specialists at the Clinic quantify), which only added to the discomfort of this new feeling. Whenever Cher closed her eyes to try to go to sleep, this burden would creep from her shoulders into her gut. But sometimes, when her eyes were open, she saw things, things that were always there. But in ways she had never before seen them.

Although also unbeknownst to Junior, this too was especially true for Juanny Waxman. Some days the rays of sun shot magically down through the clouds like spears and it was like he was seeing the whole world through polarized sunglasses. But it all started when the sun began to go down that first day after Jimmy had gone. The sun that evening looked as if it had been hurled by God at the canvas of the sky, splatting against it in a form of divine abstract expressionism and spraying colors everywhere. Now of course Juanny had seen sunsets before, and even a Willem de Kooning exhibit once on a class trip to the Museum, but in the days after Jimmy’s passing he somehow didn’t seem so far away from them. He was no longer looking at these sunsets as much as they were happening to him. It was like he stepped outside of time, even though the spectacle he was witnessing was one of constant change, of time itself.

The days following the disappearance of Jimmy had a similar effect on Peng. Since the age of eleven, Peng’s tiny forearm hairs, on rare occasions, would rise during certain moments of certain songs. Other times, Peng could listen to these same songs without any reaction. Sometimes she would even have to force herself just to keep listening, forbidding her mind to drift from the music, in order to try to recapture the arm hair-raising experience she found so desirable. But Peng quickly found she couldn’t seek out these moments. She would play the pieces that triggered these moments over and over again, even turning the volume up at times, and although it was the same music, she could never seem to replicate the experience she sought, leaving her forearm hairs lying limply on her skin. What Peng didn’t realize was that it wasn’t the music in itself, but that the music struck a chord with something in her. So while she still played her records, she became resigned to the notion that most of the time, short of these sporadic transcendental experiences, she wasn’t really listening. And she couldn’t help but wonder, if she wasn’t really listening most of the time, what else was she missing?

So she was taken by surprise when, in the days immediately after Jimmy’s passing, while feeling that loss, she again heard the music the way she had in those fleeting moments. It first happened during a Lauridsen Chorale, a chorale she had heard hundreds of times. But for the first time, she was hearing what she could only imagine the Chorale had aspired to be. If Peng were not so self-conscious to speak in such terms, she might have said the music transported her. And this happened again and again and again in those days after Jimmy’s passing. Not only with the Lauridsen Chorale, but with the Roches and Abbey Road and Bach and Rosemary Clooney. The forearm hairs had risen.

In the void of this place in Junior’s brain, the place unaccounted for in Junior’s imagination- life without Jimmy; Junior’s mind literally went blank. He forgot how to get back home, back to the Community, to where he was now called. When he reached for his map, it was not there. How does one go about finding a lost map? A desperate perplexity replaced the initial rage Junior had experienced. Dr. Jenkins did not comment on this particular stage.

Jimmy had gained some renown amongst the amateur cartographers in the region with his savvy topographical skills, his extremely accurate relief renderings in particular. And although Junior didn’t know it until this very moment, Jimmy himself had served as a kind of relief map for Junior, guiding him through life’s peaks and valleys. But now as Junior futilely searched for the map in the shadowed corners of his apartment, it became apparent that he would need to be guided in some other way.

With Junior unable to reliably recall this journey, perhaps no one will ever know exactly how Junior found his way back to the Community on this fateful night. We do know from the series of firsthand interviews with Junior conducted by Strom Jackman and his team in the months following Jimmy’s passing that at some time between leaving his apartment and reaching the limits of the Community, Junior decided he no longer wished to find the Community. It has been widely speculated that it was this change of mind that actually put Junior on the right path to the Community.

And so Junior paused for the first time just outside the Community. He paused because he was scared to enter, because of what he might find, or more aptly, because of what he knew he wouldn’t find. The Community could not be the same without Jimmy. He paused because he needed to pause. He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t ready for Jimmy to leave and he wasn’t ready to continue without Jimmy. So he paused.

He thought again of the photo that had shown up in the mail just days before from an aunt or a cousin once removed, somebody he did not remember from the family Christmas parties of his youth. The envelope contained no note, only a photo of Junior as a toddler crawling out Jimmy’s outstretched legs as they rested on the ottoman. Junior didn’t need any of those psychology classes his sister used to take at the Center in order to draw his own conclusions. He recognized himself as an extension of Jimmy, something he could crawl from the heart of but never actually stand on his own and run from. He saw that all of his strivings were dependent on Jimmy’s support. Junior could venture out, but would always be guided by Jimmy.

Where were those legs now? Were they taken out from under him? Was he in the midst of falling? “And how far below was the floor?” Junior wondered aloud. But nobody was listening.

Junior could never really know if what took place in the Community over the next several days had started before he entered or if it had all been triggered by his arrival, like a symphony waiting for the conductor’s baton to rise. And whether or not Junior’s realization that a pause was, by definition, temporary, set something else, something much bigger in motion, or whether that something else was a force of its own, something so powerful that it set itself in motion, the only thing Junior could know for certain was that when he finally was carried into the Community, it was like a Venn diagram, where Heaven touched down close to earth, and those on earth reached up to their highest, and the two, ever so briefly, met as one.

Since there still exists a sizable faction that would argue that it was all because of Smiley Keyes, the mute boy who had grown up and done well for himself with bit parts as a film and television actor (mostly commercials), the story of Smiley Keyes should probably be recounted.Smiley did cry as an infant, as infants are wont to do. But Mrs. Keyes remembers Smiley’s sobs being different from the crying of her other six children. Smiley’s was a long, drawn-out wailing, more of a lament than a sudden outburst of discomfort, like a tremendous sadness from being in this world was rising up from deep within and seeping out of his mouth.

So Mrs. Keyes was almost relieved when it finally and abruptly ceased at the age of 19 months, until it became apparent that nothing more, no sounds whatsoever, would come from that little mouth. Oh, how Mrs. Keyes would yearn for something, anything, even the long, slow wail of woefulness she had almost grown accustomed to in those first 19 months.

She can remember clearly the day it stopped. She had gone over it, minute-by-minute, a million and one times, searching for what Dr. Jenkins referred to as the “critical transitional episode.” But try as she might, nothing. Truth be told, that day was just as ordinary as all the rest in the Community, except of course for the fact of it being the last day anybody heard so much as a peep from the lips of little Smiley Keyes.

But for as much as he was teased by the other schoolchildren during his Mainstreaming and developmentally stunted by the misguided methodology of the then fashionable Mackenzie System, which was embraced by the Center (and everywhere else) for a few academic years during the heyday of Exclusionism, Smiley possessed an inordinate amount of resiliency. Anyone who looked at Smiley for even an instant would see this. You couldn’t help but be captivated by Smiley’s eyes, the literal windows to his soul. Because soon after his “critical transitional episode” at 19 months, whatever that was, Smiley began to speak through his eyes.

Smiley’s instructor at the Deaf Jam Summer Drama Workshops, Earlene Mundle, is credited with being the first to recognize Smiley’s unique gift, the power he held in his gaze. Later, when he was sent to the Clinic for a battery of tests, his optic nerve was measured at twice that of normal size. But Science couldn’t fully explain the phenomenon. Smiley’s eyes not only spoke, but spoke with inflection. His eyes gave meaning to that for which we do not yet have definitions. And eventually Smiley cashed in on this, garnering as large a role as commercials would cast for a non-speaking part.

As people lined up that day to pay their respects, Smiley could not bear to look up. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he opened his eyes as himself anymore, rather than through another character he had taken on, so different and separate from himself. He wasn’t sure what might come out. And that is why he cast those eyes downward, away from all others. He was afraid of what he might see when he looked with his own eyes into the eyes of not another character but another person, especially Junior, whose eyes awaited his at the head of the line.

Smiley didn’t really know Junior and hadn’t really known Jimmy either. Smiley and Junior were some years apart, their paths rarely crossed, and Smiley didn’t speak anyway. Smiley was, however, acutely aware of the fact that everyone in the line of which he now found himself a part had just the right things to say to Junior. He could even feel the breath of Admiral Samples on the back of his neck, reciting the words he had written on a note card and would speak when his turn came.
As the line inched ahead, Smiley overheard the non-words of Mrs. Shepherd, “I don’t even know what to say in a time like this, Junior. There are no words.”

17 more words than I have, Smiley counted to himself, staring at a small run near the ankle of Mrs. Shepherd’s stocking and willing it to somehow stay that small forever, even though he knew that with each movement it would inevitably grow.

As Mrs. Shepherd moved on, Smiley stepped up and extended his hand to Junior. Smiley felt Junior’s hand clasp his own. Junior’s shoes were shined. In them, Smiley could almost recognize himself amidst all of the reflected light from above. And then he felt Junior pulling him closer. Except he wasn’t actually moving. He remembered his late grandmother, always nagging him about his slouched posture, telling him to imagine helium balloons tied to each ear, pulling him up straight, all the while with her index finger delving sharply into his lumbar to help prod his imagination. And this is exactly what he felt at that very moment, both the balloons tied to his ears and the finger in his lower back. And he did what he didn’t think he could do, what he swore he wouldn’t do. He slowly lifted his head, following the buttons of Junior’s shirt, until he found himself looking right into Junior’s eyes. Again he felt himself being pulled even closer. But still he remained in the same spot.

And so he stood and faced Junior. And as he looked into the eyes of Junior, he saw both the look in Junior’s eyes and the look of his own eyes. He saw the deep lament of the last sounds from his mouth. But he also saw this lament transformed. And he knew as he looked into Junior’s eyes that he was both giving something to Junior and taking something for himself.
Then Smiley opened his mouth. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t decide to open his mouth at that moment. And he didn’t know what was going to happen next.

He heard a faint whisper. “I know.”

Smiley knew as well. He didn’t know exactly what they both knew, but he just knew they knew. And that was good enough.

And because there are others that will tell you it was simply the song by the Barbershop Quartet, it would be unfair not to expand on that story as well.

The Barbershop Quartet had fallen on hard times, most wouldn’t know there even existed a Barbershop Quartet in the Community. Three of the members had long since passed their prime, the fourth had died several years ago. They had made a name for themselves in their younger days, crisscrossing the land with their four-part harmonies and unusual arrangements of traditional favorites. But as the banality of wives, houses, children, and careers came to replace the idylls of youth as they almost always do, the Quartet’s diminishing dedication to rehearsals became evident in their final product. The Quartet was stung by the chillier receptions they were now apt to receive as a result, and the ensuing disgruntlement among the members led to the expected in-fighting, which led to disharmony and rumors of a breakup. One member thought the Quartet to be nothing more than an idyll of youth. One disappeared into deep bouts with depression and alcoholism. One wanted to move in a different direction artistically, composing songs for the church choir. One was lost at sea when his Piper Cub mysteriously malfunctioned.

The three surviving members of the Quartet did stay in contact, and talks of reunions surfaced every few years. However, they faced some challenges with the four-part harmonies with which they had made a name for themselves (“The Barbershop Quartet”). So most of the reunions consisted of the three surviving members meeting in someone’s rec room or basement, reminiscing about the old days over glasses of sparkling cider or grape, swapping stories about Fantasy Spring Training Camp in Arizona or the new Candy Striper down at the Clinic, and voting on names for the Quartet in its new form (“The Three Surviving Members”, “3/4″).

So this is where things stood with the Quartet at the time of Jimmy’s passing. They sat in one of the surviving member’s converted basement that was now a rec room and talked about what the Quartet would do in response to Jimmy’s passing, what it meant to be the Quartet in a time such as this, and if a new name was needed. Unbeknownst to the three surviving members, similar conversations about the need to respond to Jimmy’s passing, albeit tailored to their own individual hobbies and talents, were taking place in rec rooms and converted basements throughout the Community. But what could the Quartet do in a time like this, especially without a bass?

Very early on the morning following Jimmy’s passing, before the first light of day, it suddenly came to the tenor as he rhythmically paced on the treadmill in his converted basement to the pulsing light of the muted television. At the same time, in his rec room on the other side of the Community, it came to the baritone as he kneeled in early morning prayer at a window in the first light of day. The lead, just a few houses down from the baritone, was stirred from his slumber and rose from the sofa pull-out bed in the rec room to go to the bathroom. As he stood urinating over the toilet, leaning wearily against the wall to his right in the flickering light of the bulb above, it came to him. As if the years of uniting in perfect harmony had eventually come to overtake even their own moments of inspiration, it came to the three remaining members simultaneously and in perfect accord- they just needed to sing.

As if carried there, they each individually dusted off their red and white-striped vests, donned their straw boater’s hats, and headed to the Barbershop. The wondrous, if not somewhat creepy, feeling that arose when they encountered each other entering the Barbershop simultaneously and identically dressed was quickly replaced with the safer aplomb of a raised eyebrow, a chuckle, and some Oh my’s. After each had his mustache trimmed, they stepped out onto the street. The streets were filled with the early morning rush hour crowds of people, but a subdued din due to the circumstances replaced the usual hubbub of the hour. The Quartet warmed up with some exercises they had picked up at the Improv Symposium and Buffet several years before, quickly tuned themselves to pitch, and as if they were 18 again, broke right into the rumbling first verse of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

The three surviving members, each crooning heavenward with eyes closed, became so lost in the harmony they didn’t even realize that for the first time since that tragic Arbor Day when the Piper Cub went down, their sound was complete. They had drowned in four-part harmony. Just behind them, in the doorway of the Barbershop, gripping a broom firmly in one hand and, like the others, with head raised to the sky above and eyes closed, Jacques the Barber, in a slightly wavering at first but beautifully rich bass, joined the three surviving members in encouraging that chariot to swing low. And the sweet chariot, in turn, dipped even lower.

No official invitation was extended to Jacques the Barber. It wasn’t as if contract papers were drawn up on the walk outside the Barbershop. Actually, not a word was spoken. When the three surviving members made their way through the small crowd that had gathered by the song’s conclusion, Jacques naturally followed.

In front of the firehouse, the new Quartet was joined by baritone Fire Chief Mandlebrow in a rousing “Wait ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nellie.” By the time the group reached the steps of the Courthouse, they had become a chorus of twelve, with another 50 or so following just to listen. Judge Milichamp recessed for “Bill Grogan’s Goat.”

We can’t be certain how aware the three surviving members were of the additional members they had accumulated. They continued to appear absorbed by the harmony, as if their four other senses had each lent all of their capacity to the auditory sense. They hadn’t sung like this in years, not since the Piper Cub went down, really not since several years before that, if ever. And they had never sung “Bill Grogan’s Goat.” They didn’t know where that came from. But on that day, as the morning grew towards noon and the sun rose higher in the sky, and as song filled all of that space, they only knew one thing- they were to keep singing.

And so the three surviving members led their growing group of now 20 singers, along with a good part of the Community in tow, through the streets that morning. Dr. Feldspar, in her Report several months later, was unable to find a coherent pattern to the route that morning after running several of the programs her then unheralded Assistant, Bob Dodd, had written. And so perhaps it will never be known exactly how the Quartet, by that time actually a choir of 32, ended up in the yard in front of the house in which Jimmy had lived.

Junior, in the magical realm somewhere between deep sleep and waking, heard distant voices, beautiful angelic voices, and was that…? Could it be? Yes, it was the words of the old favorite, “I Wouldn’t Trade the Silver in my Mother’s Hair,” that he heard. As the voices grew louder, Junior woke from his dreaming, sat up in his childhood bed, his feet hanging over the end by several inches, and looked around.

The voices were increasing in volume, like they were growing nearer, and as they reached the first chorus of “In Your Own Backyard,” Junior was drawn to them. He approached the window and pulled back the curtain. The light was blinding at first, instantly replacing the darkness the room had been shrouded in. After several moments, as Junior was again able to start to open his eyes, squinting at first, he could begin to make out a crowd in the front yard. As he opened his eyes completely and stood there in the light, what he saw gathered in the front yard was unlike anything he had ever seen. People filled the whole yard, 32 of them singing in the most perfect harmony he had ever heard, and at least, he would estimate, another hundred just standing and listening, with looks on their faces much the same as the look he imagined must have been on his own face, one of pure rapture. And in the front of all of this stood three men in red and white-striped vests, straw boater’s hats, and neatly trimmed mustaches, each with his head raised heavenward and eyes closed. Junior wasn’t even sure if they were aware of the hundred plus people behind them.

With the last note of “In Your Own Backyard” still ringing across the front yard, the three surviving members, but at first only the three surviving members, suddenly burst into the first verse of a new song. Up to this point, almost magically, as if all 32 of them had been rehearsing together for months, each song had begun without introduction, without someone yelling out, “Bill Grogan’s Goat,” or, “I Wouldn’t Trade the Silver in my Mother’s Hair,” without anyone counting off a beat, but with all the singers somehow starting in perfect unison. But now the three surviving members began to sing a number not immediately recognizable to Junior. At first, he thought it might be “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” or perhaps a slightly untraditional arrangement of “Marian the Librarian.” Scholars have argued that the song by the Quartet on this morning on the front lawn of the house in which Jimmy had lived had strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the melody and hints of “Betelehemu” in its structure, but there has never been a consensus regarding the origin of this song. And yet somehow, the other voices soon joined in. And from his window, it sounded to Junior as if the hundred who had gathered heretofore just as listeners now sang along as well.

As the notes of this strange yet somehow familiar new song rose up to the window at which he stood, Junior felt them enter. He knew he was singing but could not be sure if any sounds were coming out of him. And it was just like that that he remained, transfixed at the window. The song from outside, from the Community, was the Community. And now it was also part of him. Some of the emptiness temporarily began to fill.

As the song ended, the last note seemed to ring on, and Junior wondered where exactly it would go when it disappeared. As he thought about it and really listened, he thought he could still hear the last note, albeit evermore faint, in the silence. And as the Quartet and their hangers-on dispersed, Junior thought he might still be able to hear that last note somewhere in the silence. And he wasn’t sure anymore when the music ended and when the silence began. Or even if there was a difference.

But it wasn’t just Smiley Keyes or the song by the Barbershop Quartet. It wasn’t just the sunsets or the tiny hairs on Peng’s forearms. It was all of these and it was everything. It was each raindrop, by themselves inconsequential, landing together to form the puddle in Jimmy’s Spot, into which Junior peered to see in return a fluid form of himself. The puddle would eventually dry up and become part of the earth. It was the cacophonous individual sounds of the crickets blending as one to create the droning hum that whispered, “It’s okay to rest now,” to Junior as he lied in his childhood bed. It was Jimmy’s colleague, Tyco McBrewster, whom Junior had never before met but whom Junior knew to have counted Jimmy as much a friend as a colleague, and whom Junior would eventually turn to for professional advice that was simultaneously knowledgeable, empowering, reassuring, and endearing. It was in Tyco’s voice that Junior heard the voice he had heard in his imaginings of the future with Jimmy, only it was being spoken through a different instrument. It was the fulfillment of a void. But it was a void that didn’t so much happen to Junior as Junior let happen to himself. And what filled the void was always there, ready to fill the space when the time came, like a bud so small it is all but invisible. What Junior felt happening in the Community was always happening. It had just been diluted over time. But now the intent behind all of the things that took place day after day as long as the days kept going- the muted sound of the pine forest covered in fresh snow, Mrs. Danticoat waving to the children from the end of her lane, the red bark of the trees in the fading sun, the twists in a conversation with Mr. Sauers, was reflected in a moment. And the same force that made the Community a community day-in and day-out now thrust itself on Junior in a highly concentrated dose and with a power and glory unlike anything he had heretofore experienced. Junior was enveloped in an embroidered quilt.

And now as Junior stood on the bank with the sun setting behind him and watched the ashes float through the air and drift gently down the stream, he no longer wondered where Jimmy was. He was scattered everywhere. He isn’t the bird, but the space under the bird’s wings as it soars across the sky. Not necessarily sun or flower, but the photosynthesis. He isn’t the note, so much as the chord. Just like he isn’t the person, so much as the community. Jimmy hadn’t gone anywhere. He had gone everywhere.

Suddenly, there is a scent in my nose that makes everything around me irrelevant: the perfume of the first girl who was ever foolish enough to have sex with me. I had been fingering through the latest contribution of Desmond Morris an instant ago, but now I am assaulted with wafts of that far too sweet, girlish, nonsensical scent; like a mixture of lavender, cinnamon, and citronella. I shove the book back into the shelf and spin around, startling an old man in a tweed hat behind me, but I do not see the culprit. She must have just walked by, distributed her scent and moved along.

My eyes dart to both sides and see too many women browsing, but none have the correct vector to have just passed me. But where would she go smelling like Jen the First? The romance section? The homeopathy section ? The self-help section? Inexorable focus floods over me again and decides there is nothing more important in the History of Ever than finding that scent. But which way, left or right? Up the escalator or down the stairs? Through the coffee shop where the trail is sure to vanish, cloaked amid decaf eggnog lattes and mochaccinos? Or to another neighborhood of the store entirely, where they sell CDs and tote bags?

And who would choose to be such an anachronism, anyway!? Who would be so out of time and out of sense to seize a smell resting safely elsewhere in my head to where it could only bring befuddlement and tremendous temporal distress? And it has already happened: the smell infiltrates my nostrils, tunneling into my brain and bursting my long lost Jen-lobe, splattering previously forgotten sensations (and Jen-sations) over the restrained upholstery of my brain. And now it is as if I can smell a host of other smells unavailable to the shelf-dwellers and the Yuletide browsers: surprisingly vivid de-flowering smells. The smell of an aroused woman that at first struck me as unspeakable but now… it reminds me of some of the few truly happy moments of my life. And, of course, following immediately on the tail of contentment, I remember regret. I so prefer it when the Lobe of General Sexual Experience explodes; with a broader canvas, it is harder to fish out a regret to fixate on—to fix.

I was a terrible lover back then. Not that I was expected to be a master, but it is discomforting to think of how clueless I was. I was so excited to simply have SEX that any additional concerns with quality or care or duration were unfathomable. But now I can’t stop myself from looking back and berating my younger self with “back seat” lovemaking like a backseat driver, always screaming “turn left.”

So I turn left and flare out my nostrils like a cowbell, a net to catch the Jen-smell. I pass a woman a few years younger than me in a short tartan skirt. She smells faintly of CK One. I pass a girl in gypsy dress who smells of nag champa, cranberries, and Ivory soap. I pass a co-ed with Cleopatra hair and a nose ring. She…she smells of vanilla body cream, but I press on, nonetheless. Five steps later, the terror that maybe I had gone the wrong way is nearly smothering, but still, I proceed deeper into the store, into the biography section.

The trail has gone thin; I smell only dust and paper and binding glue. My heart and my lungs flop like pancakes as I exhale in despair. I chose the wrong direction. I simply can’t tolerate this world with so many turns and no road signs. I sit down on a step ladder to gather my mind. Must remember the details, must be sure I do the right thing next time around.

And this is sickest thing about me; I’ve never truly rid myself of the belief that I will have the opportunity to go back and correct my mistakes, all of my mistakes, regardless of how hard I might try to re-train and re-condition myself to its impossibility. But, on the other hand, I wonder how anyone can go on if life really is live, with no re-takes and no eight second delay. How can anyone just accept that the mistakes we make stay there, mocking us until we die, possibly of some very large mistake in our future?

The smell has forced me to sort through my irrepressible expectation that this life is only a dry run. I think I can blame this quirk on my mother, as that seems to be tradition in this country. It has to do with the God that she gave me.

Nominally my family was Catholic, but I think my parents opted for that only after my grandmother made it clear it would kill her if her grandchildren were brought up as Godless as Sputnik. So I think they simply chose the religion they “knew,” but my mother, in particular, couldn’t rectify all the mysticism and incense and intermittent stigmati and novenas with the idea of an infinite, benign and omniscient creator.

She explained to me at an early age that the conventional representations of God and Heaven were just kitsch so that our primitive minds could begin to comprehend what lay beyond. She knew she needed to do this, not just for her own conscience, but because she knew the cartoon representations of Heaven were never going to meet my standards for eternal reward. Standing on clouds, playing harps, looking the same except for gigantic pigeon wings, seemed more like a punishment than a gift and certainly torture if it extended to infinity. If Heaven, the lynchpin of the whole damned moral system, was to be a true reward it simply had to be something so unique, so satisfying, so perfect that we would be foolish little pigeons, indeed, not to seek it.

But Mom stayed mum on what Heaven was like, preferring to pretend that she knew but wouldn’t tell me, but all the while teasing me with this thought: “Do you think you can imagine what Heaven is like? He can do anything, remember?” So I was left with this mother of all puzzlers, bigger by far than what my Christmas presents would be: What was in store for me at the end of it all? What afterworld would be so fantastic to justify a life of dreary righteousness?

First, as I progressed through the lower grades, I imagined Heaven must be where God made you a peer. Omnipotent, omniscient, very tall, etc. His equal and confidant. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? But this idea always kept falling apart.

Why would God make me and everyone else omnipotent? Wouldn’t that threaten his power base? Wasn’t it a little sick that my Heaven required me to be a deity? And what could a human mind do with omnipotence, anyway? After making an entire galaxy out of Ovaltine and dental floss half the population would be fresh out of ideas.

I used to imagine the tale of a newly-minted god, given omnipotence after death, standing a thousand times as large as the entire known universe, looking around him with inebriating awe. But after exhausting a billion years of thought in an instant, which he could then erase, and re-create, and re-do backwards with talking ponies playing parts of all the main characters, he finally becomes so detached, so bored and frustrated he destroys himself (poof!). Omnipotence always ended in suicide when I thought about it too much (which was always) and perhaps that was where God went, that night He slipped out and never came back. Or was that Dad? And if so does that mean it was God who kept stealing Mom’s scotch?

Regardless, I needed my question answered. So I developed an unsophisticated idea: a heaven worth its salt had to be a place where you (as an individual created by God) name your own unique prize. Whatever you want. No hassle for the deity.

It was so simple, so sensible. When we die God would give us what we wanted, He wouldn’t decide for us what Heaven should be. Free will was humanity’s special characteristic and He wouldn’t abandon it when handing out our gifts. But if this was true, I needed to be prepared. I needed to know at the drop of a hat what I would wish for, just in case I was struck by a stray bullet or incinerated in a 4th of July hamburger catastrophe (I was equally worried about both back then).

From that moment on, my neurosis with past offenses, imperfections and asymmetries became an obsession. Instead of letting go of painful moments I had to pick through them, study them, to find the moment I could have made the other choice. I scrutinized every detail of every mistake so I would not be caught asking for cookies or a nice car at the pearly gates. I wanted to fix everything, live my life over substituting every wrong choice with the perfect one, every uncomfortable pause replaced with a brilliant quip, every crush I was aware of too late with a torrid affair, and every stalled checkout lane I chose with the fastest one. And my God, my sensible God, would have to let me if He really loved me as much as all those dour catholic school teachers promised me He did.

And even after I eased into godlessness and I could declare to the altar and to the moon that I was only an agnostic because I couldn’t disprove his existence, this hope remained inextinguishable; A tool I could not abandon on the off chance, in some way, I might be right one day.

But just as I think this a shadow of the scent returns. I leap to my feet in front of a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, snorting the air ever more ferociously for Jen’s perfume. A blonde streaks by, crossing the shelves only an aisle away. I just catch a glimpse of her backpack, it has a peace symbol, a marijuana leaf, and three of those dancing Grateful Dead bears sewn into the fabric. Jen the First had those bears ironed into her jeans, plastered to her bedroom wall, and stuck to the bumper of her shiny, young Volkswagen. I try to remind myself I am not actually chasing Jen, but the all-consuming specter of future regrets propels me forward, after that girl.

And maybe that was Jen? Perhaps Jens, like leprechauns, do not age? Perhaps when I catch her she will turn around in unblemished Jen-ness, still 16 years old. Just like the first time I saw her: in a close fitting long-sleeved tie-dye, with wooden beads around her neck and incongruous olive drab military pants held up with a braided leather belt. Her hair was always long and a perfectly straight strawberry-blonde and her lips glistened from peach-flavored gloss.

I had no pre-conceptions of what a “deadhead” was then. I knew nothing of their legendarily poor hygiene, their razor-aversion, and their myth that hair was “self-washing” if you let it go long enough. To me “deadheads” meant rich girls with perfumed blouses, manicured hair, skin as clear as a lake, and legs shaven and toned from running track.

The first time I saw her I gave up, she was out of my awkward and brooding league. Her always slightly tanned skin seemed to vibrate with sex, and sex was that maddening goal that only seemed more unattainable when this glistening creature walked into my friend’s living room looking for the “guy who sells mushrooms.” And though that wasn’t me or my friend who I was sitting with watching re-runs of Battle of the Planets (in willful defiance of the age-categorization), she stayed and talked with us, with me, smoking cigarettes and giggling, telling stories of road trips and dead shows and parties where she drank too much and about this girl in her class who actually got to fuck a Grateful Dead roadie. To which I said “I’m sure he was. You know, I’m one of the Dead’s roadies?”

My joke was meant to be dismissive, but the soon-to be Jen the First, maneuvered her eyes directly on to mine. I fumbled a breath. It was a look I had never before received; it was focused right on me with an animal intensity that reduced me to a meat dish or a play thing. I stifled the exhilaration bubbling up from my belly and tried to retain some cool. My disinterest had to be what drew her and I was not about to modify any approach that worked. As I dismissed her further, I mumbled under my breath and worried if it was even possible to proceed without ruining this astonishing possibility.

And I see her now! The girl with the backpack. Her back is still to me, but only a few feet away in the poetry section fiddling with an anthology of the beats. As I inch closer, I have to remind myself this isn’t her, this is not only not Jen the First, but it probably isn’t even the girl who brought that scent into this book store and initiated this most recent frenzy. It couldn’t be, it’s too unlikely, I had turned the wrong way, it was all in error…

But now I am in the aura of her body and I can smell it, hints of that conjuring fragrance. I step closer; it is unquestionably Jen’s perfume, the lavender, the cinnamon, the bug candle. As I edge forward I see that the girl’s hair is perfect and straight, her small body looks as skinny as a 16 year old, and like Jen, she comes up only slightly above my collar bones. My hand presses itself ever so slightly onto her shoulder strap. My heart jumps as she turns her head around, casting more of that addictive smell outwards.

The girl I am looking at has a pretty, angular face; her forehead is furrowed with concern and her face in a hesitant smirk.

“Can I help you?” She asks, small-ly.

I muster a head shake and apologize to this possible Jen who is sadly not Jen the First. “Very sorry. Thought you were someone else,” I say and she turns her head, wearily, back to the bookshelf. But in the following instant, while it is still acceptable for me to be close enough to her to suck in that smell, I bask in the vividness of the memories it gives.

It brings back the illicit moments in Jen the First’s mother’s room under the blue light of an unwatched TV screen. The shaking fingers feasting on the strange contours of a smooth and strong body, and kissing her with every muscle in my neck. And that smell, that immature and ecstatic aroma, has made this image clear and crisp, in full-digitized color and I think of each stroke, of each peck and nibble and lick. I am with Jen the First again in a frenzy, as if we only had seconds left before our youth ran out. She pins my head to the pillow and opens her eyes wide as if to let her wild ness seep out and drip into my eyes. And I swear from a shivering in my back a few drops do. But before I can drift back into an uninterrupted moment of heat and skin and unbounded newness, I have to intrude on the memory and glare at myself from a few meters distance and think about how differently I will do it next time.

I. Faith

Three weeks before your twenty-fifth birthday you visit a well-known New York hospital to see a specialist, a kindly old blue-eyed doctor who is so pleased to meet you, who inserts a long thin needle into your throat efficiently, apologetically, looking for evidence of a malfunction you feel confident he will not find.

The odds are against it: you are young, you are healthy. More importantly (in your view) you are an intuitive person; if something were wrong you would have suspected a problem, felt a nagging unease.

In twenty five years you have seen ample reason not to trust your body, with its eruptions of acne, of canker sores the size of raisins on your tongue, its sensitive skin that scars and bruises and flushes and burns altogether too easily, its untrainable lust for the wrong man, who is regularly updated but never fundamentally changed.

You have no reason to believe the God you were raised on exists, reason not to, even, because of your many unanswered prayers to Him. But these are selfish prayers, about men and work, foolish prayers for world peace, and God’s failure to answer may not actually count against Him. (A stronger argument against Him, against His benevolence, at least, may be found both your grandmothers dying, both your grandfathers leaving, when your parents were children.)

And yet in your own inchoate way you believe in your self-call it instinct, a daimon that will warn you if anything truly awful, truly extraordinary, truly important were looming. Anything, for example, potentially fatal in a part of your body you were unaware even existed until three weeks ago, a small gland shaped like a butterfly—or so the doctor says.

II. Cinnamon Rolls

After the appointment you return with your friend Stefan to the office. You buy Stefan a cinnamon roll, the only decent food served in the company cafeteria apart from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You buy two black coffees, and then another cinnamon roll so that you do not have to share with Stefan, as you usually do, in the interest of staying slim. You had gotten up very early, riding the subway a long way up to the hospital, riding the subway a long way back to work, instead of walking as usual to the office, and you are hungry.

The cinnamon roll is not the best you have ever tasted, nor the worst. It is simply an average cinnamon roll, drizzled with the right amount of sugar glaze and free of annoying raisins, and you see no reason to savor it, especially.

You brought Stefan with you to the hospital because he is a good friend, kind and sympathetic, an ideal friend, really, sharing even your taste in men—with one crucial difference, as you both jokingly say. Choosing him spared you the humiliation of calling the boyfriend with whom your breakup is so fresh you forget to label him “ex,” or your former best friend, of involving your family.

Your parents worry enough about everything already, and, since the doctor is going to give you a clean bill of health, you see no reason to tell them.

III. Recognition

Five or six days later—you’re not sure how many, exactly; you have not been especially careful to count them, since you are not worried—the specialist calls you at work. Courteous as ever, he provides the names of one or two surgeons, recommending that you contact them immediately.

You do not feel anything as you hang up the phone and tell your boss why you must go home, as you collect your handbag and jacket, take the elevator downstairs and walk out of the building into the windy autumn afternoon.

There are so many tasks ahead: appointments to make, medical literature to read, family members to call. You feel terribly worried about telling your parents that you have failed this test, this simple test that counts more than any other exam you have ever taken, all those finals you lost sleep over all those years in school to win your A’s. You are terribly worried about telling your sister, who lives so far away, and your brother, who will worry for you.

Your mind jumps from worry to worry, turns over the unfamiliar names of the surgeons, during your walk home.

It simply cannot be; you sense nothing.

When at last you unlock your apartment door you cannot comprehend having arrived here along familiar streets, having passed the same bedraggled deli flowers and laundry-by-the-pound places, the same cheap Chinese takeouts, when the one thing you had always believed in, beyond God and your body, has just been proven false.

Even more than the diagnosis, it is this, the recognition that you are no different than anyone else, that leaves you stunned and reeling, picking up the phone and setting it down again, unable to remember even the number you memorized as a small child, the same seven digits your parents have never changed.

IV. Physical Fitness

Before leaving for your parents’ house, you fret over what to pack. The length of your stay in the house where you grew up will be determined in part by the diagnosis made during your surgery.

You feel relieved in a way to leave the dim windowless living room, the bedroom with small barred windows and bad memories of arguments with Mr. Fresh Ex. Also you know, in a secret unspoken way, that your return restores the family. Your sister has married, become a mother, moved three thousand miles away, your brother has married, will be a parent soon, too, unimpeachable evidence of passage into adulthood, sanctioned even by the Bible in that verse so popular in wedding ceremonies, “you must leave your father’s house.”

Not you, though, not you, the baby, the best hope; your body must stand in for all three. You are frightened, but not at all surprised, when your brother tells you later that your parents believe this illness means you will have to give up your apartment and move back with them indefinitely.

V. Tightrope

You decide to wallow, not in self-pity, but in information, as if you can master an illness by outsmarting it. You spend an hour sitting on the floor in the Health section of a humungous bookstore, poring over thyroid books. You buy one with a reassuring title, a reassuring author, who survived.

At home again you spread out the sheaf of medical textbook pages your brother-in-law the doctor, your friend who works for the medical publisher faxed you. You learn a word for the curable kind, papillary, that sounds like a French butterfly, and a word for a rarer, more aggressive strain, medullary, that sounds like a monster out of Greek mythology.

Your initial test was inconclusive, resembling both the butterfly and the monster. You will not know more until after the surgery.

VI. Meeting of the Minds

Two days before the surgery, your mother meets you at the train station in the town where you grew up, waiting in the car while you walk down from the platform. When, as expected, she immediately begins to detail how much your diagnosis upsets her, how stressed she is, you have a strategy. You open the folder you have brought with you and hand her a pamphlet, telling her politely (as it suggested) that this is your situation. She must respect this fact, discussing the subject or not as you choose, and supporting you.

Startled, she agrees to your request. This is the first time in your life you have ever been able to say this to her. The moment passes quickly.

The gears grind as she restarts the car, then pulls away from the curb while you fiddle with the radio, then decide to review your pre-surgery to-do list. Among the many things you need are pajamas for the hospital, since the ratty old mismatched boxers and T-shirts you wear at home when you are single are deemed inappropriate—a rare meeting of the minds on the subject of fashion-by both your mother and you.

You spend a long time in what passes for a lingerie section in the old-fashioned department store she chooses. This store seems to specialize in voluminous flannel nightgowns and floor-length, high-collared robes. Wandering among the racks you envision your lingerie drawer at home: bits of barely there black silk, of red silk, not meant to be worn for long.

You find nothing in the department store, nothing at all to your liking. But something must be acquired and you cannot think of a better place nearby.

When your mother chooses for you, an elaborate ensemble with a nightshirt, nightgown, pajama pants, slippers and matching robe, you acquiesce politely. You do not mind the fabric or pattern, soft, dove-gray cotton adorned with inoffensive pale yellow flowers. But even in a size small every piece of the set hangs loosely off your body. You feel like a child during the shopping trip: she drives you to and from the mall, selecting the set and paying for it, throwing in plain white cotton underwear and warm woolly socks, things she is sure you also need; and you feel like a child when you try on the pajamas again later that night in the bathroom you shared with her and your sister for so many years, a child waiting to grow into her clothes.

VII. Into the Mystic

When she learns of your illness, your former best friend loans you a Scottish wool throw blanket that you are expected to wash and return to her later, and gives you three CDs of Van Morrison music she has copied from her CD collection. The two of you used to listen to Van Morrison on aimless summer days, Saturdays full of longing and illicit alcohol, in high school and college. The two songs you both liked best were Brown Eyed Girl and Into the Mystic. She also listens to these songs with her roommates in Brooklyn, a close-knit group of her college friends who—for reasons you acknowledge but cannot alter—have replaced you.

After bringing these gifts, your former best friend does not visit again. Since you carried very little on the train, forgetting completely about music, you listen to the Van Morrison CDs she made for you. They are not as good as the other Van Morrison albums you already own. Actually some of the songs annoy you; on these albums his boozy extended solos seem a little too self-indulgent, a little too unrestrained. But you listen to the albums obsessively anyway, over and over, as if they were something you once loved.

VIII. Health Food

Your father goes to work as usual on the day of your surgery. Without ever discussing it with anyone, you have known since the beginning he would not be there. Your brother says that after hearing the news, your father told him it could not be true; you eat health food.

His absence and this comment seem to make your brother angry on your behalf—a response you recognize as valid in way, though the entire sequence hardly seems connected with you.

IX. Room for Waiting

Your former best friend can still be called upon to serve a constructive purpose. After all, she has known your mother more than twenty years, almost as long and as well as she has known you. Since your sister lives three thousand miles away, and you are holding your brother in reserve for follow-up tests, someone else must accompany you and your mother on the morning of the surgery.

The three of you arrive at the hospital early—too early, so early there is time for your former best friend to talk with your mother in a claustrophobic, pastel-colored waiting room, a room that seems to you like a transition between life and death, a place where color begins to leach from the world, while you sit silently.

X. Good at Heart

Now, in the waiting room, seated on a wooden, hard-backed chair connected to the one your mother sits on, the one occupied by your former best friend, you decide to try reading. Bringing this highbrow literary magazine seemed a sane and reasonable decision, the clearest possible sign to yourself that even though God has seen fit to send you here on your twenty-fifth birthday, you are not coming unhinged.

You have no interest in fiction at the moment, none, nor cartoons, but find yourself drawn in to an angry essay about people with coarse sensibilities and coarser minds who, the author charges, have misappropriated the legacy of Anne Frank.

This author speaks with a terrifying clarity, a pure undiluted rage. She knows Anne Frank better than everyone else, knows that had Anne carried the famous diary with her to Bergen-Belsen she would have, in anger and despair, stricken the line, “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” this errant line that readers in search of a happy ending instead of a tragedy cherish as emblematic, ignoring what should be an obvious truth.

Somewhere in the farthest corner of your mind, an almost silent voice disagrees with the author’s self-righteousness, with her essay’s central thesis; but your counterargument is only a feeling, flimsy and unformed, easily crushed by her highly articulate, erudite rage. Who are you, anyway, to disagree?

You leave the magazine on the chair—taking care first to remove the label with your name and address—before following the nurse who has called you to change into a hospital gown for the surgery.

XI. A Secret

Mr. Fresh Ex visits you in the hospital, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, carrying a large bunch of brightly colored, helium-filled “Get Well” balloons.

This simple act redeems many complex mistakes, making you almost happy.

It’s too bad you look terrible, having spent two hours longer than expected in surgery, for reasons that have not yet been explained. And, of course, your parents and brother and sister-in-law surround you, your father having decided to put in an appearance now that you have survived the operation.

By design none of them met Mr. Fresh Ex during the six months you and he dated. When he walks in with the balloons your parents mistake him, at first, for a delivery boy.

This is the first time you have spoken to him since that last, fatal argument. The introductions are awkward, and he does not stay long.

After he is gone you tie the balloons to the edge of the metal bed frame and lie back to look at them. A kind of gladness fills you that he cared enough to find out the surgery date and location. It pleases you also that he is not what anyone in your family expected, and so, despite meeting them, he remains in a way special, a secret still.

XII. Heroines

Here is a photograph of you, dressed in your blue zip-front wool sweater, holding your sister’s baby. He is round-headed, round-eyed, all liveliness and plump curiosity, twisting in your thin arms to stare at the camera. Appearing tranquil, you are smiling, the peaceful smile of one who has accepted death, who will willingly surrender her place in this world to make way for healthy new babies. Your skin is pale, your body lean and frail-seeming, as if you were a descendant in a long line of distinguished young consumptive heroines like the ones from the novels of your girlhood: Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, Beth in Little Women.

It is the kind of photograph the people you leave behind would frame to remember you by, the little boy wandering past it occasionally on his way to steal quarters from the loose change box his father stores next to the photographs on his dresser, stopping to examine the image, even wondering, once in a while, about the woman who died many years ago while he was still just a baby. You would be smiling down, bathed in white light, willing him to come clean.

Like many photographs this image is misleading. Rather than acceptance, your unruffled expression signifies exhaustion. At the time this picture is taken, you are still unable to replace your natural thyroid hormones with a synthetic version, and have been spending eighteen hours a day in your gray flowered pajamas, asleep in your childhood bed. Your doctors have withheld the replacement hormone for weeks while they strive to figure out what it was exactly, this never-before-seen grotesquerie they cut from inside of you.

XIII. Surgical Pathology
The surgeon furnishes you with a copy of your lab report. It is printed from a primitive computer program, in short choppy chunks interspersed with computer commands that make it clear your case is one among thousands stored in a vast database. The report contains words you know, and, like any foreign language, words that sound familiar but have unexpected meanings. You smile at “gross description,” wondering if doctors joke about this phrase, or if they are inured to its childish humor. You glance through the report several times, unable, for some reason, to read it through completely. Your eye keeps catching unfamiliar terms, focusing on the computer commands.

Ultimately, the surgeon translates for you. Not in words, but a picture she draws with a ballpoint pen on the bottom of the last page. Her rough rendering seems straight out of a game you have played with your family, sketched charades. A circle the size of a quarter, ringed by a dozen smaller circles-guess what this picture means?

No need to guess; the surgeon interprets for you. Perhaps before the surgery one of the outer circles slipped away to ride into your bloodstream, spreading throughout your body. She and the specialist, the expert pathologist in Philadelphia who was so thankful to review such an interesting case agree: more tests are necessary.

XIV. Radioactivity

After a trip to the hospital’s nuclear medicine department for round one, stage one of the new set of tests, you phone Stefan. “I’m radioactive,” you say brightly into his voicemail box. As if this was an amusing, new development, as if you have not always been toxic to some degree, as if close personal contact with you has never previously been dangerous or risky.

On your way out, you take a pamphlet designed to answer your questions in a soothing manner. It is written in dumbed-down language and illustrated with cartoons.

You are not sure which of these devices bothers you more: the light-hearted, overly simplistic explanations of why you shouldn’t pick up any babies or sleep next to anyone, or the cartoons.

You decide it is the cartoon woman. From her hairstyle alone you can tell that unlike you, at age twenty-five she already has a husband, a family of her own who will be directly, deeply affected by her inability to share a bed, a goodnight kiss or hug after swallowing two pills containing radioactive iodine. If, after she has avoided iodized salt and intimate physical contact with anyone, eaten all of her meals off disposable plates during a three-day period as the iodine spread throughout her body to bond with any errant thyroid tissue, and the scan reveals an incurable metastasis, her death will be a tragedy.

Taking out a ballpoint pen, you begin to deface her image, adding a Mohawk, jaunty raised eyebrows, fangs. Then the reality catches up to you: radioactive iodine is at this very instant spreading through your body, leaching out into the world through your urine, saliva and sweat, and when you meet Stefan for a salt-free dinner later you must remember not to touch him.

XV. Better

You wake in an unfamiliar room, feeling as if you are floating.
Pale sunlight slants across the painted tin ceiling, close enough to touch.
Shabby blue sheets and the sound of snoring.
The man has long dark hair which fans across his pillow. His back is turned toward
you.

In a rush the night returns: his calloused finger tips between your shoulder blades in the bar, tracing your dragon tattoo. Ending up here, on your knees in the kitchen of this crummy walk-up studio. Falling off the ladder the first time you tried climbing it.

He actually believed it was your birthday, and bought all those drinks for you.

You feel glad the sunrise woke you. Better to leave before the inevitable awkward breakfast, the phone number he might try to give you. You always use one you can rattle off like it’s real: Stefan’s old number, that’s been disconnected since he moved.

Quietly, so guitar guy does not stir, you climb down the ladder and grab your clothes, dressing quickly. You find your earrings and your bracelet, all four silver rings, arranged on his battered coffee table.

Good thing you do not have your boots on yet when you step on the choker. This you pick up and slip into your coat pocket. The clasp is a little tight, the cascading strands of beaded silver a little too heavy on your neck. No need to wear it now.

The door unlatches easily, quietly. Even after you took off the choker, even when he was kissing you, stroking you, lying above you, he did not notice the scar. None of them do.

You let yourself out, not caring that the door slams—you are down the stairs and gone. Partly you feel like a successful thief, but mostly you do not feel anything as you step into the empty early morning.

Everyone neglected to tell me that I had a house where my heart ought to be. Maybe they were unaware. Perhaps, on the ultrasound screen, it appeared as a tiny womb within my chest, an open throbbing gash, a wound. It will heal shut, just as any injury, the doctor must have assured my parents. Though it may leave a scar.

Only later did it coalesce into a house. The edges hardening into roofline, window panes, joists, scabs of shingles, little bone studs for framing, a structure pushing back against the press of lungs and muscles, holding open the space within. A humming cartilage refrigerator, kidney couches, translucent membrane curtains, goblets gleaming as though carved from the lens of an eye. Mostly the space though, enough room for the cool salty breath of the sea to glide through.

Then, a garden began to grow. Soil glistening with dew filling the beds between my ribs. Serpentine mint, poppies with sunny opiate smiles winding closed at dusk, lavender stalks tickling my esophagus. Dwarf apple and lemon and peach, heavy with pungent fruit. Winding blackberries intertwining with bushy lantana, red sunset conglomerate flowers. Above all the heady scents, opulent frivolous spring, fresh clean rot, pollen trickling through my sinuses. I began to sneeze at inopportune moments, such as while driving or shaking hands.

Beyond the tangling garden a dark forest grew. Incense cedar, butterscotch pine, Monterey cypress, twisting curly-barked madrones, spreading live oaks laden with acorns. Redwoods sprouted upwards and their sharp points waved in the cold fog that swathed my brain. On the forest floor lush bracken ferns unfurled from furry fiddleheads. Weeping streams flowed over sandy creek beds, wet water-smoothed stones. Indian paintbrush, columbines, leopard lily, drooping flowers above the flow.

I began ingesting defoliants to keep the weeds back.

One day a little girl came up to the house. She pushed open the door and called into the empty house, I’m hungry. The cartilage refrigerator hummed, but there was nothing inside when she opened it. The cupboards were likewise bare except for a fine bone dust filling the cereal boxes. She called and called but nobody answered. Her voice horse, she threw the boxes of dust on the floor, smashed the bone china. She threw a rock through the blank and glass-eyed television.

After she left, a little boy came down the stairs from the attic. He looked around at the mess. Exhilarating and terrible. Who will clean this up? he thought. I can’t, I’m too tired. He curled up on the kidney couch, weeping, the sun setting into the forest outside.

For months, I slept badly, my heart palpitating in raging nightmare. All good dreams broken over her knee.

In the morning the little boy woke up. The sun was gleaming in the dew on the lily leaves, in the mouths of smiling flowers. His mouth was dry and cracked. The surfaces of the house were covered in a fine layer of dust, coating the crescents of glass from the broken TV, a film on the membrane cushions of the couch. The boy stood up, his limbs creaking and went outside, surveyed the garden, gone riotous and unruly and tangled, mingled so he didn’t know what was what. Blackberry canes lancing from the honeysuckle. A tomato vine emerging from the leaves of the lemon tree, bearing its incongruous fruit. Everything seemed unapologetically dirty, clean dirty, dirt everywhere, things growing out of the shit.

The boy went into the garden, sat down amidst the plants, ate some leaves of mint. Then he went back inside and looked at the mess. It looked much better in the morning light. Who cares? he said to himself. He scraped the top of the piles of bone flour into a bowl and mixed it with some salty water from the tap. He baked the dough in the fire place, over a flame he stoked himself from some juniper twigs. Then he took his bannock in a little leather bag, and went outside. He picked a bunch of blackberries and took them with him in his sack. He walked off into the forest. He ate his lunch by the side of the rushing stream, and he lay back on the bank and looked up through the trees, the light sifting through the wide gossamer leaves of a maple. I wonder who that girl was? He thought.

Even while he was attacking his friend Walter Bob Feston, practically accusing him of being possessed by the Devil, Jackie Barron knew that he was out of control, sounding like a revival preacher he once heard, calling down hellfire and damnation. It was not like him.

Jackie went to church, of course. Going to church and loving Jesus was taken for granted in Cherokee, Tennessee; it was like eating supper, or loving your mother. Being a good person just naturally meant going to Sunday School in the church basement at nine o’clock on Sunday morning, then going upstairs for the sermon at ten o’clock, and—this was mostly women—going to Prayer Meeting on Wednesday night.

Jackie did all that, but he sure never went around talking about God and Jesus all the time – or any of the time.

He didn’t have a clear picture of Heaven—angels and harps and clouds didn’t really sound like all that much fun—but he had a clear picture of Hell in his mind. Brother Jennings preached about Hell a lot, and the way he described it—just as clear as if he’d been there—it was all horrible fires that burned your feet, and having sores all over your face, and everybody screaming “I’m sorry!” after it was already too late. Jackie knew he would do pretty near anything not to go there.

Still, that didn’t really explain why Jesus and the Devil and everything just seemed to take him over that day at Walter Bob’s house. He’d gone there to trade comic books, the way he always did. He had read his new Captain Marvel and Submariner and The Torch enough times, and he knew Walter Bob would have the new Superman, and Plastic Man, and Wonder Woman—who was darn good for a girl, although Jackie wouldn’t ever want anybody to see him buying one.

When they finished, Walter Bob didn’t want Jackie to leave. Jackie knew that was because Walter Bob didn’t have too many friends—maybe not any others. He was funny-looking and he was the only kid in sixth grade—maybe the only kid in town —who wore glasses, and the other kids made fun of him.
Jackie thought he was okay, and sometimes they played checkers together. The truth was, Jackie kinda liked being somebody’s only friend, and he liked it that Walter Bob looked up to him—the way Jackie looked up to Eddie Garrett, who was popular and tough and already doing stuff with girls.

“Wait a minute,” Walter Bob said. “Don’t go yet. I heard a real good joke from my cousin and I’ll tell it to you. You want to hear it?”

“Okay,” Jackie said. ” Go ahead.”

Walter Bob, very excited, snickered through his nose and said, “It’s really a riddle, and this is what it is: What was the last thing Jesus said on the cross?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“He said ‘Jesus Christ that stings!’”

Walter Bob laughed his laugh that sounded like hiccupping. Jackie didn’t laugh. He knew you weren’t supposed to make jokes about Jesus. Walter Bob knew it too, because he took one look at the darkness on Jackie’s face and stopped laughing.

“Walter Bob … how could you tell that? You go to church, your mama sings in the choir … and you took the name of the Lord in vain. You made fun of Jesus!”

Jackie could tell by the look on his face that Walter Bob knew he was in trouble, but he was surprised by the panic in his friend’s voice.

“I didn’t think about it that way, Jackie. I’m sorry! I shouldn’t of told that, and I never will again! You’re not mad at me, are you? Don’t be mad.”

Jackie knew what it was like to be afraid of what grownups might say about something, but this was the first time anybody ever looked at him and looked scared.

It felt strange. It didn’t feel bad.

“Will you tell your mother and Brother Jennings or do I have to?” he said. “If you don’t tell – and I don’t, either – it’s the same as lying. I can’t lie for you, Walter Bob – that’s a sin, too. And I don’t know if we can be friends any more. Maybe you should just take back your comic books and give me mine. You said a joke about Our Lord Jesus Christ!”

There were tears behind Walter Bob’s thick glasses now. He got up from the washtub he’d been sitting on and fell on his knees next to Jackie.

“Please don’t be mad at me, Jackie! I’m sorry! I’ll beg God to forgive me; I’ll pray on my knees all night; I’ll put all my allowance money and my lawn-mowing money in the church basket next Sunday. Please don’t tell! I’ll do whatever you think I ought to do. I’m ashamed, Jackie!”

Jackie had never known a feeling like this before. Somebody was begging him for something. Somebody was on his knees to him. He could dispense mercy. Or not.

“Get on up, Walter Bob,” he said finally. “If you beg Jesus to forgive you … and you read a chapter of the Bible every night … I know He will. He’s merciful. I maybe can’t be your friend for a while, but I won’t tell anybody. And you can keep those comic books. You just need to be all clean with God before the next ones come out.”

Walter Bob, his swallowed sobs jerking his chest in tiny spasms, took Jackie’s hand and held it tightly. “I promise!” he said. “I hope I die if I ever say anything like that again. Just please don’t stop being my friend. Please.”

Jackie put his free hand on the other boy’s shoulder and said “He forgave the people who crucified Him; I know He’ll forgive you. And I will, too.”

Jackie took the comic books he had traded his for, and walked slowly home, thinking about what just happened. He was surprised because the more he thought, and remembered, the more he didn’t feel good about it any more. Not at all.

An Excerpt from Baron’s Chronicle

Here’s the thing about Luzhin: from the night we met, I knew he was not an honest person. It’s an opinion never changed, even as we became what some would call friends. There was something about him that inspired me; here was a person who came to America in the early ‘90s when he was twenty, abandoning Russia in spite of its imminent overhaul. And by the way he tells his story, you can tell Luzhin wasn’t discouraged by the abrupt, life-altering move. After all, living in Russia, as Luzhin explained it to me, was like living in a hedge maze, only without the exits. You run round and round, following every promise for change, for hope, always looking not necessarily for a way out, but just an opening. A way to something better.

After a year of living as an expatriate in Brighton Beach, Luzhin landed here in Chicago, in Ukrainian Village and was immediately taken under the wings of the older men in the community, Eastern European and Russian ex-pats. In Luzhin they saw what everyone saw in the burly Russian-possibilities. But mainly, their minds had Luzhin pegged as another fresh slab of Communist meat who didn’t speak the language and could be easily exploited. They made Luzhin a boxer, even though he hated violence. Which, incidentally, made him perfect for what he was asked to do: take dives. Here was this pick-up truck of a man with squared off shoulders and a block head who, through the workings of his counterparts, had a reputation for decimating other boxers back in Russia, where he was undefeated champion of the butcher’s market circuit. Luzhin was no fighter, but because of his training, which was purely on how to intimidate and sell his ferocity, he had the ability to shrink a man’s ego with a single glance. He took dives across the city for a year and half straight, sometimes being forced to undergo as many as ten rounds of orchestrated pugilism-lefts, uppercuts, and jabs, absorbing the pain in stride, knowing that the beatings were temporary. Because all the while in his bare, unheated studio apartment, on his own and with help from people in his neighborhood, Luzhin was learning the language, Luzhin was absorbing, Luzhin was understanding the operations behind everything, and everyone.

Once the betting world caught on to Luzhin’s strategy-even though he won a fight here and there, rigged in his favor to give him a semblance of legitimacy-his boxing career was over. But he was rewarded for his services, his character, his desire, and his loyalty to those who made a considerable amount on his year of ass beating.

There was pool hall off of Augusta that Luzhin was given to manage. It was a rough place, a melting pot of lowlifes from an array of nationalities-Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, German, sometimes even Hispanic-that clashed on a nightly basis. Luzhin was given a set of keys and free reign of power. It only took a short while for Luzhin’s ambition to create a vision of what the pool hall could be. After a few months, Luzhin hired bouncers-immigrant Russians fresh to the country like Luzhin was two years previous-who could do more than intimidate, which was all he was good for. With their help the problem starters, the drunk brawlers and the shady bookies were all cleaned out, then the dealers, then finally the drugs themselves. Better lighting was installed, and Luzhin hired an a.m. cleaning crew, more Eastern European immigrants. There was a pride Luzhin took in taking immigrants under his wing and molding them into his definition of Americans. Within two years time, there were televisions and a satellite dish-all fallen off a back of a truck-installed by friends of friends. Sports ran all day, and bets were always open, most of which were taken by Luzhin himself. A backroom, once used to store unorganized records and supplies was converted into an office. From here Luzhin kept and stowed accounts of everything that went on in the pool hall, the neighborhood, even the city. He assimilated details into his wealth of knowledge that gave him an unparalleled understanding of how things worked. People began to know Luzhin’s name and respect the Russian who came to this city with nothing and scraped his way up from punching bag to shrewd money maker who had two straightened fingers on the pulse of the entire neighborhood. Who, upon walking into the pool hall, commanded the pause of everyone there. But don’t be mistaken, Luzhin was not a member of any sort of Russian Mafia; he was much too free wheeling to follow someone else’s plans. There were ties, but no direct membership. After five years, Luzhin bought the pool hall from those associates for whom he got knocked to a pulp every third Friday or so. The purchase was a simple business transaction by that point, the memory of Luzhin as the taciturn grunt long forgotten.

Luzhin had a myriad of other endeavors in between, some pyramid schemes he ran, a venture into the meat business (purchasing and selling off entire cows), buying up other people’s debts, and some infomercial investing which I still don’t quite understand to this day. When I met him, he still owned the hall, but he was the one orchestrating dives, manipulating the way things were going to be. No, Luzhin was not by any means an honest person, and I knew this. But I followed him nonetheless.

My grandmother has $7,000 under her mattress in case she has to flee to Israel. My father won’t go to Germany, and he especially won’t buy German made ovens. I grew up in a new era, the politically correct environment of an East Coast American suburb. As a third generation Jew of an assimilated non-religious family, it was my job to forget. Not only did I think my family was crazy for holding a grudge, I had German friends.

There was a great divide between my generation and the ones that had lived through the Holocaust. It was their identity. To me, it was a history lesson. I was lucky. I grew up far away from anti-Semitic sentiment and the shtetls of Europe. It wasn’t my story to tell. I didn’t have lost relatives or scattered cousins throughout the world like other Jewish families did. We came here before the war and changed our names at Ellis Island. We assimilated quickly and focused on establishing financial security in the new country. I didn’t go to temple or fast on Yom Kipper. My culture was based on New Jersey malls and Bon Jovi. I liked it that way; we all did. I represented rebirth. We lived in a bubble where peace surrounded us and the genocide was… done. Yet, sometimes in the safety of my suburban lawn, this legacy of death would shadow me. My grandmother would yell at me for dating a non-Jew, or the TV news would report that someone had drawn a swastika on a school door. And I would realize that it wasn’t completely over.

I read “Night,” watched “Exodus” and “Schindler’s List.” I tried to dissolve the cloudy haze that had been separating me from the past. But these stories remained distant and my understanding was dim.

So when my friend (also Jewish) and I went backpacking through Europe during the summer of ’93 in our junior year of college, I was looking forward to learning more. I hoped the buildings, museums, and squares would fill in the gaps of the past to create more meaning. We wandered the European cobblestone streets looking for bits of information that might give us a better sense of what it was like to be Jewish. There weren’t many clues. We weren’t able to spot the leftover pain in their Jewish faces or fear in their posture as they walked by us.

Instead we visited all the tourist attractions that were written up in guidebooks and rated as a “must-see”: The Ann Frank house, Prague’s Jewish quarter, and Dachau. There we hoped we’d get our answers.

At the Ann Frank house, we waited in a crowd for twenty minutes on a long narrow staircase that led up to the attic to see where the little girl and her family hid. It was dark and we were packed between the walls like cattle. The woman on the step below had a big square bag with sharp edges that poked my waist. I leaned my body forward in an uncomfortable position. I turned to say something to her, but she scowled at me.

When the line began to move, the crowd pushed me up another step. At the top was a small nook with a moveable bookcase ajar like a door. Patterned paper covered all the windows. The crowd gasped. The apartment was dark and not as small as I was expecting. It was bigger than my New York apartment with enough room for four people to walk around and be comfortable. Pictures of film stars and the British Royal family remained on the walls. Brown furniture was arranged like any home. The line continued to move slowly along a narrow space defined by frayed rope. The tourists were loud and chatty, and they snuck flash pictures under a sign that read, “Please no flash photography.” I wanted to stay longer, to feel the family’s fear, but the crowd pushed me forward.

At the end was another long staircase leading down. It was also full. “Oh how horrible, how awful,” everyone said as we waited at each step to move towards the exit that emptied into the museum gift shop. My friend and I both bought a book.

In Prague, we learned about the Jewish Quarter. At one time, it had been walled-off by the Pope. Now, the ghetto had become a neighborhood of crowded museums. We stood in one based on Hitler’s “Museum of an Extinct Race.” It had been his dream to take all the Jewish relics he had pillaged and display them for everyone to see.

There were a few small white rooms, well lit with clean glass display cases that held silver menorahs, Passover plates, and mezuzahs. Each artifact had a cold, short description of its significance and how it was used.

There weren’t many visitors to this museum. It wasn’t such a draw. We all knew what menorahs looked like. They weren’t the items that needed to be seen. As I walked out, I craved for something deeper. I wanted to see the eye of the storm, to understand why Hitler had turned my people into lampshades. I wanted to see death itself; I wanted to see the lampshades.

When we got to the Old Cemetery, which was not a Holocaust site, it felt more relevant. Most of the tourists were there, crowded around a small plot of land stuffed with tombstones, surrounded by a rope. Bodies were stacked there up to twelve-layers deep dating from the Middle Ages. We walked around them in a slow line, like a conveyor belt. Stone slabs with Hebrew letters protruded from the ground, packed so close together there were more tombstones than grass. Some were tilted, some had fallen, some were leaning against each other like loose books on a shelf. The collective voice of the crowd was loud. Their cameras and flashes snapped like paparazzi, more flashes than tombstones. I took a few pictures as well and then wished I hadn’t. Small flickers of light danced on their graves. My body felt sore, as if it had been beaten.

I was excited to finally get to Germany, and in between the beer gardens and apple strudel, we went to Dachau. A backpacker in our hostel said that Auschwitz was better. He said it had more pictures and stories. He said there were huge piles of hair and shoes all taken from the dead. It did sound better. But because my friend didn’t want to go to Poland, I settled for Dachau.

The bus ride there was like a class trip. Everyone chatted about his or her experiences in Germany and how good the bratwurst was. I remember I had been away for the last episode of Cheers and another backpacker told me what had happened with Sam and Diane. That seemed so important to me at the time.

When we arrived, I had my camera ready. There wasn’t much to see inside the grounds. The square site was empty and neatly kept. The human element had been removed. Embarrassingly enough, it was a little disappointing. I walked over the pebbled paths holding onto my camera. There were a few cabins in a row. The ovens looked like narrow pizza ovens and the showers were concrete and freshly painted. The barbed wire had been taken down.

A burning acid rose up my esophagus into my throat. I decided not to take any pictures. Suddenly, I wanted to cry and I squeezed all my muscles together to form a tear, but nothing came out.

Near the exit was a beautiful bronze sculpture that read, “Never again.” Beyond the sculpture sat fifteen orange tents. There were fifty Rwandan refugees sitting in the dirt and cooking lunch. There was a cardboard sign in front of them with the words: “You said never again.”

I walked up to the first group. There were three women and a baby wrapped in a sheet. The woman, who was cradling the baby in her arms, looked up at me. Our eyes met. They were dark and hopeless and surrounded by deep creases in her skin. She had dirt on her forehead and a hole in the shoulder of her t-shirt. I quickly turned away from them and headed back to the bus, feeling lightheaded. I wanted to go back and say something to her, give something to them, but what could I do? At that time, I was twenty and I didn’t know anything about Rwanda or NGOs.

The bus ride back was long and silent. We kept our heads down and refused to make eye contact. It didn’t matter what religion or race we were that day, or what country we were from. We were all tourists forming a new culture and we had forgotten.