The Awful Possibilities: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen
Author: Christian TeBordo
Date: 2010-05-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories; Fiction; Anthologies; Literary Fiction
Description: After three novels, dynamic and masterful young writer Christian TeBordo, has finally collected his best short stories in The Awful Possibilities. A girl among kidney thieves masters the art of forgetting. A motivational speaker skins his best friend to impress his wife. A man outlines the rules and regulations for sadistic child-rearing. A teen in Brooklyn, Iowa, deals with the fallout of his brother's rise to hip hop fame. Populated with the people we've all heard whispering in hallways, mumbling in diners, shouting in the apartment next door, these brilliantly strange set pieces that explod
Publisher: Featherproof Books
Rights: Copyright © 2010 by Christian TeBordo

Table of Contents

Title Page

ss arrachs!
①
②
③
④

three Denials

My wife denies being my older self.

My neighbor denies the very shit on my shoes.

Sweet William, don’t even bother denying it.

the champion of forgetting

wake up body!

took and lost

oh, little so-and-so

moldering

i can only hope that he still believes in redemption.

rules and regulations

about the author
featherproof BOOKSTORE this is a CATALOG
Copyright Page

Several of these stories would not have been started, most would not have been finished, and almost none would have been published without the support and intervention of Adam Levin.

Which isn’t to say these awful possibilities are his fault.

Thank you, Adam.

ss arrachs!

①

Imagine you’re planning your own school shooting. Imagine you have good reasons, and it’s none of that I-play-too-many-video-games-and-listen-to-Marilyn-Manson-because-no-one-likes-me bullshit. You’re in tenth grade and you do okay in classes and you’ve got plenty of friends for what it’s worth but it’s not worth much to you. You live in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, Iowa. There are no Jews in Brooklyn, Iowa. Keep that in mind.

Imagine your brother’s two grades ahead. He does a little worse than you in school but not bad. He’s got friends, not as many as you, two in fact, but he likes them more and they all live together in the apartment above your mom’s garage. They’re in a rap band and call themselves the Mongreloids, but they only have one song and it isn’t very good, for lack of inspiration, they say. They’ve got ideas but no inspiration.

Imagine they are perfectly good at expressing these ideas when they aren’t rapping, especially Wallace, your brother, which is not his real name but his rap name, but the ideas are not perfectly good. They’re a weird mixture of Nuwaubianism and the Wu-Tang Manual with a dash of the Da Vinci Code thrown in for balance. Your brother and his friends believe the white man is the devil, but they don’t feel like the devil and they all feel in their very cores the call to throw around the word nigger casually.

Imagine your brother won’t let you up above the garage except to listen to new mixes of their one song, which always sound the same and never any better, and for indoctrination sessions which he calls Right Righteous Teaching. Right Righteous Teaching is a combination of esoteric and problematic racial/religious philosophy and horrible word play. White stands for With Hell I Triumph Evermore; black for Belief, Love, Action, Knowledge. The missing c is the white man’s Cancer. Miscegenation is the only hope for humanity. Hence, Mongreloids.

Imagine you find the ideas ridiculous at first and still but there isn’t much to do in Brooklyn and you like hanging out in the apartment above the garage which they call the sanctuary, the lab, the thirty-sixth chamber, and eventually start enjoying the teachings, not because you believe, but because it’s a very involved and imaginative mythology developing before your eyes and the eyes of the internet, though no one out there seems to be paying much attention. Statcounters don’t lie.

Imagine you’re there when your brother has the revelation, and though you don’t see the connection, you can see that it’s utterly spontaneous and that your brother truly believes it. A man will come, a boy really, and he will terrorize a school with the white man’s weapons and the black man’s sense of style, none of these trenchcoats, shiny black fingernails, combat boots, and hockey player haircuts, and this will trigger the revolution, the new era, the tupacalypse.

If you think for a second that this is reason enough to plan your own school shooting then you’re a fucking idiot. But it’s interesting at least.

Imagine some asshole grad student finds the Mongreloids on MySpace and decides to do some kind of dissertation on them. You are suspicious, but your brother, who, despite his naiveté, is actually a pretty skeptical guy, agrees to go along with it. Because the grad student lived in Brooklyn, the real Brooklyn, not this Iowa bullshit, for a year before grad school, so he probably knows what’s up, he says.

Imagine the next thing you know the grad student’s moving into your brother’s old room in your mother’s house because he’s too good to sleep on the couch in the apartment above the garage but not too good to spend all the rest of his time with them in the lab, the sanctuary, the thirty-sixth chamber, smirking behind his hand like the devil he is, and he might be fucking your mother for good measure. You don’t know it then, you’re not even suspecting it, but keep it in mind.

Imagine you know this, the smirking part, because you’re still allowed up there a couple of times a week for Right Righteous Teaching, though it’s more performative now, less freestyle, and your brother tones things down, i.e., is suspiciously silent on the once world-historical issue of a school shooting, but still you can see Chris Nelson, the grad student, the motherfucking devil biting his tongue ‘til his eyes water like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Like your brother is a joke.

Even without the motherfucking you have your reasons now, right? The only choice is between grabbing the grad student by the back of his blond head and pounding his pale face in until it’s red, and throwing your set in the air as you walk down the hall between homeroom and first period. Chris Nelson lived in Brooklyn, the real one, for a year after college, your brother says. What do you do?

If you can get beyond imagining, if you start dreaming of strutting through school in slow motion with a gangsta lean, arms extended and guns blazing, your black hoody barely covering your thousand-yard stare, nothing but your erection keeping your jeans above your ankles, and all those faces begging you to stop, to spare just me, but you can’t hear them because the soundtrack shuts it all out (“Sound Bwoy Bureill,” Smif-N-Wessun), and all those faces are the face of Chris Nelson, though sometimes they’re your brother—if you can dream that, you can understand.

②

Now imagine you’re in the backyard trying to dig a hole deep enough for a backpack full of guns, but the ground itself is buried beneath a foot of hardpacked snow, and the dirt at the surface is practically permafrost and taking forever to break. You’re freezing and sweating and aching, and your only hope is that you can get it done before anyone notices you’re missing.

Now imagine how pretty soon parents all over the country are going to be digging through their children’s things looking for exactly what’s in that bag, or even less—plans, drawings, journal entries, rap records—and you know your mom will do the same, will call in the cops for your own good or because she needs some attention too, more than she’s getting from Chris Nelson if she’s getting any yet, and even though you don’t give your own motherfuck about the cops, the last thing you, the Mongreloids, your brother, want is for you to be called a copycat.

Now imagine what everyone else is doing as you pack the earth back into some approximation of its former self. Wonder what Wallace and the guys and Chris Nelson are doing that very moment. Imagine what your mother is doing. Think quickly back to the Mongreloids and wish you hadn’t. Remember the look of your brother as you watched the school shooting unfolding the hour before.

Now imagine you can remember watching that grainy cellcam footage yourself. Maybe you can. Everybody else can. Everybody else did. But can you imagine watching him doing exactly what you’d imagined yourself doing, from costume to posture to facial composure. It’s exactly like you thought it would be. It’s scarier than you thought it would be. It’s like watching your imagination of yourself, but cooler and a thousand miles away, a thousand miles ahead, just one fucking hour. Fuck.

Now imagine yourself crying as you bang the snow back over the spot you’ve dug and filled. It’s cold enough to freeze the tears to your face but your face is so hot with rage it never will. Your brain won’t stop telling you that whatever the Mongreloids are doing, they’re doing it above the garage, and they’re happy about it, and you’re not allowed to join them now. You’ll never get the chance to join them. School’s closed. Go to bed little bitch.

Now imagine that—what are the Mongreloids doing?—could be one of your concerns for the next month or two, in fact your only, minus the first couple of days. The first couple of days school’s closed, like shooting is a virus likely to spread through the country unless the kids are quarantined at home, and you’re in your room like all the other kids. What the nonkids don’t realize is everything’s a virus nowadays and the kids in their quarantines are downloading videos the shooter made in the hours before the shooting within hours of the event. Four more kids in three separate states catch the sickness before the quarantine’s lifted, though they won’t know it ‘til a few months have passed with a dozen more dead.

You probably don’t have to imagine having watched the videos yourself, so remember instead. Remember the way the kid, his hood already up, stood in front of the camera, in front of the cinderblock wall of his dorm room, talking calmly, deadvoiced, about accounting like it was more death sentence than major. Remember the haunting way he told the story of his high school aptitude testing. Remember?

It says here you’d make a good tax assessor.

What does a tax assessor do?

Assess a tax?

Assess a tax. Okay, I’ll assess a tax.

Do you see my point now? It’s a parable for the generation after metaphor died. It’s the Mongreloid creed. Don’t forget to remember. You’ll be doing more remembering than imagining soon enough.

But before you remember again, imagine school reopens and you give up on shooting and feel about the same about school qua school as you ever have. Your brother and his friends don’t. They don’t go back to school. They don’t even leave the lab or don’t seem to, though they must, sometimes, because they have to eat, right, and neither your mother nor your motherfucker seems to be catering to them. Sometimes when you creep around the perimeter of the garage trying to hide your tracks in the snow you can hear their rhymes and drums bouncing like machine-gun fire off the low winter sky, but you can’t make any of it out.

Now imagine you still see Chris Nelson pretty regularly. You still see your mother pretty regularly. You don’t see any signs of any funny business and you never hear any creaking or moaning creeping through the groaning wooden walls of the old house. But you could be missing something. You’re at school all day most days and neither of them ever seems to have anything to say to you anyway, even when you say something to one or the other, even when you interrogate. That’s the way it all goes until spring.

Now imagine spring comes to Brooklyn and the snow thaws and the grass greens and what trees there are start to bud. But instead of emerging from the garage, your brother invites you, through Chris Nelson, to inter yourself in the lab, for one night only, where the Mongreloids will perform, live and in its entirety, the concept album they’ve spent these last months composing and recording and preparing to perform, a concept album full of Right Righteous Teaching with a through-line about the first hip-hop school shooting and how it changed the world forever.

Now imagine that you accept the invitation, but grudgingly, and with low expectations that have less to do with the grudge than with your memory of how bad their first and for so long only song was. But as the music begins it becomes clear that something has changed, and drastically. In fact, it’s maybe the greatest, most unexpected jump in quality since The Fugees scored. By the time the final anthem, “Assess a Tax,” explodes climactically and decays to static leaving the silence crackling in your ears like wax paper, you’re left drained, and you find yourself weeping softly.

Now imagine you have no words to offer your brother, and at first that makes you feel frustrated and guilty and like a fraternal failure. Then you realize, you can see on his face, that he doesn’t need them now. Your brother has become a god, a mongreloid god, and he knows it.

Now imagine you go to bed, and despite the night’s excitement you sleep well and soundly, assured that you’ve witnessed the beginning of something new, a renaissance with roots in Brooklyn that will change the world like a virus, the good kind if there is one, the kind that will cure the world of the white disease. Chris Nelson and your mother could be having screaming farewell sex in the room next door and this would not effect much more than a moment of your peaceful dreams of a new era, a new America, completely reversed of its curse.

Now imagine that while you sleep so well, sex or no, Chris Nelson and the Mongreloids are loading their things and themselves into the band van and stealing out of Brooklyn under cover of night, headed east to Philadelphia where the motherfucker knows some people who know some people, the tracks in the gravel driveway the only note they leave for you. To date it’s the last time you’ve seen your brother in person, and you can’t decide even now whether to be crushed or fucking furious or both from one day to the next.

Now remember. Remember what you already know.

③

Remember how within weeks Chris Nelson had turned from grad student to rap impresario, how with the guidance of some stupid or unscrupulous advisors the album was released, not as an album—the record industry was dead, they said—but as the soundtrack to an 8-bit first-person school shooter, maybe the worst, stupidest video game ever underdeveloped.

Remember how the game was released without so much as a tracklist much less a lyric sheet.

Remember how the news media, controlled as it is by the forces of the white devil, with its obvious investment in not having a revolution bent on the overthrow of precisely itself, heard, or pretended to hear in the lyrics what it wanted to hear, despite my brother’s repeated insistence that the song was called ASSESS A TAX!.

Remember how within weeks everyone involved had achieved a level of notoriety, infamy even, usually reserved for petty African and Middle Eastern dictators, but how, despite the protests of the Anti-Defamation League, the Congressional Hearings, the emergency session at the United Nations, the game sold like crazy, and my brother really seemed to be enjoying himself, at least on the screen.

Remember how the news crews descended on Brooklyn to investigate what kind of evil hamlet could breed such a virus.

Remember the headlines: The Real Children of the Corn. Hitler in the Heartland.

Remember that stupid article in the weekly magazine of the national newspaper of record suggesting a few possible insinuations for why there are no Jews in Brooklyn.

Remember how you watched the screen as the clueless townies, the shit I grew up through, in order to clear a good name they’d never had, because they’d never had a name of their own, because their name was Brooklyn, announced their intention of clearing Brooklyn of the remnants of the virus it had gestated and incubated unaware for so long, with pitchforks and torches, and how you did nothing, never considered that those remnants were more than my house, were my mother, her fetus, myself.

Now it is now and you can neither remember nor imagine now.

④

Now I’m in the apartment above the garage, but it isn’t like I’d imagined it would be because I’m alone, because my brother’s in the city of brotherly love forgetting me and getting turned into nothing but Marilyn Manson with better clothes and dope beats, and because the goyim of Brooklyn, Iowa, have my house surrounded. Lucky or not for me they don’t know about the apartment above the garage. So they’re standing around the house waving their weaponized farm implements and demanding that the sins of the Mongreloids be visited upon the brother and the mother and the fetus of the mother and the motherfucker. They’re demanding retribution and the restoration of a reputation of no repute, and all I can do is pray they get tired of it before they realize I’m up here, pray they go home.

Now when I’m not praying, I’m sleeping. It isn’t as peaceful as it was the night my brother left—how could it be?—but you’d be surprised. The chanting of the angry villagers, the glow and crackle of their torches, can be soothing enough that I fall asleep despite myself, and though I only nap for minutes at a time, I dream, and I remember my dreams. In the dreams I’m strutting through school in slow motion with a gangsta lean, arms extended and guns blazing, my black hood barely covering my thousand-yard stare, nothing but my erection keeping my jeans above my ankles, and all those faces begging me to stop, to spare just me, but I can’t hear them even though there’s no soundtrack now, or maybe just the static at the end of the Mongreloids’ album, or the crackle of torches in the distance, and all those faces are the face of Chris Nelson, though sometimes they’re my brother. And I know now that dreams aren’t reality. I know now they’re a stand-in for something else, something bigger than a school shooting, like a nudge from God himself, that complicated motherfucker. So when I wake I go back to praying, that they’ll go away, burn the house if they have to, my mom, whatever, so that I can head out for the back yard under cover of night, and dig up my bag of guns, and head out east. I could use some Right Righteous Teaching. I need to assess a tax where a tax is due.

three Denials

My wife denies being my older self.

“I’m not your older self,” she says.

Everything was going fine until the vows. Everything always goes fine until the vows. I find someone to love. I find someone I can find no wrong in, another self. And then comes that part in the vows, my other self.

“But we said in the vows my other self,” I say.

“It’s a metaphor,” she says.

“And you’re older than me,” I say.

She’s got six months on me. Six months less four days, leap year notwithstanding. It’s one of those April-December things—myself one of them, herself the oldster—if only April and December weren’t so far apart.

“You’re the one who insisted we write our own vows,” she says. “You wrote my other self,” she says.

“If only April and December weren’t so far apart,” I say.

“What the fuck do April and December have to do with anything?” she says.

“It’s a metaphor,” I say.

“For what?” she says.

Here comes the explaining. I hate having to explain this, having to explain myself to my older self, the possibility, the inevitability that in six months I could be so dense as to need a statement like if only April and December weren’t so far apart explained for me.

“It means you’re six months older than me,” I say.

“April and December are eight months apart,” she says. “Or four months apart,” she says.

“I said it’s a metaphor,” I say. “For how you always get there first and then you ruin things for us,” I say.

“Neither of us was born in April or December,” she says.

“You don’t understand,” I say.

Try explaining anything to my older self. Sometimes I think she’s willfully misunderstanding, though, to advocate the devil for only a moment, it could be the restricted blood flow.

“Maybe we could work this out if you’d just untie me,” she says.

“I’ve heard that one before,” I say.

And I have. There were a couple of times I even fell for it. Don’t imagine this one’s my only other, older self. Or imagine whatever you want. What are you, my judge? No seriously, are you my judge? Then maybe you can understand why I do what I do?

My neighbor denies the very shit on my shoes.

Believe me when I tell you there is shit on those shoes.

They’re sneakers, gray, with Courage on the heels just above the plastic that makes them for running, the plastic above the shit.

I meet my neighbor—not as in rendezvous—I bump into her without physical contact in the stairwell where I have my cigarettes. She’s having a cigarette with her daughter who isn’t having a cigarette.

I’m wearing sneakers when I meet my neighbor, just not the sneakers in question. The sneakers in question are outside my door, up the stairs first on the left. They’re not allowed in for the shit on them. And they aren’t in question until my neighbor says your shoes.

“Your shoes,” my neighbor says.

I look down at my shoes. They say New Balance, but I’m several exchanges ahead of ourselves.

First she says: “Hello. I am a woman who is divorced from Georgia. Don’t ask me why.”

“My wife is from Georgia,” I say.

“Actually Louisiana,” she says. “I’m also an epileptic.”

I don’t know whether she means that she’s actually from Louisiana, as though she’d forgotten for a moment where she was born and raised, or that my wife is actually from Louisiana, that she’s met my wife before and can hear through the Georgia accent to the Louisiana one smothered underneath, which I have not detected if it’s there to detect.

“Which is why I get confused.”

“Have you met my wife?” I say.

“He was definitely a man,” she says. “He was making inappropriate remarks while folding my laundry. I became flustered and couldn’t find my way through this large building to the apartment where my daughter awaited me with clean pajamas.”

It’s not such a large building. Four stories and a basement, the whole thing shaped like a horseshoe.

“These ones,” says her daughter.

Nothing special—fuzzy and blue with a zipper running from left ankle to only gullet—though there are those who get nostalgic about the footy ones.

“She’s like my older self,” I say.

“My daughter?” says my neighbor.

“My wife,” says me.

“My daughter,” says my neighbor, “was awaiting me, being patient. And her pajamas. But how could I know that she wasn’t getting frantic with my epilepsy?”

My wife is probably getting impatient, though frantic I doubt. I’d told her I was going for a cigarette and she knows how long a cigarette takes. Not this long. My cigarette is an inch of ash swerving slightly from the filter between my fingers.

“I was standing in the middle of the hallway getting more and more unrecognizable,” says my neighbor.

“To whom,” I say.

“To me they all look the same,” she says. “All except for your shoes.”

I look down at my shoes. I say: “They say New Balance.”

“They said Courageous,” she says, “and gave me the courage to find my way back.”

“I should be finding my way back to my apartment where my wife is awaiting me being patient,” I say. “Besides, there’s a doormat on the first floor embroidered with dolphins frolicking in a moonlit sea.”

I take a step toward the stairs. I didn’t notice how close she was until I took a step toward the stairs. Her arm, the one that isn’t holding a cigarette in its hand, crooked across her chest, hooked by hand on the opposite shoulder, presses into my belly.

I take a step back, and another. I rest my ass on the ass-level windowsill of the window I sometimes stare out of, when smoking and alone. I light a new cigarette, turn my head, and stare out the window. Or into the window where my neighbor’s reflection floats.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says.

I’m thinking: I was waylaid by the new neighbor. Her features are reversed in reflection, but her voice moves ever in the same direction.

“You’re thinking this would make more sense if I wasn’t so pretty,” she says.

I’m thinking: she’s an epileptic. She will have been teetering on the verge of convulsions.

“How do you think it makes me feel,” she says as she drops to her knees.

“Courageous?” says her daughter.

She’s sitting a few stairs down with her back to us, ignored and feeling ignored. I turn and look down at her, then down at her mother, her mother’s eyes about level with my lap. Her mother reaches out both-handed, takes my left foot, and brings the sole to her lips.

“Wrong ones,” I say.

She drops the left and lifts the right, brings it too to her lips as though I meant wrong one, as though I were talking about foot.

I say: “What do you think you’re doing,” but I’m thinking: Do they measure the distance between Louisiana and Georgia in dollars or years and either way, which one is inside? Which is out?

Sweet William, don’t even bother denying it.

There is a thing I should tell Sweet William which is: “Sweet William, do not do the come-hither fingers to a man’s neck, especially when he has recently shaved, leaving his skin feeling naked and vulnerable.”

“It’s Wee-yum,” says Sweet William.

“OK Sweet Wee-yum,” I say, “Where’d you get a name like that anyway.”

He’s skinny, with bad teeth and finger-waves à la Nat King Cole, but his clothes don’t fit right and he’s always on his way back from the grocery with several soft packs of the long thin cigarettes, menthol, in a little plastic bag. Kind of sweet, all in all, but you’d have to be perceptive to see it. I never notice anyone perceiving him but me.

“I didn’t,” Sweet William says, “only you call me that.”

“Sweet Wee-yum,” I say, “are you suggesting that we have some sort of special relationship, something more intimate than just saying hi when we pass each other in the lobby and then forgetting each other completely until the next time? Do we use pet names on each other? Because don’t test a man, Sweet William.”

“Wee-yum.”

“Sweet. Wee-yum. Shit,” I say. I say: “I’ve had about enough of you. Go back to your room. Get out of my sight.”

He pops-eyes like I just demanded his first born if he’ll ever bare one, and waves his long, skinny cigarette in my face, this way, that, metronomic, whining: “But I just lit this.”

It’s almost hypnotic.

“Are you trying to hypnotize me, Sweet Wee-yum?”

I slap it from his mouth, but I don’t hit him, not even close. The cigarette tumbles down the steps of the stoop and into the grass. He gets up and scurries after it, following the smoke signals and retrieving it with a smile. It sounds pathetic, but if you saw it, it’s the kind of thing that makes him sweet, the kind of thing you’re not perceiving.

He takes a victory drag, exhales practically glowing, and says: “These things are expensive.”

Those things are nothing but poison wrapped in a combustible tube dipped in acid to make them kill faster. Strictly ghetto.

I think Sweet William’s Section 8. That’s my only problem with this building. We get spacious apartments with hardwood floors and high ceilings at a decent price, but we also get the toothless hag in fourteen who says she’s waiting on an inheritance if you can understand a word she says and the British accent’s probably fake anyway, a fat kid named Porkchop practicing his piledriver on the lawn with the neighborhood kids in case somebody from the WWF drives by, and tranny hookers brandishing salt-water balloons any time anyone comes around thinking gentrification.

I wonder what Sweet William thinks of gentrification.

“Sweet William: what do you think of tranny hookers?”

I used to imagine Sweet William hustled himself. Back then I thought of him as Sweetback, maybe even called him that a time or three before he told me his mama named him Wee-yum. Then I thought what kind of hustler name is Sweet William, and besides how are you going to hustle when no one but me talks to you.

After that it was Sweet William, the gentlest hit man in the world, appropriate for a loner like him. But you’d think a hit man worth his Ray-Bans could afford to smoke something a little better than the black death, even if he did have a three-pack-a-day habit. Anyway he’s never gone long enough to assassinate anyone of importance, even if he took the Concord, which he couldn’t. It’s been retired. Probably doesn’t even have a passport.

“I don’t have any problem with them,” says Sweet William.

“Hit men?” I say.

“The tranny hookers,” he says, lighting another.

“That’s exactly the problem with you,” I say.

That’s exactly the problem with Sweet William, but try convincing him of that. I don’t. I just knock another cigarette out of his mouth. Or try to.

“Missed me,” he says, grinning stalactite. Stalagmite. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know anything about him.

I’m thinking about going back inside when he slips another cigarette halfway out of the fresh pack with a half-slick flick of the wrist. I take it no thanks and pop it in my mouth. He offers me a light, but I’ve got my own. I pull it from my pocket and get a little buzz from the first drag.

We smoke our cigarettes in silence. It’s past dusk now, but not quite night, the sky like the cover of a romance novel, except it’s blocked half-out by the factory up the hill that I never found out what it turned out because it hasn’t turned anything out as long as I’ve lived here, and the moon is beaming on a Malibu with only one hubcap instead of some shirtless shepherd and his maiden if that’s what this romance was supposed to be about.

Sweet Jesus, the romance of Sweet William.

I finish first because I’m fast without trying. I flick my butt to the curb and wait button-lipped to see if I can get anything else. Sweet William catches me looking at him, but it takes him a while to catch the meaning. He kind of rolls his eyes, which is the exact thing that you don’t want to do to me, and if you don’t believe me ask anyone who’s ever done it, or worse for you try it yourself. So when Sweet William does the wrist flick again and three cigarettes fly out because the pack’s starting to loosen up, and I snatch them one two three before they ever hit the ground, he’s getting off easy.

This time I say thank you: “Thanks,” because I figure it’ll piss him off.

“Why don’t you just ask?” he says.

I wave all three of them in his face like I’m trying to hypnotize him and say: “Because these things are expensive,” like you’re getting very sleepy, and I go inside because three should be enough.

But then I want another one right away to keep the buzz going, so I pull out my lighter and it flicks a spark but doesn’t burn anything and I try it again and nothing so I go in the bedroom to borrow my wife’s but she’s tied up making false claims and you know how that goes: no use trying.

I have no alternative but to use the stove which is dangerous but desperate times are calling “just don’t singe your see-through eyebrows.” I turn the knob all the way right until it clicks and a great ball of fire flies from the right front burner, then back left to a delicate but deadly blue halo, and squat with my knees pressed to the oven, leaning in until I’m lit, trauma-free.

The buzz returns but the cigarette’s practically finished by the time I’m finished standing up with the stove safely off and cooling, and I haven’t even had time to lean back in my chair and savor it. They put something in Sweet William’s brand to make them burn faster so you smoke more. Excelsior, I think, from the planks of a plague-infested ship.

I take the second cigarette from behind my left ear and light it off the first because I’m not going through the whole ordeal again. I throw what’s left of the first into a pot soaking in the sink and flop into my armchair like that.

But it’s hard getting comfortable. There’s the awareness that I haven’t got much time, so I have to choose between shifting around and savoring. I choose savor. I drag deep and release like I’m relaxed, but I’m not because there’s something poking at my back from the crack between the cushion and the chair’s right arm, and my wife is making a racket howling: “If you untie me I’ll tell you the truth of how the balance between inside and out equals blessed assurance,” which almost makes me want to change the subject until the only good thing comes to an end which is cigarette number two.

I barely have time to get number three from behind ear number right and lit off two before two goes ash but I do. I get it lit. Then I’m grinding the butt beneath my heel on the carpet because I’m so mad and unrelaxed, and going out saying: “It’s too late you had your chance” before the door slams behind me.

Sweet William’s not on the stoop anymore, but I want three more cigarettes because the last three were hardly my fault, so I wait there in case he decides to come back out. It’s not like I can’t afford my own. I can. I’m not Section 8, but it’s dark now and I don’t go out after dark because of the Killer Bee.

He didn’t get a name like that from me. I’ve got way more imagination than to call a guy with nasty blond dreadlocks striped with the gutter’s own filth something he could pass for, though really more of a killed bee if you don’t tell him I said it and I didn’t.

Instead I said: “Okay,” when he said don’t follow me even though I wasn’t following him, I was just behind him and staying that way. I was on my way into Annie’s breakfast place to smoke the cigarettes that I did have then, and drink her coffee but not her greasy water because my wife was getting me down.

He had this stagger that was way worse than drunk, more like four feet in the grave and trying to grow a couple more and I told myself this man will be wanting to smoke so stay back until he’s past the door.

When I say told myself I mean in my head where he couldn’t hear it, but even so he turned around and said what I told you he said and I responded as reported like let that be that and the world keep turning which wasn’t good enough for him and it never is.

He said: “Killer Bee’s got eyes in the back of his head,” and I said okay again—instead of asking him where he got a name like that, which is a dumb name and less surprising than, say, Our Lady of East Genesee Street—despite all evidence to the contrary, the extra set of eyes, not my okay which is not debatable, plus my perception which told me he’d seen me in Annie’s window by virtue of his sideways gaze. Even if he did have eyes in the back of his head they’d be watering all the time and probably stinging from the fumes of his pelt.

Still not enough.

“And all he does is kill and kill and kill,” he said, which would not be enough to keep me from going out for smokes, no. It was the way his liver was leaking into his eyes. They were the same color as his hair. There are certain eye colors that I have no problem swatting, but there is no winning against yellow even if you win, no none.

I finally got into Annie’s when somebody else distracted him with a powdered donut, but he just stood there in the window pointing at me with the index of one hand and eating the donut with the other like eating a donut is such a tough guy thing to do and I have not been out after dark since.

I try to remember if there’s anyone else who would give me three cigarettes and can only think of the epileptic who is divorced from Georgia, and I’m sure she’d do it, but she’d make me repay her by letting her kiss my shitty sneakers which let’s face it is demeaning to us all. So there’s nothing but to head for Sweet William’s apartment.

Sweet William’s door is closed, but the hallway in front of it smells like smoke and I can hear some music playing inside though not enough to make out and keep your mind out of the gutter. So I put my ear to the door, just to make sure that I won’t be interrupting any God-knows-what, and also maybe to figure out what he’s listening to which turns out to be “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha which is about what you’d expect. And just when Don Quixote sings: “To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause,” the door opens and I fall forward into Sweet William’s apartment.

Sweet William reaches out to steady me, and I reach out to knock his hand away.

He says: “What are you doing?”

There is a thing that I should tell Sweet William which is: What am I doing, Sweet William? I’m not the one opening his door wearing nothing but a terrycloth robe and a mud-mask, but remember, there’s no point telling him anything, so I don’t, which is why I said his name the right way.

I push him back, but his head jerks forward and his mud-mask splatters on my shirt. Not much damage done, but doing the laundry in this building can be a huge pain in the ass due to a man down there who will tell you inappropriate things or so says the epileptic Georgia divorced. I’ve never seen him, but maybe that’s because I minimize my laundry-room time by trying to keep my clothes clean unlike some people.

So I knock Sweet William to the floor instead and I put my foot on his neck but not hard. Just enough to keep him down.

I say: “Sweet Wee-yum, this is not a bad apartment,” and it’s not. Same layout as mine, but he’s got a flair for decoration. For example: the white fur area rug that he’s laying on which makes me feel like I’m choking him on a cloud.

“Thanks,” he says, squirming a little but not much. “Do you want another cigarette?”

Of course I want another cigarette, but you can’t tell Sweet William anything so I say: “No, I want the truth,” which is true in a way.

“Which truth?” says Sweet William.

“The truth about Sweet Wee-yum,” I say. “The best one,” I say.

I can’t really tell what’s going on down there, but the way his head lolls from side to side and his eyes roll backward, I’m guessing he’s thinking.

He says: “I was a little boy who loved his grandfather,” and then he stops or pauses.

If stop then okay but it doesn’t sound like the best truth. If pause it’s probably the beginning of a truth that’s going to make me puke.

I say: “Is that the whole truth so help you?”

“Do you want the whole truth?” he says. I really don’t think so, but he goes on right away: “He was in the war.”

“The great one?”

“Yes,” says Sweet William, “Korea.”

Don’t bother to tell Sweet William that Korea was barely even good if you weren’t even there.

“He used to call me his little prince,” he says. “And then, one night—”

A pause when I want it stopped. I take my foot off his neck and say: “Stop,” and Sweet William gasps half the smoke-stale air of the apartment into his lungs, lets it go and takes the other half. You can feel it. The room has its own weather. He sits up and rubs his neck with his old lady fingers, rests his elbows on his knees.

Maybe I can still get another cigarette.

“What about the rest of the truth?” he says.

“I don’t want the truth anymore,” I say. “I just want a cigarette.”

He reaches into his bathrobe, flicks out a couple of cigarettes. He hands me mine and lights his own, but he doesn’t offer me his lighter because he thinks mine still works. He pulls a small, clean glass ashtray from the opposite pocket and uses it accordingly.

“Why didn’t you just ask?” he says.

“Because nothing gets through to you, Sweet William,” I say, “because you got traumatized by your grandfather.”

Sweet William looks traumatized to learn about the trauma.

“It wasn’t traumatic,” he said. “It would have been if not for the angel Tillie.”

Who the fuck is the angel Tillie? Because I have read the Holy Bible cover-to-cover three times if you count the one I skipped every other word in search of codes and the gospel truth is Sweet William is about as sane as Our Lady of East Genesee Street.

“Sweet William, who is this Tillie?”

“He’s the angel who told me my grandfather was in a better place.”

I say: “Bullshit, Sweet William. Everyone knows that angels are girls.”

“Not this one,” says Sweet William. “This one was a little boy in a turquoise loincloth who floated around on a little cloud like this.”

He runs his ugly fingers across the white fur rug on his way to reclining on this night with one elbow on the floor and his head in his hand.

“That’s not an angel,” I say. “That’s a cherub.”

I know because I saw a picture when I was ten, a circle of babies flying around their mom, and when the security guards pulled me from the canvas and got the pocket-knife out from between my teeth, they told me: “Cherubim, not babies.” My first and last field trip.

“So I’ve been looking for the better place ever since,” says Sweet William.

“What better place?” I say.

Sweet William scurries over to the end table beside his baby-blue sofa, grabs a book, and hurries back, spreading the book on the floor in front of him wide open. It looks like a map from up here, but a map of what I can’t tell. Sweet William does come-hither fingers to the air and you can’t do anything about it, it’s his apartment, but my squat is hesitant.

“New Jersey,” I say.

Sweet William points at a blue line on New Jersey.

“I’ve been saving up for a car,” he says. “They got a thing, the Korean Veteran’s Memorial Highway, and when I get there, I’m gonna pull over to the side of the road and shove my hands into the dirt until I got two good handfuls.”

I look at his hands and wonder if he’s been practicing.

He says: “I’m gonna shove the Korean Veteran’s Memorial Dirt in my pocket and keep it with me always.”

Sweet William just keeps staring at the map as though he can see the highway, the dirt, his grandfather, the best truth, on it, but really it’s just a bunch of pastels trying to cover up nature so thick it smells like cat-piss, an oil slick I saw on an airplane my only time up before the knockouts kicked in, the impossibility of ever really getting anything across to anybody in the ugliest place.

I’ve got my cigarette and my knees are achy. I stand up to let myself out.

Sweet William stubs out his cigarette, passes me an ashtray, and waits for the pressure of mine. When it doesn’t come, he looks up and notices me for the first time since the truth came out.

“Your cigarette’s not lit,” he says.

I say: “My lighter died.”

“Why didn’t you just ask?” he says.

But I’m tired of asking.

the champion of forgetting

Here is a list of failures.

I was staying in a hotel room with some people. I didn’t know their names. I wasn’t their friend. Not the kind where you say hi my name’s and hi my name’s and then you call each other names.

Before I was staying in the hotel room I was walking down Market and they snatched me into their van so I was kidnapped.

What’s that called after you’re kidnapped. When you’re just staying in the hotel room.

There wasn’t tape on my mouth or chains. On my wrist or anything. You could walk around in it and watch television. You could go for ice so the door wasn’t locked. From the inside.

The first time I went for ice I had to knock to get back in. That was when we made up the idea to put a thing in the door when I went for ice. Or somebody else for something else. A shoe or ashtray.

One of the men slipped the metal chain from the wall between the door and the frame. That was the only chain unless it was a metal bar. The girl had failed the test anyway. It was a good hotel room. My first.

It wasn’t the only hotel room. Sometimes there were others. One at a time. It looked like the other ones we lived in. Two men a woman and me. Four. And yes there was sex.

Sometimes there was sex in the other hotel rooms. On either side of us unless we were on the end.

Sometimes when there was sex in another hotel room a man said a woman’s name or a woman said a man’s.

Sometimes in our hotel room a man said a woman’s name or the woman said a man’s. Sometimes when there was sex. Sometimes when there was not. I don’t know if it was the real names. Sometimes they were different. Sometimes they were the same which was not often. Or I don’t remember because I was the champion of forgetting.

When we got to the hotel room. The first time I got to the hotel room. After I got kidnapped. When I wasn’t kidnapped anymore. When there wasn’t tape on my mouth. When I was in the van there was tape on my mouth but not in the hotel room.

At first there was tape on my mouth and my wrists. That’s when the man who was our leader then said not to say my name. And the woman said better forget your name.

If you don’t say your name you don’t forget your name and you always want to say it. This is how I was for a while. When the tape was on my mouth. Sometimes I said my name because who even knows what you’re talking about with tape on your mouth. But when there wasn’t any more tape I bit my tongue. It hurts to bite your tongue.

When you forget your name you don’t bite your tongue. Why would you. You don’t want to say it and you don’t say it. If you do you don’t know because it’s forgotten. It’s suddenly somebody else’s and you’ve forgotten theirs too.

This is the way it works.

One time when it was my turn to register for the hotel room. They give you cash from the box of cash and you say you would like a room for your name and give the man or woman at the desk the money they gave you and the man or woman gives you a key. A key is a symbol of a room to them.

I said I would like a room and the man. I don’t remember his name. The man behind the counter said what is your name. I didn’t remember my name because I had forgotten it. I gave him the money but he didn’t give me a key.

When I got back to the van the man who was our leader then. The leader gives you money from the cash box and says what hotel to drive to or what hotel you are driving to if you ask and whose turn it is to drive and who to kidnap and who’s turn it is to register for the hotel room. Also some of the sexual things. That time it was mine.

The leader said that it was a test and I had failed the test.

I almost never knew when I was getting tested. Especially when I was first kidnapped and for the time after that I don’t know what to call. An example of this is the first test. The first test they said was a test.

The first test. What I think of as the first test they did not say was a test. One of them said do you think she’s a screamer and another one said there’s only one way to find out. The one who said the second thing. She was the woman. She dug a little corner of the tape away from the skin of my face. Then she pulled off the whole tape.

I didn’t scream. The girl said see she didn’t scream but not that I had passed a test.

The first test that they said was a test. There was a needle and the needle went in my arm. I didn’t scream but that was not this test. Blood came out of my arm through the needle and filled up the tube of it.

While I was not screaming but there was still blood coming out I said what are you doing. The man who was doing it. The leader. He said it’s a test.

When the tube was full he gave it to the woman and the woman took it to the bathroom. I asked if the test was over but it was not. I got nervous about the test because some of it was happening in the bathroom where I couldn’t do anything about it and I didn’t know how much of it was happening where I was so I let him put a wad of cotton over the spot on my arm that the blood came out of and apply gentle pressure.

It felt good until the woman came out of the bathroom with a look on her face. The pressure became more than gentle for a second.

The woman said her blood is wrong and we can’t do sex to her right now.

The man let go of my arm and walked out of the hotel room. He forgot to leave a shoe in the door, so I went and did it for him. Then I took a nap for loss of blood or to forget about the failure.

There were more tests but they only admitted it sometimes. Only when I failed except once.

This is a list of failures.

The other time the door locked when I went to go get ice.

There was a new boy that day so five but not for long. He failed the screamer test by screaming, but they didn’t tell him that. Or maybe they did but he was screaming too loud. I didn’t hear it.

When they fail the screamer test there are two needles. The first one puts stuff in and the stuff puts them to sleep. The second one takes blood out for the real test.

Other than being the champion of forgetting my only job was getting ice. This was because of the failures I told you about and other failures.

I would get ice between when the tape got taken off. Sometimes I would take the tape off but that wasn’t a real job. And the first needle or second needle if the boy or girl was a screamer or not. It was just in case.

One of the things about getting the ice being your job was you were supposed to be quiet. This is not easy when you’re carrying every empty container you can find and then it’s full of ice but I never got in trouble for that part. The ice rattled a little but this was not a surprising sound.

When I got back to the door of our motel room. The outside. I had the mini trash can from the bathroom and the mini trash can from the bedroom and the ice bucket and the mugs for the complimentary coffee and the pot that you make the complimentary coffee in all full of ice and I shouldered the door like I usually did to get in.

But someone had closed it and it had locked. My shoulder just made a thud against the door. I don’t remember if it was me.

On the other side. The inside. I heard someone shush me but I didn’t know who. And I didn’t know what to do because a knock is louder than a thud from my shoulder. So I waited to see if they would notice that the thud was made by a person who had not brought the ice in yet because the door was locked.

I waited a long time for them to notice but they didn’t. I wondered again if I should knock but I couldn’t knock anyway with my hands full of containers full of ice. The ice was cold and my hands hurt from it and my arms hurt from carrying it all so I put the ice down so I could have the choice of knocking if that was the best choice.

I did a pros and cons and decided that because a knock is louder than my shoulder I wouldn’t knock. So I waited. I sat down next to the ice with my back against the wall and waited and fell asleep.

I didn’t wake up until I heard someone scream what the fuck. The man who was our leader then. I didn’t know what the fuck for.

I was only a little awake wiping my eyes when the door opened a crack and a head came out of the crack and it was the head of the man saying what the fuck again.

He looked down at the containers full of ice. Over at me. The ice was turned to water and he screamed that at me too. He screamed at me to get up. The boy had passed the second test and someone else had passed the test of doing sex to him.

I had already failed the test of doing sex with one of those balloon things and a steak. A couple of boys ago. That was a failure that you only get one chance at. At least me.

The steak is a symbol of a boy or girl to them. The meat of a boy or girl. And the balloon is their skin. The scalpel cuts it right or wrong.

We were alone in the motel room. The same one or different. I don’t remember. Me and the woman. She was our leader when the others were out kidnapping another boy to get him unkidnapped and just staying in the hotel room because he was no good for sex too.

Nobody knew yet.

The woman who was our leader was in the bathroom and I got nervous because of how I failed a test in the bathroom without being in the bathroom.

I was watching TV with an eye on the ice to keep it from melting. She came out with the steak-balloon and said this is a test.

I asked her if I passed and she said I can’t tell you ‘til you take it. I took it and said did I pass. She said the test not the steak-balloon. She said this is the skin and this is the meat. She said this is what you use to do it. It was a scalpel.

Now do it.

I took the scalpel. My first. In my free hand. The one that wasn’t holding the balloon. I brought the balloon up closer to my face to see the meat through the skin. I held the scalpel over it.

I looked up at the girl who was our leader with only my eyes.

She said not like that. She said you’ve seen how we do it.

I couldn’t remember how they did it but I guessed up was bad so I put it on the bed in front of me and hunched over it.

I acted like I was concentrating but really I was concentrating on how to pass the test.

I looked up with my eyes and she just stood there watching. I put the point of the scalpel to the skin of the balloon. Same. I stabbed with the scalpel. Through the skin and the meat and into the bed. I kept my eyes on our leader.

I couldn’t tell if I had passed or not from her face. She walked over and told my fingers to let go of the scalpel with her hand. She pulled the scalpel out of the bed but the meat stayed on like barbecuing.

I asked her if I passed and she said no. I asked her if I got a second chance and she said that was a failure you only get one chance at. At least me.

Failing was easier when she was our leader. With the other leader. The man. I failed like this.

That’s fucking it. I’ve fucking had it. She’s got to fucking go.

Twice. At least for me. The first was a failure I already mentioned.

He said get out. He said this is the last straw.

The woman said shut up. She said it’s only forty bucks. She said we told her to forget her name and she did. That’s one test she passed. She’s the champion of forgetting.

I was the champion of forgetting.

After that they called me champ. Except the leader. The man who was our leader. Or forgetful if I forgot something and failed another test. But that time she called me champ.

We went to another motel and it was not my turn to register for a room. Never again.

The last time. At least for me. At least so far. The leader said that’s fucking it. I’ve fucking had it. You’ve got to fucking go.

His face was standing over mine and spit and bready breath flew out of his mouth. His hands were fists.

Another hand. The woman’s. It came out of the door and put itself on the man’s shoulder. The hand’s voice said his name. I don’t remember. It said calm down.

But he didn’t calm down. He threw a fit. He punched the walls and kicked and his kicks knocked over the containers full of melted ice and the water spilled over the carpet and made dark shapes on it.

He didn’t care. He kept punching and kicking until he was too tired to punch and kick anymore and hunched over with his hands on his knees.

He looked up at me with just his eyes and said get out. He said that was the last straw.

I was too scared to get out of the way of his punching and kicking. I was still just sitting there with my back against the wall and I didn’t get up or get out.

Go he said. He said leave now.

The woman said we’ll take care of that later. She said first we need more ice.

A door opened down the hall and a head peeked out. The head said everything all right out there and the woman said go mind your own business.

My business was ice. I started to get up to gather the bucket and the trash cans and the mugs and the coffee pot but she said to just stay there.

She put her hands on the shoulders of the leader and walked him back into the room. She came out with the other man and they gathered up all the empty containers and took them down the hall to fill them and came back with the full containers and went back into the room.

The door closed behind them. They forgot to put something in it. I just sat there waiting until I fell asleep.

When I woke up they were in the room yelling. All of them. One of them said she won’t even remember. Because I’m the champion of forgetting. One said but I like doing surgery on her and another one said another good reason not to keep her around.

The woman said let’s do it and get out of here quick.

The door opened and I looked up. It was the woman. She said come on champ.

I got up slow and walked into the room.

I was nervous. I didn’t know if it was a test. I thought it was a test because everyone was looking at me but what kind of test is come on other than come into the room.

They were all standing there with their coats on and carrying their bags. All except the boy they had done sex to. The bathroom door was closed.

The woman. She had the ice bucket. She said we’re going to go.

Do something the leader said. We’re going to go do something. He said we have a special job for you while we do something.

We’re making you the leader of you and the boy in the bathtub.

I asked if it was a test. The man said yes this is a test. He said make sure you have enough ice for when we get back and remember not to remember your name. The other man said or ours and the rest of them said it again. Or ours.

Then the woman said let’s go and they went.

I just stayed there making sure my name was forgotten. The way I did this was to try to remember it and not be able to. It was a test that happened inside me and I always passed once I invented it.

It took me a long time to invent it because first I had to make sure I forgot it. After it was my turn to get the motel room I knew I could pass whenever I wanted. I was pretty sure there was enough ice.

I was about to tell myself that I had passed the test when our leader came back in. He was breathing hard so I guessed he made it all the way to the van before he remembered he forgot something important.

I was afraid he was going to make the boy in the bathtub the leader of me and the boy in the bathtub but he just looked at me and went in the bathroom.

I heard him in the bathroom going through something plastic. The bathroom door was open but I stayed where I was. Maybe a bag. Maybe the mini trash bag in the mini trash can. I couldn’t tell from the bedroom.

The sound stopped and he came out. He had a needle and a scalpel in his hand and he was wiping them off with a washcloth one at a time walking toward me.

I asked him if I passed the test. I asked him if I was still the leader of me and the boy in the bathtub. He just kept walking toward me wiping the scalpel and the needle with the washcloth.

When he got to me he held out his left hand. The washcloth was spread out on it like a tablecloth and the needle and the scalpel were laid out on it like a fork and a knife. Or knife and knife.

He said hold these and I held out my left hand like he was holding his so that I could just slide the whole thing onto my hand like in the magic trick except bringing the silverware with it.

He said no. He said just the scalpel and the needle.

So I took just the scalpel and the needle. It was full of sleep stuff. I took it with my left hand and closed it around them. I wondered if I was supposed to hold one in each hand.

I asked him if I passed and he said the test wasn’t over yet. He said remember not to remember our names. Or yours.

I asked him if I was still the leader of me and the boy in the bathtub and he said I’ve got to go champ and went.

That was the only time he called me champ. So far. It sounded funny. Like it was my name. But I did the test of trying to remember my name and couldn’t.

I remembered that champ was short for a job. The champion of forgetting.

By then I thought the ice might be melting or melted. I knew how long it took ice to melt. That was my job. But I didn’t know what happened once the ice had melted. We always left after the sex. I didn’t know what happened when the boy or girl woke up from the nap.

I went over to the bathroom door and knocked with the hand that wasn’t holding the needle or scalpel. The boy didn’t answer. I knocked again. I hoped I wasn’t disturbing him. There was no do not disturb sign on the doorknob.

I knocked again. I opened the door. I walked in.

The bathroom looked empty. Clean like when you first get the motel room. It made me want to sit on the toilet. Usually there was pee on the seat and trash in the trash and scalpels and towels and needles and shampoo bottles everywhere. The only good time was when you just got there.

The shower curtain was closed but I knew the boy was behind it. I said I’m going to pee so don’t look. I pulled down my pants and sat on the toilet but I was nervous the boy would look so I couldn’t go. I got up and got dressed.

I said you can look now but he didn’t.

I asked him if he was behind the curtain. I asked him if he was decent. He didn’t answer so I pulled the curtain open with my free hand and looked in. To check on the ice. And the boy because I was the leader of me and him.

The ice was melting but not melted. The boy was behind the curtain but not decent. He was naked on his back on the ice and I could see his whole front.

I told him it was okay. I told him I was our leader now. For now. But he didn’t answer. I reached down and touched his shoulder. I shoved his shoulder but he didn’t wake up. He was cold.

As the leader I had to do something about his indecency and his coldness. Also the ice. I had to not remember my name or theirs while I did it.

I was used to being the champion of forgetting so I wasn’t worried about remembering but I had to stop and think about the indecency and the coldness and the ice. I wouldn’t be able to get his clothes on him or warm him up without taking him off the ice but why would I make sure there was enough ice if he wasn’t on it.

Then I thought of a thing that would kill two of the birds with one blanket and it was a blanket. I went back into the bedroom. There were two beds and one cot. The beds had a comforter and a blanket on them but the cot only had a blanket.

I didn’t know how long it would be until the others would get back and they would need the beds and the blankets on them so at first I was going to give him the blanket from my cot.

Then I remembered that I was the leader of me and the boy in the bathtub so I did a pros and cons and I made a decision like a leader and I pulled the comforters and the blankets and even sheets off both beds.

While I was pulling everything off the beds the hand holding the scalpel and needle dropped the scalpel and needle but my hands were full so I left them.

In the bathroom I dropped everything else on the floor and picked them up one at a time and put them on the boy in the bathtub. I tucked them in between his shoulders and the ice until the floor was clear again and the boy looked decent and maybe getting warm.

When I pulled my hands away from the last tuck I saw that they were wet and remembered that I was going to get ice. I went around the rooms and picked up the mini trash cans and the coffee mugs and the coffee pot.

They took the ice bucket with them. They always did after sex.

I had to put the mugs down to open the door so I put the mugs down. Then I remembered the needle and scalpel and got worried they would come back while I was getting ice and see that I had got ice without the needle and scalpel so I went and picked them up and dropped them in a mini trash can.

I opened the door and picked the mugs back up and went down the hall to get ice.

It took me a long time to fill all the containers with ice because the ice machine was taking a long time to make the ice and let go of it. So long that I thought about going to the one at the other end of the hall which sometimes worked.

I hoped that everyone would not get back and find the boy alone in the bathtub of melted ice without his leader but then all of the containers were full.

When I got back to the door of our motel room I shouldered it like I usually do to get in but it was closed and locked. My shoulder just made a thud against the door. It was either me or the boy in the bathtub. I didn’t hear anything on the other side of the door. The inside.

I wanted to knock on the door to see if the boy would let me in but I couldn’t because my hands were full of containers full of ice. It reminded me that there was probably no ice left for the boy in the bathtub and I worried about my leadership skills. I put the ice down so I could have the choice of knocking and do it.

I knocked. I listened. I didn’t hear anything. I knocked again. I didn’t hear anything.

I whispered into the door. I whispered like a yell. Boy in the bathtub. This is your leader. Can you hear me. If you can hear me let me in.

I don’t think he could hear me. He didn’t let me in. I didn’t remember if I left the bathroom door closed or open. If I left it closed he couldn’t hear me through two doors. But if I left it open I did not know why he didn’t answer me.

I was scared he woke up while I was taking a long time getting ice and left because I was taking such a long time. That he got mad at me because he woke up without enough ice. That it was all a trick to see if I was a good leader and I was not a good leader and I had failed another test.

I whispered into the door. I whispered like a yell.

I don’t remember my name.

I said I don’t remember our names.

I yelled I am the champion of forgetting.

I am the champion of forgetting.

I am the champion of forgetting.

A door opened down the hall and a head peeked out. The head said everything all right out there. I turned to the head and stopped yelling.

Everything was not all right out there but everything had not been all right out there before and the girl had told the head to go mind its own business.

I did a pros and cons and told the head to go mind its own business but it didn’t go mind its own business. It peeked out more to its shoulders and an arm. It said what’s all that stuff.

Because it didn’t mind its own business I didn’t know what happened next so I told it to go mind its own business again. I told it it did it before but it was a body now and it was coming toward me looking at all the containers full of ice like it was very curious about them.

It said your ice is melting. It said what do you need all that ice for.

I said mind your own business. I yelled mind your own business.

Mind your own business. Go.

But his arm reached out and grabbed my arm and pulled and I was in his room with the door closed behind us and him between me and it almost right away.

I screamed. A little bit nothing and then let me out.

He said shut up. He said I only took you in here to get you to stop screaming. I’ll let you go when you stop screaming.

I stopped screaming.

He put his hands in his long hair and turned around and walked away from me. Then he walked back toward me. He looked like I failed another test. I started to worry that this was another test.

He said now what was all the ice for.

I said is this another test.

He said I asked you first.

I said you said you’d let me go if I stopped screaming.

He said first tell me what all the ice is for.

Fuck it if it is a test. And was it a test.

I tried to run past him but he was too big. He just pushed me back and I fell over. I got back up and tried to run past him again. This time I ducked his arm and when he tried to block me with his body I shoved the needle into his belly and pushed the button and pulled the needle back out.

At first he just looked surprised. Then he fell over face first.

After the stuff puts them to sleep the second needle takes out blood for the real test. I didn’t know what happened in that test. What the girl does in the bathroom. But I had seen them do the sex and I had a scalpel.

I squatted down and sat on him like a horse and used it to cut open his shirt. His back was hairy and even though there was nobody around I got nervous that someone would find out if I failed this test so my hand shook and I scratched him a little with the scalpel in the wrong place.

Then I put the scalpel in the right place. The skin there was the balloon and the meat was the meat. I poked through the balloon but not as hard as before and slid it down like I saw them do. Then I pulled the skin apart and pulled out the meat. It looked like the others.

I almost cried I was so happy.

Instead I looked around for his ice bucket. It was right on the counter. I went and got it but it was empty. I put the meat in anyway and the top back on.

I went to go get the ice which was melting. This time I remembered to put a thing in the door to keep it from locking. It was his shoe.

I brought back the ice and put a little of the ice in the ice bucket with the meat like they did and dumped the rest in the bathtub. There wasn’t much so I went back with all of the containers and filled them all which took a long time again and dumped them in the bathtub.

Usually when they put them in the bathtub they were smaller and two or three of them did it but there was only me. At first I tried to wake him up so we could do it together.

I said I am your leader. Wake up and help me get you in the bathtub. But he didn’t wake up.

I tried to lift him up but he was too heavy. I tried to pull him by his arms but they slipped out of my hands. Then I tried his hair. He had long hair for me to get my hands in and I got my hands in and when I pulled, he budged. I pulled again harder and he budged a little more but not enough.

I did a pros and cons and realized I would never get him in the bathtub at this slowness so I went to the bathtub and filled all the containers with its ice and dumped them on him. On the floor. I hoped it would keep him cold enough.

Then I remembered the other boy I was the leader of. I took the ice bucket with the man’s meat and the empty containers and went to go get more ice for him but I left the man’s shoe in the door in case I needed to lead him anymore.

When I got back to the old room with all of the ice I put the ice down but kept the covered ice bucket in my hands. I knocked and said are you awake yet but the boy didn’t answer. So I waited. I sat down next to the ice with my back against the wall to my right of the door and the bucket in my arms and waited and fell asleep.

When I woke up there was a cart with garbage bags and towels in front of me and a maid standing over me saying do you want your bed made. I remembered that she could not make the bed because all of the makings were tucked around the boy in the bathtub if he was still in the bathtub.

I looked up at the door and saw the do not disturb sign on the doorknob. Do not disturb I said.

She said did your mom and dad lock you out.

I tried to remember their names for once and were the names Mom and Dad. I pictured the boy in the bathtub and thought Mom. I kept the picture and thought Dad. I didn’t think he was Mom or Dad but I didn’t know if he locked me out. Even if he did I was still his leader and I had to get back in to lead him.

Nobody locked me out or I don’t know his name I said. I think I would like my bed made after all.

The maid put her key into the lock and the door opened. I slipped by her into the room. I heard a groan and saw that the bathroom door was left open.

I said I don’t want my bed made anymore. I pointed to the do not disturb sign with the hand that wasn’t holding the ice bucket and said do not disturb. The maid shook her head but walked away and stopped disturbing me for then.

I kept the door open with my foot and dragged the other containers full of melting ice in by ones and twos then let the door close and slid the bolt.

I heard the groaning again and went into the bathroom through the open door. The boy was still in the bathtub but he took off his blankets because he didn’t want to be warm. The ice under him was mostly melted and the water was pink. He was indecent.

I told the boy I’m sorry but you would have plenty of ice if you had responded to the commands of your leader. I told him now the ice I got for you is almost as melted as the ice you already have but not as pink. I told him now I’m going to have to go get ice all over again and it will take a long time and you will probably just keep groaning and not cooperating because that’s all you have done and not done.

There was a knock at the door. It was you but I didn’t know it yet. I don’t know you.

I went to the door and peeped through the peephole and saw you. You couldn’t see me but you said to let you in.

I didn’t know if it was a trick. I didn’t know if you were the new leader or if we would lead the boy together. But then I thought that you might ask my name which I can’t remember. I’m not supposed to remember. And I decided to be quiet.

I walked away from the door and into the bathroom through the open door and told the boy in the bathtub to be quiet but he groaned.

You knocked again. Louder now.

I did a pros and cons and told him shut up. I told him I can’t get anymore ice because someone. It was you. Was at the door.

You knocked. He groaned. You tried to turn the doorknob but it was locked. I told him to shut up. He groaned. You tried to unlock the door with a key. Was it the maid’s key. I think it was the maid’s. The door unlocked and the handle turned but the door didn’t open because I had slid the bolt and you can’t unlock the bolt from where you were. The boy groaned.

I said you’ve left me no choice. If you refuse to obey the commands of your leader. And you were at the door. I have to put you to sleep.

The needle was empty but I thought there might be a drop or something in it. Enough to put the boy to sleep since he was weak from the sex. I pulled back the button and poked the needle through his balloon and into his meat and pushed down on the button.

I heard you kicking the whole time. You were kicking and kicking and then you took a break to go get the axe you came in with and then you were axing. The boy jerked around for a little while but then he stopped groaning and went back to sleep.

I could hear you axing still and I had just enough time to get the sheets and blankets and comforters back on the bed. They might look made but they are not.

And then your axe came through the door. Then you. And you started pounding on the boy saying what did you do to him and somebody get an ambulance and I’m sorry I cut you with my scalpel but all I wanted to know was am I still the leader of me and the boy in the bathtub and who is the leader of me and you and did I pass the test.

wake up body!

Sometimes we like to imagine that our bodies know what’s best for us, big cuddly shells about the thumb-sized selves located in the intangible crevices between the gullets and the spleens, like the earth, which dares not wobble on its axis or stray from its orbit about the sun, for the sake of our bodies for the sake of our selves.

If we’re thinking straight, then what is this man thinking.

What is this man thinking when we imagine that our bodies know what’s best for ourselves. What is his body thinking as his self slips softly to sleep. What are his eyes thinking as his lashes interlock and lids meet across four lanes of highway, as his wheels slip to snowy shoulder.

Better shoulder than we, we like to think. But if we’re really so smart, then why don’t we speed past this accident patiently waiting to happen. If the body knows best, why does the foot not push the pedal to the floor and lead our bodies to a place where they need not concern ourselves with windshields, asphalt, and insurance claims. Or are these concerns diverting our attention from the matter at hand.

See his tail lights shimmering on the horizon like a man-made mirage. Mirages are for daylight. This is more like a fireworks display. We are feeling that child-like anticipation, awaiting the finale, the spark of side-panel against guard-rail. But we aren’t children, and these sparks spark conscience, the spark of why are we trailing this man at twenty-five miles per hour from half a mile back, this man whose body does not know what’s best for him.

This is the sound of the hand on the horn, as of a man wailing on a continuous loop until the wail becomes a chorus of wails, until the ear can not differentiate between sound and sound from one moment to the next. In the car ahead of us, the sound of the horn increases as we accelerate, in volume and in pitch. The horn wails, Wake up body! Wake up and tell your man to save himself.

Either the body does not hear or its man is not listening. We know this from a distance of less than a car length, our own ears ringing with the wail of the horn. The finale is but a tease, because these sparks will spark for miles, a cacophony of horns, rumble strips, and guard rails that can only end in a whimper. One of our bodies whimpers, and we understand this to be a prophecy.

Which is not to say that our faith in the body is not a bit shaken. There is a tension in the air, a sense of the impending failure of everything. We’re driving on eggshells. And the bodies are not exempt. Your upper lip is dotted with sweat. As I fidget, my ass sticks and re-sticks to the seat. There is a smell, a mingling of smells, a mingling of smells of uncomfortable bodies, sticking and sweating and tensing on eggshells.

Our own horn sounds closer with the window rolled down. The air sounds louder, more immediate, like the place where thunder happens. Our hair whips wildly about the cold dark night pouring into the car. And above all of this, the screech of side against rail flits about the smog of sound competing for the bodies’ attention.

As in the celebrations of our youth, the finale becomes the tease and the tedium long before the pop hiss whimper, and our bodies abandon us to imagination of bodies closer to the action, in peril, sacrificing limbs and skins for an evening’s entertainment. What force of mind, of will must it take to hold an explosion in your hand. How much more to sit inside the explosion itself.

That’s what this man is doing. Worse, his body seems to be allowing, even encouraging it. I think it’s you who can’t accept this. I think I’m slower than you just now, still stuck in awe, not of the display, but of the body’s place within the display. There’s an aura hanging over you, an aura of unwillingness to accept it, to accept that this body doesn’t know what’s best for itself, and I can smell it, even as I smell the cold black air that has driven our body smells out the window or into the back seat. I can smell your resistance. And don’t imagine that it isn’t pulling me in its direction, up and over, once again beside the accident patiently happening.

I suppose it’s possible that the man is simply dead, that his body has given up its ghost, soul from tailpipe slushing freshly fallen snow. From my angle, behind the wheel, I can’t see his angle behind his wheel, but I can picture him slumped over it, his self somewhere else, a dead man driving.

If we were thinking straight, this is where we would leave it. Not him, but it. Death behind the wheel does not implicate the body any more than any other death. The body cannot be guilty of death if the body is not guilty of death, a reflexive thought if I’ve ever had one, but reflexes are the domain of the body. The body doesn’t leave the hand on the hot stove. The body doesn’t sleep against guard rails at speeds above no speed, and if it did, it would still be yearning for the warmth of its bed.

I feel like weeping. I feel like bawling on your shoulder. I feel like rolling up the windows and taking my hand off the horn. I feel like falling back and following this dead man, against this guard rail, along this exit ramp, your screams an affirmation of all that we have thought, heard and felt together, a confirmation of the body’s best intentions.

And loud, too. Louder than the sound of the hand on the horn, louder than the air in the window, louder than the screech of side panel, his or ours now that we have joined him in explosion, against guard rail, louder than anything I’ve heard tonight. Your screams are overwhelming, overpowering, overjoying, a syllogism proving that this man is dead.

At least in a vacuum.

There is no sound here. No guard rails, no horns, no screams, though I’m sure that if I looked your way I would see you hiccuping the way that you do when the cry is out. But no sound. Just this claustrophobic calm, as though the sky were not a sky but some sort of planetarium, the neighborhood its own little hemisphere, as sterile and dead as the man in the car ahead of us.

He’s moving along slowly now. His foot has slipped from the pedal, the car carrying him forward out of habit. And our car has come to a stop. Our doors have opened.

This is the feeling of the air in your lungs, an icicle crammed down your throat. Your still-moist cheeks are burning below zero, and it isn’t long before you’re falling behind.

Pause for breath. Yes. I can’t imagine what you hope to accomplish with this late night jog. I can’t imagine what I hope to accomplish either.

As I overtake the car, I am overtaken by the impossible. Behind the wheel, a man who looks exactly as I’ve been imagining him, with one exception: he isn’t slumped over the wheel, dead, but sitting straight up, hands at ten and two o’clock, precisely as prescribed, eyes watching the road so intensely that the belated blinks cause his whole face to wrinkle when they finally arrive.

And I am staring, with equal intensity, at him. I don’t notice the enormous snow bank until we both slam into it as the road ends dead.

Maybe slam is not the word. Fall works better, falling into fluffy snow, floating like a boat pushed from gravel into water. We fell into the snow, and feeling returned, a feeling of complacency.

Stand up, says my body.

But I don’t stand up. Why would I stand up when I can lie here in this snow bank.

Stand up, says my body, or you’ll die here in this snow bank.

I still can’t hear. I can hear but I’m not listening. I am listening without believing. I don’t believe in bodies, but I stand up.

As I stand up, the man opens his car door and falls again into the snow bank. I run over to make sure that he’s all right, asking him if he’s all right, looking him over for signs of injury, asking him again if he’s all right. He’s breathing, his breath forms clouds in the still clear night, but still he does not respond.

Why don’t you stand up? I say.

The clouds of breath begin to thin a foot from his face, but leave no evidence of answer.

Look, I say, there’s a house behind this snow bank.

It’s true, there is a house behind the snow bank, a big brick house with central heating and a fireplace, with beds and sofas and overstuffed armchairs everywhere you look. Inside.

One cloud replaces another at an even rate, and the sound of them is almost no sound.

It’s not a very long walk to the house, and it’s sure to be unlocked.

Also true. This is a safe neighborhood, out in the middle of nowhere, and people aren’t afraid to leave their doors unlocked.

The man’s face is less informative than his breath, his breath informing me only that he is breathing.

If the door is locked, I say, you can break the window.

The houses are breathing, too. Above our heads, the houses breathe evenly so we know they’re alive.

Go ahead, I say, break the window. Break the window without even checking to see if the door is locked.

Still, he doesn’t move. I can’t understand why he doesn’t move. Doesn’t he know that desperate times have been calling for desperate measures. Does he believe in times and measures. Does he believe me when I tell him that the door is unlocked. Does he believe me when I tell him that no one will mind if he breaks the window. He should believe me. He should listen to me when I tell him that he can break the window, that I won’t mind, because I live in this house, and even now, my only hope is that his body knows what’s best for him.

took and lost

“Help!” he screamed. “Help! Police!”

The man was already walking away. The man who had taken something from him.

“That man just took something from me!” he screamed, pointing at the man who was walking away.

No one paid them any attention—the man who lost something or the man who took something—but the man who lost something continued screaming. It was a crowded city and the sky was a dark gray and the people were rushing to finish their various errands before the rain began.

“He’s getting away!”

Even in casual conversation, the man who lost something had a high-pitched voice, but when he screamed, his voice was positively shrill, high enough to shatter glass, so high that the average human ear couldn’t detect it. But that’s hyperbole, and hyperbole doesn’t suit the purpose here, which is a relation of how the man who lost something reacted to losing something, an important something.

It was a passive loss, as opposed to an active one. He didn’t drop something on the ground or leave it beneath a discarded newspaper in a restaurant or even never have something at all. Someone had taken something of his against his will. The man who was walking away.

And the people could hear him. They just weren’t listening.

He screamed again, or he had never stopped screaming in the first place, “That man! That man! Stop that man!” and though he was pointing his finger and screaming in the same direction as he had been all along, he was by then no longer pointing at a man, but at the crowd of men and women and children into which the man who took something had disappeared.

Yes, disappeared. However, this disappearance is not the real concern. The real concern is how the man who lost something reacted to this disappearance, this subtraction, this loss, and he reacted by following the man who took something into the crowd, where he himself didn’t disappear.

He found himself surrounded by the crowd, and not by the man who took something, who couldn’t have surrounded him. One man could have stood beside him or in his field of vision. One man could have attempted to surround him by putting his arms and legs about his body, but this would have been an embrace, not a surrounding, and why would a man who had just taken something embrace a man who had just lost something when this taking and this loss are linked by necessity?

He wouldn’t, because not only was the man who took something not a stupid man, he was a brilliant man. When he isn’t taking something and disappearing, he is definitely not surrounding people who have lost something as a result of his taking something. No, he’s sitting at a table, penning poems with his left hand and novels with his right, while beautiful and scandalous arias drip from his tongue.

Which is more than we can say for the man who lost something. Nothing dripping from his tongue—he’d stopped screaming. It wasn’t so much a decision as a reflex reaction—you don’t scream in the middle of a crowd that doesn’t seem to care what you’re screaming about, or even that you’re screaming, if you still have any hope of getting their attention otherwise.

For example: “Excuse me.”

It was all he could manage. He said excuse me and paused, waiting to be excused. It was a long pause. So long that if you didn’t know the meaning of excuse me, or if you were unaware of the context, you might have thought excuse me was all he meant to say, as though he’d spoken it into oblivion and was observing its effect in another dimension, because in this dimension, the men and women and children didn’t excuse the man who lost something. They didn’t even stop to consider that he might want to be excused. In fact, many men and women and children in the crowd were saying excuse me, excuse me too, and none of them were excusing any of them.

The man who lost something wasn’t as brilliant as the man who took something, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d known before he said it that excuse me wouldn’t work. It was a matter of manners. It was a stalling tactic.

It was with a clean conscience and less hope than he’d hoped for that the man who lost something surveyed the crowd again, this time in search of someone who might have noticed the man who took something lurking among the men and women and children.

You’re not as brilliant as the man who took something either, but you don’t have to be brilliant to suspect that the man who lost something wasn’t ready to confront a grown man or woman about the man who took something. He was looking for children in the crowd, children with smiling, curious faces and bright eyes that absorbed everything, children who might have noticed a man who took something lurking about in the crowd, children who might be coerced into revealing what they might have noticed.

There were many bright-eyed children in the crowd, but one little boy seemed to be more bright-eyed than the rest. A very little boy, practically a toddler. Too little a boy, in any case, to be standing alone in a crowd. No one around him seemed to be his mother or father or sister or brother, and no one, save the man who lost something, seemed to be aware of the little boy’s presence. The man who lost something moved closer to him and affected an air of jolliness, what he thought was an air of jolliness.

“Hey there, big fella,” he said, like a grown man who’s never spoken to a child—he’d never spoken to a child—and then he waited for the little boy to respond, comforted by the jolly nature of the man who lost something, the jolly man who spoke to the little boy.

But the little boy wasn’t comforted. His big bright eyes filled with water, and though the tears didn’t slide down his rosy cheeks, the man who lost something grew sad and his stomach ached.

“No,” said the man who lost something, “I wanted...” but the little boy just kept staring and the tears just kept welling without fall.

The man who lost something crouched down on one knee. He lowered himself down to the little boy’s level.

“I just wanted.”

Still no change, and the man who lost something felt awkward. He wobbled a little and steadied himself. He switched knees.

“I just wanted...”

“There you are!” said the little boy’s big sister—“Mom’s been looking all over for you,”—in the bossy way that big sisters have of addressing their little brothers.

Her little brother showed no sign of having heard a word of it. He kept staring at the man who lost something through the swell of tears that wouldn’t drop.

“We better go find her,” said the big sister.

She took the little boy by the hand and tried to walk away, but the little boy didn’t follow. His arm extended and his body jerked. The big sister turned back toward her little brother, his hand still in hers.

“What’re you doing?” she said.

He didn’t answer. He was staring away from her. She followed his eyes to the eyes of the man who lost something. His eyes met hers, and the three of them formed a triangle of sorts, angles without lines.

“Who’s your friend?” she said to her little brother, her eyes still on his friend.

Again, the little boy didn’t respond, would probably never respond to either of them, so the man who lost something took the initiative back from whoever had taken it, and responded for him.

“I was trying to ask him a question,” he said.

“He’s not supposta talk to strangers,” she said.

“I understand. I was just trying to ask him if...”

“You’re still a stranger,” she said.

“Then you,” he said. “Have you seen a...”

“I’m not supposta talk to strangers either.”

“I’m trying not to be strange.”

The man who lost something knew that it made no sense. He was gambling on his ability to frustrate a child into speaking with him.

“I just want to know if you’ve seen a man around here.”

As he was speaking, a drop of rain fell from the sky and landed on the big sister’s nose. She looked up as though to assure herself of where it had come from, and, satisfied with her initial impression, said, “It’s raining,” and the rain fell violently, hurting their heads and hands and faces.

The men and women and children in the crowd ran with shrieks and cries and curses to their homes or to the cover of the awnings that extended from certain storefronts along the street. The man who lost something and the little boy and his big sister didn’t move. The man who lost something hoped the little sister would forget he was a stranger in the chaos the downpour created.

“So have you seen him?” He had to speak loudly because of the rain, and his voice became shrill again. “Have you seen him?”

“Yes,” said the big sister, already soaking wet.

“Where?” screamed the man who lost something. “Where’d you see him? Where’d he...”

“There you are,” said the mother of the little boy and his big sister. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

The girl grabbed her mother’s hand, but the little boy...

“Let’s go,” his mother said, “You’ll catch your death.”

She picked her little boy up with one arm and held his big sister’s hand with the other, but as they walked away, the man who lost something grabbed the big sister. Her arm extended and her body jerked.

The mother turned around sharply, revealing an expression of shock and of anger. The man who lost something released the little girl, but the mother’s expression didn’t change. She was no less shocked or angry.

The rain was still pouring down. The mother, like the big sister like the little boy like the man who lost something, was saturated, her clothes sagging from her body, her face distorted by streams of water streaming, and it was a terrifying sight.

“What do you think you’re doing!” she screamed.

There was blood in her voice. There was blood and guts, and the man who lost something couldn’t answer. He was still crouching in the rain on one knee. A puddle had formed around that knee, and he was getting the chills. He dropped to his other knee. Two knees in a puddle. It was pathetic.

The man who lost something didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say. He wouldn’t have been able to say it if he did know what to say. He wanted to beg forgiveness. He wanted to explain that he was nothing but a man who had lost something. He was nothing but two knees in a puddle. He was the equal and opposite reaction, not to a man who took something, but to the act of taking something.

The expression of shock left the mother’s face, and the anger, abandoned or purified by shock’s sudden departure, made the man who lost something tremble and swoon. He tried to ask her about the man who took something, but his voice was the voice of trembling and swooning, which is no voice. He tried to apologize, but his voice remained no voice, and his stomach hurt like nothing. He tried to reach out and grab the big sister’s arm.

He reached out and grabbed the big sister’s arm.

The mother didn’t try to say nothing. She said nothing. She ripped the big sister from the man who lost something, and the big sister cried out in pain. The sound was unbearable, blood and guts again. The mother dragged the big sister and the little boy away, almost running, and they didn’t look back to see the man who lost something fall face down.

When the man who lost something awoke, there were two police officers nudging him with their boots. He didn’t know they were police officers, but it was clear to him that there were boots nudging him—his ribs, his shoes. He decided to play dead.

One officer, the one who had been kicking more than nudging, continued to nudge, or kick depending. The other one, the one at his feet, stopped nudging, and walked, around the man who lost something, to his head.

The man who lost something wasn’t very good at playing dead. He was breathing so heavily that, despite the rain, his breath was causing ripples in the puddle near his mouth.

“He’s alive,” said the officer who was standing over his head.

He squatted down to get a better look at the man who lost something. The man who lost something still didn’t know that the two men were police officers, but he couldn’t help opening his eyes to evaluate the situation. The officer saw him open his eyes, and tried to squat even further, bending his head so low that his hat fell into the puddle beside the man who lost something.

“He got your hat wet,” said the officer who was still nudging the man who lost something.

He poured more energy into the next few kicks.

The man who lost something didn’t react. He’d seen the hat in the puddle, and realized that the men were police officers. It hadn’t crossed his mind that two police officers might be interested in finding out why a man was lying in the middle of the street on a rainy morning. He knew, or thought he knew, why they were there, and it didn’t have anything to do with loss or taking.

He jumped up quickly and took a few steps backward, trying to keep both officers in view at the same time, trying to ensure that he could run if he needed to run. But his movement startled the officer who had squatted down low, and he fell back, landing in another puddle.

“He assaulted you,” said the officer who had only stopped nudging the man who lost something because it was no longer practical.

He drew his gun.

“He just startled me,” said the officer who had fallen over. “I fell over.”

It took a while for the officer who had fallen over to convince the other officer to put the gun back in its holster, but he finally did. When, guns in holsters, the two police officers turned back toward the man who lost something, the man who lost something had partially disappeared.

Partially, because the tips of his shoes were sticking out from behind the mailbox on the corner. The police officers had been trained to find suspicious characters and interpret suspicious behavior, and they were not fooled. They knew the man who lost something was still in the shoes.

“We know you’re back there,” said the officer who had drawn and holstered his gun.

The man who lost something didn’t respond. The kicks in the ribs had been painful, but the threatening of his life was just too much. That officer, a police officer who would draw his gun on an innocent man, was a bad police officer.

“Everything’s okay,” said the other officer. “Just come on out.”

This was a pleasant police officer, a good police officer. If both of the officers had been good, the man who lost something wouldn’t have come out from behind the mailbox, because if they’d both been good, he’d never have hidden behind a mailbox in the first place. Good police officers don’t pull guns on innocent men.

He didn’t come out.

“We just want to make sure you’re alright,” said the good police officer

“What about the gun?” said the man who lost something.

“He put it away.”

“What about that lady and her kids?”

“What’s he talking about?” said the bad police officer.

A feeling of relief washed over him, and he remembered—this wasn’t about an angry woman and her unhelpful children. He hadn’t awakened, face down in a puddle, to the nudges of two police officers because he’d grabbed a little girl’s arm, but because he’d lost something, or because someone had taken something.

“Nothing,” said the man who lost something.

It was almost a blessing that these two police officers had come along when they had. The trail, if there was a trail, was getting cold, was being rinsed away by the rain. The man who lost something was wasting time behind the mailbox. He stepped out and walked toward the officers.

“Shit,” said the bad police officer.

The man who lost something looked like shit. His clothes were dirty and slimy and wet. His face was bruised from the fall. He looked like a vagrant. The two police officers probably thought he was a vagrant.

“A man took something from me,” said the man who lost something.

“The guy who knocked you out?”

You know it isn’t the case; the man who lost something knew it wasn’t the case, but it was such a long and ridiculous story, the losing and taking and screaming and men and women and children, “Yes,” said the man who lost something. “The guy who knocked me out.”

The bad police officer removed a small wire-bound notepad and a ballpoint pen from the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. He uncapped the pen and flipped the notepad open to a blank page.

“What’s he look like?” said the bad police officer.

The question caught the man who lost something off guard, not because he didn’t know what the man who took something looked like—though he didn’t—but because he couldn’t see why it mattered, as though a man who was sufficiently handsome, or sufficiently ugly, had a right to take something.

“I don’t know,” said the man who lost something.

The bad police officer looked down at his notepad, but he had nothing to write on it. He wouldn’t have been able write on it anyway, because the rain had dampened the page and smeared its light blue lines.

“Let’s go,” said the bad police officer. “This guy’s wasting our time.”

“Wait,” said the good police officer grabbing the bad police officer.

His arm extended and his body jerked. The bad police officer waited.

“Was he short or tall?” said the good police officer.

“Maybe,” said the man who lost something.

The bad police officer turned to walk away again, but the good police officer kept hold of him.

“Was his hair light or dark?” said the good police officer.

“I don’t know,” said the man who lost something. “I don’t know what he looks like.”

By then even the good police officer was losing patience. He probably wouldn’t have stopped his partner from walking away again, but his partner didn’t try to walk away.

“What’d he take,” said the bad police officer.

It hadn’t crossed his mind. The man who lost something didn’t know what the man who took something had taken. He didn’t have to say it. He could tell from the bad police officer’s expression that the bad police officer could tell from his expression.

“I guess,” said the man who lost something, “I could go through my pockets and see what’s missing.”

He began to search his pockets. In the left front pocket of his pants he found the keys to his apartment; in the right, cigarettes and matches. In his back right pocket was his wallet, and in the left breast pocket of his coat he found a stick of chewing gum. He thought maybe he remembered having more chewing gum, but he could never keep track of how many sticks out of a pack he’d already chewed.

“What’s missing?” said the bad police officer.

“I don’t know,” said the man who lost something.

He put the gum in his mouth and chewed.

There was a pause. None of them spoke. The bad police officer didn’t walk—or threaten to walk—away. The good police officer couldn’t think of any more questions to ask. It was a moment of silence for whatever was missing, an unspoken eulogy for something lost or left out.

And it was making the good police officer uncomfortable.

“Why don’t you let us give you a ride home,” he said.

“I only live over there,” said the man who lost something, pointing across the street at a three story walk-up.

It was true, he hadn’t made it very far before the man who took something took something.

“Then go on home,” said the good police officer. “Give us a call if you remember anything.”

But the man who lost something wasn’t listening. He hadn’t turned back toward the police officers after pointing at his building. He walked across the street without a word. A car braked hard in order to avoid hitting him, and the driver yelled “Fuck you,” before speeding away, unaware that there were two police officers looking on.

The police officers were looking on, but they took no notice of the car and its driver. Their eyes were following the man who lost something, still crossing the street toward the man who took something, whom they didn’t yet know was the man who took something, whom they didn’t yet know was the man whom the man who lost something thought was the man who took something, whom they would never be quite certain was the man who took something.

“Give it back!” screamed the man who lost something, shrill again, and he pounced at the man who took something, though he was still a body-length away.

He fell short, landing on his face.

The man who took something stood as though waiting for the man who lost something to get up and pounce again. The man who lost something got up and pounced again, knocking the man who took something to the ground, screaming “Give it back! Give it back!” as he tussled with the man who took something, who didn’t tussle back or give it back.

The good police officer was the first to reach them, and he pulled the man who lost something from the man who took something. The bad police officer arrived and helped the man who took something to his feet.

“Let go! Let me go!” the man who lost something screamed. “He took something from me!”

The good police officer had to struggle to hold him back while the bad police officer searched the other man’s pockets, more because it was his duty than because he believed the man who took something had taken something. He found nothing, literally nothing, not even lint in his pockets.

“This man has nothing.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the shrill screams of the man who lost something, and his own voice became shrill. “He’s taken nothing from you.”

“He did!” said the man who lost something—“He has!”—struggling against the good police officer’s bear hug.

“Calm down,” said the good police officer, “calm down,” but the man who lost something continued to struggle screaming for several minutes, before calming down, too exhausted to continue, going limp in the arms of the good police officer.

“How do you know this is the guy?” said the bad police officer.

“He’s been watching the whole time,” said the man who lost something.

“But how do you know this is the guy?”

The man who lost something had no answer.

“Then we’re gonna have to let him go,” said the bad police officer, and he let him go.

As the man who took something walked away, he looked over his shoulder, an inscrutable expression on his face. The good police officer assumed it was a look of fear, fear of being pounced on again. The man who lost something saw a knowing look, a triumphant look. The bad police officer didn’t catch it at all. He was trying to be unobtrusive while checking his pockets, his belt, his holster to see if anything was missing, and his stomach was beginning to ache.

You know the feeling by now. The same one the man who lost something had as he walked up the stairs to his apartment building. He was dirty and slimy and wet. His face was bruised, his muscles were sore, and he could taste the blood in his throat from all of the screaming he’d done. He opened the door to the awful possibilities of a life with meaning.

oh, little so-and-so

A man about my age sees a little girl standing in the middle of a busy intersection, blowing a whistle and flapping her arms like a marionette. He assumes she assumes she’s directing traffic. Traffic is flowing smoothly. No accidents are happening.

It isn’t a matter of whether he wants to move toward her, to help her. He moves toward her to help her whether he wants to or not, as though there are strings attached to each of his limbs, strings so fine that they can’t be seen by the eye that doesn’t mean to see them, unless they catch the glare of the sun just so, and even then the eye that doesn’t mean to see them doesn’t know what it’s seen.

The little girl doesn’t see them, doesn’t mean to see them, or just doesn’t care. She’s got other things on her mind. Something to do with the traffic. Standing before her in the middle of the intersection, strings slack, the man still thinks she thinks she’s directing traffic.

She blows her whistle. She flaps her arms. Traffic continues flowing smoothly, though now that he’s in the middle of the street, the man can see that the cars that make up the traffic are slowing as they approach the intersection, the drivers trying to avoid hitting the little girl, and now the man, or to see what they can see.

“Directing traffic?” the man says.

The girl points a finger at him. She blows her whistle at him. She keeps on directing traffic, or whatever it is she’s doing, with the arm that isn’t pointing its finger.

“What?” he says.

The little girl opens her mouth. For a moment, the whistle sticks to her upper lip. Then it falls downward and dangles from the string around her neck. The girl takes a step forward and her finger pokes the man in the chest.

“You’re in my way,” she says.

“I’m in your way,” he says.

He wants to get out of her way, to turn around, get out of the middle of the street, go back to whatever he was going about, but something—let’s say the strings—won’t let him.

“Directing traffic,” he says.

She drops her finger-pointing arm to its side. She stops flapping the other arm, and lets it fall to the other side. There is no noticeable change in the flow of traffic. Still the same slowing at the intersection for the same reasons.

“I’m hitching a ride,” she says.

The man would really like to leave.

“That’s not how you hitch a ride,” he says. “You hitch a ride like this.”

The man stretches out an arm, stretches out the thumb at the end of it, but he’s standing in the middle of an intersection, and even if a driver were inclined to pick up a hitchhiker while driving smoothly if slowly through, the driver wouldn’t know which direction the man hoped to go, and probably wouldn’t take the trouble to find out.

Who knows what their inclinations are. No one is taking the trouble to find out.

“That’s not how I hitch a ride,” says the little girl. “I hitch a ride like this.”

She puts the whistle back into her mouth, blows it at him, and begins to flap her arms like a marionette.

“Good luck,” says the man.

But he doesn’t turn to leave.

The girl speaks around her whistle: “You got a car?” she says.

“What’s your name?” she says.

He tells himself not to tell her. He tells her his name.

They’re in his car now, but they aren’t going anywhere. He hasn’t even put the keys in the ignition.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” he says.

The seatbelt barely fits around her backpack. Her backpack is on her lap. It covers her entire lap from the top of her thighs to the tip of her knees, with maybe a little overhang depending on whether she’s slouching or sitting up straight. He hadn’t noticed how large it was when they were standing in the middle of the street, because when they were standing in the middle of the street, she’d been facing him the whole time. He hears the seatbelt click and starts the car.

“Where are we going?” he says.

“The cemetery,” she says. “A funeral.”

“You mean a burial?” he says. “They usually have the funeral at church.”

He puts the car in gear and pulls out into the busy intersection where traffic is still flowing smoothly despite the little girl’s absence.

“Or a funeral home,” he says.

He doesn’t know why, but he turns left at the intersection, heading for a particular cemetery even though the little girl hasn’t told him which particular cemetery the funeral, the burial, is being held at.

“Not Will,” she says.

“Who’s Will?” he says.

“Will’s having a funeral at the cemetery,” says the little girl.

He assumes Will is a friend. Her use of his first name—he assumes Will is a first name, assumes Will is a he—leads him to assume that Will is a friend, rather than a relative, a teacher, a neighbor, and he is overcome with feeling for the girl. Something pulls a tear from one of his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

The little girl looks at him as though she doesn’t understand why he should be sorry and says: “Yeah you are.”

Now the tears flow freely from both of his eyes. No one has to pry them out. He’s incapacitated by his own weeping. The car swerves right and harder left while the man tries to steer through the blur of his tears.

The little girl yells at him: “You trying to kill us?” and the man stutters “No,” through sobs and around hiccups. Finally he manages to pull over to the shoulder, slam on the brakes, and cut the engine.

“Put it in park,” the girl says.

He puts it in park just as the car is beginning to roll backward down the mild incline. The little girl opens the front pocket of her backpack and rummages through it.

“I might have to find someone else to hitch a ride with,” she says.

“N-no,” he stutters, still sobbing.

“Then clean yourself up,” she says, pulling a wad of napkins from the pocket.

The man accepts the napkins and wipes the tears from his cheeks and eyes. He blows his nose as the sobbing slows then stops altogether. His breath comes shaky and shallow, and he feels weaker than he usually does.

He blows his nose again, throws the soggy napkins into the back seat, and inhales deeply until he’s sitting upright with his chest puffed out. He exhales, inhales again, and forgets to exhale. He sniffs, deeply, as though something stinks.

“Something stinks,” he says.

“Yeah, you,” says the girl.

The man sniffs the air again. Again, sniffing in directions, his head rolling as though he’s having a fit.

“No,” he says. “Something stinks.”

“Something stinks,” the girls says in her most mocking voice.

She rolls her head, sniffing and sniffing around the car like a cartoon. The man stops sniffing and watches her. He’d like to smack her upside the head, but he doesn’t, he can’t. The little girl, seeing she’s made her point, stops rolling her head, rolls her eyes, and smacks him upside the head.

“Drive,” she says.

But he doesn’t drive yet. His eyes have landed on her backpack, at its open front pocket. He sniffs again, but doesn’t move any closer to her, to it.

“What’s in the bag?” he says.

Suddenly she doesn’t seem so defiant. She doesn’t have an answer. She reaches quickly but awkwardly for the zipper, and it gets caught halfway. She tugs and it doesn’t budge. She tugs again but nothing. She’s tugging and tugging her way to a tantrum.

The man reaches over calmly and peels her fingers from the bag. He pulls the zipper back an inch or so in the direction of open, and closes it smoothly.

The little girl flashes him a look—something like a pout, but with an I-could-have-done-it-myself anger, or maybe frustration, behind it. He’s seen that look before, but he can’t quite remember where. It doesn’t make him want to cry, though. He can’t remember what it makes him want to do.

“Can we go?” she says.

“Is that it?” he says.

They’re at the cemetery now. The strings have pointed his finger toward something just beyond the windshield—a party of mourners standing around a casket, mourning, while a priest stands at the head of the casket, chanting or incanting.

The little girl doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t said anything since asking if they could go, but she unbuckles the seatbelt, hefts the bag, and opens the door. The man cuts the engine.

“So this is it,” he says, and the little girl slams her door on his affirmation.

None of the mourners seems to register their approach. No, oh little so-and-so made it to her friend Will’s funeral, or who the hell is that man with little so-and-so, or who the hell is that little so-and-so. They’re a staid group of mourners, not a moist eye in the bunch.

The man would prefer some tears, a sound or two beside the priestly drone, so he provides it himself. The tears flow again, freely from his eyes, incapacitating him with weeping. The girl punches him to stop, tells him to pull himself together, but he can’t hear her through the sobs and hiccups.

The girl takes off her backpack, rummages through the front pocket, and pulls out another wad of napkins. She shoves them into his hands, and his sobs die down. He begins to clean himself up.

As his eyes clear, he looks around to see if his outburst has startled anyone, or sparked any other outbursts or potential outbursts, but the mourners still look like they’re lost in themselves. The priest says his ashes to ashes and the mourners file away by ones and twos.

“I feel better,” says the man. “Don’t you feel better?”

He brings the soggy wad of napkins to his nose and sniffs inconspicuously while he awaits an answer.

“I thought they put the coffin in the ground and throw dirt and flowers on it,” says the little girl.

She looks up at him. He yanks the napkins from his nostrils and shoves them behind his back as though the napkins were what he meant to hide.

“Yes,” he says, looking around for some physical manifestation of what he’s affirming.

His eyes land on the casket suspended above its final resting place and covered in flowers, alone, as the last of the mourners straggle from the grave site, get into their cars, and drive away.

His fingers fiddle with the napkins behind his back. He doesn’t want to look at the little girl, but he does. Her physique manifests confusion over the contradiction between his confirmation and the facts before their eyes.

“I mean no,” says the man. “Only in the movies.”

“What about the guns?” she says.

This time he has no idea what she’s talking about.

“Movies,” he says.

“Will’s funeral’s gonna have guns,” she says.

“It’s over,” he says. “There were no guns.”

“I’m talking about Will’s funeral,” says the little girl.

“You’re sure that wasn’t it?” he says.

They’re walking now, through the cemetery, ever further from the site of what he’d thought—because the little girl had done nothing to deny it—was Will’s grave, and far from the sight of it.

“It wasn’t it,” she says.

“Because I don’t see any others,” he says.

The girl ignores him and keeps walking up the gentle slope. He follows, pulled along by something like a string. The cemetery is larger than he would have guessed driving past it, they’ve been walking longer than he would have guessed they’d be able to walk without ever retracing their steps and moving in circles, and the sun has just dropped behind the gentle slope a few gentle slopes over, leaving them to hike by dusk-light.

“It’s getting dark,” he says.

“Don’t you ever shut up?” says the girl.

He shuts up. He concentrates on staying that way, but they’ve been walking for a long time and the less he talks, the more he tries to concentrate on not talking, the more he concentrates on how tired he is, and hungry, the more tired and hungry he becomes. It’s like there’s another string pulling him in the opposite direction, creating a near equilibrium.

The distance between them isn’t so big—a pace or two—but when he falls back another pace or two, the girl, who hasn’t looked back in a while, looks back. Another pace or two and the man stops, too exhausted to go on without a break. He bends over with his hands to his knees, stares at the grass around his feet and pants a little. The little girl stops with her back to him.

“What?” she says.

“I need a second,” he says.

She slips out of her backpack and pulls it around to the front of her, easing it down to the ground. She bends over, unzips the backpack, and rummages through it.

“Hungry?” she says.

She pulls out an open, half-full package of orange peanut butter crackers, and holds them over her shoulder. The man hears the wrapper crackle, looks up from the ground, and sees it glinting in the half-light. He walks toward her, around her, taking the package from her upstretched hand as he goes. The man stops in front of the little girl and withdraws a cracker from the wrapper.

He shoves the cracker whole in his mouth and hands the package back to her. She accepts, withdraws and nibbles away while putting the package back into her bag and trying to close the zipper one-handed.

It gets caught halfway. She tugs and it doesn’t budge. Again, but nothing. The man reaches over calmly and pulls the zipper back an inch or so in the direction of open, then closes it smoothly.

“Ready?” he says.

The girl tries to lift the bag, but its bottom doesn’t leave the ground. It’s gotten about ten pounds heavier in the course of their break. Not the bag itself but the bag in relation to the girl, its liftability.

“Let me give you a hand,” says the man.

He reaches for the bag, lifts it by a single strap, and slings it over a shoulder.

The girl screams: “No.”

She pounces. She grabs the bottom of the bag with both hands tightly. She lifts her legs from the ground, allows the bag to lift her in hopes that it will fall with her too. The man spins left, trying to see what’s happening behind him, but the girl’s ungrounded legs fly out behind her and she remains behind him, though the location of behind him changes from one moment to the next.

Faster now, until her body is perpendicular to yours and her grip starts to slip from the bottom of the bag, until her screams of no and stop and give it back blend into something a little less intelligible and a little more primitive, until her body flies away in the direction of centrifugal force and, of course, gravity, and she hits the ground dizzy and whimpering and empty-handed, but otherwise unharmed.

He stops facing her. He bends over and vomits at the ground between his feet, splattering his sneakers and smearing his face with what little there was in his stomach. The little girl sits up with her head between her hands and her elbows on her knees like she might do the same herself, but she suddenly stands, walks around behind him, unzips the front pocket of her backpack, and rummages through it.

She pulls out another wad of napkins and hands it to him over his shoulder. He takes them, splitting the wad in rough halves, using the one to wipe his shoes, the other his face. He stops mid-wipe, and looks over his shoulder at the little girl.

“What the fuck is that smell?” he says.

She gives him the look again, but he still can’t remember what it makes him want to do. She reaches down and zips the front pocket of her backpack without any struggle.

“Can I have my bag back now?” she says.

“I see something,” he says as they crest another gentle slope.

It’s been a long time since he’s seen anything but dark shapes, the dark shape of the little girl in front of him, the bag like a huge, head-hiding hunch on her back. It’s moonless night now. They’ve been relying on their feet and the feel of the ground.

“It’s a light,” he says.

A fire of some sort, radiating pale-orange a few feet every way but down. A scraping sound comes from the same direction as the fire, slow and faint. They move toward it and the light grows more bright, the scraping louder but just as slow.

The light resolves itself into an old camping lantern. The lantern rests on the ground in front of a large pile of dirt, a pile of dirt that grows imperceptibly larger as more dirt flies out of a hole in the ground—a hole that they still can’t see—in counterpoint to the scrapes.

The little girl runs on ahead. The man tries to run, but lags.

“We’re here,” yells the girl, dime-stopping with swinging arms at the lip of a hole the man can see now, though he’s still a few yards back.

The little girl steadies herself, squats, lets the backpack slip from her shoulders to the earth behind her, and disappears into the hole—legs, torso, head and hands. It gives the man the scare he needs to lunge the last few feet.

Looking down into what he can see now is a grave-in-progress, he finds the little girl, arms thrown about the neck of a short, sinewy man of indeterminate age, dirty from digging in his work-wear, face shadowed by the dark of the pit and the stuffed-down brim of a baseball hat, a spade resting against his thigh. They look the portrait of a father and daughter, the portrait of a sinister father and daughter.

“That’s him,” says the little girl to the gravedigger.

“Who,” the man says.

“You,” says the gravedigger, lifting the girl by the waist back to the edge of the hole, and seating her there with her legs dangling over the side.

The gravedigger then puts his own hands on the edge and lifts and pulls and kicks his way up, with grunts and strains and popping veins. He manages to get a leg, crooked at the knee, onto flat ground, and crawls his awkward way out.

“I don’t know which is harder,” he says, wiping sweat mingled with dirt to mud from his face with the back of a forearm, “getting in or getting out.”

The man stares at him as though he doesn’t know to chuckle because he doesn’t.

“Depends who you are,” says the girl with a giggle.

“Depends who you are,” the gravedigger laughs.

Something forces a forced chuckle from the man—there’s no string that can force a chuckle—then forces a joke as well:

“What man dost thou dig it for?” he says.

The gravedigger rolls his head as though he’s rolling his brim-hidden eyes as though he’s heard it a thousand times. He digs in his pockets, pulls out a match, and strikes it against his dirt-crusted shirt. It flares, releasing a sulfurous smell and illuminating everything but his face. He pulls a cigarette from behind his ear and lights it with the match.

“There isn’t much left,” he says. “You can help.”

He hops back into the hole and beckons the man. The man steps closer to the edge and looks down. He squats, sits, and slides into the grave. The gravedigger hands him a pickaxe and tells him to watch where he swings it. The gravedigger sets to work. The man too, eventually and reluctantly.

Between swings and scrapes, he can hear the little girl running around above them, digging through her bag, removing things from her bag, placing the things she’s removed at some distance from her bag.

He swings, the gravedigger’s shovel scrapes, and the thumps of the little girl’s feet carry the message that her feet are moving, down through the earth to him. Swing scrape thump. It goes on like this until he swings, the gravedigger’s shovel scrapes, and the little girl wails:

“Will!”

The man stops mid-swing. The gravedigger hops from the pit in one quick motion, shovel in hand. The man drops his pickaxe and tries to climb out too, but it’s easier getting in than getting out.

The edge is about level with the top of his head. He places his hand on the earth above him and tries to lift himself upward, gets far enough to see flat ground, the legs of the gravedigger with an arm around the little girl, their backs to him, before falling back down.

He swings his arms as far as he can over the edge, grabs a clump of grass with each hand, and tries to worm his way up and over, swiveling his hips and kneeing the side of the grave. He’s got his shoulders out on flat ground and his face buried in the dirt when the gravedigger finally turns, sees him, and grabs his wrists, pulling him into the open. He lies there a moment, face down, spitting dirt from his mouth, smelling the grass and something else. Something that stinks.

When he lifts his head he sees it—a fishbowl of average size, and in it, a goldfish the size of an average fishbowl, dead, bloated round like a cartoon or a bath-toy, and staring at him with sunken, glassy eyes. Beside it, a gun, and several feet away, the bag, a withered crumpled shell of its former self. He’d say something, but something’s got his tongue.

“Ready for the funeral?” the little girl whimpers.

She’s crying. He reaches into his back pocket, and pulls out the crumpled wad of used napkins he’d put there. He hands them to her. She blows her nose as the sobbing slows then stops altogether. Her breath comes shaky and shallow, and she looks fragile.

“How’d he die?” he says.

Her face twitches on the brink of something, of crying or that look.

“Ate himself to death,” she says.

A fish in a bowl can’t eat himself to death. The man gets up on his palms, all fours. He stands, breathes in the fresh air. A fish in a bowl has to be fed to death. He looks down on her, her face lit from below by the orange glow of the lamp.

“You killed him,” he says.

“That’s enough,” says the gravedigger.

He reaches a hand out to keep the man from moving any closer.

“I gave him a choice,” says the little girl.

She reaches for the gun. The man freezes. He looks to the gravedigger for an explanation.

“For the twenty-one gun salute,” says the gravedigger. “She’s only got the one.”

“She killed him,” says the man.

He turns back to the gun, to her. She’s got that look on her face again, and suddenly I remember what it reminds him of.

He was about her age, under the sheets late at night reading a cut-rate comic book by flashlight. There was an illustration. It was supposed to teach a moral. Two little kids, a boy and a girl with huge heads, tied together by a rope, one end knotted around the girl’s waist, the other the boy’s. They were running away from each other, toward milkshakes larger than they were and just out of their reach, stretching the rope taut. This was represented by loose fibers at the center of the rope, and the look on their faces. That was the look.

The moral was in the next panel. They took turns standing on each other’s shoulders and enjoying the milkshake. But he didn’t learn the moral. He couldn’t get past that look on their faces.

It made him want to swing the rope over one of the gigantic straws protruding from the gigantic milkshakes and dangle from their legs, listening to them scream as the rope slipped up their bodies to their scrawny necks, to swing as their bodies spasmed spaghetti western style. He wouldn’t let go until every last drop of life had been squeezed from their cartoon bodies.

But I think I’m starting to get the hang of him.

She’s got a gun. There’s a full-grown man with a shovel standing next to him.

moldering

I was growing moldy of wallet from hoeing down and the sweat therefrom. My wife, who does not hoe much anymore, down or up, though her business is fancy-dancing and her body hard in all the right places and soft in the others, liked to remind me that it stank repulsive and caused me to scrub my hands upon handling it.

Now I am faithful to her in all things, and I still enjoy the pleasure of her flesh and hers only as much as I would have on the day I met her if she’d have allowed me to lay hands on her during our five episodes’ courtship, but a man has his pride, and so I did my best to ignore her cold-shouldering all the way to rejection-outright until the fourth straight evening of unfulfilled marital duties when I felt myself about to explode, and I burst out with a “What must a man do to regain your affections?”

“I do not know,” said my wife, “for no man but you has managed to gain my affections, and therefore no man but you could ever have lost my affections, ergo, there is no man but you who could hope thus far to regain my affections.

“As for you,” she said, “your hopes of regaining my affections hinge upon three simple tasks: first, you must secure a new wallet for yourself and my affections by proxy. Then you must destroy the old, moldy wallet now in the seat of your dungarees after transferring its contents to the new. Finally you must lather your hands as you’ve never lathered them before and run them a minute under the hottest water your skin can stand. That accomplished, you will find me upon this very bed, warm of shoulder and spread of legs, so long as I sense that you will never think on these last days again, except as a reminder to be vigilant against molding the new, and as a warning.”

My wife is a reasonable if stingy woman, and I would have been more than willing to fulfill each of these obligations daily, but for the part about the sense of what I would and would not think on, not because I was resistant, but because the senses of people about things or thoughts can be unpredictable if not fickle, not least so my wife’s, so I knew that some kind of preemptive gesture was required of me.

Without further consideration, that is, without enough, I told her: “My darling, it’s so like you to ask so little of me that it shames me when I fall short.”

I leapt from our bed and proceeded to dress myself in the clothes of that day, beginning with the dungarees in whose back pocket the old wallet moldered, saying: “I am even now dressing myself with the intention of marching to the tannery, where I will purchase, not just a new wallet of immaculate hide, but a pretty little handbag for you, cut from the same animal as the wallet, as a token of my dedication to our oneness.”

By the time I had finished my modest oration, my shirt was buttoned and tucked, my boots were on, and my hat was in hand. My wife was already sitting up, a look like concern upon her face.

“At this hour?” she said.

I glanced at the clock on the night table. It was midnight, but my brain was aflame, and the lamp behind my wife showed me the shape of her beneath the lacy gown she favored, redoubling my intention of redoubling my efforts on our respective behalves.

“Woman,” I said, “my passion knows no midnight, and besides, the tanner was a friend of my youth.”

I placed the hat atop my head and tipped it to her, not daring to attempt to rustle a kiss from a woman of such will as I left our bedroom and then our cozy home.

The tannery’s neighborhood is not quite as cozy as ours, but I am no stranger to it having grown up there, the son of a preacher man and woman both, and the respect of the residents of the old neighborhood for the memory of my dear departed parents, not to mention my own knack with bootstraps, has earned me the reputation of a local boy made good. The old folks look upon me with homespun admiration. Witness, for instance, the repulsive vagrant who approached me as I strolled the night-dark streets, the same man we used to torment as boys, offering him at times a sandwich or some stale pastry laced with gravel from our lots, others, something a bit more sharp.

He approached me beneath the rare functional street lamp and I recognized him immediately. He was older and might have had even fewer teeth if that was possible, evidence that boys keep being boys, but it was the same ugliness as ever.

He said: “It’s kind of late for a guy like you to be wandering these streets,” and I thanked him kindly for his concern as my heart’s cockles warmed at the thought of the intense loyalty of my downtrodden brothers and sisters, especially as I had not always been so generous toward this particular brother. I offered him a Marlboro Red from my just-opened package, but he refused, most likely out of humility, though possibly he associated free cigarettes with some small explosion in the past.

I lit one of my own, told him to suit himself, and said: “I’m off to the tannery.”

“Tannery’s closed this time of night,” he said.

Again with that almost childlike eagerness to help. I hesitated to tell him that he wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t already know, but, as he was bound to see me continue on in the tannery’s direction, it being only a few blocks off, I feared he would panic if I didn’t set his mind at ease.

“I’m aware of that,” I said, “but the tanner was my closest boyhood companion.”

“Things change,” he said, imbuing those two words with all of his pride in my accomplishment, as though he’d had some small role in them, and I grew watery of eye, but decided it would be gauche of me to inform him in so many words that his role had been larger than he could know. Instead, I tossed the remains of my cigarette into the street and offered again. He accepted this time, and I walked on toward the tannery waiting for a bang that never came.

The tannery was closed as expected, but I could see inside by the light of the neon signs in its windows, signs that advertised a variety of tobacco and alcohol products, another reminder that things had changed, but the sign above it still said the tannery. I supposed it made sense that a craftsman in the old neighborhood could no longer sustain himself on fine hides alone, what with the wide variety of mass-produced and artificial textiles available for much lower prices.

It saddened me that someone as skilled as the tanner, someone who had, as a youth, demonstrated the potential to craft chaps for the thighs of the crowned heads of Europe (and no less an authority than Mr. Bedell, our YMCA camp crafts instructor, had suggested it), had sunken to hawking perishables to pay the rent. But a gift is a gift, and gifts don’t go away. I reasoned that my friend would be made as glad by the commission as I would by the results, even at this hour.

If things hadn’t changed too much, then he still lived above his shop in a cramped, vermin-infested efficiency that was not without its bohemian charms, and I dared to hope that the small workshop where he did his finest work was still there, in the corner by the stove, for I meant my new wallet and my wife’s pretty handbag to be his very finest work.

I went to the small door at the side of the tannery and pressed the buzzer’s button with a sense of anticipation I hadn’t felt in ages, then waited impatiently for the door to open and my old, dear friend to greet me with surprise, then brotherly warmth, a warmth that I hadn’t experienced of late, a byproduct, I suppose, of this hectic modern life and of my vast responsibilities.

As it turned out, I would have to be more patient than expected as my friend the tanner did not answer the door at all, and neither did anyone else. While I waited, I thought back on my last trip to the tannery, the time I had purchased the wallet moldering in my back pocket. That had been years ago, shortly before I took my bride, and if memory serves, I had arrived at a similar hour and waited another, periodically pressing the buzzer, only to find that my friend’s bell was broken.

It seemed unlikely that a man of my friend’s dexterity would not, in the course of these many years, have attempted to fix the bell, or at the very least to engage a repairman, but the urgency was great, greater now that I needed a pretty handbag to match the wallet I would request, and I could not afford to waste an hour standing in the street until my friend came down to take the air and smoke a cigarette as he had before.

I didn’t bother knocking on his door as I knew that the street door merely let into a stairway, and at the top of the stairway was another door which led into the tanner’s studio and which would block even the loudest of knocks, so I raised my leg and brought my boot down upon the door’s knob with great vigor, and the knob came off and fell to the sidewalk with a clang and I raised my leg again and kicked at the hole in the door where the knob had been, and the door splintered and gave.

I ran up the stairs, hoping that I hadn’t spoiled my chances of surprising my friend with the racket produced by the door’s destruction, and in hopes of maintaining any element of remaining surprise, I crashed through the door at the top of the staircase announcing myself as follows:

“I am come in fulfillment of ancient prophecy, for though I have no need of riding chaps and my head is unadorned, is not the celebrity the new American royalty, and am I not, in all modesty, a celebrity?”

I would not have stopped there, but would have gone on to flatter my friend with my opinions of his abilities if he had been there to hear them, but he was not and I did not, as I am no great admirer of the sound of my own voice and try to use it only when it can be of some use to my fellow man.

My fellow man, as I said, was not there, but there was plenty of evidence that he had not been gone long—the coffee in the pot was still lukewarm—and that he meant to return shortly—the lamp above his kitchen table had been left on.

There were also signs throughout the place that the place was still, in fact, his. The butts in the ashtray were of the brand I recall him favoring, and, mounted on his wall, in a deep frame behind glass—a frame not particularly well-wrought but of great sentimental value because I had made it in the same crafts class at the same YMCA camp in which my friend had fashioned his first wallet—the wallet was even now on display in the very frame I had given him as a gesture of respect for his gifts, and because, even at that tender age, I knew that I wasn’t meant to work with my hands, and Mr. Bedell’s reaction to the frame had confirmed as much. Most encouraging, though, was the work table, crammed, as I’d remembered, into the space between the couch and the wall.

Whatever was on the table was covered by an oilcloth. I was tempted to peek beneath it to see what dazzling new heights my friend had attained, but the years have taught me nothing if not respect for the sanctity of the artist’s sanctuary, be the artist a lowly worker in leather, like my friend, or an artist of personality and entertainment, like myself, so I resigned myself to waiting in a chair at the kitchen table, heartened by the idea that I had retained the element of surprise, and passing the time by imagining his reaction to finding me awaiting him at his kitchen table to offer him the commission of a lifetime.

Naturally, even the most patient of men can only occupy himself with such thoughts for so long before the excitement that they provide peters out and finally becomes a kind of repulsion, but I am a resourceful man, and so I pulled my wirebound notebook and a pen from my pocket with the intention of taking notes on the evening’s events to that point, convinced that they could be worked into something revelatory and motivational if recited at one of my many speaking engagements.

However, when I placed the notebook upon the table, I found that it had become, not moldy like the wallet, but warped of page and still damp from the last night’s hoedown, and when, undeterred, I put pen to paper, I found that the pen would not make its mark. It was then that I hit upon the idea of ordering a hide-bound notebook to match the new wallet and the pretty handbag, and I made a note of it on the back of my hand with the pen, so that I should not forget about it in my excitement over the reunion and my eagerness to please my wife.

By then I had been distracted from thoughts of the reunion long enough that they were again capable of producing in me a sense of anticipation, although less intense than previously, the type that need to be rationed out lest they become repulsive, so I alternated imaginings of the reunion with imaginings of my wife’s silhouette backlit by her bed lamp, and of all the glorious favors she would grant me upon my successful return, which thoughts can never become repulsive, even if the acts themselves might seem somewhat distasteful when put into words.

I won’t put into words what I was imagining when I first noticed that I was hearing my old friend staggering up the stairs because I put it quickly out of my mind, lit a fresh cigarette, crossed my legs, and gave myself a sharp slap to the face to clear my head.

I had left the apartment door open in order to hear him staggering up the stairs, being well aware of the difference between surprise and shock, and knowing that when he found it that way, he would be prepared to find someone awaiting him, and would therefore not have a heart attack when I began my speech, but that he would never in a thousand lifetimes expect that it was I who awaited him.

He stormed through the door with the jagged neck of a glass bottle in his hand and thrust it blindly about him screaming, “What do you want motherfucker!”

I realized I hadn’t taken enough care to consider the effect that returning home to find both of his doors splintered and open, in the old neighborhood no less, would have upon my friend’s delicate and artistic constitution, and he was obviously deeply intoxicated to boot, so I labored to set his mind at ease post-haste.

“I am come in fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” I said, “for though I have no need of riding chaps and my head is uncrowned, is not the celebrity the new American royalty, and am I not, in all modesty, a celebrity?”

As I finished my introduction he seemed to notice me, as me, for the first time, and I saw in his inebriate and bloodshot eyes, a look of recognition. He breathed a sigh of relief and let his improvised weapon fall to the carpet, relieving me, not of the fear of injury but of having to injure.

“I thought you were a cowboy,” he said.

It was only when he said that, that I realized how true the vagrant’s words had been. I’d been thinking of my separation from the tanner in terms of years, whereas the vagrant, in his ignorant intuition, had hit upon the greater changes that the years had wrought. My friend, who, in a sense, I’d left behind even before I’d actually left him behind, had stayed behind to make his way in a much slower universe.

I tried to explain: “Years ago, I did consider the IT professional to be the new cowboy, and cyberspace the final frontier, but, though I still enjoy hoeing down and consider myself something of a proverbial outlaw, for some time now I have supported myself and my family through speaking engagements and television appearances.”

The tanner struggled back toward the doorway, indicating it with the hand that had held the bottleneck. “Well, it was an honor getting reacquainted with your highness, but I’m exhausted and drunk and need my rest,” he said.

I didn’t move from my seat, not wanting to give the impression that I agreed completely with the vagrant. Yes, things had changed, and yes I had moved on to better things and places, but I didn’t want the tanner to think for a moment that I had merely stopped in to lord it over him.

“Please,” I said, “don’t stand on formality. Pretend that we last saw each other only yesterday, because I assure you, the warmth of my feeling for you has only grown as it would have if we’d remained in contact all this time.”

My friend didn’t move either, but said: “As happy as it makes me to hear that, I do have to open the shop in a few hours.”

As certain I was that he was as happy by my attentions as he suggested, his tone contained a certain amount of what I took to be resentment, particularly toward the end of his response, the part about opening his shop, and I realized that he was making a certain assumption, common enough among people of his station, but mistaken nonetheless, about the relative difficulty of our lives and livelihoods. This assumption, that I am successful because I work less, is both absurd and hurtful, and my anger, when faced with it, has been known to get the best of me, but, in this case, my tender feelings toward my friend won out without much struggle and I brushed it off, though I still didn’t move.

“But friend,” I said, “my visit is not just about pleasure but business too, a matter of business lucrative enough that you could choose not to open the shop tomorrow or the next day or the next week, and still have more money than you would if I left right now.”

Perhaps it was crude of me to speak so blatantly about matters financial with someone of his meager means, but it seemed to get his attention and his response was no less crude. He let the hand indicating the door drop to his side and said, skeptically: “Oh yeah?”

I decided that this was the right time to get down to business, so I stood up and made my way over to his work table. He watched me with a combination of friendly curiosity—I was always a bit unpredictable—and an artisan’s awareness, but when I placed my hands upon the oilcloth to remove it with a ceremonial flourish, he ran to the table and placed himself between myself and it.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

“I respect the sanctity of your studio,” I said, “and will follow your wishes in the way that I treat it, but the workshop will have to be unveiled if our business is to be transacted.”

He didn’t move, but he said: “What business are you talking about, exactly.”

“I’ve come for a wallet,” I said, “of the finest hide and craftsmanship, and a pretty handbag to match.”

The tanner smiled inscrutably and said: “You’ve come to the wrong place.”

I stepped backward from the table, wondering just what he meant by that, worried that his circumstances had caused him to abandon his dream, angry at the way the neighborhood, the world, crushes that hope out of people, of us. And I don’t just mean him. Do you think I dreamed, when watching him work his magic on that wallet back in YMCA camp, of finding fame and my wife through Which Rich Cowboy Wants to Marry a Frigid Virgin™?

“Please,” I said to him, “please tell me you haven’t given up.”

He laughed again and nodded affirmative, a nod so careless, so flippant as to stir in me anger, despite our past closeness and my hopes for our reunion. I clenched my fists and bit my tongue to avoid another outburst. I turned my back to him and began counting to ten, allowing my eyes to wander the room in an attempt to distract myself from my disappointment, but instead my disappointment was exacerbated when I glanced again at the poorly crafted frame with the beautifully crafted wallet inside. My eyes welled with tears, and it was well beyond ten seconds before I was again ready to turn and face my friend.

When I did, I found him flipping the oilcloth back over his worktable suspiciously, but I didn’t get a chance to see what was beneath.

I asked him: “What are you doing?” and he answered: “Nothing.”

I knew he wasn’t meaning to raise my suspicions, but he was raising my suspicions. What I couldn’t decide was why he was trying to hide whatever was beneath the oilcloth from me. Was he lying about having given up? Was he, in fact, working on his masterpiece beneath that cloth? And if so, who had commissioned it? Someone more important than me? Didn’t he know who I had become? Or did it have nothing to do with tanning? Was it something so shameful that he couldn’t allow me to see it?

I asked him: “What have you got beneath that oilcloth?” and he answered: “Nothing.”

I took a step toward him and another until I was staring directly into his eyes.

I said: “I demand to know what you’ve got beneath that oilcloth,” and he said: “None of your business,” but he must have seen from my expression how serious I was, because he reached behind him slowly and slid a hand beneath the oilcloth.

He pulled his hand out and held it up between us. My eyes focused slowly, but when they did, I saw a thin white tube between his thumb and forefinger.

“A joint?” I said.

He laughed nervously, put the joint in his mouth, and lit it. I shoved him sideways and pulled the oilcloth from the table, like a magician, before he even had the chance to exhale. There were scales and bricks and piles of weed and joints and papers and bags scattered across the table. I averted my gaze.

“Do you know the kind of trouble it would make for me if anyone were to find me here, in this apartment with,” I waved an arm in the direction of the table without looking back on it, “with this?”

“It’s just pot,” said the tanner.

“Pot, heroin, child pornography—I don’t care,” I said. I said: “I’m a role model!”

“Not around here,” he said.

I knew he was just speaking in anger. If I was a role model anywhere it was there, where they needed me. I knew it was best to ignore it. But then I worried that his outburst could be a symptom of a greater problem, something more than envy.

“I can get you help,” I said, pulling the joint from his mouth and stomping it out on the floor. I put a hand on his shoulder. “We could say I was only here for an intervention. And then, when you’re clean, I could take you with me, to my appearances, as an example.”

“Like a trained monkey,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “like a monkey. Like a cleaned up monkey with a gift.”

I was too busy pointing at the frame on the wall to see his wind-up. His fist hit my jaw and I fell backward into the wall behind me. As I slid down the wall to the floor, the frame teetered above me and then fell, its glass shattering to shards beside me, the wallet coming loose from the mounting, landing on the carpet like a spent rag.

I picked it up from the floor and looked it over. It wasn’t as perfect as it had been in my memory—there were some uneven stitches and some warped seams—but my memory had been built on potential, a potential I thought I could still see in the thing itself, its smooth surface, its intricate folds. I held it out toward him with both hands.

“You had such a gift,” I said, “when did you give up on your dream?”

He shook his head at his sore knuckles. “The store was called the tannery before I ever owned it,” he said. “The previous owner’s name. I was never a tanner.”

“All of the greats feel that way sometimes,” I said. “Do you think I always feel like a successful public personality?”

“No,” he said, taking a step toward me, “I was never a tanner.” He snatched the wallet from my hands and said: “This is the only wallet I ever made.”

I was certain I had him there. I pulled the moldy wallet from my back pocket and waved it in front of him. “What about this?” I said.

He winced as though prepared to admit defeat and said: “You made that one, technically.”

We had agreed, on my last visit, never to mention the fact to anyone. I was happy with the wallet and he had been handsomely compensated, and I would never have admitted that I had had a hand in making it if he hadn’t insisted on bringing it up, if only in front of me.

“That’s just a technicality,” I said, “and don’t mention it again.”

It’s rare and unfortunate that I have to address my fellow man in this manner, and it always brings me pain to do so, but my manner in such situations is commanding and serious enough that the person I address knows not to raise his voice again. Or usually he does. My friend seemed to have forgotten.

“I’ll mention whatever I want whenever I want to,” he said.

I stood up slowly and ominously, and each step that I took announced the gravity of my intentions. I left an arm’s length, the length of one of my arms, which are longer than his, between us, and said: “Go ahead and mention it.”

He laughed again. His laughter was becoming as irritating as his words.

“You think I haven’t already?” he said.

He started to add something else, no doubt some petty, childish expression of underclass envy that he would have regretted had I not knocked him unconscious with two blows before he’d had the chance.

As he lay there at my feet, I found it hard to accentuate the positive. All I could see was the sniveling brat whose messes I’d always had to clean up, whose debts I’d always had to pay, whose fights I’d always had to fight, and I said aloud to him: “You will never be a tanner without me,” in hopes that it would haunt his sleep, that he would awaken after I’d finished and take it for truth. And to drive the truth home, I pulled down his dungarees, far enough to expose his bare ass and thighs.

I saw straight off the mark from my previous visit, a long and uneven rectangle of pinkish scar tissue across his left buttock. I felt around behind me for a sliver of glass large enough and sharp enough to suit my purposes. I pressed the point to his flesh and punctured the skin. He awoke with a shriek.

“Hold still,” I said. “Struggling will only increase your pain.”

He went limp in my hands and I continued, dragging the shard slowly downward, across, up and back. When I pulled back the hide, using the glass to cut the skin from the gristle, he began to squirm again.

“I’m not finished,” I said, pressing him flat to the floor. “I need a handbag yet.”

I lifted his shirt and used the pen in my pocket to create a template over the better part of his back. And then I cut. And then he began to squirm again.

“Go on,” I said. “Lie down on the bed.”

He made his way to the bed, slowly and shakily, with whimpers and yelps. I went to his icebox and, finding no cube trays, pulled several packages from it. I went over to the bed and placed the frozen peas and beans and such upon his raw flesh.

“Do you still keep the needles and thread in the drawer?” I said.

He didn’t reply, unless you count a pathetic groan as a reply, so I opened the drawer and found them right where I’d left them, as though they hadn’t been touched since my last visit, and given the tanner’s abandonment of tanning, it was likely they hadn’t.

I spent the next several hours trying to stitch his hide into a wallet and handbag with a number of false starts and backtrackings and plain old mistakes. They did not shape up to look as I’d imagined them, but that’s so often the case with any type of art, and besides, the act itself, the monotonous process of stitching the seams had a calming effect upon me, and soon I was remembering the good things again—my wife, who would overlook the imperfections and see through to the potential and also the vast effort I had made on her behalf, and then my friend who, despite the difficulties we’d had that evening, due, I was sure to his substance abuse, would, I was sure, remain my closest friend, and who, I hoped, might be inspired, after this latest lesson in his craft, to take it up again.

The dawn sun was beginning to peek through the windows as I knotted the thread on my wife’s not quite pretty but lovingly crafted handbag. It illuminated the note I had made upon the back of my hand, reminding me that I’d intended to procure a matching notebook.

My friend whimpered again from the bed. I pulled out my old wallet, pulled all of the cash from it, and dropped it on his table. He whimpered again. I looked at the back of my hand. I brought it to my mouth and licked it, rubbing the note into a light blue shadow across my skin. I counted to ten and then tried to decide if a notebook was really necessary.

i can only hope that he still believes in redemption.

An old man yelled: “Give it back!”

It was early. Not in the morning, but in general. It was too early in general, for me, for the boy, for the old man who was yelling at the boy: “Give it back!” Again: “Give it back!”

It was already turning out to be a bad day for redemption.

The old man couldn’t see what the boy wanted with it. True, it was a bright, shiny penny, but that’s hardly enough reason for a maybe eight-year-old kid to tangle with a somewhat able-bodied and in any case full-grown man. Pennies are everywhere. He’d seen a penny—a slightly-less-shiny one—a block up the street from where they were standing, and stepped right over it without a thought. There hadn’t been anybody scrambling for that penny.

All right, it wasn’t slightly less shiny. It was dull. It was tarnished. But one penny is worth one one-hundredth of a dollar regardless of gleam. Unless that penny carries sentimental value, and it’s no coincidence that the penny the boy wouldn’t give back was shiny. The old man had spent hours polishing it, and the others, even the freshly minted pennies, the ones that didn’t look like they needed it. Yes, there were others, and every one of them was threatened when any one of them was threatened. They were a confederacy of bright, shiny pennies.

The old man set his box down on the sidewalk, cautiously, or arthritically, and walked toward the boy, cautiously or arthritically, with one hand outstretched.

“Please,” he said, “just give it back.”

The boy probably couldn’t understand why the old man wanted the penny so desperately, which is probably why he wouldn’t give it back.

“There’s a penny back there a block,” said the old man.

He gestured over his shoulder in the direction of the other penny.

“On the sidewalk,” he said.

The boy didn’t respond.

“So you might as well give me mine, since there’s another one back there,” he said, gesturing again so the boy could go claim the other one for himself.

Still no response.

“I could go get it for you,” said the old man. “We could trade,” he said. “We could each have one.”

The boy’s silence caused him to continue.

“Of course,” he said, just to be fair, “mine would be shinier cause I spent so much time polishing it.”

The boy finally spoke: “Why would I want that when I got this?”

He held it out between thumb and forefinger. The old man’s own thumb and forefinger were only inches from the penny. The proximity made things seem even more hopeless.

“Because it’s mine,” said the old man. “That’s why it’s shiny,” he said, “because I polish it.”

The boy didn’t seem to understand the politics of polishing and ownership.

The old man took it upon himself to explain: “The one back there belongs to whoever picks it up,” he said. “It hasn’t been polished in a long time. You could go get it. You could polish it yourself.”

The boy let the penny slip into his palm and closed his fist over it, dropping his arm to his side.

“Maybe I will,” said the boy. “Maybe I’ll keep this one, and go get that one, and polish that one and have two.”

“Not two,” said the old man. “One for each of us. Two people, two pennies.”

“Then why don’t you go get the other one?” said the boy.

“I don’t want the other one because it’s not mine,” said the old man. “There’s no redemption in it,” he caught himself, “for me. My redemption’s in the one you’re holding,” he said. “Part of my redemption.”

He glanced down at his box, at the other polished pennies pasted to the top to form the word redemption. There was just a spot of glue where the penny that dotted the i—the penny the boy was holding—had fallen off.

“Redemption?” said the boy. “It’s just a penny,” he said. “It isn’t worth any more than the one back there.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said the old man. “So why don’t you give me mine and go get it?”

“Why don’t you?” said the boy.

The old man finally gave up trying to convince him. He needed another angle. He lunged at the boy from another angle, taking the boy’s clenched fist between his much larger hands and trying to pry his fingers open, yanking and pulling and pushing and scraping the boy’s hand with his nails.

“Get off,” the boy screamed, his legs running out from under his torso, his torso tugging his arm, but the old man wouldn’t get off.

“Let go,” the boy screamed, “let go,” but the old man didn’t let go.

He was lost in a cheap imitation of redemption, afloat the gentle waves of physical struggle. The penny was back in its proper place atop the i, his redemption redeemed by lop-sided violence. As he bit into the boy’s flesh, the old man’s eyes were dotted briefly by bright, shiny pennies. The boy was still screaming, the old man still biting the hand until it fell open empty.

The penny wasn’t in it. The old man released him and the boy stumbled backward, nursing his hand, holding it tightly to his stomach and bending at the waist. He wasn’t bleeding. The bite hadn’t broken the skin.

The old man watched the boy as he performed a little boy ritual of moans and grunts and a seizure-like shaking of the hand. He knew the boy wasn’t really hurt anymore, had never been hurt very badly. The old man wasn’t the sharp-toothed strong-jawed predator he’d once been.

The little boy’s seizure slowed to a nervous jitter and then stopped altogether. He let out a deep breath, stood up straight and looked the old man in the eyes, which suddenly seemed tarnished.

“You bit me,” he said.

The old man pointed at the hand he’d bitten. The boy was still holding it, now more gently, to his stomach. He lifted his hand to show the old man his empty palm, a faint bite-mark on the webbing between thumb and index finger.

“This one,” he said. “You bit this hand,” said the boy.

“The penny,” said the old man.

“No, my hand,” said the boy.

“What’d you do with it?” said the old man.

The boy grinned. He held out his other hand and revealed the bright, shiny penny.

“It was a trick,” he said, forming a fist.

The old man was dealing with a much craftier opponent than he’d imagined, but the old man wasn’t as simple as he’d pretended to be. He knew that if you wanted a penny—a specific penny that you’d polished yourself, that was part of your redemption, a penny that carried sentimental value—from a boy, all you had to do was offer that boy a nickel. It didn’t matter if the nickel was shiny. Nobody polishes nickels. Nickels don’t carry any sentimental value.

But the man didn’t carry any nickels because nickels have no sentimental value. No dimes or quarters for the same reason. There’s no redemption in the higher denominations of pocket change. Copper is the color of redemption.

So the man reached for his wallet, opened it, and pulled out a one-dollar bill.

“Here,” he said.

You could see the boy’s lips working to hold back a smile.

“Your dollar for my penny?” he said.

“My penny,” said the old man.

“Your penny,” the boy said, opening his hand again.

The old man hesitated, not because he’d changed his mind, but because he hadn’t expected it to be so easy. He took a moment to consider what sort of new scheme the boy might have up his sleeve. Or in his other hand. Would the penny disappear again when he stepped toward the boy? Had the boy switched his penny with another equally shiny penny during the assault?

He needed to assure himself of the penny’s authenticity, of its redemption quotient.

“May I?” said the old man.

The boy nodded and the old man stepped closer, bending his head down toward the boy’s open palm, reaching out his finger to touch its smooth, polished face.

“Look, don’t touch,” said the boy.

The old man stepped back and didn’t come forward again until the boy nodded permission. He bent down and stared so hard you might have thought he was trying to lift it with his brain.

He could make out the date on the penny. To the best of his memory it matched the date on the one that had dotted the i of redemption, but in order to be sure, he removed a slip of paper from his breast pocket and unfolded it.

There was a diagram on it—it spelled out the word redemption—and on the diagram, a list of dates that corresponded to pennies. At the end of the diagram there was a period, but there was no date on the period.

The old man looked back and forth between the diagram and the penny, and, satisfied, folded the slip of paper and put it back into his pocket.

The boy, no more or less patient than any other boy his age, was getting impatient. He was ready to finish the transaction and get away from the old man forever.

“Come on,” said the boy. “We trading or not?”

The old man jumped back again. The boy rolled his eyes as the man baby-stepped forward holding the bill behind his back with one hand and reaching out toward the boy’s hand with the other. He snatched the penny and smacked the bill into the boy’s palm, then jumped back. He kept his eyes on the boy, not his re-acquired redemption.

The boy was examining the dollar bill with what seemed like genuine happiness, pleased with his ten thousand percent profit, though his math probably wasn’t quite so exact. The old man looked down at his part of the bargain, and saw that all was well with redemption—the head where the head belonged, the tail where the tail belonged. He rolled the polished penny over and over in his hand.

He laughed: “Ha! Ha! Ha!” as he rolled.

It was a forced sounding screeching laugh, slower and more rhythmic than the real thing, approximating or faking the unchecked hubris of the redeemed. It didn’t sound right. It didn’t feel right.

“Never try to con a con, kid,” he coughed through the screeching. “Don’t try to hustle a hustler.”

He kept coughing and laughing and screeching. The boy looked frightened, more frightened than when the old man had bitten him. Or differently frightened. This was his first real glimpse of redemption.

“I am redeemed,” said the old man. “I am almost redeemed. And what do you have to show for it?”

He snatched the bill from the boy’s hand and waved it in front of the boy’s face.

“A dollar?” he screeched. “This?”

He was breathing heavily. The boy was on the verge of tears. He didn’t care so much about the money anymore as about escaping before the old man could do him any harm. Any more harm.

The old man stood still and quiet until his breathing steadied.

“This,” he gasped. “A dollar.”

A dollar that he held between thumb and forefinger of each hand and ripped in two, then in four, then into hundreds of uneven little bits and shreds, each worth less than even the most tarnished penny, until they were sticking to his sweaty palms and flaking to the ground like ugly olive snow.

The old man rubbed his hands on the seat of his pants and said: “I hope you’ve learned as much from this as I have.”

The boy wiped a tear from his cheek with the back of his arm. For a second, I thought he was going to hit the old man. Instead he ran past him, picking up the old man’s box and running down the street in the direction of the other penny. The old man didn’t even try to follow.

I yelled: “Hey. Up here.”

The old man stood staring at his penny. I thought he might not bother looking up at me, but then he did, he bothered.

“The boy lives in this building,” I said.

I didn’t know where the boy lived, but I’d seen him before. Often, in fact. From my window, I’d seen him go in and out of the building. So he might live here. Or maybe he’s only visiting a friend.

“You could wait for him here,” I said.

I was standing in the window.

I said: “I’ll make coffee. It’ll get you out of the cold for a while.”

It was cold, an autumn day, crisp as a new one dollar bill, with a wind blustery enough to blow a skinny old man into oblivion without redemption.

I watched him walk in from the street. I heard him walking up the stairs. I closed my window, walked across the room, and opened the door for him. He walked in without acknowledging me, and went over to my window.

I introduced myself. He didn’t introduce himself. I’m not sure whether he heard me or not.

“Coffee?” I said.

It took him a minute to say: “No.”

No thank you, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I’m a gracious host. I started a pot of coffee.

I walked around the room as though I were the visitor, picking things, my things, up and looking at them through my impersonation of his eyes: a puppy-shaped paperweight, an empty tea-tin, a pen with my accountant’s name and address on it.

He was staring out my window as though the boy might be hiding anywhere in the scene, as though the culprit, who they say always returns to the scene of the crime, couldn’t have actually left the scene of the crime in the first place. As though all he had to do was wait until the criminal, the boy, peeked out from behind that tree trunk, that garbage can, that blade of grass.

The coffee began to drip into the pot with the sound of sizzling water.

“What’s in the box?” I said.

He forced a cough and leaned in closer to the window. His breath condensed on the cold glass, and he wiped it quickly lest the fog obscure his view for even a moment.

I walked over to the kitchen table, and brought him a chair. He didn’t notice me behind him. I tapped him on the shoulder.

He said: “What?” without looking back.

“I thought you’d like a seat,” I said.

He sat down in the chair still staring out the window. He turned around a moment later.

“Thanks,” he said, and went back to watching.

The coffee pot was full and my room smelled like coffee. I poured two cups and asked if he took cream and sugar.

“Do you take cream and sugar?” I said.

“Black,” he said.

I placed his mug on the window sill in front of him.

“Thanks,” he said, this time without turning toward me.

Which made three responses. I thought he might not mind answering a question or two as long as it didn’t require his looking away from the window.

I tried again: “What’s in the box?”

“It doesn’t make any difference now,” he said.

“Then why are you staring out my window?” I said.

“I’ll go,” he said, but he didn’t move.

“What’s redemption?” I said.

He coughed again and leaned into the window. His breath condensed on the cold glass and he wiped it away. He hadn’t touched his coffee, and it was steaming the window below the level of his eyes.

I walked over to the kitchen table and went back to what I was doing. I did what I was doing until it started to get dark. I turned my lamp on as the sun set, and the man started to see more of his own reflection than the street outside until he was just squinting at himself. From the table, I watched him lean toward the window, wipe his breath off the glass and sit back, over and over until finally he fell asleep. I’d almost forgotten about him by the time he woke with a jump, stood up, and brought his mug full of cold coffee to the sink.

“I’m going,” he said.

He pulled his jacket tight around his body, buttoned it all the way up to his neck, and left. I watched him walk out of my room. I heard him walk down the stairs. I assume he went out the front door of my building and down the lamplit street in the direction of the other penny, but I didn’t get up to check.

Does he stare out his window at another cold autumn day? The day is crisp as a new one dollar bill with a bitter wind that could blow a skinny old man into oblivion without redemption.

Does he pull his jacket tight around his body and button it all the way up to his neck? Does he look down at his box? It’s about the size of a shoebox, but any indication of whether or not it’s a shoebox has been worn away.

The word redemption is spelled atop the box. Is it spelled in peeled-paper as though something’s been pasted on and ripped off? Pennies. Is there a bright shiny penny dotting the i?

Does he take the box under his arm and walk out of his room, down the stairs and into the street? Cars drive by. Children play. Does he walk up the block toward the grocery store? If he goes to the grocery store he will find relief from the autumn morning in the rotting-produce warmth of the grocery store.

Does one of the clerks say: “It’s that guy.”?

Does the clerk who says it’s that guy pretend to be busy so he won’t have to help him?

Does he stop in front of the customer service desk? The customer service desk is on the wall opposite the entrance. Do the rest of the employees pretend not to notice him? Do they scurry away like bunny rabbits? Is it because they know that the last to notice him will have to redeem him?

Is the new girl the last to notice him? She barely looks old enough to work. Does he place his box on the counter in front of her?

“How may I help you?” she says with a smile that says, paper or plastic.

Does he open the box? Are there piles and stacks of colorful coupons inside? Does the girl pick through them, puzzled as to what’s expected of her?

She says: “What am I supposed to do with these?”

Does he want to redeem them? Does he say: “I want to redeem them.”?

She looks up at him as though he’s an idiot. She wonders if he’s an idiot, if he really doesn’t know how to use a coupon.

“Don’t you know how to use a coupon?” she says. “You buy things with them. To get a discount on things. Like this one.” She picks out a coupon with a picture of a bottle of green dish detergent on it. “It says you get ten cents off a bottle of green dish detergent when you use it.”

Does he respond?

“So if you wanna go get a bottle of green dish detergent I can give you ten cents off,” she says.

Does he not respond?

“Except this coupon expired over a year ago,” she says. “See this?” She shows him the date on the bottom. “It expired on this date. That’s a year ago so I can’t give you ten cents off.”

Does he point to the fine print below the date? The girl squints to read.

“It says actual cash value: one one-thousandth cent,” she says.

Does he nod?

“But we don’t have one one-thousandth cent,” she says. “You would need like a thousand of these just to make one cent.”

Does he point toward the box? Toward the other coupons in the box? Does he make sure she counts every one of them? It takes her more than two hours because she loses track and has to start over several times.

“One thousand,” she says, and smacks the last coupon on the counter with a hateful look that doesn’t become her young face.

She hands him his redemption. One penny.

Does he take it? Does he rub it against his shirt? A rub against a shirt is a far cry from the rigorous routine of polishings that the rest of his pennies got.

Does he ask her for some paste?

She checks beneath the desk—the sound of clutter being tossed around—and stands up brandishing a tube of rubber cement.

“This is all we got,” she says.

Does he cement the period to redemption? Rubber cement works as well as paste, but doesn’t smell as good.

Does he say thank you?

“Fuck you, too,” she says, not quite beneath her breath.

Does he step back outside? It’s still a cold day. Does he head toward home with the empty box under his arm? Do the two pennies on the box reflect the rays of the setting sun? Now and again.

How long before he stops in front of a trash can and drops the box in unceremoniously? Who’s keeping track? And does he still believe in redemption? Does he finally believe in redemption?

rules and regulations

Rules and Regulations

Do: restrain the child. Though he is smaller than you, he may be quicker, and if he is not now, he will be, soon and suddenly. So restrain him, with your hands on his arms if the discipline is to be an abbreviated version of the discipline for any number of reasons including exhaustion, illness, general weariness, drunkenness, or, for that matter, sobriety. Remember: that a minor offense on the part of the child does not necessarily call for an abbreviated or lesser punishment since, as the Good Lord tells us: a sin is a sin is a lie is a murder is a theft is a sass. Restrain him with something more efficient and reliable (you will one day be old and shaky, if you are not already), for the more intensive discipline, leaving your hands free to mete out punishment as punishment was meant to be meted out. I prefer: leather belts, but have been known to use: twine, bed sheets, shoelaces and other household devices, as the occasion arises. These materials can be used in a variety of ways, the simplest and most common of which is: in conjunction with a chair. The arms and/or legs and/or neck and/or torso may be tied to their corresponding places on said chair. Other options include: the bed, the banister, and, particularly in the winter months: the radiator. You may tie the child’s hands behind his back, his hands to his ankles, his feet behind his head, etc., if no props are available. This accomplished, you are ready to begin the discipline proper.

When disciplining, there is one rule that must always be kept in mind: do not: lose control. When I speak of control, I do not mean control of the child, not in this situation. In this situation, control of the child is a given. He has been restrained, and the odds of his escape, especially in the case of the leather belt are: slim to none. To further ensure complete control, you may wish to: gag the child, but I generally choose not to as his cries can be a good indication of the effectiveness of the discipline. In either case, control of the child is not in question. You must not: lose control of yourself. If you forget this rule, as so many others have: your failure is guaranteed. But it is so easy to do! The disciplining of a weak and whimpering child can drive even the strongest-willed of disciplinarians into a frenzy, and we have all succumbed to it at one point or another. This failure has a wide range of manifestations, from: not getting the point across to: the death of the child which will result in the removal of that sweet burden: discipline. Do not: let the child die. Avoid: losing control. Discipline is an act to be carried out in reflection, not passion. Many an evening, after a hard day of work, I took respite in the meditative bliss of discipline, making it clear to the child that it was for the benefit of the both of us, and that the lesson taught and to-be-learned on such an occasion, was a general, rather than a specific, one about taking respite in the meditative bliss of discipline. Always: be sure that the child is aware of the lesson to be learned. There is no justification for discipline if there is no lesson to be learned, or if the lesson to be learned is not learned, as in the case mentioned above. Without a lesson, the child will be confused, and may even grow, in time: not to appreciate the discipline.

The punishment should fit the crime. If the child is caught with his hand in the cookie jar: discipline should be concentrated about that hand which was in the cookie jar, as well as the stomach which he would have filled with cookies and is therefore a co-conspirator, if not the driving force behind the offense. But it will not always be so simple. The child is likely to do ninety-nine percent of his offending with his mouth. In a perfect world, this would not pose any problems: discipline would be concentrated about the mouth. However, this is not a perfect world, and, unless you are a stricter disciplinarian than I, i.e., one who does not: allow the child to leave the house, for any reason, you can imagine the many problems that such an approach could cause. You must then find a method of discipline which will not become a matter of: public knowledge, or worse: public involvement. Many have opted for: washing the child’s mouth out with soap. Since the first time my father washed my mouth out with soap, I have found this to be the most ridiculous form of discipline. As disciplinarians, we need to think like our children in order to ensure that lessons are well-taught and equally-as-well-learned. The symbolism of washing a mouth out with soap, making that mouth “clean,” is lost on the child. He is left with a soap flavored mouth, and he will get the soap flavor out of his mouth by marching defiantly over to the cookie jar and eating a cookie, convinced that you will do nothing more than scrub another part of his anatomy as further punishment. And how could you really do otherwise? A child needs consistency. He needs a reminder, something that will stay with him longer than a mouth full of suds. I recommend: choosing another part of the child’s body, the right thigh for instance, and renaming it, for the duration of the discipline: mouth. You need not consider the philosophical implications of this renaming, so long as the child is led to understand that, for practical purposes: his leg is his mouth. This may, in fact, kill two birds with one stone, as the boy will, for a time at least, be less prone to committing offenses with either: his mouth or his right thigh. Remember though, that the opposite is not true: the renaming and punishment of the leg in place of the mouth does not accrue to credit for future offenses by the leg. If the child commits simultaneous offenses with the mouth and the right thigh, and for the above reasons, you choose to name the right thigh: mouth, you must then designate another part of the anatomy, perhaps the left thigh: right thigh, and apply proper discipline. Stick to the basics. The most successful disciplinarians stick to the basics. They recognize that discipline is an heirloom which has been handed down to them, and which they must preserve intact for future generations.

Finally, do not: allow the child any opportunity to discipline you, ever. If this entails posting an armed guard at the door of his bedroom, better yet: guarding the door yourself, then do: so. Curbing the child’s desire to discipline is a painstaking and time-consuming process. Again, there are various ways of dealing with it. Some have chosen to engineer a crippling accident in an icy driveway. Others have gone with a simple policy of sending the child to live with a distant relative at a predetermined age. These are not corrective, but preventive measures in which there is no real lesson to be taught or learned. The child can be faulted for many of the things he does in adolescence, but it is something of a stretch to fault him merely for being an adolescent. And while the latter method seems fool-proof, there arises the potential that the child may act out his desire to discipline on his unsuspecting grandmother. It is also, in a sense, an abandonment of your duties as a disciplinarian, and it denies you the fulfillment of practicing discipline on a less fragile subject. The more honorable disciplinarian chooses not to transplant, or fully disable the child. If you are not going to complete the disciplinary process, then there is no point in ever beginning it. I would advise you to administer sedatives secretly, by grinding them into powder and slipping them into the child’s supper, or by placing the pills in an empty bottle of vitamins. If you decide upon the latter method: you will want to make sure that he takes the “vitamins” regularly, encouraging him to grow up big and strong, so as not to betray your intense fear that exactly that will happen. Should he go even one day without the drugs, his disciplinary instincts are bound to surface, and when they do: the child will surely tear you limb from limb, leaving you bound to your bed, and forcing you, in your old age, to: dictate your rules and regulations to: some fairy college boy who wants to: make a poem out of you.

Rules and Regulations

Do what Dad says, but think what you want. He is a shriveled, jaundiced thing, and his phantom limbs are as corporeal as your phantom sister, the pain of them proof that he will not be outlasting anyone as predicted.

Take dictation—fluff his pillow in the morning, change the channel now and then, turn out the lights when you see he’s asleep, enact your revenge with double-knotted bows and dirty linen. Every happy family is as corporeal as his phantom limbs. The unhappy ones are like us. We are tired and angry phantoms. Admit it. Just ask yourself when you do what Dad says. Why are you so tired?

Take dictation—take your vitamins. No, the ones that make you tired. Change the bedpan, bite your tongue. Next time do it before you try to remind him that his arms and legs are attached to his shoulders and crotch, respectively, respectfully enough. Not for him. Bite your tongue again while he berates you for the reminder, but think what you want. Think the bathroom is five feet from his ass. Even his voice is shriveled and jaundiced. Even as it tells you it is going to outlast you all it is falling asleep. The process can take hours. Try not to gag when the process has taken its time. Try not to jitter while trying not to gag.

Take dictation—warm up something from a can, take your vitamins and mix them in, take it to him, spoonfeed, wipe, repeat. Try not to think of the airplane game. Try not to laugh when you think of the airplane game. He is too tired to care, but don’t push. Ask yourself while you do what he would say. Why are you so sad?

Be your own dictator—turn him on his side so his phantom limbs don’t get phantom bedsores. Ask yourself while you watch him look like a sleeping baby. Will this shriveled baby outlast us all? How will this jaundiced baby last with us all gone? Is this phantom tired or is it another unhappy trick? Tell him you were not talking to yourself. Tell him you were talking to your corporeal sister. Tell him you do so have a sister.

I’m sorry. This has been my fault, but you will have to do what Dad says. Think what you want. Think we all thought he would be more tired than he is. Think who is tricking whom.

Take dictation—put him back on his back, change the channel, go start a pot of coffee, take it to him, spoonfeed, wipe, repeat. Apologize for the airplane game. Apologize for the laughter, all laughter everywhere, and for babies who are children who will outlast their parents. Apologize for being so dramatic. Apologize for spilling about a drop of coffee on his shriveled, jaundiced chest. Try not to spill anymore. Tell him to stop screaming. Ask him to stop screaming. Plead. Try not to notice how he fans the burn site with his phantom arms, but if you do, bite your tongue. You’re learning.

Take dictation—go get a bag of ice, notice the ice cream beside the ice cubes.

Be your own dictator—make up for it all with a bowl of ice cream. Take your vitamins, crush them up and sprinkle them on. Don’t be stupid, they don’t look like sprinkles. Slather the ice cream in chocolate syrup, take it to him, apologize, go get the bag of ice, apply, apologize again, spoonfeed, wipe, repeat. Think what you want. Think how did you ever think that the airplane game was funny. Do not do the airplane game. Don’t be so sad. Your trick is working, this time it is. He’s tired, so tired that he doesn’t stop himself from pushing away your corporeal arm with his phantom arm while dribbling the previous mouthful down his shriveled baby chin. Wipe. Say there, there if you can’t resist. Say Dad. Dad? Are you awake? Poke him with a finger. Not in a phantom limb. Poke him on the chest. Say are you awake.

Be the only dictator—turn him on his side. Don’t think about the cold, rubbery feel of his baby body. Don’t look at all. Don’t look back. Do what you want for a while. Sit in a chair at the kitchen table and think what you want. What do you want? Do you want an unhappy family? A family is happiest when it wants what it has. This family has any number of phantoms. Which phantom is angriest, the chicken or the egg. Go be a chicken or an egg. Take another vitamin if you’re chicken, but go do it. Do what Dad wants. Think what Dad says. Don’t look at him. Don’t think about how his skin glows jaundice in the dark. Stop thinking.

I’ll be your dictator—reach under the bed for the soiled sheets. They’re soiled. All the better. Say Dad you soiled the sheets. When he doesn’t respond say my dad is a phantom shit factory, a big yellow armless legless baby with arms and legs, my dad is good for nothing but spoonfeed wipe repeat. Keep it up, not louder but going. Check for rapid eye movement while you lay the soiled bedclothes on the floor beside the couch. It means he’s asleep but not too deep. It means your monologue is being the dictator of his phantom dreams. It means just a tweak in volume when the time is right and things will go exactly as you want for once. Don’t talk to your corporeal sister. Not now. Say you know as well as I do that I believe in you but I’m in the middle of something that’s not going to do itself and if you want to watch you can but it isn’t going to be pretty.

You need a new dictator—get back to Dad quick. Tell him you never ever believed he would really outlast you all. Lie. Tell him you hardly expect him to outlast the night. Separate the strips you ripped last night from the mostly intact and in any case corporeal mass of the soiled sheet. Use the strips to tie your father’s phantom limbs together, wrist to wrist behind his back, go easy if he stirs. Grin when he doesn’t wake up. Say What. What would you do about it anyway, baby Dad? Your sadness is the last thing on your mind now, isn’t it?

Try dictating for yourself again—raise the volume slowly as you lift the soiled sheet to his ear. Go ahead and put it down to double check the knots if you must. Continue to raise the volume as you lift the sheet again.

Take Dictaphone—press record and lay it on the couch beside Dad’s head. Lower your mouth to Dad’s ear and raise the sheet. Talk while you tear. Say Dad this is the sound of tearing, of anything tearing, a sheet, a skin, a limb from a limb. Raise the volume as he startles awake. Tell him you are tearing him to pieces as you start another strip. Throw the first strip in the air and watch it flutter like a long, wrong snowflake to your father’s face and laugh as he struggles then whimpers, begs and finally cries saying he wants his arms back, his legs, how he knows you are good and he is bad and how he can fix this. But he can’t, because for now you’ve forgotten your sadness and the memory of his miserable face and the sound on the tape. And the fact that you’ve left your father’s phantom limbs bound on the couch with him will keep you company until you fall asleep and wake to clean up your mess.

Rules and Regulations

Keep a journal but do not write in it such bitch-like things as Dear Diary, You are the only one who I can tell all of my secretest stuff to, for only you understand me and accept me as I am, because fuck that, it’s no way to do things, the whimperest cry for help. No need for help much less cries or whimpers when you follow these simple rules, so keep a journal, or a diary, and don’t write anything in it that the rules don’t tell you to, and for God’s sake don’t write anything actual.

Pretend you have a brother. Don’t write this down. Pretend to have a brother who pretends to have a sister, which is you. Pretend to pretend. Get so good at it that you’re barely even there anymore, wherever it is you are, until your pretension is so strong that it’s true if not exactly real. But don’t worry about that, Parmenides, your diary is still blank so shut the fuck up.

When you’ve finally shut up and stopped worrying about inanities such as true and real, you might be ready to disappear, to be the brother, but God help you if you’re not, if you’re lying to yourself about how good you’ve gotten. They’ve got people who can see right through you, who will look you in the eye and hand you the gun, the blade, the pills and laugh at you when you’re too chickenshit to pull, slice, or swallow. Or worse. They’ll coddle you to your face and whisper to Dad that all girls have a tough time in adolescence, that everything will be okay, that all you really need is some love and attention and maybe a positive female role model when you’ve already got so much love and attention you want to puke from the perfect female role model, Dad, so it’s probably best if you just stop here now and come back if you’re ever really ready to be the brother. Go now.

Don’t imagine for a second that just because you’re reading this I believe you’re really ready or that you have any business believing same. Anybody can read who’s not a retard and that book better still be blank. If it isn’t, burn it and go get a new one. I refuse to be held responsible for your attempt to be the brother, but if you insist, this is what you shall do:

Be the downside of the cycle of violence, re to every action, passive to aggressive. Everything is your fault and you pretend to know this. Not as you, as the brother. You’re not pretending anything anymore because you are nothing but the brother’s imaginary sister, nothing but the fantasy that somebody gives a shit. But you don’t have to care. Just let him believe he believes you do, like you let him believe he believes he’s the victim when really he’s not. Really he’s just another cog, a whiny little cipher who manufactures impotent little apocalypses every single evening.

Does this mean anything to you? If not you’d better give up now and forever. If so, open the journal and write your brother’s rules and regulations in big, bubbly, pengirlship for contrast. Do it now.

I have no way of knowing if you did it right or at all, and even if you did it doesn’t mean you’re ready to be the dad. First, because you already have a dad and your dad is so nice and considerate and caring it makes me want to scrape off every inch of my skin before I jab colored pencils in each ear simultaneous and don’t think I couldn’t. Forget that dad. This is your brother’s dad, and he knows how to handle his business, and his business is ruling and regulating. Can you imagine a dad who knows how to handle his business? Even if you can it isn’t enough. You can’t pretend anymore. You have to become him so hard that you’re suddenly all gone, because he doesn’t believe you exist, even in your imaginary brother’s imagination. It’s just him and the boy.

Now you’re either dead or alive and I can’t tell you which and when. If you’re where you’re supposed to be you can do anything and you fucking well better. If you’re where you’re supposed to be, then you don’t need these rules and regulations anymore, you’re already writing the father’s rules and regulations in the son’s handwriting, because the father is speaking from his mouth to the ears of the son and from there to the son’s hand, and you’re all of it, every single one. But don’t stop there. If you can be the father, you can be the author of the first and last lines of every story left to the English language and all the others too. You can be Odysseus, Borgia, Faustus, Hamlet, but fuck him. You can be Descartes, thinking therefore you are therefore thinking everyone else too. Shit, you can be Descartes’ evil genius. You can be God.

Calm the fuck down. Come back. You’re going to need me again when the notebook’s full.

Ignore that empty feeling when the notebook’s full. Everyone, all those who’ve gone before you have felt that feeling, because those who haven’t failed worse than those who failed the brother. Understand? Breathe deep. Put the notebook down somewhere nobody can find it and come back when you’re ready.

If you’re ready, pick the notebook up and put it down where somebody can find it, in the living room, where somebody will find it, specifically the father. Not the brother’s father, he’s imaginary again but don’t let on. Your father. The one who’s going to cry his eyes out over whichever page he lands on first, and the waterworks won’t let up until he’s read it cover to cover, wishing he wasn’t, wishing he hadn’t, and ending by asking himself what did he ever do to make you this way, because he won’t blame you, he can’t, and that’s his fault, one of many, and this is your revenge, the only one you’ll ever need.

Time it right so that you walk into the living room just as he turns the last page, but don’t let him know you’re there until he closes the cover and looks up like he’s looking up to God but only sees you by accident. Be God. Be God on purpose. Laugh at him like God should, not like it’s all a joke, but like it’s all more serious than he could ever know, so serious it can never be any other way ever. Keep laughing as he stammers trying to say something. Use the foam at the corners of his mouth as fuel for your eternal flame. When he finally gives up, tell him, Did you ever expect that God was a girl my age? Why wasn’t it totally obvious to you, even when I was just an X on a sperm that I was the meaning of life, and the meaning was all a trick all along?

Lay it on thick, because his first thought’s going to be, This girl needs a psychologist. How did I raise a girl that needs a psychologist this bad? He still won’t blame you because he’ll never have it in him to understand your powers, even when he finally tries to respond and realizes you’re not there, because you won’t be there anymore, and neither will he or the living room or the notebook. You’ll finally be where you wanted, call it what you will. No more brothers, no more dads, no more rocks, no more thoughts, no more words.

about the author

Christian TeBordo has published three novels. This is his first collection of short fiction. He lives in Philadelphia.

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Copyright © 2010 by Christian TeBordo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for review.

The following stories have previously been published:

“SS Attacks!” in The Lifted Brow (The Fake Bookshelf); “My wife denies being my older self.” in Reinventing the World; “Sweet William, don’t even bother denying it.” in Avery Anthology; “The Champion of Forgetting” in Torpedo and The Best of Torpedo; “Wake up body!” in Sleeping Fish; “Rules and Regulations” in Ninth Letter; “Rules and Regulations” [a different one] in Lamination Colony.

Thanks to the editors.

Published by
featherproof books
Chicago, Illinois
www.featherproof.com

Library of Congress Control Number 2009936110
eISBN : 978-0-982-58087-5

Design and Illustrations by Zach Dodson at Bleached Whale Design

Set in Gentium